From roughly the mid-nineteen-fifties through the mid-nineteen-seventies, the availability of airtime on American television stations exceeded their capacity to fill it with high-quality original programming. This was especially true in the hours when relatively few viewers were awake to tune in, a condition that gave rise to the late-night movie show. Specializing in lesser Hollywood productions and the releases of by-then forgotten studios, these programs came to constitute home revival houses, and often eccentric ones. By its very nature, the repertoire of yesteryear’s “B movies” consisted mostly of genre pictures, and no genre proved as popular among this particular viewership as horror. Hence the eventual popularity of hosts like Vampira, Ghoulardi, and, later, the iconic Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Widely recognized as having inspired generations of filmmakers, writers, and artists, the late-night movie show also provided ordinary viewers with glimpses of film history and culture they’d never get otherwise. And though its time may be long since over, you can still experience a version of it this Halloween, or on any other night, through sources like the Youtube playlist above.

It collects about 150 horror and suspense films that, whether frightening, kitschy, funny, or some combination of those qualities, could well have been locally broadcast to the willing insomniacs of 50, 60, 70 years ago. Revenge of the Zombies, The Monster Maker, Fangs of the Living Dead, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory: with movies like these, the entertainment — and the enticement to stay tuned, no matter the hour — began right there in the title.

Not that this is a playlist of guilty pleasures alone. Silent pictures like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu, and Häxan continue to be scrutinized by film-studies scholars as foundational to not just modern horror cinema but the visual language of cinema itself. However straitened their budgets, nineteen-sixties features like Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents (a favorite of Martin Scorsese), and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death are now credited with merits transcending their genre. But even the less retrospectively elevated likes of The Murder in the Museum, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Little Shop of Horrors, and The Psychopath luridly demonstrate that horror could be mixed with mystery, science fiction, comedy, and psychological drama. The power of that hybridity was what late-night movie shows impressed on their most discerning viewers — which is to say, their least discerning ones.

Visit our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a couple of tracks from Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on Switched-On Rock, Switched-On Country, Switched-On Santa, or Switched-On Bacharach? More likely than not, you’ve never even heard of those other albums, which have nothing to do with Carlos and everything to do with the music-industry fad that her then-high-tech renditions of Bach set off in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. That’s the subject of the new Bandsplaining video above, which covers the “awkward and glorious” releases that constituted the initial waves of electronic pop music.

Like so many cultural shifts, the rise of electronic pop took place thanks to a technological change. To be more specific, it was made possible by the invention of the voltage-controlled, modular synthesizer, itself dependent on two particular innovations. Voltage control permitted the pitch of the sounds being generated to be selected with a piano-style keyboard, a slide ribbon, a sequencer, or any other interface the creator’s electronics know-how would allow. In the context of synthesizers, a module is “a little box with an input and an output that did one thing and one thing only, either making a waveform or modifying it somehow,” as Robert Moog once described it, adding that multiple modules could be connected together with cables.

If the name Moog sounds familiar, that’s because the lines of synthesizers that bear it changed music forever. In fact, Carlos used an early Moog model to record Switched-On Bach, having custom-built it in collaboration with the inventor himself. Though the machine set up behind the Bach impersonator on that album’s cover may look unwieldy today, it represented a major improvement in convenience over the room-filling, musically unintuitive behemoths previously accessible only at certain universities and corporate R&D departments. So did the synthesizer invented by Don Buchla on the west coast, at about the same time Moog was building his on the east coast, though each man’s design expressed a different vision of how electronic instruments would adapt to music, or vice versa.

