It’s nearly impossible to find an unblemished square of pavement in New York City.
Unless the concrete was poured within the last day or two, count on each square to boast at least one dark polka dot, an echo of casually discarded gum.
For obvious reasons, this year’s festival took place entirely online, but the Dance Theatre’s offering is a far cry from the gloomy Zoom‑y affair that’s become 2020’s sad norm.
Those who gripe about the discomfort of wearing a mask while exerting themselves should shut their traps until they’ve performed ballet on the platform of the 145th and St. Nicholas Subway Station, where the dancers’ pristine white shoes bring further buoyancy to the proceedings.
The Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge serve as backdrop as four young men soar along the promenade in Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park. Their casual outfits are a reminder of how company founder Arthur Mitchell, the New York City Ballet’s first black principal dancer, deliberately relaxed the dress code to accommodate young men who would have resisted tights.
The piece is an excerpt of New Bach, part of the company’s repertoire by resident choreographer and former principal dancer, Robert Garland, described in an earlier New York Times review as “an authoritative and highly imaginative blend of classical vocabulary and funk, laid out in handsome formal patterns in a well-plotted ballet.”
And in these fractious times, it’s worth noting that only one of the dancers is New York City born and bred. The others hail from Kansas, Texas, Chicago, Louisiana, Delaware, Orange County, and upstate.
The group seizes the opportunity to amplify a much needed public health message—wear a mask!—but it’s also a beautiful tribute to the power of the arts and the vibrant neighborhood where a world-class company was founded in a converted garage at the height of the civil rights movement.
Like the great prog drummers of old—Bill Bruford, Neil Peart, Phil Collins—Tool’s Danny Carey is an artisan. They don’t make drumming like that anymore. He says so himself (sort of) in an interview with Music Radar about his side project Legend of the Seagullmen with Mastadon’s Brent Hinds. Remembering how Robert Fripp would stand on the edge of the stage, watching Tool play when King Crimson opened for the modern prog-metal giants, Carey remarks, “We weren’t syncing to some bullshit like so many other bands. We were actually playing live. It’s a sad thing when almost every band you see isn’t doing that. It’s the clicks and backing tracks that are keeping time. I’ve never played to a click on stage in my life.”
A “click track,” for those who don’t know, is exactly what it sounds like: a playback of clicks (or any percussive sound) to the desired tempo, pumped into a musician’s earpiece to keep them playing in time. A useful tool of the recording studio, many musicians, as Carey says, now use it on stage, along with vocal pitch correction software and pre-recorded backing tracks to make sure everything sounds exactly like it does on record.
All of this technology ruins the feel of live performance, Carey maintains. He would know. He’s been playing live since the 80s and playing with Tool since the band formed thirty years ago. He also jams every other month, he says, “with these weird dudes who played with Miles Davis or Mahavishnu Orchestra.” So… yeah. The dude’s got some classic chops.
But technology isn’t all bad in live music, far from it. Being a drummer used to mean that hardly anyone could see you on a big stage. You might be the most talented, best-looking member of the band, but you were hidden away behind your kit with the singers and guitarists soaking up the glory. Even when certain celebrity rock drummers get their own stages (with their own mini-roller coasters), it can be impossible to see what they’re doing up close. No longer. Thanks to unobtrusive cameras that can stream video from anywhere, no corner of the stage need be obscured. We can watch a Tool show from over Carey’s shoulder, as in the video of “Pneuma,” live in concert, at the top, produced by drum equipment company Vic Firth to demonstrate Carey’s new signature sticks.
It’s better to let Carey’s playing speak for itself, but for reference, “Pneuma” comes from Tool’s very eagerly-awaited 2019 album Fear Inoculum, just one of many tracks “filled with twist after turn, conventional song structure be damned,” Ilya Stemkovsky writes at Modern Drummer, “with Carey at the center of the storm, providing the heaviest, most massive bottom possible. He even gets his own solo percussion track, ‘Chocolate Chip Trip,’ on which he incorporates gongs and bells, among other sounds.” Maybe this live view, and Tool’s well-deserved Grammy Win for Best Metal Performance this year for “7empest,” will inspire more drummers to drop the click and bring back what Carey calls the “dedication to your vibe” from the days of artisanal drumming.
