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  • Why music can give you chills or goosebumps

    Why music can give you chills or goosebumps

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    Frisson is the French word meaning “shiver”, but in this case, we’re not shivering because we’re cold, we’re shivering because we’re stimulated by music.

    When we hear a certain piece of music or view a particular work of art, there may be an intense psychological and physiological reaction. “You have this sudden rush of dopamine,” explains psychologist Dr Rebecca Johnson-Osei. “It’s a similar pathway that gets activated with sex and other things that are rewarding to our brains.” 

    Filmed and presented by Greg Dukes

    Commissioning Editor: Griesham Taan

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  • Suavecito: The ‘Chicano national anthem’

    Suavecito: The ‘Chicano national anthem’

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    How Suavecito became a powerful symbol for change

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  • Surrealism: How our strangest dreams come to life in design

    Surrealism: How our strangest dreams come to life in design

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    “Surrealism is no longer an art movement but an attitude toward art and design,” says Mateo Kries, director of the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, receptacle for many of the most important Surrealist artworks. That attitude is clearly at work at the exhibition Strange Clay, at London’s Hayward Gallery. Among the contemporary artists using “clay in an unexpected way” are David Zink Yi, whose giant alien squid (2010) sprawls in a glossy pool of ink; Japanese artist Takuro Kuwata’s candy-coloured Yeti-like creatures; and Lindsey Mendick’s kitchen infested with ceramic slugs and cockroaches.

    Viewing Klara Kristalova’s botanical scene, Camouflage, that is installed there is like wandering through a Grimm’s fairytale glade. Ceramic figures, often adolescents with exaggerated features, morph into weirder states – such as Wooden Girl, trapped inside a tree stump, with twiggy hands; or a boy in street gear with a horse’s head. The artwork was inspired by the view behind her house near Stockholm: “It’s a forest full of my abandoned sculptures,” the artist tells BBC Culture. “With time, they change, disappear and seem to grow anew. I find that to be a good metaphor for life.”     

    Kristalova grew up in an isolated part of Sweden, “with a sense of disquiet intensified when my mother read me scary folk tales,” she says. Her artist parents kept many books on Surrealism, which she devoured, and that “got into my backbone,” she says. “I loved Max Ernst, and I especially loved Meret Oppenheim. I found her work a bit silly and playful, but it came close to being about women’s life.”

    Oppenheim is often credited as being the most famous female Surrealist. In the late 1930s she designed Traccia, a whimsical side table sitting on birds’ legs. A few years before, in 1936, when she was 22, she had made a bracelet out of a brass tube, and covered it in fur. It was for Schiaparelli, but she wore it to meet Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a cafe in Paris. Her friends’ comments on seeing it – that anything could be covered in fur – inspired Object, her cup and saucer coated in gazelle fur that, according to MoMA, is “the single most notorious Surrealist object”.  

    Today, when we’re so familiar with Oppenheim’s furry cup and saucer, it’s a stretch to imagine the shock and intrigue it caused at the time. It begs the question: can Surrealist-inspired art, which relied on its power to disturb, still have shock value?

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  • The Well of Loneliness: ‘The most corrosive book ever’

    The Well of Loneliness: ‘The most corrosive book ever’

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    Suppression would be the making of both the novel and its author’s reputation and yet in the decades since, this supposed Sapphic survival guide has continued to attract plenty of criticism from diverse quarters. In the 1970s, for instance, it became the focus of a backlash from Second Wave feminist critics for its patriarchal worldview. And by 2017, Winterson still hadn’t warmed to it – although she chose it as the book that helped her come out, and argued that “A book can be bad and still have a place in history”. Writing this time in The Guardian, she asserted: “The Well reads like a misery memoir long before they were invented. It’s the fictional story of Stephen Gordon and her struggles with the fact that she thinks like, acts like, loves like and wants to be a man. Radclyffe Hall had no idea that sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary”.

    Hall’s beliefs definitely complicate the book’s legacy. Contrary to what might be expected of a pioneering lesbian author, her politics were reactionary at best. As an expat living in Italy in the lead-up to World War Two, she not only supported Mussolini’s Fascist government, she also supported its censorship – of books. And if Victorian womanhood wasn’t for her, she fully supported it for others, believing that a woman’s place was in the home.

    For Professor Doan, much has changed in terms of how the novel is discussed. “When you read it today you do feel that there’s a lot in it that makes you feel pretty embarrassed by it,” she says, noting that its racism, for instance, was scarcely talked about even a couple of decades ago.

    These days, she prefers to direct anyone interested in learning more about Hall to Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, a short story written in 1926 in preparation for The Well. This story holds the key to the novel’s real meaning, Doan believes. “To me, that story is about a human who is trapped in the wrong body, has been designated as a female and doesn’t feel like a female and has a fantasy of becoming a male. There’s no desire or love or romance in that story, and it made me realise that The Well of Loneliness isn’t about love between women either.”

    Doan says she was never really convinced that The Well was a lesbian novel. As she explains, “It would be a better text to think of in the context of trans history. The publishers would be missing a commercial opportunity right now if they didn’t try to push its cultural meaning to the trans community. If they want to identify a text that is at the start of the awareness in culture of the possibility of a trans existence, it’s got to be The Well of Loneliness.”

    So should we be using a different set of pronouns for Hall and Stephen? Some scholars, including Jana Funke, Associate Professor of English and Sexuality Studies at the University of Exeter and editor of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, now use gender-neutral pronouns for both author and protagonist.

