How Londinium Became London, Lutetia Became Paris, and Other Roman Cities Got Their Modern Names

in History | January 3rd, 2024

They Might Be Giants achieved pop-cul­tur­al immor­tal­i­ty when they cov­ered Jim­my Kennedy and music by Nat Simon’s nov­el­ty song “Istan­bul (Not Con­stan­tino­ple)” in 1990. Key to the the lyrics’ humor is their simul­ta­ne­ous fix­a­tion on and appar­ent dis­in­ter­est in the rea­son for the re-nam­ing of the Turk­ish metrop­o­lis. As often as you hear the song — and we’ve all heard it count­less times over the past few decades — you’ll learn only that Con­stan­tino­ple became Istan­bul, not why. In his new video above, on how the cities of the Roman Empire got their mod­ern names, ancient his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of Youtube chan­nel Told in Stone, pro­vides a lit­tle more detail.

“Istan­bul seems to be a Turk­ish ren­der­ing of the Greek phrase eis ten polin, ‘into the city,” Ryan says. Oth­er of that coun­try’s urban set­tle­ments have names that would be more rec­og­niz­able to an ancient Roman cit­i­zen: “Bur­sa is Prusa, Smyr­na is Izmir, Attaleia is Antalya, Ico­ni­um is Konya, and Ancyra is Ankara.”

Iznik was orig­i­nal­ly called Nicaea, but so was Nice, France (though only the for­mer has the his­tor­i­cal dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing pro­duced the Nicene Creed). “The French towns Aix and Dax are descen­dants of the Latin aquae, springs. The same word, lit­er­al­ly trans­lat­ed, is behind Baden Baden, Ger­many, and Bath, Eng­land.”

For some cities, the tran­si­tion from a Roman to post-Roman name did­n’t hap­pen in one sim­ple step. It’s well known that, in the days of the Roman Empire, Lon­don was called Lon­dini­um; what’s less well known is that it also took on the names Lun­den­wic and Lun­den­burg in the eras between. And “although the clas­si­cal name of Paris was Lute­tia” — as pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — “the city was already known by the name of a local tribe, the Parisii, by late antiq­ui­ty.” If you can guess the cur­rent names of Forum Tra­iani, Igilgili, or, Bor­be­toma­gus, you’ve got a keen­er sense of ancient his­to­ry than most. Mod­ern West­ern civ­i­liza­tion may descend from the Roman Empire, but that lega­cy comes through much more clear­ly in some places than oth­ers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

A 3D Ani­ma­tion Reveals What Paris Looked Like When It Was a Roman Town

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Every Ital­ian City & Town Found­ed in the BC Era

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

Every Roman Emper­or: A Video Time­line Mov­ing from Augus­tus to the Byzan­tine Empire’s Last Ruler, Con­stan­tine XI

Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Pho­tos That Explore the Roman Empire

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

 

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How Toilets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval England

in History, Life | December 28th, 2023

How­ev­er detailed they may be in oth­er respects, many accounts of dai­ly life cen­turies and cen­turies ago pass over the use of the toi­let in silence. Even if they did­n’t, they would­n’t involve the kind of toi­lets we would rec­og­nize today, but rather cham­ber pots, out­hous­es, and oth­er kinds of spe­cial­ized rooms with chutes emp­ty­ing straight out into rivers and onto back gar­dens. And that was just the res­i­dences. What would pub­lic facil­i­ties have been like? We have one answer in the Told in Stone video above, which describes “pub­lic latrines in ancient Rome,” the facil­i­ties con­struct­ed in almost every Roman town “where cit­i­zens could relieve them­selves en masse.”

These usu­al­ly had at least a dozen seats, Told in Stone cre­ator Gar­rett Ryan explains, though some were grander in scale than oth­ers: the Roman ago­ra of Athens, for exam­ple, boast­ed a 68-seater. A facil­i­ty in Tim­gad, the “African Pom­peii” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, had “fan­cy arm­rests in the shape of leap­ing dol­phins.”