William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist might feel wrapped in the historical glow of “elevated horror” now–serious filmmaking for discerning fans and critics–but that was very much *not* the case back in the year of its birth. Back in the grimy, Watergate years of the early ‘70s, The Exorcist was as much a side-show freakout as anything William Castle produced back in the day. It was an endurance test.
The above film from that time proves it, showing the long, around-the-block lines, the sold-out screenings, the repeat viewers, and the record-breaking opening weekend grosses ($2 million in just 24 theaters in December, before opening wide across the nation in 1974.) This event had more in common with your current comic book movie or Star Wars sequel, and all the while being an R‑rated film based on Catholic dogma and featuring some of the most colorful profanity ever hurled at a man of the cloth (on screen at least).
Of course, it is the reactions of the viewers that make this footage worth it. The cinema workers talk about how even the biggest guys can’t hack the film and exit white as a sheet. Two young women say this is their second attempt to watch the film all the way through. Another guy say he wasn’t scared by the film but “I dunno, I just fainted.”
And we do in fact see some people faint in the lobby, just going down like a sack of bricks, and an usher tells the camera he has two kinds of smelling salts to choose from. One woman in line even tells the camera crew, “I wanna see if it’s gonna make me throw up.” In fact, at one point some theaters started handing out “barf bags” for nervous viewers (which probably increased their chances of vomiting). MAD Magazine even got in on the hype with an appropriate cover (“If the Devil Makes You Do It” reads the bag.)
All this was incredibly good for business, and incredibly good for the news media, who sent crews like this one down, along with a reporter to interview people bailing on the film halfway through. The demonic voice is what did it for people, provided by actress Mercedes McCambridge, who reportedly downed raw eggs, smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey to give her voice that raspy edge.
From this year’s vantage point it all looks quaint and fun–all these different people from various walks of life having a shared experience in a theater, everybody whipped up into a delightful and ultimately harmless frenzy.
Most of the documentary was shot at the National Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles. Only three years old at the time, the cinema was the last single-screen theater built in the United States. It was torn down in 2008, replaced by some tony apartments and a street-level sushi bar.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
For decades, urban planners around the world have looked to the Danish capital of Copenhagen, with its low-rise high density and unparalleled culture of everyday cycling, as an example of how to design a city. But what of the Danish track record in designing suburbs? Recently, a photographer by the name of Henry Do brought the world’s attention to one such settlement, Brøndby Haveby or Garden City, with a series of aerial photographs posted to Instagram. “Unreal how my recent images from here went crazy viral,” Do writes in the caption of a follow-up drone video — “unreal” being just the word some have used to describe the place itself, composed as it is entirely out of circles.
Built in 1964 to the design of “genius landscape architect Erik Mygind,” Brøndby Haveby mimics “the traditional patterns of the 18th century Danish villages, where people would use the middle as a focal point for hanging out, mingle and social interchange between neighbors.”
This unusual form, more of which you can see in Do’s drone photos at Lonely Planet, suits the long-established Danish cabin culture, according to which every city-dwelling Dane with the means buys a smaller second home in the countryside as a retreat. (Though the houses in Brøndby Haveby are owned, the gardens are rented, and local zoning laws prevent anyone from occupying their properties for more than six months out of the year.)
Wherever it is, this cabin must be made hyggelige, an adjective often translated into English as “cozy” and that, in recent years, has become a byword for the love of small-scale contentment that sets Denmark apart. (Not everybody is sold on the concept: “With its relentless drive towards the middle ground and its dependence on keeping things light and breezy,” writes British Denmark expat Michael Booth, “hygge does get a bit boring sometimes.”) As Lenni Madsen, a Danish Quora user with a Brøndby Haveby house in the family, puts it, “Imagine your average small-time community, where everyone knows everyone else, you see each other across the hedge, perhaps sharing a beer or having coffee at each others’ houses.”