    Maureen Duffy takes a different view, seeing Stephen’s gender nonconformity as a function of Hall’s discomfort with her own lesbianism. Writing in her introduction to the most recent Penguin Modern Classics edition, Duffy uses a pivotal scene from the novel to make her point: defending herself to her mother, Stephen justifies her sexual intimacy with Angela Crossby by explaining that she’s “never felt like a woman”. It’s an argument Hall insists upon, Duffy suggests, “in order to justify her own very active homosexuality, which she embraced in spite of her espousal of Roman Catholicism”.

    It’s worth noting that even readers for whom Hall clearly had a desire, however latent, to transition, The Well of Loneliness is by no means a straightforward text. Oliver Radclyffe, the trans author of a forthcoming monograph, Adult Human Male, changed his surname in homage to Hall. He’s written on the website Electric Literature about how his feelings for the book changed as he undertook his own journey from Englishwoman raising four children in the Connecticut suburbs, to femme lesbian, to trans man. As he puts it, “it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues”.

    Ultimately, it isn’t possible to know whether or not Hall would have identified as transgender – a term not coined until much later – and labelling this long-dead queer person as such is innately problematic. What is certain is that more than 90 years after it was banned, this decidedly flawed piece of literature continues to make readers think anew. As Doan says, “We’re confronting its complexity, and that can only be a good thing.”

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  • Baba Yaga: The greatest ‘wicked witch’ of all?

    Baba Yaga: The greatest ‘wicked witch’ of all?

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    In fact, the origins of Baba Yaga might go back far further than the 17th Century — there’s a school of scholarly thought that says she’s a Slavic analogue of the Greek deity Persephone, goddess of spring and nature. She’s certainly associated with the woods and forests, and the wildness of nature. “The essence of Baba Yaga exists in many cultures and many stories, and symbolises the unpredictable and untameable nature of the female spirit, of Mother Earth, and the relationship of women to the wild,” says Ryan.

    What lifts Baba Yaga above the usual two-dimensional witches of folklore is her duality, sometimes as an almost-heroine, sometimes as a villain, and her rich, earthy evocation of womanhood. “Baba Yaga still remains one of the most ambiguous, cunning, and clever women of folklore,” says Ryan. “[She] commands fear and respect, and simultaneously awe and desire. I admire her carelessness and her independence, even her cruelty, and in a world where women are so often reduced to hazy blurs of inconsequence, she is a figure that reminds us that we are ferocious and untameable, and that such freedoms often come at a cost.”

    In fact, she’s something of a proto-feminist icon. “Absolutely she is,” says Yi Izzy Yu, one of the authors who has contributed a story to Into the Forest. One of the ways in which she merits such a description is that she completely upends the nurturing mother stereotype applied to women by eating children rather than pushing them out or breastfeeding them. “She’s powerful despite not being attractive in a conventional sense. She lives by her own magical terms rather than mundane rules,” says Izzy. “And she challenges conceptual categories at every turn. Even her home is both house and chicken, making her, yes, housebound in a sense, but not in any way ‘tied down’. In this [way], I guess, she is an early motorhome gypsy.”

    A true outlaw

    Izzy likens Baba Yaga to trickster characters from many mythologies, such as Norse god of mischief Loki or Coyote from Native American folklore. “While Baba Yaga often plays a villain, she is also likely to offer assistance. For example, in Vasilisa the Beautiful, she helps free Vasilisa from the clutches of her evil stepfamily,” she says. “And while Baba’s dangerous to deal with, like many of those who operate on the shadowy side of the law in contemporary movies, she can as well prove herself invaluable in dangerous circumstances.

    “In this way, Baba Yaga complicates the passive female nurturing role with a type of ‘I’ll do whatever the heck I want’ outlaw power that you ordinarily only see associated with men. You could say then that Baba Yaga crosses the wicked witch trope with the fairy godmother trope to create an ultimately far more unpredictable and powerful role than either of those.”

    Izzy was born and grew up in Northern China, and as a great deal of Russian literature was translated into Chinese, Baba Yaga crossed the border and into the Chinese psyche. “My first exposure to Baba Yaga was a Chinese cartoon I saw when I was very young. I remember this cartoon because I told my grandmother that Baba Yaga looked exactly like my Big Uncle. This made her laugh. Big Uncle did not laugh,” says Izzy.

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  • Spielberg’s The Fabelmans review: An emotional crowd-pleaser

    Spielberg’s The Fabelmans review: An emotional crowd-pleaser

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    Making crowd-pleasing movies is Steven Spielberg’s superpower, and sometimes his biggest flaw, pulling him toward a tear-jerking (“ET go home”) tug of sentimentality. His autobiographical The Fabelmans is definitely a crowd-pleaser. It won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival, instantly vaulting it to the top of the Oscars race. But this fictional version of his childhood and adolescence is also among his most rigorous and emotionally honest films, largely avoiding self-indulgence. Infused with family warmth, but with a knowing adult eye on the loss of innocence, it is one of the year’s most genuinely heartfelt films.

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    Spielberg is, of course, famous for stories about broken families, but this one has no adorable extra-terrestrial or UFO to drive the plot. Instead, it relies on Spielberg’s strength as a master storyteller, as we follow Sammy, the Spielberg stand-in, through his beginnings as a filmmaker and his parents’ divorce. Spielberg has revealed much of that story in interviews over the years, so it is clear that The Fabelmans is very close to reality. It begins on a snowy night in 1952 when Burt (Paul Dano), a practical-minded computer engineer, and Mitzi (Michelle Williams), the imaginative parent, take Sammy to the movies. Seeing Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, as the young Steven really did, is awe-inspiring, frightening and life-changing for the wide-eyed small boy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord). Spielberg, whose films have a technical crispness even when loaded with fantastical elements, has evidently inherited aspects of both parents.

