The invention of siblings Miklós and Étienne Vadász, the world’s first pocket record player caused a stir when it was introduced a century ago, nabbing first prize at an international music exhibition and finding favor with modernist architect Le Corbusier, who hailed it for embodying the “essence of the esprit nouveau.”
Unlike more recent portable audio innovations, some assembly was required.
It’s fair to assume that the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound staffer deftly unpacking antique Mikiphone components from its cunning Sony Discman-sized case, above, has more practice putting the thing together than a nervous young fella eager to woo his gal al fresco with his just purchased, cutting edge 1924 technology.
A period advertisement extols the Mikiphone’s portability …
Fits in a jacket pocket
Goes in a lady’s handbag
Will hang on a cycle frame
Goes in a car door pocket
Ideal for picnics, car jaunts, river trips
…but fails to mention that in order to enjoy it, you’d also have to schlep along a fair amount of 78 RPM records, whose 10-inch diameters aren’t nearly so pocket and purse-compatible.
Maison Paillard produced approximately 180,000 of these hand-cranked wonders over the course of three years. When sales dropped in 1927, the remaining stock was sold off at a discount or given away to contest winners.
These days, an authentic Mikphone can fetch $500 and upward at auction. (Beware of Mikiphonies!)
When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mercator projection of the world hung on the wall of an elementary-school classroom; maybe it was a road atlas in the glove box of your parents’ car. For Neil Sunderland, the earliest cartographic high seems to have come in childhood, from a humble map of Lancashire. When he found success in finance, his addiction grew in proportion to his means, and today his multi-million-dollar map collection includes the work of renowned sixteenth-century artists like Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Giovanni Cimerlino, who in 1566 depicted the known world in the shape of a heart.
Cimerlino’s cordiform Earth (bottom) is just one of the 130 historic “world maps, celestial maps, atlases, books of knowledge and globes” now available for your perusal at Oculi Mundi, an elaborate web site with the digitized holdings of the Sunderland Collection. “A platform to explore high-resolution images of these beautiful objects, to peek inside the books, and to discover information and stories,” it offers both a chronologically ordered “research” mode and a more free-form “explore” mode for browsing.
Either way, with its oldest artifact dating to the early thirteenth century and its newest to the early nineteenth, it contains a great swath of cartographic history to behold.
The New York Times’ Susanne Fowler quotes Sunderland’s daughter Helen Sunderland-Cohen, who oversees the Oculi Mundi project, describing a particularly venerable atlas by fifteenth-century humanist scholar Francesco Berlinghieri as “one of the earliest uses of copper plate, in atlases and in print. You can see how finely engraved the lines are, and how they’re learning to use copper plate.” All art may be inseparable from the state of technology of its time, but maps — the makers of which have always been driven to visualize and organize as much knowledge of the world as possible — reflect it with a special clarity.
Exploring the Sunderland Collection through Oculi Mundi, you can also trace changes in what sort of knowledge belongs on maps in the first place. Sunderland-Cohen names as a personal favorite the “Rudimentum Novitiorum” from 1475 (above), “an illustrated chronicle in Latin used by monks as a teaching aid for novices.” Besides maps, it includes “Biblical history that is illustrated with lots of wonderful woodblock drawings, and everybody’s wearing clothing of the day, and in the houses of the day”; the connoisseur will notice techniques imported from illuminated manuscripts. As for what such a work costs today, well, if you have to ask, you’re not fully hooked on maps yet. Enter Oculi Mundi here.
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.
Generations of foreign tourists in Europe have heard advice about traveling in groups, haggling prices, avoiding pickpockets, and being able to communicate in, if not the local language, then at least the lingua franca. It turns out that very similar guidance applies to time travel in Europe, or at least specifically to the region of England, France, Germany, and northern Italy in the central Middle Ages, roughly between the years 1000 and 1400. In the new video above, history Youtuber Premodernist provides an hour’s worth of advice to the modern preparing to travel back in time to medieval Europe — beginning with the declaration that “you will very likely get sick.”
The gastrointestinal distress posed by the “native biome” of medieval European food and drink is one thing; the threat of robbery or worse by its roving packs of outlaws is quite another. “Crime is rampant” where you’re going, so “carry a dagger” and “learn how to use it.” In societies of the Middle Ages, people could only protect themselves by being “enmeshed in social webs with each other. No one was an individual.” And so, as a traveler, you must — to put it in Dungeons-and-Dragons terms — belong to some legible class. Though you’ll have no choice but to present yourself as having come from a distant land, you can feel free to pick one of two guises that will suit your obvious foreignness: “you’re either a merchant or a pilgrim.”