Indeed, up through at least the first few years of the seventies, it would’ve been impossible to say how or whether electronic sounds would find their place in mainstream records. The emergence of home hi-fi culture created a market for swinging “space age pop” by the likes of Les Baxter, Dick Hyman, and Juan Garcia Esquivel, the subject of Bandsplaining’s previous video. This one highlights such releases as Richard Hayman’s Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine and Gershon Kingsley’s Music to Moog By, whose track “Popcorn” would become a worldwide hit when re-recorded by Hot Butter in 1972, but not before the space-age composer Hyman got in on the action. “The Minotaur,” his piece of hypnotic psychedelia with an Indian drone and Greek melody, reached #38 on the Hot 100 57 years ago — and today, remains a thrilling eight-and-a-half-minute ride down one of the many roads electronic pop music didn’t take.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities, fascination with the grotesque, imaginative takes on cultural traditions, and a predisposition for the proto-surreal. Like the odd figure lurching through the first movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they are gnomic artists: enigmatic and ambiguous, given to the aphoristic in stories and tone poems of monstrous and marvelous beings. It’s easy to imagine the three of them, or their works at least, in cryptic conversation with each other.

We might imagine that conversation as we watch three works by these major European artists—all of which we’ve featured on the site before—animated via the painstaking pinscreen method pioneered by husband-and-wife, Russian-and-French duo Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker.

The two invented the technique in the 1930s. Dedicated to this extremely labor-intensive process, they made 6 short films over a period of 50 years, including adaptations of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” narrated by Orson Welles, Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.

We know the Mussorgsky piece as a terrifying vignette from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Seven years before that marriage of classical music and animation came out in 1940, Alexeieff and Parker released their version, at the top. Steve Stanchfield at Cartoon Research calls it “one of the most unusual and unique looking animated films ever created.” Its “delightful and at times horrifying imagery… challenge the viewer to comprehend both their meaning and the mystery of how they were created.” The same could be said of “The Nose” (1963), whose improvised soundtrack by Hai-Minh adds dramatic tension to the eerie animation.

Each of these films uses the same method, a handmade pinscreen device in which thousands of pins are pushed by hand outward and inward for each frame to create areas of light or dark. The pair intended to move beyond the flatness of conventional cel animation techniques and capture the depth and contrast of chiaroscuro. They achieved this through the most achingly slow process imaginable, yet “the illusion of dimensional drawing in animation has rarely been created better,” Stanchfield writes, not even in the most sophisticated computer-generated imagery.

Alexeieff and Parker’s “Before the Law,” from a parable in Kafka’s The Trial, takes a picture-book approach to the animation that would reward younger viewers. Welles’ narration anchors the production with even more than his usual gravitas. In 1972, they returned to Mussorgsky, in the short Pictures at an Exhibition, above. Here, after a prologue in French and the stylizations of the opening Prelude, the figure of “The Gnome” appears, a translucent homunculus hatching from an egg and dancing across the piano keys. I like to think Mussorgsky, Kafka, and Gogol would find this imagery irresistible.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

To get a sense of Sagrada Família’s popularity with YouTubers, you have only to take a look at the related Open Culture posts linked below. As will hardly escape your attention, most subjects that consistently draw the attention of the GoPro class are not nineteenth-century Catholic churches. But Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece, whose construction alone has survived him by a century now, transcends many boundaries of intellectual and cultural interest: history channels feature it, travel channels feature it, religious channels feature it, and, of course, architecture channels feature it. Most recently, Sagrada Família has appeared on The B1M, which is all about construction — the more ambitious, the better.

We’ve previously posted B1M videos on the Flatiron Building, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the extraterrestrially curving work of Zaha Hadid, and every generation of New York skyscraper. That selection only hints at the range of structures to which the channel’s creator Fred Mills has paid close attention, and yet it’s Sagrada Família that puts him at a loss. “There’s parts of this building where you can’t help but describe what you’re seeing,” he says as he stands in its stained glass-illuminated central nave. “There’s other moments where you don’t have the words; it’s just emotion.” Entering it feels, as he describes it, “less like you’re standing inside a building, and more like you’ve been transported to the threshold of heaven itself.”

How does Sagrada Família create this experience for its visitors, even in its incomplete state? Some will credit divine inspiration; others, Gaudí’s sheer architectural genius. Mills seeks out more concrete forms of explanation, right down to the very blocks of stone used to build its towers. Granted much more access than ordinary tourists, who now come at a rate of about 1,500 per hour, he goes all the way up to see the massive cross assembled on the church’s pinnacle, and all the way down to the basement workshop where intricate models test the myriad possible ways to realize Gaudí’s vision. For when he died in 1926, having been hit by a tram, the plans he left behind didn’t exactly explain all the details about how to finish what resembled no other building ever erected, religious or otherwise.