Judged by their ruins, these pub­lic “restrooms” may seem unex­pect­ed­ly impres­sive in their engi­neer­ing and ele­gant in their design. But we may feel some­what less inclined toward time-trav­el fan­tasies when Ryan gets into such details as “the sponge on a stick that served as toi­let paper” that remains “one of the more noto­ri­ous aspects of dai­ly life in ancient Rome.”

These weren’t tech­ni­cal­ly latrines, as Lina Zel­dovich notes at Smithsonian.com. “The word ‘latrine,’ or lat­ri­na in Latin, was used to describe a pri­vate toi­let in someone’s home, usu­al­ly con­struct­ed over a cesspit. Pub­lic toi­lets were called fori­cae,” and their con­struc­tion tend­ed to rely on deep-pock­et­ed orga­ni­za­tions or indi­vid­u­als. “Upper-class Romans, who some­times paid for the fori­cae to be erect­ed, gen­er­al­ly wouldn’t set foot in these places. They con­struct­ed them for the poor and the enslaved — but not because they took pity on the low­er class­es. They built these pub­lic toi­lets so they wouldn’t have to walk knee-deep in excre­ment on the streets.”

The prob­lem of large-scale human waste dis­pos­al is as old as urban civ­i­liza­tion, and Rome hard­ly solved it once and for all. The Absolute His­to­ry short above shows how the cas­tles of medieval Eng­land han­dled it, using lava­to­ries with holes over the moat (and piles of “moss, grass, or hay” in lieu of yet-to-be-invent­ed toi­let paper). At Medievalists.net, Lucie Lau­monier writes that the urban equiv­a­lent of Roman fori­cae were “often built over bridges and on quays to facil­i­tate the evac­u­a­tion of human waste that went direct­ly into run­ning water.” Inno­v­a­tive as this was, it must have posed dif­fi­cul­ties for boaters pass­ing below, to say noth­ing of the users unfor­tu­nate enough to sit on a wood­en seat just rot­ten enough to give out — the prospect of which, for all the defi­cien­cies of Mod­ern West­ern civ­i­liza­tion’s pub­lic restrooms, at least no longer wor­ries us quite so much today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

Urine Wheels in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Dis­cov­er the Curi­ous Diag­nos­tic Tool Used by Medieval Doc­tors

Hermeneu­tics of Toi­lets by Slavoj Žižek: An Ani­ma­tion About Find­ing Ide­ol­o­gy in Unlike­ly Places

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Going to the Bath­room in Space But Were Afraid to Ask

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

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Behold the “Double Helix” Staircase Often Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: It Features Two Intertwined Spiral Staircases That Let People Ascend & Descend Without Obstructing Each Other

in Architecture, History | December 27th, 2023

Image by Zairon, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Among the non-wine-relat­ed points of inter­est in the Loire Val­ley, the Château de Cham­bord stands tall — or rather, both tall and wide, being eas­i­ly the largest château in the region. “A Unesco World Her­itage site with more than 400 rooms, includ­ing recep­tion halls, kitchens, lap­idary rooms and roy­al apart­ments,” writes Adri­enne Bern­hard at BBC Trav­el, it “boasts a fire­place for every day of the year.” No less vast and elab­o­rate a hunt­ing lodge would do for King Fran­cis I, who had it built between 1519 and 1547, though the iden­ti­ty of the archi­tect from whom he com­mis­sioned the plans has been lost to his­to­ry. But the unusu­al design of its cen­tral stair­case — and cen­tral tourist attrac­tion — sug­gests an intrigu­ing name indeed: Leonar­do da Vin­ci.

“In 1516, Leonar­do left his stu­dio in Rome to join the court of King Fran­cis I as ‘pre­mier pein­tre et ingénieur et archi­tecte du Roi,’ ” Bern­hard writes. “Fran­cis I enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly embraced the cul­tur­al Renais­sance that had swept Italy, eager to put his impri­matur on the arts, and in 1516 com­mis­sioned plans for his dream cas­tle at the site of Romoran­tin. For Leonar­do, it was an ide­al assign­ment – the cul­mi­na­tion of an illus­tri­ous career, allow­ing the artist to express many of his pas­sions: archi­tec­ture, urban plan­ning, hydraulics and engi­neer­ing.” But not long after its con­struc­tion began, the Romoran­tin project was aban­doned, and by the time Fran­cis got start­ed on what would become Château de Cham­bord, Leonar­do was already dead.