This seems a far cry from the alienation and depravity of the standard suburban cul-de-sac, at least as portrayed in American popular myth. And it isn’t hard to see the appeal for average urbanites, especially those looking to spend their generous vacation time in as different an environment as possible without having to go far. (Homeowners must already have a primary residence within 20 kilometers, which includes the city of Copenhagen.) The astonished reactions on social media would suggest that most of us have never seen a place like this before. But for the Danes, it’s just another chapter in their civilizational pursuit of all that is hyggelige.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Brian Hirt, and Erica Spyres all played both The Last of Us, and more recently immersed themselves in the lengthier The Last of Us 2, which has been generating a lot of acclaim but also controversy. Actually, Erica just watches her husband Drew Jackson play these things, but he showed up to this discussion too. Yes, these creations of Neil Druckmann with the Naughty Dog team are groundbreaking, and riveting, but by design not necessarily “fun,” or thereby involving much “playing.”
The franchise is ostensibly about a zombie apocalypse and an immune girl that might be its cure, but it’s really a drawn-out drama about loss, family, and the cycle of revenge… You know, in between running around looking for scraps to craft weapon upgrades and skulking around driving shivs through the necks of numerous monsters and people.
We compare The Last of Us to other zombie media like Walking Dead, address the shifting points of view in the game (playable flashbacks!), representation, fan and critical reaction, the effectiveness of the game’s message, and more.
This conversation should work both for listeners who’ve actually played the games and those who are just curious about what the fuss is about. There are some plot spoilers about the end of the first game and events near the beginning of the second game necessary to discuss the narrative.
If you’ve explored the filmography of Werner Herzog, you’ve heard him speak not just his signature Teutonically inflected English — often imitated in recent years, though never quite equaled — but German as well. What else does he speak? In the clip above, the Bavarian-born director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo responds thus to the question of exactly how many languages he has: “Not too many. I mean, Spanish, English, German… and then I spoke modern Greek better than English once. I made a film in modern Greek, but that’s because in school I learned Latin and ancient Greek.”
The list doesn’t end there. “I do speak some Italian. I do understand French, but I refuse to speak it. It’s the last thing I would ever do. You can only get some French out of me with a gun pointed at my head” — which is exactly what happened to him. “I was taken prisoner in Africa” by “drunk soldiers on a truck,” all of them “fifteen, sixteen years old, some of them eight, nine years old,” armed and taking dead aim at him. “That was very unpleasant,” not least due to the lead soldier’s insistence that “on nous parle français ici.” And so Herzog finally “had to say a few things in French. I regret it. I shouldn’t have done it.”
But speaking, in Herzog’s world, isn’t as important as reading. “I read in Spanish and I read in Latin and I read in ancient Greek and I read in, er, whatever,” he told the Guardian in a more recent interview. “But it doesn’t matter. It depends on the text. I mean, take, for instance, Hölderlin, the greatest of the German poets. You cannot touch him in translation. If you’re reading Hölderlin, you must learn German first.” This alongside an appreciation of “trash movies, trash TV. WrestleMania. The Kardashians. I’m fascinated by it. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.”
It you want to become like Werner Herzog — well, best of luck to you (though he has created a “rogue film school” and currently stars in a Masterclass). But if you want to follow his lead in this specifically linguistic respect, you can start from our collection of free online lessons in 48 languages. There you’ll find material to start on everything from Spanish to modern as well as ancient Greek. Also included is French, Herzog’s bête noire, as well as Latin, which in the Guardian interview he calls his third language. German, which also figures into our collection, turns out not to be Herzog’s native language: “My mother tongue is Bavarian. Which is not even German, it’s a dialect.” With his filmmaking activities curtailed by world events, perhaps he’d consider producing a series of lessons?
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
When the pandemic ends and travel resumes, you’ll hopefully find puppeteers Diana Romero and Andrés Maturana entertaining folks, both young and old, on the streets of Madrid. Above, watch them entertain passersby with a marionette of Freddie Mercury singing the Queen classic, “I Want to Break Free.” Down below, you can see their marionette take on the Beatles.
Here’s some quick backstory on their work:
Periplo Puppets are Diana Romero and Andrés Maturana: designers and makers of puppets and stories. We began in 2003 with TitiriBeatles at the Ramblas of Barcelona and studying self-taught at Institut del Teatre Library. We traveled with our puppets through the streets of Europe and America gathering information and experience, until in 2009 we decided to live in Madrid and be a Theatre company. …We focus on audiovisual performance mixing video mapping, string puppets, and latex puppets to make shows that involve the audience.