As Mills points out, subsequently developed technologies have helped keep Sagrada Família’s now 144-year-long construction proceeding apace. And though great celebration attended the topping-out of its central tower high above the streets of Barcelona this past February, more work remains to be done. Completing its interior, roofs, and side chapels, as well as the grand façade with its main entrance, should take another decade, depending on how the relevant disputes involving local residents and the city council play out. Still, it seems likely indeed that Sagrada Família will finally be finished within our lifetimes, which makes for the kind of drama that will keep attracting both large- and small-time documentarians. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to see anything else quite like it,” Mills says, which hints at another reason for all the content-creator fascination: though it may well be completed in our age, Sagrada Família could hardly be less of our age.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Maybe it’s the cloistered headiness of Rene Descartes, or the rigorous austerity of Isaac Newton; maybe it’s all the leathern breeches, gray waistcoats, sallow faces, and powdered wigs… but we tend not to associate Enlightenment Europe with an explosion of color theory. Yet philosophers of the late 17th and 18th centuries were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on optics, as did Newton.

Newton first described in his 1672 paper the “revolutionary new theory of light and colour,” the University of Cambridge Whipple Library writes, “in which he claimed that experiments with prisms proved that white light was comprised of light of seven distinct colours.” Scientists debated Newton’s theory “well into the 19th century.”

One early opponent famously illustrated his rebuttal. Poet, writer, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Theory of Colors (see here), with its carefully hand-drawn and colored diagrams and wheels, in 1810. From Newton’s time onward, color theorists elaborated prevailing concepts with color wheels, the first attributed to Newton in 1704 (and drawn in black and white, above).

Newton’s wheel “arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk.” A few years later, two color circles—one with 7 colors and another with 12—appeared in a painting manual attributed to Claude Boutet (top), based on Newton’s theories. Artists, chemists, mapmakers, poets, even entomologists… everyone seemed to have a pet theory of color, generally accompanied by elaborate colored charts and diagrams.

The color wheel was one among many forms—which often presented contrasting theories, like that of Jacques-Fabien Gautier, who argued that black and white were primary colors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about it, have endured almost unchanged. The wheel further up (third one from top) by British entomologist Moses Harris from 1766 shows Newton’s 7‑color scheme simplified to the 6 primary and secondary colors we usually see, arranged in the complementary and analogous scheme, with tertiary gradations between them. Another entomologist, Ignaz Schiffermüller, drew the 12-color wheel right above.

Color is always representative. Newton’s original wheel included “musical notes correlated with color.” By the end of the 18th century, color theory had become increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies, as in the wheel above, the “rose of temperaments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1799 to illustrate “human occupations and character traits,” the Public Domain Review notes, including “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four temperaments of humoral theory.

It’s a fairly short leap from these psychologies of color to those used by advertisers and commercial designers in the 20th century—or from the artists and scientists’ color theories to abstract expressionism, the Bauhaus school, and the chemists and photographers who recreated the colors of the world on film. (Goethe’s color wheel, below, from Theory of Colors, illustrates his chapter on “Allegorical, symbolic, and mystical use of colour.”) See more early color wheels, like Philipp Otto Runge’s 1810 Farbenkugel, as well as other conceptual color schemes, at the Public Domain Review.

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. 

Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability to pick up new admirers. But even though he may have a decent readership by the standards of French novelists who died in the middle of the nineteenth century, one does wonder whether he still inspires the kind of devotion embodied by William Hobart Royce. A Brooklyn bookseller’s assistant first introduced to Les Cent Contes drolatiques as an impressionable (and duly scandalized) teenager on a trip to England, Royce became not just the early twentieth century’s foremost American expert on Balzac, but also a kind of clone of the man himself, right down to his appearance.

“In their long association, Royce has contracted several habits from Balzac,” writes the New Yorker’s Alva Johnston in a 1933 profile. “When working late at night or early in the morning, he combats fatigue, as Balzac did, by taking snuff, smoking Latakia tobacco, and drinking enormous quantities of coffee. These are not mere whims or idol-worshipping ceremonies on the part of Royce; they are practices which he adopted from Balzac after testing them and convincing himself that they were sound.”

