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Image by J. F. Horrabin, via Wikimedia Commons
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 2.)
“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:
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.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 1994, Jerry Beck edited the book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, which challenged experts to create a ranking of the best short, cel animated cartoons ever made. To no one’s surprise, the experts chose 10 Warner Bros. animations crafted by Chuck Jones. They also gave a nod to Fleischer Studios’ original Superman cartoon, Disney’s first animation with Mickey Mouse (1928’s “Steamboat Willie”), and the Donald Duck-starring WWII propaganda film,“Der Fuehrer’s Face.”
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.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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 several such videos 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.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Along with Astounding Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine was one of the most important science fiction digests in 1950s America. Ray Bradbury wrote for it–including an early version of his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451–as did Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance, and numerous others.
Now a fairly decent collection of issues (356 in total) is available for your perusal at archive.org for absolutely free. It’s not complete yet, but it’s close.
When Galaxy appeared in October 1950, it promised a kind of science fiction different from the space operas of previous decades. As an “annual report” written by publisher H.L. Gold proclaimed,
…other publishers thought the idea of offering mature science fiction in an attractive, adult format was downright funny. They knew what sold–shapely female endomorphs with bronze bras, embattled male mesomorphs clad in muscle, and frightful alien monsters in search of a human soul.
And while Astounding Science Fiction was focused on technology–suited for an America that had fundamentally changed since WWII–H.L. Gold’s Galaxy focused on ideas, humor, satire, psychology and sociology. It also had one of the best pay rates in the industry, and offered some of its writers exclusive contracts. And the writers responded in kind and followed their own obsessions–although Gold often pitched ideas.
(Ironically, though immersed in stories of inner and outer space, Gold was an acute agoraphobe, and stayed in his apartment, communicating by phone.)
After a wobbly start graphics-wise, Gold hired Ed Emshwiller in 1951 to paint covers, whose often humorous style (e.g. this Christmas issue below) suited the humor inside the issue.
Confident in their stable of writers, Galaxy produced the wonderful birthday cover at the top, featuring caricatures of everybody from Bradbury to Asimov. There’s also a guide to see who’s who.
A series of editors–including Frederik Pohl–took over from Gold after a car accident in 1961, and by 1977–eight years after Pohl’s departure–the magazine was on its decline. There were more iterations, reprints, anthologies, and online versions, but the essential run is here. And those first ten years changed American science fiction forever, paving the way for experimental writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.
You could start with the Ray Bradbury story (“The Fireman”) we told you about, or Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Puppet.”
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
A heads-up on a deal: Between today and December 2, 2024, Coursera is offering a 40% discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $239.40) gives you access to 7,000+ courses for one all-inclusive subscription price. This includes Professional Certificates from leading companies. Take, for example, the Data Analyst Professional Certificate from Meta, the UX Design Professional Certificate from Google, or the AI Developer Professional Certificate from IBM.
The $239.40 annual fee–which translates to 65 cents per day–could be a good investment for anyone interested in learning new subjects and skills, or earning certificates that can be added to your resume. Just as Netflix’s streaming service gives you access to unlimited movies, Coursera Plus gives you access to unlimited courses and certificates. It’s basically an all-you-can-eat deal. Explore the offer (before December 2, 2024) here.
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Photos on this page courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage
Few who hear the story of the Endurance could avoid reflecting on the aptness of the ship’s name. A year after setting out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drifting ice off Antarctica. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men waited for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slowly crushed, and eventually had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the history books is the sub-expedition made by Shackleton and five others in search of help, which ensured the rescue of every single man who’d been on the ship.
This harrowing journey has, of course, inspired documentaries, including this year’s Endurance from National Geographic, which debuted at the London Film Festival last month and will come available to stream on Disney+ later this fall. “The documentary incorporates footage and photos captured during the expedition by Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who [in 1914] brought several cameras along for the journey,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Filmmakers have color-treated Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used artificial intelligence to recreate crew members’ voices to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”
The fruits of an even more technologically impressive project have been released along with Endurance: a 3D digital model “created from more than 25,000 high-resolution images captured after the iconic vessel was discovered in March 2022.”
As we noted at the time here on Open Culture, the ship was found to be in remarkably good condition after well over a century spent two miles beneath the Weddell Sea. “Endurance looks much like it did when it sank on November 21, 1915. Everyday items used by the crew — including dining plates, a boot and a flare gun — are still easily recognizable among the protected wreckage.”
Endurance has, in other words, endured. Its intactness — which “makes it look as though the ship,” writes CNN.com’s Jack Guy, “has been miraculously lifted out of the Weddell Sea onto dry land in one piece” — is, in its way, as improbable and impressive as Shackleton and company’s survival of its fateful first expedition. The degree of detail captured by this new scan (not technologically feasible back at the time of the last acclaimed documentary on this subject), should make possible further, even deeper research into the story of the Endurance. But one question will remain unanswerable: would that story have resonated quite as long had the ship kept its original name, Polaris?
via Smithsonian.com
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Enter the Mushroom Color Atlas, and you can discover the “beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms.” Featuring 825 colors, each associated with different types of mushrooms, the interactive atlas lets you appreciate the broad spectrum of colors latent in the fungi kingdom. The shades, tints, and hues will surprise you.