Leonar­do’s influ­ence nev­er­the­less seems present in the fin­ished cas­tle: in its Greek cross-shaped floor plan, in its large cop­u­la, and most of all in its “dou­ble helix” stair­case, which resem­bles cer­tain designs con­tained in his Codex Atlanti­cus. “The cel­e­brat­ed stair­case con­sists in a hol­lowed cen­tral core and, twist­ing and turn­ing one above the oth­er, twinned heli­cal ramps ser­vic­ing the main floors of the build­ing,” says the Château de Cham­bor­d’s offi­cial site. “Mag­i­cal­ly enough, when two per­sons use the dif­fer­ent sets of stair­cas­es at the same time, they can see each oth­er going up or down, yet nev­er meet.” (Blog­ger Gretchen M. Greer writes that “one woman I trav­eled with found the stair­case so strik­ing­ly sym­bol­ic of the mar­i­tal dishar­mo­ny and dis­con­nect that result­ed in her divorce that she declared the beau­ti­ful archi­tec­tur­al fea­ture the ugli­est place in the Loire.”)

Some schol­ars, like Hidemichi Tana­ka, iden­ti­fy the hand of Leonar­do in prac­ti­cal­ly every detail of the château. “Seen from afar, the roof ter­race, with its mul­ti­tude of archi­tec­tur­al embell­ish­ments, is sug­ges­tive of a soar­ing city sky­line,” he writes in a 1992 arti­cle in the jour­nal Art­ibus et His­to­ri­ae. “It may be worth com­par­ing the ‘city in stone’ with the town­scape in the back­ground of Leonar­do’s Annun­ci­a­tion in the Uffizi Gallery, Flo­rence, as well as with the struc­tures in the draw­ings of floods which the artist made in his lat­er years.” Though per­haps a chrono­log­i­cal­ly implau­si­ble achieve­ment, the design of the Château de Cham­bord would have been nei­ther tech­ni­cal­ly nor aes­thet­i­cal­ly beyond him. And indeed, who would­n’t be pleased to see medieval cas­tle archi­tec­ture paid such extrav­a­gant and still-impres­sive trib­ute by the quin­tes­sen­tial Renais­sance man?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Designs the Ide­al City: See 3D Mod­els of His Rad­i­cal Design

Explore the Largest Online Archive Explor­ing the Genius of Leonar­do da Vin­ci

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Ver­sailles: Six Min­utes of Ani­ma­tion Show the Con­struc­tion of the Grand Palace Over 400 Years

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

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Two Ways To Shoot The Same Scene: A Comparison of The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) Shows How Filmmaking Changed Over the Decades

in Film, History | December 27th, 2023

Some years ago, the Guardian’s Anne T. Don­ahue rec­om­mend­ed, as an alter­na­tive Christ­mas movie, Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail from 1998. “Admit­ted­ly, You’ve Got Mail takes place from Octo­ber to spring,” she writes, “but what mat­ters most is that the movie’s most com­pelling scenes — when Joe Fox (Tom Han­ks) dis­cov­ers that Kath­leen Kel­ly (Meg Ryan) is Shop­Girl, when they have cof­fee, when Kath­leen real­izes she’s prob­a­bly going to lose her store (and again, no, not cry­ing) — occur over the Best Time of Year™.” If none of this rings a bell, jin­gle or oth­er­wise, you may need to get up to speed on the roman­tic come­dies of the nine­teen-nineties. You’d do well to begin with Ephron’s pre­vi­ous Christ­mas­time-set Han­ks-and-Ryan vehi­cle, Sleep­less in Seat­tle.