Western scholarship has had “a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry.” This does not mean, however, that cooking has been ignored by historians. Many a scholar has taken European cooking seriously, before recent food scholarship expanded the canon. For example, in a 1926 English translation of an ancient Roman cookbook, Joseph Dommers Vehling makes a strong case for the centrality of food scholarship.
“Anyone who would know something worth while about the private and public lives of the ancients,” writes Vehling, “should be well acquainted with their table.” Published as Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome (and available here at Project Gutenberg), it is, he says, the oldest known cookbook in existence.
The book, originally titled De Re Coquinaria, is attributed to Apicius and may date to the 1st century A.C.E., though the oldest surviving copy comes from the end of the Empire, sometime in the 5th century. As with most ancient texts, copied over centuries, redacted, amended, and edited, the original cookbook is shrouded in mystery.
The cookbook’s author, Apicius, could have been one of several “renowned gastronomers of old Rome” who bore the surname. But whichever “famous eater” was responsible, over 2000 years later the book has quite a lot to tell us about the Roman diet. (All of the illustrations here are by Vehling, who includes over two dozen examples of ancient practices and artifacts.)
Meat played an important role, and “cruel methods of slaughter were common.” But the kind of meat available seems to have changed during Apicius’s time:
With the increasing shortage of beef, with the increasing facilities for raising chicken and pork, a reversion to Apician methods of cookery and diet is not only probably but actually seems inevitable. The ancient bill of fare and the ancient methods of cookery were entirely guided by the supply of raw materials—precisely like ours. They had no great food stores nor very efficient marketing and transportation systems, food cold storage. They knew, however, to take care of what there was. They were good managers.
But vegetarians were also well-served. “Apicius certainly excels in the preparation of vegetable dishes (cf. his cabbage and asparagus) and in the utilization of parts of food materials that are today considered inferior.” This apparent need to use everything, and to sometimes heavily spice food to cover spoilage, may have led to an unusual Roman custom. As How Stuff Works puts it, “cooks then were revered if they could disguise a common food item so that diners had no idea what they were eating.”
As for the recipes themselves, well, any attempt to duplicate them will be at best a broad interpretation—a translation from ancient methods of cooking by smell, feel, and custom to the modern way of weights and measures. Consider the following recipe:
WINE SAUCE FOR TRUFFLES
PEPPER, LOVAGE, CORIANDER, RUE, BROTH, HONEY AND A LITTLE OIL.
ANOTHER WAY: THYME, SATURY, PEPPER, LOVAGE, HONEY, BROTH AND OIL.
I foresee much frustrating trial and error (and many hopeful substitutions for things like lovage or rue or “satury”) for the cook who attempts this. Some foods that were plentifully available could cost hundreds now to prepare for a dinner party.
SEAFOOD MINCES ARE MADE OF SEA-ONION, OR SEA CRAB, FISH, LOBSTER, CUTTLE-FISH, INK FISH, SPINY LOBSTER, SCALLOPS AND OYSTERS. THE FORCEMEAT IS SEASONED WITH LOVAGE, PEPPER, CUMIN AND LASER ROOT.
Vehling’s footnotes mostly deal with etymology and define unfamiliar terms (“laser root” is wild fennel), but they provide little practical insight for the cook. “Most of the Apician directions are vague, hastily jotted down, carelessly edited,” much of the terminology is obscure: “with the advent of the dark ages, it ceased to be a practical cookery book.” We learn, instead, about Roman ingredients and home economic practices, inseparable from Roman economics more generally, according to Vehling.
He makes a judgment of his own time even more relevant to ours: “Such atrocities as the willful destruction of huge quantities of food of every description on the one side and the starving multitudes on the other as seen today never occurred in antiquity.” Perhaps more current historians of antiquity would beg to differ, I wouldn’t know.
But if you’re just looking for a Roman recipe that you can make at home, might I suggest the Rose Wine?
ROSE WINE
MAKE ROSE WINE IN THIS MANNER: ROSE PETALS, THE LOWER WHITE PART REMOVED, SEWED INTO A LINEN BAG AND IMMERSED IN WINE FOR SEVEN DAYS. THEREUPON ADD A SACK OF NEW PETALS WHICH ALLOW TO DRAW FOR ANOTHER SEVEN DAYS. AGAIN REMOVE THE OLD PETALS AND REPLACE THEM BY FRESH ONES FOR ANOTHER WEEK; THEN STRAIN THE WINE THROUGH THE COLANDER. BEFORE SERVING, ADD HONEY SWEETENING TO TASTE. TAKE CARE THAT ONLY THE BEST PETALS FREE FROM DEW BE USED FOR SOAKING.