    The family – including Sammy (played as an adolescent by Gabriel LaBelle) and his three sisters – follows Burt’s job from New Jersey to Arizona to California, but Mitzi is the human dynamo driving the film. Williams captures all her energy and underlying sadness as a suburban homemaker who could have had a career as a pianist. With blonde pixie hair, lacquered red nails and Peter Pan collars – the period details are vibrant and exact – she is adored by everyone around her, yet is also the ultimate disruptor of the family. Her enthusiasm for life and her recklessness seem inseparable. She piles her children into the car and drives toward a tornado because it’s exciting, only later realising the danger they were in.

    It would have been easy for her to run away with the film, but Spielberg never loses sight of the tightly knotted family dynamic. Burt is meek and quiet next to his flamboyant wife, and the role much less flashy. But Dano’s beautifully subtle performance captures Burt’s profound decency. Dano also lets us glean that as the marriage begins to crumble, Burt sees what he doesn’t want to admit even to himself.

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  • Bones and All: The greatest taboo of all

    Bones and All: The greatest taboo of all

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    The strange thing is that the you-are-what-you-eat scene in Hannibal undoubtedly has what Waddell calls “the ick factor” – but it also prompts queasy laughter. Certain kinds of violence may be unambiguously distressing to see, but Lecter’s cranial canapés make audiences chuckle. At the end of The Silence of the Lambs, he bids Clarice (Jodie Foster) a suave farewell: “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.” If he’d said he was going to torture and murder that “old friend”, it would have been abhorrent – but because the audience knows he’s planning to eat Dr Chilton (Anthony Heald), possibly with a nice Chianti, some embrace him as a devilish anti-hero.

    Why can cannibalism be more humorous than other such outrages? “It should be the most unspeakable human crime,” explains Forshaw, “but it’s so alien to anything we know that we’re not sure how to react.” Cannibalism in films is unique because it sits right on the border between fact and fantasy, between the everyday violence of a crime thriller and the supernatural violence of a monster movie. It may happen in the real world, but it’s so rare and so appalling that it seems like the stuff of legend – so it can be terrifying and loathsome, but funny, too. For instance, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street features a witty duet in which Sweeney and Mrs Lovett discuss which professions make the tastiest pie fillings. And Forshaw’s favourite line on the topic comes from a 1976 comedy, The Big Bus: “You eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal. What a world!”

    What’s even weirder is that some cannibal films don’t just have comic aspects, but erotic aspects, too. Bones and All and Fresh both revolve around cool, sexy characters played by pin-up actors, as does Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016). All of these films ponder the link between loving someone and feasting on them, between cannibalism and kinks and body modification. And, let’s not forget, one of these films is available on Disney’s own streaming service. Who knows, perhaps the ultimate taboo won’t be taboo for much longer.

    Bones and All is released on 22 November.

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  • Trompe l’oeil and the images that fool the mind

    Trompe l’oeil and the images that fool the mind

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    These two works capture the essence of the exhibition, which makes a connection almost entirely overlooked until now, linking the iconoclastic Cubist trio of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Gris to the playful, trompe l’oeil (literally translated as “deceives the eye”) paintings of the past, many by artists ready for rediscovery. The show does not posit the direct influence of specific earlier works on Cubism, but examines their echoes in the early 20th-Century movement, from its embracing of still life to including unreliable texts. And all these artists use their optical tricks purposefully, to engage viewers in questions of truth and falsehood, issues that make the exhibition perfectly suited to our own age, when facts themselves are in dispute.

    Trompe l’oeil reached its height in 17th-Century Europe, in paintings so realistic that the objects in them seem to be projecting forward from the canvas into the viewer’s space, close enough to touch. In a common motif, straps seem to be physically holding up various objects – such as sheet music or letters – on a display board, when the entire image, wooden frame included, is actually a painted illusion. The Cubists, of course, did the opposite, fracturing images to grasp an object’s essence. In her memoir Life With Picasso, Francoise Gilot quotes the artist as saying, “We tried to get rid of trompe l’oeil to find a trompe l’esprit. We didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind.” But a major point of the exhibition is that mind games questioning the nature of reality and of art itself were already there in the most ambitious 17th-Century trompe l’oeil paintings. “Any mimesis is not real, despite how real it might look,” Braun tells BBC Culture. Trompe l’oeil, she says, offered  a “sophisticated and philosophical discourse in the Baroque period, and then again when the Americans took it up in the 1890s,” a pattern the Cubists were heir to.

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  • Self-care spaces: How your home can make you feel good

    Self-care spaces: How your home can make you feel good

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    For Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, the founders of online design magazine Sight Unseen, the pandemic brought about a newfound appreciation for the myriad objects they had both accumulated over the years. “We were sitting in our homes and our objects were really bringing us comfort, and making us feel less lonely,” Khemsurov tells BBC Culture. This sparked the idea for the duo’s book, How to Live with Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors, published this week, in which she and Singer offer up their tips on “how to maximise the visual and emotional impact of your space” through objects.