Despite being pri­mar­i­ly con­sid­ered a spir­i­tu­al sequel to Sleep­less in Seat­tle, You’ve Got Mail is also an adap­ta­tion of a much ear­li­er pic­ture, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Cor­ner. Released in 1940, it stars James Stew­art and Mar­garet Sulla­van as co-work­ers in a Budapest leather goods shop whose mutu­al ani­mos­i­ty con­ceals, even to them­selves, the fact that they’ve been amorous­ly cor­re­spond­ing after being con­nect­ed through a per­son­als ad. This premise (which in turn comes from Par­fumerie, a 1937 play by Mik­lós Lás­zló) holds out prac­ti­cal­ly unlim­it­ed mileage to the rom-com genre. That two high-pro­file films have faith­ful­ly adhered to Par­fumerie gives cinephiles an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­pare and con­trast, mak­ing a study of how film itself changed over near­ly six decades.

Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, attempts just such an exer­cise in the new video above, focus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable scene shared by the two movies. “On the day the pen pals final­ly agree to meet at a café, the man, who gets there sec­ond, sees through the win­dow that his beloved is actu­al­ly his real-life antag­o­nist, and because of this, does­n’t reveal his true iden­ti­ty. This imbal­ance of knowl­edge makes for a mar­velous scene of dra­mat­ic irony, cre­at­ing a ten­sion that is at once heart-wrench­ing and hilar­i­ous.” In The Shop Around the Cor­ner, this scene plays out in a lit­tle over eight min­utes; in You’ve Got Mail, it takes near­ly ten. But what real­ly sep­a­rates the styles of the ear­li­er pic­ture and the lat­er is “the num­ber of shots used to cov­er the scene.”

“In 1940, Lubitsch filmed the café scene in just nine­teen shots. In com­par­i­son, Nora Ephron, 58 years lat­er, used 133 shots for the same mate­r­i­al,” result­ing in a dif­fer­ence in aver­age shot length of well over twen­ty sec­onds. This increase in cut­ting could reflect the fact that “ear­ly film­mak­ing tech­niques were influ­enced by the con­ven­tions of stage plays, where many film­mak­ers” — Lubitsch includ­ed — “began their careers,” where­as “films of the eight­ies and nineties were influ­enced by music videos and com­mer­cials, which increased view­er tol­er­ance for more rapid edit­ing,” to say noth­ing of the many oth­er wider cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences between the pre­war years and the end of the mil­len­ni­um. And when, some Christ­mas down the line, this mate­r­i­al next gets adapt­ed, it will pre­sum­ably reflect the aes­thet­ics (so to speak) of Tik­Tok.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Young Nora Ephron Gets Ani­mat­ed About Breasts, Fem­i­nism, Jour­nal­ism & New Pos­si­bil­i­ties (1975)

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Most Trou­bling Christ­mas Film Ever Made

The Impor­tance of Film Edit­ing Demon­strat­ed by the Bad Edit­ing of Major Films: Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, Sui­cide Squad & More

Nora Ephron’s Lists: “What I Will Miss” and “What I Won’t Miss”

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

 

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For 500 Years, Every Student Who Attained a BA from Oxford Had to Swear Enmity Towards a Person Named Henry Symeonis

in History | December 26th, 2023

Image via The Bodleian Library

If you were to ask a cer­tain kind of Eng­lish­man what sets his home­land apart from the rest of the world, he might point to the strength of its tra­di­tions. And what holds true for Eng­land itself holds even truer for its most renowned insti­tu­tions, espe­cial­ly its most pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties. Those who dream of attend­ing Oxford dream not least of its dis­tinc­tive tra­di­tions: from the rel­a­tive­ly fre­quent For­mal Hall, to the var­i­ous cer­e­mo­ni­al rit­u­als on Ascen­sion Day, to the Mal­lard Song sung just once per cen­tu­ry by the elites of All Souls Col­lege, dat­ing back to that col­lege’s foun­da­tion in 1438— which was still long after the time of Oxford’s ulti­mate per­sona non gra­ta, a long-mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure named Hen­ry Syme­o­nis.