Balzac himself explains the importance of these substances to the writing life — nothing less, to his mind, than life itself — in “Traité des excitants modernes,” or “Treatise on Modern Stimulants,” an essay he appended to Physiologie du goût, the celebrated text by the lawyer-politician-gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

Known for drinking his own custom blend of beans from Martinique, coffee from Bourbon (now known as Réunion Island), and Mokha from the pot pictured above, Balzac also recommends to his fellow “men of excessive vigor” a “horrible, rather brutal method” involving “finely pulverized, dense coffee” prepared with as little water as possible and consumed on an empty stomach. In response, he promises in this partial English translation of the essay, “ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up.”

In the case of Balzac, who created thousands of characters and deployed them across his body of work, that charge could have been a fearsome sight indeed. Yet he proved equal to it night after writing night, sitting down to his desk some time between midnight and 2:00 a.m., then producing manuscript pages with his quill at a typewriter’s pace until morning. After a nap, more work followed until 4:00 or so in the afternoon; soon thereafter would come an early-evening dinner, and thus the cycle would repeat. A commonly cited figure holds that Balzac drank as many as 50 cups of coffee per day, which even the most proudly caffeine-hooked laptop jockey today would struggle to touch. Nor would it be advisable to try, given that Balzac’s formidable coffee habit may have contributed to his death at age 51 — but then, it certainly played a part in the productivity that ensured his immortalité.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Stephen King has that rare, and spectacularly profitable, skill to suck you into his world and compel you to flip to the next page. And when you’re hooked, his words have the uncanny ability to simply unfold like a movie in your head. So it isn’t surprising that his books have been widely adapted to the silver screen. Some are flat out masterpieces. Others are most decidedly not. This appreciation by filmmakers of King’s storytelling chops isn’t just contained to this side of the Iron Curtain. In 1986, Soviet animator Mikhail Titov — whose previous work includes How the Cossacks Played Football (1970) — turned King’s short story “Battleground” (1972) into an animated movie, titled simply Сражение or Battle.

The short is about a noirish hired gun who dresses in a trench coat and a fedora. He is contracted to kill a toy maker. When he returns home, he discovers that there’s a box on his doorstep and makes the completely unwise decision of taking it inside. Soon, toy soldiers start to tumble out of the box. They have live ammo, rocket launchers, tiny little helicopters at their disposal and they are on a single-minded mission to kill him. The killer soon finds himself pinned down in the bathroom, waiting for the next attack.

The film is a lot of fun. Titov relies heavily on rotoscoping – an animation technique you probably remember from A‑ha’s music video Take On Me. The killer’s form and movements feel realistic as the rest of the movie’s heightened, brooding world bends and bulges as if rendered through a fisheye lens. And like A‑ha, the film’s synth and saxophone soundtrack might sound painfully 80s to some. You can watch Battle with subtitles above or without subtitles below. The dialogue is minimal throughout.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. 

This Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of famed escape artist Harry Houdini. Today, most of us know more about the manner of that death than we do about any of the feats of escape artistry that made him famous in the first place. As the story goes, he’d mastered his own body to the extent that he could tighten his abdominal muscles so as to withstand even the hardest punch to the gut. Or at least that’s the image he let circulate: taking it as a challenge, a student and amateur boxer turned up and offered his fist to Houdini as an unexpected test. A week and a half later, the great escapologist was dead of peritonitis.

It seemed that the blow he sustained had ruptured Houdini’s already-inflamed appendix, and that remained the widely accepted, if not medically airtight, explanation for nearly a century. Yet there was always something too dramatically neat in the tale of a man famed for defying death being done in by nothing more than a thoughtless young man’s sucker punch. Generations of enthusiasts have offered explanations of their own, some more plausible than others, but few investigations into this quasi-legendary demise have been conducted as seriously as the one undertaken in our time by retired urologist Larrian Gillespie, author of Houdini: The Man Who Died Twice.