Julie Beeler, a designer living in Oregon, first launched the interactive Mushroom Color Atlas back in 2021. Now, she has released a companion book, The Mushroom Color Atlas: A Guide to Dyes and Pigments Made from Fungi. Illustrated by Yuli Gates, the book is “equal parts art book, field guide, and color distillation workshop.” You can order your copy today. The same goes for a Mushroom Color Atlas poster.
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The web site Overlook Hotel has posted pictures of Stanley Kubrick’s personal copy of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. The book is filled with highlighted passages and largely illegible notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s intentions for the movie.
The site features a picture of the book’s careworn cover along with two spreads from the book’s interior —pages 8–9, where Jack Torrance is being interviewed by hotel manager Mr. Ullman, and pages 86–87 where hotel cook Dick Hallorann talks to Jack’s son Danny about the telepathic ability called “shining.”
Much of the marginalia is maddeningly hard to decipher. One of the notes I could make out reads:
Maybe just like their [sic] are people who can shine, maybe there are places that are special. Maybe it has to do with what happened in them or where they were built.
Kubrick is clearly working to translate King’s book into film. Other notes, however, seem wholly unrelated to the movie.
Any problems with the kitchen – you phone me.
When The Shining came out, it was greeted with tepid and nonplussed reviews. Since then, the film’s reputation has grown, and now it’s considered a horror masterpiece.
At first viewing, The Shining overwhelms the viewer with pungent images that etch themselves in the mind—those creepy twins, that rotting senior citizen in the bathtub, that deluge of blood from the elevator. Yet after the fifth or seventh viewing, the film reveals itself to be far weirder than your average horror flick. For instance, why is Jack Nicholson reading a Playgirl magazine while waiting in the lobby? What’s the deal with that guy in the bear suit at the end of the movie? Why is Danny wearing an Apollo 11 sweater?
While Stephen King has had dozens of his books adapted for the screen (many are flat-out terrible), of all the adaptations, this is one that King actively dislikes.
“I would do everything different,” complained King about the movie to American Film Magazine in 1986. “The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre.” King later made his own screen version of his book. By all accounts, it’s nowhere as good as Kubrick’s.
Perhaps the reason King loathed Kubrick’s adaptation so much is that the famously secretive and controlling director packed the movie with so many odd signs, like Danny’s Apollo sweater, that seem to point to a meaning beyond a tale of an alcoholic writer who descends into madness and murder. The Shining is a semiotic puzzle about …what?
Critic after critic has attempted to crack the film’s hidden meaning. Journalist Bill Blakemore argued in his essay “The Family of Man” that The Shining is actually about the genocide of the Native Americans. Historian Geoffrey Cocks suggests that the movie is about the Holocaust. And conspiracy guru Jay Weidner has argued passionately that the movie is in fact Kubrick’s coded confession for his role in staging the Apollo 11 moon landing. (On a related note, see Dark Side of the Moon: A Mockumentary on Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Landing Hoax.)
Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237 juxtaposes all of these wildly divergent readings, brilliantly showing just how dense and multivalent The Shining is. You can see the trailer for the documentary above.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing the cathedral that would remain a work in progress nearly a century after his death, Antoni Gaudí built a model upside-down, making use of gravity in the opposite way to which we normally think of it as acting on a building. But as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Gaudí was hardly the first to use that technique.
Take St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Christopher Wren decided to make the tallest building in London in 1685. It included what would be the highest dome ever built, at 365 feet off the ground. “For a traditional dome design to reach this height, it would have to span an opening that’s 160 feet or 49 meters wide, but this made it much too heavy for the walls below,” says Hicks. “Existing techniques for building this just couldn’t work.” Enter scientist-engineer Robert Hooke, who’d already been figuring out ways to model forces like this by hanging chains from the ceiling.
“Hooke’s genius was that he realized that the chain in his experiments was calculating the perfect shape for it to remain in tension, since that’s all it can do.” He explained domes as, physically, “the exact opposite of the chains. His famous line was, ‘As hangs the flexile line, so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.’ ” In other words, “if you flip the shape of Hooke’s chain experiments upside down, the forces flip, and this shape is the perfect compression system.” Hence the distinctively elongated-looking shape of the dome on the completed St. Paul’s Cathedral, a departure from all architectural precedent.
The shape upon which Wren and Hooke settled turned out to be very similar to what architecture now knows as a catenary curve, a concept important indeed to Gaudí, who was “famously enamored with what some call organic forms.” He made detailed models to guide the construction of his projects, but after those he’d left behind for Sagrada Família were destroyed by anarchists in 1936, the builders had nothing to go on. Only in 1979 did the young architect Mark Burry “imagine the models upside-down,” which brought about a new understanding of the building’s complex, landscape-like forms. It was a similar physical insight that made possible such dramatic mid-century buildings as Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center: pure Space Age, but rooted in the Enlightenment.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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