As recent­ly as the time of Dick­ens (or at least the era in which he set his nov­els), Bach­e­lors of Arts stu­dents turn­ing Mas­ter of Arts stu­dents at Oxford were, accord­ing to the blog of the Archives and Man­u­scripts at the Bodleian Library, “required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, priv­i­leges, lib­er­ties and cus­toms, as you might expect; and not to lec­ture else­where, or resume their bach­e­lor stud­ies after get­ting their MA.” But they “also had to swear that they would nev­er agree to the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of Hen­ry Syme­o­nis,” who­ev­er that was. “Nowhere in the statutes did it explain who this Hen­ry Syme­o­nis (or Sime­o­nis) was, what he was sup­posed to have done or why those get­ting their MAs should nev­er agree to be rec­on­ciled with him.”

The clause in ques­tion came up for review in the ear­ly 1650s, but “even by that time, one sus­pects that the oath was of such antiq­ui­ty that no-one knew any­thing about it and it was thought best to leave it be.” Not until 1912 did Regi­nald Lane Poole, Keep­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty Archives, deter­mine that Syme­o­nis was the son of “a very wealthy towns­man of Oxford.” In 1242, “he and a num­ber of oth­er men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of mur­der­ing a stu­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty. Hen­ry and his accom­plices were fined £80 by King Hen­ry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result.” Two decades after the mur­der, Hen­ry III issued Syme­o­nis (who had, in any case, long since returned to town) an offi­cial par­don.

“The Gov­ern­ment was aware of the volatile rela­tion­ship between town and gown and was con­cerned, in 1264, at the prospect of the Uni­ver­si­ty leav­ing Oxford in protest if Hen­ry was allowed to return.” What seems to have hap­pened is that “Hen­ry Syme­o­nis had bought the King’s par­don and his per­mis­sion to return to Oxford. The King was will­ing to allow his return if the Uni­ver­si­ty agreed to it. But the Uni­ver­si­ty refused and chose to ignore the King’s order” — and even “gave Hen­ry Syme­o­nis the unique hon­or of being named in its own statutes, mak­ing the University’s dis­like of him offi­cial and per­pet­u­al.” There his name stayed, receiv­ing the sworn enmi­ty of five and a half cen­turies’ worth of Oxford stu­dents, until the removal of the rel­e­vant oath in 1827. “No back­ground infor­ma­tion nor rea­son for the deci­sion is record­ed,” notes the Bodleian’s blog, pos­si­bly because “nobody knew exact­ly what they were abol­ish­ing.”

via Archives and Man­u­scripts at the Bodleian Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Inter­ac­tive “Mur­der Map” Reveals the Mean­est Streets of Medieval Lon­don

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

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

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A Man Hiding from the Nazis Made 95 Issues of a Highly Creative Zine (1943–1945)

in Art, History, Life, Magazines | December 26th, 2023

Copy­right by Char­i­ties Aid Foun­da­tion Amer­i­ca thanks to the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Bloch fam­i­ly; restora­tion and dig­i­ti­za­tion: Jew­ish Muse­um Berlin. This per­tains to all images on this page.

Per­haps at some point in the future,

the poems in your tongue I com­posed,

will be brought to your notice,

and if so, to delight will I then be dis­posed.

— Curt Bloch, Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret

Zines typ­i­cal­ly tend toward the ephemer­al, owing to their small cir­cu­la­tions, errat­ic pub­li­ca­tion sched­ules, and the unpre­dictable lives of their cre­ators. 

Curt Bloch’s zine, Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret (The Under­wa­ter Cabaret) defies these odds.

Bloch not only pro­duced an impres­sive 95 issues between August 1943 and April 1945, he did so as a Ger­man Jew hid­ing from the Nazis in the rafters of a pri­vate home in the Dutch city of Enschede, not far from the Ger­man bor­der.