You could probably go with red or white, though I’d hazard Apicius went with a fine vinum rubrum. This concoction, Vehling tells us in a helpful footnote, doubles as a laxative. Clever, those Romans. Read the full English translation of the ancient Roman cookbook here.
Do you like being right? Of course, everyone does. Are you successful at convincing others? That’s a tougher one. We may politely disagree, avoid, or scream bloody murder at each other, but whatever our conflict style, no one is born, and few are raised, knowing how to persuade.
Persuasion does not mean coercion, deceit, or manipulation, the tactics of con artists, underhanded salespersons, or stereotypically untrustworthy lawyers….
Persuasion is about shifting others’ point of view, respectfully and charitably, through the use of evidence and argument, ethical appeals, moving stories, and “faith in the power of your ideas,” as Neal Katyal explains in his TED presentation above, “How to Win an Argument (at the U.S. Supreme Court, or anywhere).”
Katyal’s job as a Supreme Court litigator makes him an authority on this subject. It may also distract you with thoughts about the current Court power struggle. Try to put those thoughts aside. In places where reason, evidence, and ethics have purchase, Katyal’s advice can pay dividends in your quest to win others over.
In his first case before the Court a “handful of years” after the 9/11 attacks, he represented Osama bin Laden’s driver in a suit pressing to recognize Geneva Convention rules in the war on terror and to rule Guantanamo unconstitutional. His opponent, the Solicitor General of the U.S., had argued 35 cases before the court; “I wasn’t even 35 years old,” Katyal says. He won the case, and he’ll tell you how.
His most important lesson? Winning arguments isn’t about being right. It isn’t about believing really, really hard that you’re right. Persuasion is not about confidence, Katyal insists. It’s about empathy. Oral arguments in the courtroom (which judges could just as well read in transcript form) show us as much, he says.
When his legal expertise was not helping in preparation for the big trial, Katyal felt desperate and hired an acting coach, who trained him in such techniques as holding hands while making his arguments. What? Yes, that’s exactly what Katyal said. But he did it, and it worked.
Holding hands with the Justices isn’t an option in court, but Katyal found other ways to remind himself to stay close to what mattered, wearing accessories his parents had given him, for example, and writing his children’s names on a legal pad: “That’s why I’m doing this, for them. To leave the country better than I found it.”
Once he had established his private reasons for caring, he was ready to present his public reasons. As the old saying goes, “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” The facts absolutely matter, yet the burden of showing how and why facts matter falls to the persuader, whose own passion, integrity, commitment, etc. will go a long way toward making an audience receptive.
This advice applies in any situation, but if you’re wondering how to move Katyal’s advice online.… well, maybe the ultimate lesson here is that we’re at our most persuasive when we’re close enough—physically or virtually—to take somebody’s hand.…
“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grandseñores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe collections—they were guides to court etiquette and sumptuous records of luxurious living. In ancient Rome, cookbooks functioned similarly, as the extravagant fourth century Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome demonstrates.
Written by Apicius, “Europe’s oldest [cookbook] and Rome’s only one in existence today”—as its first English translator described it—offers “a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life.” It also offers keen insight into the development of heavily flavored dishes before the age of refrigeration. Apicus recommends that “cooks who needed to prepare birds with a ‘goatish smell’ should bathe them in a mixture of pepper, lovage, thyme, dry mint, sage, dates, honey, vinegar, broth, oil and mustard,” Melanie Radzicki McManus notes at How Stuff Works.
Early cookbooks communicated in “a folksy, imprecise manner until the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s,” when standard (or metric) measurement became de rigueur. The first cookbook by an American, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, placed British fine dining and lavish “Queen’s Cake” next to “johnny cake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack,” Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald write at Smithsonian, all recipes symbolizing “the plain, but well-run and bountiful American home.” With this book, “a dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.”