    This involves taking a more intentional approach to both acquiring and living with objects, prioritising heartfelt connection over what Khemsurov dubs a “keeping up with the Joneses” attitude. “It’s the basic idea that an object can very easily become imbued with meaning and memories,” she says. Whether it’s something a friend made you which reminds you that you are cared for, or a nick-nack purchased while travelling abroad, she observes, objects allow us to relive moments, or feel closer to loved ones, at a glance. “In terms of the aesthetic of the object, we tend to be quite agnostic,” Singer adds. “The whole point is building an interior around your personality.”

    Surrounding yourself with treasured objects is, of course, only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to compiling a personal space that makes you feel good. Lindsay T Graham, a personality-and-social psychologist specialising in how we affect – and are affected by  –  the spaces we inhabit, suggests taking an intuitive stance right from the start. “First, go into the space, and look at how it currently makes you feel,” she tells BBC Culture. “Don’t overthink it, just ask yourself, ‘Am I feeling stressed? Or happy? Am I ready to wind down? Or am I amped up?’ Then take a step back and think about what you want to be feeling. Noticing the mismatch between the two will offer clues to what needs to be shifted in order to create an environment that’s really going to support you.”

    Home sweet home

    From there, it’s all about selecting the right tools to achieve the desired psychological effect. One element is lighting. “Lighting can transform a space instantly,” says Graham. “Plus, there’s been so much research about its influence on our circadian rhythm, which impacts both our mental and physical health.” Much of this research centres on using different coloured lights to incite different moods. “You can buy warm or cool light bulbs,” environmental psychologist Sally Augustin, PhD, tells BBC Culture. “If you’re trying to create a calming atmosphere where people will enjoy spending time together, for example, you want a warmer, softer light, whereas for something that requires concentration, you want the light to be cooler and more intense.” Warmer light is most effective when emitted from a lower level – “say, from tabletop or floor lamps” – Augustin explains, while cool bulbs should be placed in ceiling fixtures or overhead lighting sockets.

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  • Wakanda Forever and the ‘Black Panther effect’ on Hollywood

    Wakanda Forever and the ‘Black Panther effect’ on Hollywood

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    But Carter points out that while progress has been made on the small screen since 2018, “we were already seeing an uptick in black leads in television prior to [Black Panther]” – see shows such as  Rhimes’ hit political thriller Scandal (2012-2018), featuring Kerry Washington as fixer Olivia Pope, and sitcom Blackish, which premiered in 2014 and targeted a black viewership “but still was pulling in incredible numbers from a universal audience”. The same applied to music industry drama Empire (2015), which captured more than 17 million viewers in its first season. However, while these various successes have been “colossal from where we’ve come from, they still are crumbs and we need more of [them],” believes Carter.

    What type of stories are being told?

    Aside from the question of whether we are seeing enough black stories, the nature of the stories being told continues to cause debate. In particular, critics have pointed out with increasing frequency the way in which film and TV can prioritise the platforming of narratives centred on “black trauma“, from police brutality and lynchings to slavery. The latter, in particular, remains a recurring topic in US film and TV: the latest high-profile film on the subject, set to be released in December, is Will Smith’s Emancipation, about a man who escapes a Louisiana plantation. For Gauyo, at times “the slave narrative has been so overdone, but in ways that have been redundant. There haven’t been many fresh takes”. However, last year filmmaker Barry Jenkins’ 10-part Amazon miniseries The Underground Railroad was praised for its distinctive approach to the subject. The small-screen adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel follows Cora, an enslaved woman trying to escape to freedom through a physical underground railroad network, making literal the old metaphor for the network of safe houses and secret routes that escaped slaves used.

    The award-winning series featured some gruesome scenes of torture and brutality but in contrast to those, there were also many scenes of gentleness and tenderness, exploring relationships such as those between a mother and daughter on the plantation. In general, there was less of a focus on slave owners and their cruelty, and much more on the enslaved people themselves and their stories. For Gauyo the series is fresh and “an example of telling something in a different way and from a new perspective that we haven’t seen before”. 

    There is certainly more room for improvement in getting fair and equal representation in Hollywood. Gauyo says that while “we’ve [black people] had a history of being marketable and showing our success in the television and film zeitgeist, there still seems to be a disconnect with the people at the top who are making decisions to greenlight some of these things”. A 2021 report by management consultancy firm McKinsey and Company revealed that fewer black-led stories get told, and when they are, they have been underfunded and undervalued, despite often earning higher relative returns than other movies. Figures like Brunson and Coogler have broken the mould, as before them have everyone from Rhimes to Spike Lee, but for Woods, they are “outliers and not the norm”.

    “Black Panther can only do so much. We have to have people who are actively working in Hollywood to be change agents,” says Carter. This is something Gauyo also agrees with. “To an extent, people look at Black Panther as to why there’s been a certain level of growth in the industry from people of colour,” he says – but as someone who works in Hollywood, he believes more diversity is needed amongst the decision-makers who greenlight projects. The McKinsey and Company research also reveals that black professionals are severely underrepresented in executive decision-making roles throughout the industry. For Gauyo, it’s fantastic that films like Black Panther and shows such as “Insecure and Abbott Elementary get greenlit [now], but the fact is there can be so many more”.

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  • A Clockwork Orange: 60-year-old teen slang that still shocks

    A Clockwork Orange: 60-year-old teen slang that still shocks

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    Within the first few lines of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, we are lured into a near-future after-dark realm, and a strangely potent new language. Fifteen-year-old Alex, the tale’s ultraviolent anti-hero and “humble narrator”, addresses us in the flip horrorshow slovos – that is, crazy, brilliant words – of Nadsat: a youth slang concocted by the polyglot author. The word “Nadsat” derives from a Russian suffix meaning “teen”, and the language of A Clockwork Orange is a vivid blitz of English and Russian words (“horrorshow” stems from the Russian term khorosho, meaning “good”) with varied additives: Elizabethan flourishes (“thou”; “thee and thine”; “verily”); Arabic; German; nursery rhyming.