When she had the chance to examine his death certificate, Gillespie noticed apparent irregularities that led her down the rabbit hole to “a paper trail of misstatements and actions by more than a dozen people close to Houdini, including relatives and employees,” writes the New York Times’ Robin Pogrebin, “including a conspiracy to change his official death date to October 31st, fixing his memory to Halloween.” According to her reconstruction of events, Houdini actually died the day before: not of appendicitis, and not as a result of the young man’s punch. “Rather, she argues, the culprit was a bowel obstruction, brought on by a fibrous mass of chop suey that Houdini ate on Oct. 28.”

Emergency surgery took place the next day, but it was too late. “Septic shock set in, Houdini’s fever spiked to 105 and his rapid breathing led to muscle spasms and unconsciousness.” He was operated on again the day after, and “Gillespie’s research into the death certificates indicates that the magician died that afternoon at 1:26 p.m.” Gillespie argues that the lack of a proper autopsy helped conceal possible medical malpractice and allowed Houdini’s widow to collect a double-indemnity payment for what was treated as an accidental death. Even if accepted, her theory probably won’t erase the cultural link between Houdini and Halloween. But the theory does add a new dimension of irony to his life story: the man who could survive a Chinese water torture cell proved to be no match for American Chinese food.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a producer, arranger, and jazz composer. And while he’s best known for arranging music for Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orchestrating music for television. Working under a pseudonym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis composed background music for the cartoon studio Filmation between 1968 and 1982. And, during the late 60s, he notably created the background and incidental music for the original Spider-Man cartoons.

Above, hear Ray Ellis’ Spider-Man soundtrack. The show’s talking parts and sound effects have been removed as much as possible, then “pieced back together into complete form,” by a YouTuber who uses the moniker “11db11.” All of the music from Season 1 is included, plus many recordings from Seasons 2 and 3. It’s worth noting that the 52 episodes from the original 1967 Spider-Man TV series have been completely restored. You can purchase them on DVD online.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Scholars disagree on when, exactly, Rome fell. But if you watch the new video from City 3D Timelapse above, you’ll understand the lack of debate on the question of whether it fell. Around the turn of the sixth century AD, buildings start vanishing at a rate that soon turns alarming; long before the end of the first millennium, it’s clear that Rome has been plunged into very hard times indeed. In the video’s accelerated visual history, that much-scrutinized 500-year span passes in a little more than five seconds. Just one minute later, it has spread not just beyond the old city limits, but beyond the very frame of the aerial view, becoming the vast urbanized region we know today.

Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 BC, when Romulus killed his twin brother Remus. As reflected by the video, archaeological evidence suggests that the area was settled earlier, though the traditional date of Rome’s founding roughly coincides with the emergence of what we know as the Roman Kingdom.

There follow the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the medieval era — when the once-formidable Eternal City was left practically for dead  — the Renaissance, the Roman Baroque period, the industrial era, and finally, our time of globalization. For reference, the classical archaeologist Giovanni Piranesi went to Rome and drew his influential etchings of its ruins around the 1:55 mark of this three-minute video.

Not that the Rome captured in Piranesi’s Vedute bears much resemblance to the Rome of the twenty-first century, for better or for worse. You can still see the Colosseum by moonlight, but the ambience won’t be the same: the overgrowth has long since been scraped off, and the cargo shorts are out in force year-round. Regardless, no city is best appreciated through its landmarks alone, not even the modern Rome so long both celebrated and dismissed as an open-air museum. Watching it rise, fall, and rise again from above within the length of a Eurovision song reminds us that it wasn’t built, or rebuilt, in a day — and that, in the face of often-formidable difficulties, it even now manages to put up something new once in a while.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Sir Christopher Lee and Edgar Allan Poe went way back. Or at least they went as far back as 1969, the year of The Oblong Box, a loose and lurid film adaptation of the eponymous story starring Lee and the also Poe-associated Vincent Price. Lee plays the doctor to whom a gang of grave-robbers delivers Price’s character, an Englishman disfigured in a voodoo ceremony who fakes his own death in order to escape the captivity of his brother. Whatever its entertainment value, the picture doesn’t rank especially high in the canon of Poe adaptations. Nor, for that matter, does the original story rank alongside works like “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” or “The Black Cat.”