His cut-and-paste illus­tra­tions are part of a long-stand­ing zine con­tin­u­um, made pos­si­ble in part by helpers who fur­nished him with pens, glue, news­pa­pers and oth­er col­lage-wor­thy mate­ri­als, in addi­tion to food and oth­er neces­si­ties. 

His print run was sub-minis­cule. Dupli­cat­ing his work was not an option, so Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret cir­cu­lat­ed in its orig­i­nal form, passed from hand to hand at great risk.

The zine’s title is a play on onder­duiken (to dive under), which Dutch peo­ple under­stood as a ref­er­ence to the 10,000 Jews hid­ing from the Nazis in their coun­try.

Ger­ard Groen­eveld, author of The Under­wa­ter Cabaret: The Satir­i­cal Resis­tance of Curt Bloch, cred­its the “huge orga­ni­za­tion” who helped Bloch and oth­ers sequestered Jews with cir­cu­lat­ing the zine:

(It) includ­ed couri­ers, who brought food, but who could also bring the mag­a­zine out, to share with oth­er peo­ple in the group who could be trust­ed. The mag­a­zines are very small, you can eas­i­ly put one in your pock­et or hide it in a book. He got them all back. They must have also returned them in some way.

It’s noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle that all 95 install­ments sur­vive. Many zinesters fall short of pre­serv­ing their work, but Bloch could not ignore this pro­jec­t’s per­son­al and his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.

Aubrey Pomer­ance, co-cura­tor of the Jüdis­ches Muse­um Berlin’s upcom­ing exhib­it, “My Vers­es Are Like Dyna­mite, Curt Bloch’s Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret”, notes that “the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of writ­ings that were cre­at­ed in hid­ing were destroyed.” 

For half a cen­tu­ry, these zines were known to a select few — fam­i­ly mem­bers, their orig­i­nal read­ers, and a hand­ful of guests whom Bloch enter­tained by read­ing pas­sages aloud after din­ner par­ties in the family’s New York home. 

Pomer­ance sus­pects that Bloch always intend­ed for his work to have a per­for­mance aspect, and that the cou­ple who shared his crawl­space quar­ters may well have been his first audi­ence for dit­ties like the one below.

Hye­nas and jack­als

Look on with jeal­ousy

For they now seem as choir­boys

Com­pared to human­i­ty.

Bloch’s daugh­ter, Simone, who describes her dad as a smar­tass, is work­ing on a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to his work. Read more about Bloch’s zine at The New York Times.

The images on this page thanks to the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Bloch fam­i­ly; restora­tion and dig­i­ti­za­tion comes thanks to the Jew­ish Muse­um Berlin.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear the Haunting Aztec “Death Whistle,” the Instrument That Made Sounds Resembling a Human Scream

in History, Music | December 20th, 2023

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.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Appre­hen­sion Engine: Bri­an Eno Called It “the Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Musi­cal Instru­ment of All Time”

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

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Why Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoléon Is “the Most Creative Film Ever Made”

in Film, History | December 20th, 2023

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.

Grant­ed that, almost a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a silent his­tor­i­cal epic as long as three aver­age movies may be con­sid­ered some­thing of a “hard sell.” But if you’re intrigued, con­sid­er start­ing with the half-hour-long intro­duc­tion to Napoléon above by The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy’s Lewis Bond, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his exe­ge­sis of every­thing from the rule-break­ing of the French New Wave to the poet­ry of Andrei Tarkovsky and the copy­cat-ism of Quentin Taran­ti­no to the aes­thet­ic of ani­me. We can thus rest assured that when Bond says that Napoléon, “with­out hyper­bole, is the most inven­tive cin­e­mat­ic endeav­or in the his­to­ry of the medi­um,” he does­n’t do so light­ly.

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the New­ly Released Trail­er for Rid­ley Scott’s Napoleon, Star­ring Joaquin Phoenix

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Vin­tage Pho­tos of Vet­er­ans of the Napoleon­ic Wars, Tak­en Cir­ca 1858

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waist­coat?: The Ori­gins of This Dis­tinc­tive Pose Explained

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

 

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