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    Sixty years on from its publication (and more than a half-century after Stanley Kubrick’s infamous film adaptation), the book’s lingo has peppered pop culture, across music (band names like Moloko, Campag Velocet and Heaven 17; song titles by musicians including New Order and Lana Del Rey; concept albums such as Brazilian metallers Sepultura’s A-Lex, 2009; lyrics including David Bowie’s Girl Loves Me, from his final album Blackstar, 2016); art (a new major UK exhibition is entitled The Horror Show!) and nightlife (from legendary Ibiza club Clockwork Orange, to NADSAT: a 2021 compilation of young LGBTQ musicians from Paris). Nadsat is the sticky creative juice that fuels A Clockwork Orange’s cult status.

    In his autobiography You’ve Had Your Time (1990), Burgess explained that A Clockwork Orange “had to be told by a young thug of the future, and it had to be told in his version of English… It was pointless to write the book in the slang of the early 60s: it was ephemeral like all slang and might have a lavender smell by the time the manuscript got to the printers.”

    There’s no such fusty potpourri whiff here. Nadsat repeatedly hits your senses with a pheromone spiciness; a metallic tang. The crisp, conspiratorial slang allows Alex to convey scenes of social ritual (the teen “height of fashion” flaunted by himself and his gang of droogs, or friends, including “flip horrorshow boots for kicking”) as well as the horror of the assaults they mechanically indulge in. It is somehow both alienating, and intimate: a mix that would invariably polarise reviewers. In 1962, The Times Literary Supplement slated A Clockwork Orange as “a nasty little shocker”. Kingsley Amis was far more favourable in The Observer, though he quipped that Nadsat proved a challenge: “the less adventurous reader, especially if he may happen to be giving up smoking, will be tempted to let the book drop”.

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  • ASMR: How whispering took over the internet

    ASMR: How whispering took over the internet

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    Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is an intense tingling sensation that some people feel when they hear certain sounds and see certain visual stimulants. Whispering and tapping quietly on inanimate objects are both ASMR-inducing techniques, but there is much more to it than that.

    This strange phenomenon’s trajectory is an intriguing one, and ASMR content is now popular worldwide.

    This film explores Weird Sensation Feels Good: The World of ASMR at London’s Design Museum, the first exhibition to celebrate the peculiarly pleasant world of ASMR. And it reveals online creators Gibi and Made in France, the “ASMRtists” who are pushing the boundaries of creativity.

    Gibi says that ASMR helps to reduce viewers’ anxiety and counter negative feelings. “A lot of people would hide that they watched it,” she says. “And now, it’s fantastic, it has absolutely blown up. I think so many people have realised how beneficial it is, and how much we need this form of stress relief.”

    Filmed and edited by Paul Ivan Harris.

    Written and presented by Precious Adesina.

    Commissioned by Lindsay Baker.

    This video is part of BBC Culture and BBC Reel’s series, A Sensory World.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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  • Teletubbies: The bizarre kids’ TV show that swept the world

    Teletubbies: The bizarre kids’ TV show that swept the world

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    Still, rebooting isn’t new. Jeanette Steemers, professor of culture, media and creative industries at King’s College London, points to various classic children’s shows revisited over the years, such as Thomas & Friends and Bob the Builder. Some represent an opportunity to reimagine characters that don’t stand up to modern day views on representation, race or disability, such as Disney’s Dumbo, the original of which employed blatant African-American stereotypes. (Similarly, Wildbrain asserts the multi-racial casting of Sun Babies in the new Teletubbies is an effort to “reflect the diversity of the audience”.) More often, however, reboots demonstrate a low appetite for risk in an increasingly cash-strapped sector: “It’s really difficult to come up with a hit,” Steemers tells BBC Culture. “Nobody knows what that magic sauce is, so people instead try and replicate it. The problem is that the reboot is often not as good as the original.” Angelina Ballerina is a case in point. The original series, with 2D animations based on Katharine Holabird’s beautifully illustrated books, was later revived using CGI with arguably diminishing returns. This resonates with Wood, for whom the Netflix Teletubbies represents a major devaluation of the brand. She disparages the use of digital production techniques, though her main concern is that the careful observation undertaken before shooting the original – perfecting that child-centred lens – hasn’t been replicated. When this was put to Wildbrain the company chose not to comment. In detailing how Teletubbies had been updated, however, it stressed that the “spirit and concept of Teletubbies remains unchanged from the original series,” and “the stories and themes still centre around wonder, discovery, joy and silliness”.

    It remains to be seen whether the reboot resonates in the same way. Netflix wields huge power but it doesn’t operate in China, where much of the Teletubbies fanbase resides. Nor will the new series be available in the UK, where the BBC holds exclusive rights. And though the Tubbies have learned to play the social media game, tweeting celebrities and riling up politicians, the controversies and zeitgeisty debates that both plagued the show and lifted it to the top of the news agenda have long since moved on.