You can hear Lee himself read all those macabre, imaginative stories and others besides in the YouTube playlist above. Some of the recordings come from Christopher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe Tales of Horror, the 1979 budget-label cassette previously featured here on Open Culture. Others include Lee’s performances of “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is commonly credited with launching the entire genre of detective fiction.

Though now most widely remembered as a horror actor, the prolific Lee proved commanding in a variety of genres: in the final decade of his life, he appeared in numerous crime pictures, adaptations of The Golden Compass and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and several Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies.

Not that he’d left Poe behind. Among the last credits Lee racked up in his lifetime is Extraordinary Tales, from 2013, a five-story anthology film in which he narrates “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Though British, his distinctive manner and slightly mid-Atlantic accent were as versatile on the screen as they were in readings of Poe, whose writing dates from a time when more than a few Americans still considered literature itself an import from across the pond. This Halloween, if you don’t have the hours free for a complete listen-through of the playlist do consider at least putting on “The Raven.” It remains a matter of debate among Poe enthusiasts to what extent Lee’s delivery of “nevermore” really captures the spirit of the poem, but it would be hard to imagine a more appropriate figure to preside over All Hallows’ Eve.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Latin is a language

As dead as dead can be; 

It killed the Romans long ago, 

And now it’s killing me.

That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonate with many modern school children, but interest in ancient Rome remains fairly robust. 

We’ve come to accept that those stately ruins were once covered in graffiti.

We can recreate their meals from hors d’oeuvres (Boiled Eggs with Pine Nut Sauce) to dessert (Pear Patina).

Thermae Romae, a popular Japanese manga-cum-feature-film, took us inside Emperor Hadrian’s bathhouse.

But what did the Romans sound like?

Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus? Or Laurence Olivier’s Crassus?

The HBO series Rome upheld the tradition of British accents.

Animator Josh Rudder of NativLang did a fair amount of digging in service of finding out What Latin Sounded Like, above.

(And he seems to have done so without the help of Derek Jarman’s NSFW Sebastiane, the only feature film to be filmed entirely in sermo vulgaris or vulgar Latin.)

Instead, he draws from ancient rhetorician Quintilian and Virgil’s poetic meter. Scroll backward through the Romance languages, and you’ll see Germanic tribes trading with and fighting ancient Roman troops.

The result is not so much a reconstructive pronunciation guide as a linguistic detective story.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist in NYC.

Any reader of Victorian literature will wonder how much a ha’penny was actually worth in those days. For a little more than a year at the very end of that period, it could buy you a cup of coffee, cocoa, milk, tea, or “fluid beef” — which would pour out of a lamppost on the corner. The Pluto Lamp, as it was branded, made its debut at the Victorian Era Exhibition, which was held in 1897 to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Amid such attractions as a 360-degree panorama of ancient Rome, Pepper’s ghost illusions, and over 1,200 works of art by the likes of J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and 180 specially selected female artists, a beverage-dispensing streetlight might seem mundane. Yet apart from being a technological marvel in its own way, it also presaged the technology-saturated streets one day to come.

Not long after the Victorian Era Exhibition, Pluto Lamps appeared in several London locations, including Exmouth Street in Clerkenwell, Leicester Square, and Rosebery Avenue. In addition to the illumination of their surroundings, and the drinks warmed by the excess heat thus generated, they in some cases offered postcards and four-to-the-penny cigarettes for sale as well.

However much attention the Pluto Lamps attracted as a novelty, this was still the infancy of the modern vending machine, whose deficiencies had yet to be fully worked out. It proved impossible, at the time, to defeat the enterprising scoundrels who used round pieces of tin in place of genuine currency, and in any case, maintenance costs seem to have proven unexpectedly high. (To say nothing of the prospect of drinking out of an enamel cup on a chain, shared with the entire public, which surely put off even some Victorians.)