Unlike modern-day Europe, through which you travel for weeks barely speaking to anyone, the Europe of the Middle Ages offers numerous opportunities for conversation, whether you want them or not. Without any media as we know it today, medievals had to “make their own entertainment by talking to each other,” and if they could talk to a stranger from an exotic land, so much the more entertaining. But having none of our relatively novel ideas that “everybody’s on an equal footing, that everybody’s equal to each other, nobody’s better or worse than anybody else, nobody gets any special treatment,” they’ll guess your social rank and treat you accordingly; you, in turn, would do well to act the part.
Imagining themselves in medieval Europe, many of our contemporaries say things like, “If I go there, they’ll hang me as a witch, or they’ll burn me at the stake as a witch, because I’m wearing modern clothes and because I talk funny.” But that fear (not untainted, perhaps, by a certain self-regard) is unfounded, since medievals “were not scared of people just because they were different. They were scared of people who were different in a way that challenged the social order or threatened social chaos.” Their worldview put religious affiliation above all, without consideration for even the most hotly debated twenty-first-century political or racial battle lines. But then, as we never needed time travel to understand, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
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.
The Spanish conquista of the Americas happened long enough ago — and left behind a spotty enough body of historical records — that we tend to perceive it as much through simplifications, exaggerations, and distortions as we do through facts. What we now call Mexico underwent “essentially an internal conflict between different indigenous groups who saw the arrival of strangers as an opportunity to resist having to pay tribute to the Aztec Empire,” says Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico history professor Berenice Alcántara Rojas. “When the Spaniards initially attacked the Mexica capital, they were swiftly driven out.”
“Only when aided by various groups of Indigenous allies, as well as by the spread of a terrible smallpox epidemic, did they manage to force the ruler Cuauhtemoc and other Mexica leaders to capitulate,” Rojas continues, drawing upon details provided in the version of the events laid out in the Florentine Codex.
That encyclopedic series of twelve 16th-century illustrated manuscripts lavishly documents the known society and nature of that land at the time — and has now, nearly 450 years later, been acknowledged as “the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico.”
“In 1547, Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish Franciscan friar who committed most of his life to working closely with the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, began collecting information about central Mexican Nahua culture, life, people, history, astronomy, flora, fauna, and the Nahuatl language, among other topics,” says the Getty Research Institute. “Nahua elders, grammarians, scribes, and artists worked with Sahagún to compile a three-volume, 12-book, 2500-page illustrated manuscript, modeling its content on European encyclopedias, especially Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,” all of which has been digitized, translated, and made available at the Getty’s web site.
A thoroughly multicultural project avant la lettre, the Florentine Codex (named for the Medici family library in Florence, where it was sent upon its completion) has only just become accessible to a wide online readership. Though it’s “been digitally available via the World Digital Library since 2012, for most users it remained impenetrable because reading it requires knowledge of sixteenth-century Nahuatl and Spanish, and of pre-Hispanic and early modern European art traditions.” By offering searchable text in modern versions of both those languages as well as English — to say nothing of its browsable sections organized by people, animals, deities, and even by Nahuatl terms like coyote and tortilla — the Digital Florentine Codex re-illuminates an entire civilization.
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.
Even those who remain impervious to disco fever seem willing to acknowledge its cultural significance as evidenced by a recent exchange on the Trouser Press forum:
It was everywhere and could indeed get tiresome. But today I can appreciate how well put-together those records by an artist like the Bee Gees were…
Hearing techno for the first time in the early 90s, and realizing it was just disco in a new, all-electronic package, made me realize how good a lot of it was…
And while the disco explosion eventually saw young straight singles doing the Bump in Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Spokane, Dorothy sticks close to the epicenter by including such legendary New York City clubs as Studio 54, The Gallery, Paradise Garage, The Saint, and The Loft, a private discotheque in DJ David Mancuso’s Lower Manhattan apartment.
There was a mix of sexual orientation, there was a mix of races, mix of economic groups. A real mix, where the common denominator was music.
One can’t mention the music at The Loft without giving props to the innovative and efficient sound system Rosner devised for Mancuso’s 1,850-square-foot space, using a McIntosh amplifier, an AR amplifier, Vega bass bottom speakers, and two Klipschorn Cornwall loudspeakers, whose circuit diagram inspired the Disco Love Blueprint’s layout.
As composer and producer Matt Sommers told The Vinyl Factory, those speakers surrounded dancers with the sort of high volume, undistorted sound they could lose themselves in:
…the Mancuso parties were unique because what he did was take it to a whole other level and created that envelopment experience where you could really get lost and I think that’s what people love about that, because you can just let your troubles go and enjoy it.
Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum
On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.
We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.
As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.
From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )
These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.
The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”
Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Many Americans receive their introduction to the style known as Brutalism in college. This owes less to courses in twentieth-century architecture than to university campuses themselves, which tend to have been expanded or even wholly constructed in the decades immediately following the Second World War. As Vox’s Dean Peterson explains in the new video above, its veterans returned home eager to receive the tertiary education to which the G.I. Bill entitled them, which “necessitated that universities build new facilities to handle ballooning admissions. And with so many new buildings being needed, what did architects of the day turn to? Brutalism.”
“Not just a style of architecture but an entire aesthetic ethos,” Brutalism had developed through inspiration from the work of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. While other architects had employed concrete before him, he was the one to make the bold choice of leaving it exposed on the surface in its raw form: béton brut, to use the term that gave the movement its name.
To qualify under the rubric of this “new Brutalism,” as architectural historian Reyner Banham (later to become famous for his ultra-modern view of Los Angeles) referred to it, a structure should demonstrate “memorability as an image,” “clear exhibition of structure,” and “valuation of materials ‘as found’ ” — in contrast to the nineteen-fifties’ proliferation of seemingly featureless glass-sheathed skyscrapers designed by modernists like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his many imitators.
“Brutalist buildings strove for honesty in their materials and structure,” says Peterson. “They showed you how they were constructed.” Though acclaimed in their day as built statements of a break from the staid past into a wholly reimagined future, many campus Brutalist buildings in the United States subsequently fell into disrepair, owing to the economic downturn of the seventies and the resultant lapses into “deferred maintenance” — which, deferred long enough, shades into planned demolition. Such has been the case with Evans Hall, the statistics, economics, and mathematics building at University of California, Berkeley, which, since its construction in 1971, played an important part in the history of computer science, not least as the node through which the whole of the west coast connected to ARPANET, the military-built precursor to the internet.
Today, objections to Evans Hall’s Brutalist aesthetics, as well as to its location in front of the San Francisco Bay and its poor earthquake-safety rating (that last being fairly common among UC Berkeley’s structures), have led to its being emptied out with an eye toward replacement. Though it may be too late for Evans Hall, much of America’s Brutalist heritage can still be rehabilitated. “Be patient,” says architecture professor Timothy Rohan (author of a study of American Brutalist Paul Rudolph). “Just because you find something unfashionable at the moment doesn’t mean you should eradicate it.” This is not, perhaps, advice particularly well-suited to college students, but given the likelihood of their exposure to Brutalism not just on campus but also on Instagram, they may turn out to be its best hope yet.
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.
In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII — who, not coincidentally, was born Giulio de’ Medici. That famous dynasty, which once seemed to hold absolute economic and political power in Florence, had just seen off a violent challenge to its rule by republican-minded Florentines who, emboldened by the sack of Rome in 1527, took their city from the House of Medici that same year. Alas, that particular Republic of Florence proved short-lived, thanks to the pope and Emperor Charles V’s agreement agreed to use military power to return it to Medici hands.
During the struggles against the Medici, the Florence-born Michelangelo had come to the aid of his hometown by working on its fortifications. It seems to have been his participation in the revolt that drew the ire of the Medici, despite their court’s on-and-off patronage of his work for the preceding four decades.
Mercifully, they never actually executed Michelangelo, and indeed pardoned him before long–not least so he could finish his work on the Sistine Chapel and the Medici family tomb. But how did he occupy himself while still living under the death sentence?
As one theory has it, he simply hid out — and in a corner of what’s now the Medici Chapels Museum at that. In a “tiny chamber beneath the Medici Chapels in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in 1530,” writes the Guardian’s Angela Giuffrida, Michelangelo spent a couple months “making dozens of drawings that are reminiscent of his previous works, including a drawing of Leda and the Swan, a painting produced during the same year that was later lost.” All of these he drew directly on the walls, and their existence “remained unknown until 1975 when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, one of five museums that make up the Bargello Museums, was searching for a suitable space to create a new exit for the museum.”
Not that you can just waltz into this stanza segreta: “Visits will be kept to groups of four and limited to 15 minutes, with 45 minute lights-out periods in between to protect the drawings,” Horowitz writes. ‘Tickets, each connected to a specific person whose I.D. will be checked to prevent tour operators from gobbling them up, will cost 32 euros (about $34), and include access to the Medici tombs.” During your own fifteen minutes in this cramped, obscure room turned tastefully-lit gallery, you may or may not feel the presence of Michelangelo, but you’ll surely find yourself reminded that a true artist never stops creating, no matter the circumstances in which he finds himself.
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.
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