    But perhaps a more pertinent question is the one Wood asks: “Where will the next Teletubbies come from?” It would be difficult to bankroll such an outlandish project today. In the UK there are no longer any quotas on children’s content for commercial channels and the Young Audiences Content Fund, a lonely olive branch, was discontinued in January. Wood also worries that a deference to nostalgia is restricting the creativity she and Davenport were afforded in the ’90s. “There are other people out there making good work, or at least they could, were they given the opportunity.” She cites a project currently sitting with Ragdoll. “It is, I hope, in the zeitgeist of now, as much as you can feel it. Will it be seen in the whole mass of stuff being churned out? Who knows, but you have to keep trying.”

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  • I Will Always Love You: The power ballad that changed music

    I Will Always Love You: The power ballad that changed music

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    In fact, it could be argued that Houston’s vocal performance was, at times, a little too influential. Vocal coaches Carrie and David Grant, who worked with contestants on the British talent shows Pop Idol and Fame Academy, as well as with artists including Demi Lovato and the Spice Girls, say that Houston’s most famous songs became a gold standard that was rarely attainable. “Just about every singer we taught or auditioned for about five years wanted to master I Will Always Love You or The Greatest Love of All or I Have Nothing,” Carrie Grant tells BBC Culture. “Most of [them] should have tried something a little easier – many a singer has been wiped out in an attempt to do Whitney!”

    David Grant believes that Houston’s influence “cannot be underestimated” because “for most female singers, she was the voice of her generation”. Though she became known mainly for singing pop, soul and R&B music, Grant points out that you could always hear her “gospel roots” in her delivery. The daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston, a longtime backing vocalist for Aretha Houston as well as a Grammy-winning artist in her own right, Whitney honed her vocal skills in the gospel choir at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. “Even if they had the [vocal] riffs, many who followed her could not mirror this history,” Grant tells BBC Culture.

    Bringing R&B to the mainstream

    I Will Always Love You remains Houston’s best-selling single, but she had already enjoyed seven years of globe-conquering success by the time she released it. Between 1985 and 1987, she scored a record seven consecutive Billboard Hot 100 number ones with songs including Saving All My Love for You, I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) and So Emotional. “Whitney was the standard bearer in a line of great R&B singers, from the ’60s with Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, into the ’70s with Gladys Knight and Patti Labelle,” says David Grant. “But what she did was to take R&B to a market bigger than any of them had experienced. Without Whitney, there would arguably have been no mass market for Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé or Jennifer Hudson.”

    Houston’s crossover success as an artist who could sing pop, soul, rock, R&B and dance music was unprecedented at the time, but not necessarily popular in all quarters. She was reportedly booed by audience members at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, a ceremony recognising the best in soul, R&B and hip-hop music. Houston addressed this incredibly awkward moment in a 1991 interview on The Arsenio Hall Show, saying: “I think that I’ve got a lot of flak about ‘I sing too white’ or ‘I sing… white’ or something like that.” She added defiantly: “I do sing the way God intended for me to sing and I’m using what he gave me and I’m using it to the best of my ability.”

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  • Carolee Schneemann: The artist whose naked body was a canvas

    Carolee Schneemann: The artist whose naked body was a canvas

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    Describing this event, this happening, this performance can never do justice to the power of the moment itself. We can gain an impression of what it was like, we can look at the scroll behind glass, we can see photographs of Schneemann reading it, crouched and naked before her audience. But we cannot really know how her audience at Telluride felt when they saw and heard it happening before them, or feel the rage pulsating through Schneemann as she recreated the work on stage. Reflecting on her 1963 work Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, she once wrote that “I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material.” How then can her performance art be displayed when the body itself is not present?

    This is a question answered in a myriad of ways by Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, the first major retrospective of Schneemann’s works in the UK at the Barbican in London. Schneemann died in 2019, and there is a specific challenge of bringing historical performance art to a retrospective exhibition. The show does this through a plethora of display techniques, combining projected films, still photography, archival writings such as performance instructions, and tactile objects including costumes and props. Curator Lotte Johnson tells BBC Culture that, “Schneemann herself was sensitively attuned to the condition of performance as an ephemeral, time-based form of expression.”

    This is why Schneemann’s archive is full of hundreds of photographs, slides, negatives and contact sheets which together offer as close to a three-dimensional realisation of what took place in the moment of the performance itself as possible. Johnson further reflects, “These photographs and moving image documentations, which Schneemann often edited into her own incredible film collages, have been absolutely crucial to the challenge of bringing her work back to life through our exhibition.”

    Schneemann’s art spans six decades from the late 1950s, refusing to fit into any clear categories of period or genre. She grew up in 1930s Pennsylvania before studying at Bard College in New York state, from which she was expelled in 1954 after two years for “moral turpitude”, due to painting her own nude body when Bard refused to provide her with life models. In doing so, Schneemann connected with herself artistically in a way that defined her work thereafter. She moved to New York, a city caught in the throes of Abstract Expressionism and an art world full of men, whom she dubbed the “Art Stud Club”. Where men took inspiration from women’s bodies, Schneemann had the self-possession to put her body into the work directly. She took herself off the canvas to create from the body itself, developing a mode of art alongside her peer Yoko Ono which inspired subsequent performance artists including Marina Abramović.

    A gesture of liberation

    The taboo of the female body as a sexual agent in and for itself lies at the core of Schneemann’s work. That is, that a woman is not simply an object of male desire in society and in the sex act itself, but rather a subject who can and should feel pleasure. The societal gaslighting performed by patriarchy, specifically of men convincing women that their own pleasure is the focus of intercourse, with the male orgasm as telos, had in Schneemann’s view forced women into submission. Johnson reflects that, “For Schneemann, working with and from the body was a gesture of liberation.”