All of the Pluto Lamps were decommissioned before the end of the nineteenth century, but they’d done their bit to expand public ideas of what was possible in the urban public realm. “For over a century, lamp posts would again do little more than shine light on to the city streets below,” writes Lukas Neckermann in Smart Cities, Smart Mobility. “But by the early twenty-first century, the spirit of the Pluto Lamps returned. City infrastructure and street furniture would once again become multi-purpose, multi-use, entrepreneurial, and connected.” And indeed, though talk of “smart cities” may now sound as dated and unappealing as that of fluid beef, lampposts have more recently been given such side jobs as vehicle charging, environmental protection, and even crime prevention. That last brings back to mind the Clerkenwell Pluto Lamp, equipped as it was with a telegraph recorder connected straight to Scotland Yard: a device that, had it lasted longer, might have inspired many a Victorian novelist.

via MessyNessy

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Manual, published in 1939, changed the country with 12-Step recovery groups, the first of these, the Sears Catalog, transformed America with mass consumption, offering customers in every part of the country access to modern conveniences and retail goods of all kinds at unheard of prices. Beginning in 1908, Sears started selling entire houses, in approximately 25-ton kits transported by railroad, consisting of 30,000 pre-cut parts, plumbing and electrical fixtures, and up to 750 pounds of nails.

“In an era before commercial aviation and long-haul trucking,” Curbed marvels, “Sears, Roebuck & Co. set up an operation that would package and ship more than 400 different types of homes and buildings to anybody who had the cash and access to a catalog.”

They started small, and just as they didn’t come up with the concept of the mail order catalog, Sears didn’t invent the kit house, though they suggest as much in their telling of the story. Instead they may have taken the idea from another company called Aladdin. Aladdin houses have been forgotten, however, and even Sears’ main competitor, Montgomery Ward, didn’t catch up until 1921 and only lasted ten years in the kit house business.

Sears houses, on the other hand, are celebrated and sought out as models of the early 20th century American home, and for good reason. Between 1908 and 1939, Sears sold 70–75,000 houses in 447 different styles all over the country. “From Craftsman to Cape Cods, they offered a custom home at budgets and sizes that could accommodate any size family,” writes Popular Mechanics.

These Sears homes weren’t cheap low-end houses. Many of them were built using the finest quality building materials available during that time. It’s not uncommon to find Sears homes today with oak floors, cypress siding, and cedar shingles.

What’s even more extraordinary is that 50% of these were built by the homeowners themselves, usually, as in a barn-raising, with the generous help of family, friends, and neighbors. The other half sold were built professionally. “Often,” writes Messy Nessy, “local builders and carpentry companies purchased homes from Sears to build as model homes and market their services to potential customers.”

These houses could have a significant effect on the character of a neighborhood. Not only could potential buyers see firsthand, and participate in, the construction. They could also order the same or a similar model, customize it, and even—as the company tells us in its own short history of the “Sears Modern Home”—design their own homes and “submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship off the appropriate precut and fitted materials.”

Sears sounds modest about its impact. The company writes it was not “an innovative home designer” but instead “a very able follower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifying houses and hardware according to buyer tastes.” Yet Sears houses aren’t beloved for their forward-looking designs, but for their sturdiness and variety, as well as for their impact on “the emotional lives of rural folk,” as Messy Nessy puts it.

“The Sears mail-order catalogues were sitting on kitchen countertops inside millions of American homes, allowing potential homeowners to both visualize their new home and purchase it as easily as they might have bought a new toaster.” Building a house required a little more investment than plugging in a toaster, and required a 75-page instruction book, but that’s another part of why Sears house hunters are such a dedicated bunch, awestruck at each still-standing model they’re able to photograph and match up with its catalog illustrations and floor plans.

In its first year of production, 1908, Sears sold only one model, number 125, an Eight-Room Bungalow Style House for $945, advertised as “the finest cottage ever constructed at a price less than $1500.” In 1918, the company moved from a numbering system to named models, most of which sound like the names of cozy small towns and bedroom communities: Adeline, Belmont, Maplewood, Avalon, Kilbourne, Del Ray, Stone Ridge…. (See a full list of these models at The Arts & Crafts Society website.)