Cookbooks are windows into history—markers of class and caste, documents of daily life, and snapshots of regional and cultural identity at particular moments in time. In 1950, the first cookbook written by a fictional lifestyle celebrity, Betty Crocker, debuted. It became “a national best-seller,” McManus writes. “It even sold more copies that year than the Bible.” The image of the perfect Stepford housewife may have been bigger than Jesus in the 50s, but Crocker’s career was decades in the making. She debuted in 1921, the year of publication for another, more humble recipe book: the Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society of Chicago’s Pilgrim Cook Book.
As Ayun Halliday noted in an earlier post, this charming collection features recipes for “Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy,” and it’s only one of thousands of such examples at the Internet Archive’s Cookbook and Home Economics Collection, drawn from digitized special collections at UCLA, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. When we last checked in, the collection featured 3,000 cookbooks. It has grown since 2016 to a library of 10,600 vintage examples of homespun Americana, fine dining, and mass marketing.
Laugh at gag-inducing recipes of old; cringe at the pious advice given to women ostensibly anxious to please their husbands; and marvel at how various international and regional cuisines have been represented to unsuspecting American home cooks. (It’s hard to say whether the cover or the contents of a Chinese Cook Book in Plain English from 1917 seem more offensive.) Cookbooks of recipes from the American South are popular, as are covers featuring stereotypical “mammy” characters. A more respectful international example, 1952’s Luchow’s German Cookbook gives us “the story and the favorite dishes of America’s most famous German restaurant.”
There are guides to mushrooms and “commoner fungi, with special emphasis on the edible varieties”; collections of “things mother used to make” and, most practically, a cookbook for leftovers. And there is every other sort of cookbook and home ec. manual you could imagine. Thearchive is stuffed with helpful hints, rare ingredients, unexpected regional cookeries, and millions of minute details about the habits of these books’ first hungry readers.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. We’ve all heard that proverb, but few of us could name its source: the Trojan priest Laocoön, a historical character in the Aeneid. “Do not trust the Horse, Trojans,” Virgil has him say. “Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.” He was right to do so, as we all know, though his death came not at the hands of the Greek army let into Troy by the soldiers hidden inside the Horse, but those of the gods. As Virgil has it, an enraged Laocoön threw a spear at the Horse when his compatriots disregarded words of caution, and in response the goddess Minerva sent forth a couple of sea serpents to do him in.
The Aeneid, of course, offers only one account of Laocoön’s fate. Sophocles, for instance, had him spared and only his sons killed, and his ostensible crime — being a priest yet marrying — had nothing to do with the Trojan Horse. But whatever drew the serpents Laocoön’s way, the moment they set upon him and his sons was immortalized by Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus in Laocoön and His Sons, among the most famous ancient sculptures in existence since its excavation in 1506. (The sculpture was originally created somewhere between 200 BC and 70 AD.) Various tributes have been paid to it over the centuries, most notably by an Austrian anatomist named Josef Hyrtl, whose built his highly Halloween-suitable recreation out of skeletons — both human and snake.
“According to Christopher Polt, an assistant professor in the classical studies department at Boston College who tweeted a side-by-side comparison of the two versions, Hyrtl created his take on the sculpture at the University of Vienna around 1850,” writes Hyperallergic’s Valentina Di Liscia. In response, a historian named Gregory Stringer tweeted that Hyrtl must have been able to intuit the “proper pose” of Laocoön’s right arm, since in the mid-19th century the sculpture’s original arm was still missing, yet to be rediscovered and reattached, and since 1510 had been replaced in copies with an incorrectly outstretched substitute. Laocoön and His Sons now resides at the Vatican (learn more about it in the Smarthistory video below), but Hyrtl’s skeletal Laocoön and His Sons was destroyed in the 1945 Allied bombing of Vienna.
In 2018, a similar project was attempted again for an exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The new all-skeleton version of Laocoön and His Sons was created, as the Houston Press’ Jef Rouner reports, by taxidermist Lawyer Douglas, taxidermy collector Tyler Zottarelle, and artist Joshua Hammond. “It looks a lot like interpretative dance,” Rouner quotes Douglas as saying of Hyrtl’s work. “It’s a beautiful piece, but I was concerned it wasn’t able to capture the original struggle of animal versus human.” Though Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus’ original is known as a “prototypical icon of human agony,” it turns out that “getting perpetually grinning skulls to seem in agony is harder than you might think.” But if any time of the year is right for grinning skulls to express the human experience, surely this is it.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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