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  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever review: Overshadowed by loss

    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever review: Overshadowed by loss

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    What is lacking is a plot that will grip anyone who isn’t already deeply invested in the geopolitics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Without one central character to follow, it roams all over the place without picking up the breakneck momentum that the best superhero blockbusters have. It pauses for long discussions about the future of Wakanda and the history of Talokan. It checks in on old characters, such as Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s CIA agents. And it spends plenty of time introducing new characters, such as a teenage Iron Man wannabe played by Dominique Thorne, and a Wakandan warrior played by Michaela Coel, the creator of the hit BBC series I May Destroy You. All four of those characters could have been edited out without much difficulty. An over-stuffed soap opera that lasts almost three hours, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever might have worked better if it had been turned into a six-part series for Disney Plus.

    One issue is that, after a couple of scenes set on US soil in the first half, the world as we know it is largely forgotten. Everything leads to a battle between Wakanda and Talokan – and as both countries are invented, and both seem like wonderful places to be, it’s hard to root for a victory on either side. You can sit back and admire the tremendous craftsmanship involved, but don’t expect to be drawn into the story. The hole left by Boseman hasn’t quite been filled.

    ★★★☆☆

    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is on general release from 11 November.

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  • Nushu: China’s secret female-only language

    Nushu: China’s secret female-only language

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    “To give each other hope, they created a script that men did not understand.” A woman in the new documentary feature Hidden Letters describes Nushu – a secret language invented 400 years ago in China’s Hunan Province, to help peasants in secluded villages deal with conditions in which their feet were bound and they were confined to their chamber rooms. Initially scrawled on the ground with wok ashes using tree branches, the script was later written on folding fans or embroidered on handkerchiefs, and evolved into poetry.

    “It’s a history that most Chinese are not familiar with,” says filmmaker Violet du Feng. “In literature, there’s very few records of women’s lives and existence and experiences, and I didn’t grow up to know any of those – I knew nothing about Nushu, and I felt like I should have.”

    Yet women today are finding inspiration in the language, as Du Feng reveals in her new documentary Hidden Letters. “Nushu is a space that allows women to confide in each other, to be vulnerable with each other, to share our struggles and challenges, and to come together and then have a space to build our own sisterhood.”

    While Nushu is being preserved as a cultural artefact, it meant much more to its practitioners – and its role is still important today. “To us, it’s art,” a museum guide says in Hidden Letters. “Not to them. It was created to rebel.”

    Video by Harriet Constable; co-produced by Fiona Macdonald.

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  • Arseny Avraamov: The forgotten Soviet genius of modern music

    Arseny Avraamov: The forgotten Soviet genius of modern music

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    “We can say that with Symphony of Sirens, Avraamov pioneered the idea of using non-traditional instruments for both composition and performance,” adds Khismatov. In later works, Avraamov would go on to incorporate tools such as saws, grinding wheels, axes and sledgehammers into his music.

    Instead of a traditional score, he used written instructions and musical notation so simplified that anyone could understand it. “Symphony of Sirens exemplifies a mode of music making in which virtuosity, notation or traditional methods of musical arrangement are dispensed with in favour of a more conceptual approach,” says Stubbs. “It’s about how you sequence and juxtapose elements. That’s as true for the most recent EP by [British electronic musician] Burial as it is for Avraamov.”

    Symphony of Sirens was attempted just once more, a year later in Moscow, though at a much-reduced scale. Undeterred, Avraamov began plotting his next project: installing powerful electroacoustic devices on Zeppelins and flying them above Moscow. Not content with conducting a city, Avraamov now had the skies in his sights.

    There were two problems though. Firstly, Avraamov was broke. Secondly, the revolutionary atmosphere in Russia that had fostered a radical, artistic avant-garde was coming to an end. “Symphony [of Sirens] represents what a lot of early electronic music represents – a utopianism, a lost future,” says Stubbs. “It was commissioned at a time when it was still optimistically held that the grand, revolutionary egalitarian prospect of the Soviet Union could operate hand-in-hand with the artistic avant-garde. Sadly, that was quashed in time under Stalin.”

    The Zeppelin project never left the drawing board, and Avraamov died in poverty and obscurity. Interest in his work only re-emerged in the 1990s, and the first reconstruction of Symphony of Sirens, based on Avraamov’s notes and using samples, took place in 2008. The following year, Khismatov debuted his own reconstruction (under his preferred translation, Symphony of Industrial Horns) at a fort in St Petersburg. It later appeared at Documenta 14 and has gone on to influence a new generation of electronic, avant-garde and politically motivated composers. In 2017, Avraamov made an appearance in the BBC documentary Tunes for Tyrants, with presenter Suzy Klein heralding the Russian as one of the forgotten geniuses of music, and even performing her own tribute to Symphony of Sirens as she stood on a Moscow rooftop and waved two red flags from side to side. Long after his death, Avraamov is finally getting his due.

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  • The Crown series 5 review: ‘Gripping, but badly-told soap’

    The Crown series 5 review: ‘Gripping, but badly-told soap’

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    But for all that Prince Charles and Princess Diana had one of the most extraordinary marriages in human history, the show does well to suggest how it might have been simultaneously sad in extremely ordinary ways: it’s a point poignantly made, in particular, through a conceit in which fictional couples whose divorces were stamped on the same day detail their own marital breakdowns. And while there had been some speculation that this current series might prove the very worst of PR for the new King, in fact, on top of championing his progressive values and work with The Prince’s Trust, its arbitration of the Wales’ marriage feels very equitable. One scene between them that sticks out for its unadorned sadness comes in the penultimate episode when an attempt at a truce, made over a plate of scrambled eggs in Princess Diana’s Kensington Palace flat, suddenly descends into recrimination: here, the show suggests, were two people that, through no singular fault, simply could never have been compatible.