In the years Sears sold houses, between 54 and 44 percent of Americans lived in rural areas, and these constituted Sears’ most loyal customers, given that the catalog allowed them to purchase things they could buy nowhere else, including ten room colonial mansions like The Magnolia, available from 1913 to 1922 for $6,488, or roughly $88,000—a steal if you can put in the work. This was the largest and most expensive model the company offered, “a three-story, eight room neo-Georgian with a two-story columned portico, porte-cochere, and sleeping porches.” (Mint juleps and servants’ quarters not included.)

Sears eventually offered three build qualities, Honor Bilt, Standard Built, and Simplex Sectional. At the lowest end of the price and build spectrum, the company notes, “Simplex houses were frequently only a couple of rooms and were ideal for summer cottages.” Many of its low-end and early models did not include bathrooms, and the company sold outhouses separately. But due to innovative construction methods, even the least expensive houses held up well.

Because the company lost most of the records after its kit house business folded, it can be difficult to identify a Sears house. And because even the “youngest of Sears homes,” Popular Mechanics points out, is now going on nine decades old, they all require a significant amount of care.” The blog Kit House Hunters has found over 18,000 Sears houses still standing across the country, most of them in the Northeast and Midwest, where they sold best. (One community in Elgin, IL has over 200 verified Sears homes.)

In the video at the top, you can see a few of those well-built Sears houses still lived in today. The short How to Architect video above points out that “Sears had a massive impact on the business of home-building, and… the business of pre-fabrication, is alive and well today.” For a look at the variety and intricacy of the Sears Modern Home designs, see this Flickr gallery with over 80 images of catalog pages, illustrated homes, and floor plans. And if you think you might be living in one of these houses, many of which have been granted historic status, find out with this handy 9‑step guide for identifying a Sears Kit Home.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets. That spring, we featured here on Open Culture an amusing retro-technological diversion called Hyperland. First broadcast on BBC2, the program stars The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams as himself and Doctor Who’s Tom Baker as his agent. “You want fifteen percent?” the former asks the latter when they first meet in a vast wasteland of flickering television sets. Not at all: “I’m here to do your every slightest bidding,” Baker explains, “to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial.”

Today, we can hardly share in Adams’ bewilderment, familiar as we are with the notion of what Baker calls a “software agent,” an “artificial and completely customizable personality” with “instant access to every piece of information stored digitally anywhere in the world: any picture or film, any sound, any book, any statistic, any fact, any connection between anything you care to think of.” We must remind ourselves that Hyperland was produced in 1990, when these lines would have struck all but the most computer-savvy and forward-looking viewers as sheer science fiction. Even three decades thereafter, they still sounded more or less like an elevated version of ordinary late-twentieth-century techno-optimism. Here in 2026, Baker’s services are close to being considered a basic necessity, at least in Silicon Valley and its global provinces.

Not so very long ago, Hyperland looked startlingly prescient about the rise of the World Wide Web, which would soon let its users seek out their own desired pieces of information and media, actively moving through links between them, in a manner unlike the passive viewing experience of television (with which it would, as no one then knew, one day converge). This was an unfamiliar idea to most people in 1990; hence the variety of clear and entertaining ways in which the program breaks down its technological basis, pulling up clips from its onscreen “database” like an interview with Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext. Like multimedia, that word may carry a whiff of antiquity today, but it was once on the lips of practically every technologist in popular culture — in a manner reminiscent of the lexicon that has sprung from new developments in artificial intelligence over the past few years.

At times, Baker’s character now looks almost realistic, as when Adams asks him to knock off the obsequiousness, or when he pulls up Kurt Vonnegut’s theory of story form before Adams fully gets the question out. Yet Hyperland devotes little time to AI per se. The program appeared in the wake of the eighties’ AI boom, when “expert systems” promised to solve problems in industry, medicine, and other sectors, but many of the field’s larger ambitions went unrealized. There followed a long “AI winter” in research and development, in whose climate Baker-as-“agent” would have been a means of humanizing an abstract-seeming concept of organizing and navigating information. Not that all his enthusiastically proffered services draw unqualified enthusiasm from Adams, who possessed a rare combination of Californian technophilia and British skepticism. His fascination with humanity’s digital future is ours — and so is his wariness.

via Mefi

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