    As for the performances? They are, this time round, a very mixed bag. Inevitably it becomes harder for each new round of actors taking on royal duties to convince, as what happens on screen converges with more and more viewers’ real-life memories. Regardless, some performances here really just don’t work. That applies to Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, who brings a strangely prim, pinched quality to the famously larger-than-life royal sibling. Equally, West as Prince Charles is all wrong: where his predecessor Josh O’Connor disappeared into the role, perfectly capturing the prince’s unworldly diffidence, among other things, West isn’t able to quell his roguishly assured star charisma.

    Those actors who fare better, by contrast, are ones who don’t themselves have such an established persona to conceal. The relatively little-known Claudia Harrison follows Erin Doherty as another inspired choice for the Princess Royal, a perfect balance of severity and warmth, while Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip offers a masterclass in creating a convincing impression of a person without looking anything like them, and Debicki pretty effectively inhabits Princess Diana using a more obviously studied mimicry (the eyes directed upwards, the ethereal, slightly wooden intonation). And as for Staunton? At first, she seems all wrong for the part, somehow both too naturally bullish and too knowing. Yet, as the series goes on, she’s a performer of such intense conviction that the question of how much her Queen is really the Queen becomes increasingly less important.

    Come the final episode of this series, a sense of déjà vu takes hold, as Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) arrives in power and Princess Diana is seen packing her bag for a visit to Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht, where she will encounter his son Dodi – because, of course, in its due-to-be-final next series, The Crown is set to cross over with The Queen, Morgan’s fine, Oscar-winning 2006 film about the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, which was the first fruit of his interest in Britain’s ruling family. I suspect the comparison with that rather more sophisticated work will do The Crown no favours at all – though regardless of that, as an incontrovertible TV “event” that is also a fail-safe controversy machine, it will undoubtedly have the world rapt until the very end.

    The Crown series five is released on Netflix on 9 November.

    ★★★☆☆

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  • How What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? demonised older women

    How What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? demonised older women

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    However, 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, and Gloria Swanson’s starring performance as Norma Desmond, had proved the story of a scorned, delusional older woman could be powerful. And in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s enormously successful Psycho (1960), Warner knew that low-budget horrors centered around reclusive eccentrics, who carried baneful secrets, could still shake up audiences. If you believe 2017’s Feud – Ryan Murphy’s television drama that explored Davis and Crawford’s love-hate relationship – Warner (played by Stanley Tucci in this limited series) was just excited by the prospect of being able to watch the dailies over a morning coffee, howling with laughter as the friction from his two leads burned on to the projector.

    Released on Halloween 60 years ago, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? defied all of Warner’s low expectations. Although it didn’t necessarily resonate with critics immediately (“This isn’t a movie, it’s a caricature!” wrote the Chicago Tribune in a scathing review), it notched up five Oscar nominations, and drew in diverse audiences who were deeply compelled by the film’s depiction of a toxic sibling rivalry and two women desperately fighting to escape self-imposed cages. Made for $900,000, it took in $9m at the box office (which – adjusted with inflation – would amount to $90m today). 

    Davis plays former child star Baby Jane Hudson, who has gone from smugly tap dancing on sold-out stages and demanding ice cream as a screaming schoolgirl diva, to becoming a washed-up loner. Despite the passing of Father Time, Jane still garishly dresses like her nine-year-old self, complete with pigtails and a face full of white powder that struggles to hide the wrinkles. Davis perfectly tows the line between misplaced childhood innocence and scornful anarchy, her split personalities the result of a life that was once full of glamour, and is now desolate.

    Meanwhile, Crawford plays the less imposing sister, Blanche, who escapes Jane’s oppressive shadow to become a successful (and much more graceful) Hollywood star in her own right, before a mysterious car accident destroys a once promising future. As a shivery has-been confined to a wheelchair, Crawford grounds the film, setting off Davis’s high theatrics and providing a constant target for her character’s unhinged jealousy. Whenever Crawford and Davis are together on screen it’s explosive, emotional, and impossible to look away.

    A lot of the enduring fascination with the film (which in 2021 was preserved by the US Library of Congress for being “historically significant”) springs from the drama of these actresses’ infamous off-screen rivalry. Reports at the time suggested that a scene where Jane viciously assaults Blanche with a series of devastating kicks wasn’t really acting at all. Meanwhile according to Davis, Crawford, perhaps bitterly angry she had been overlooked for a best actress Oscar nomination in favour of her co-star for a film she had championed long before Davis was on board, allegedly used her Hollywood connections to ensure Davis lost out on the gong at the 1963 Oscars; that was a charge Crawford herself denied. “Joan did not want me to have that Oscar!” an elderly Davis exclaimed in an interview with Barbara Walters years after the dust had settled.

    The Baby Jane-a-likes that followed

    But beyond all this gossip and conjecture, the most significant legacy of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? can be found in the films it spawned. In the years following its release, Hollywood started producing a string of so-called “Hagsploitation” movies, which like Baby Jane, provided veteran actresses including Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds with villainous, yet deliriously camp roles within horror that ensured their careers could keep on rolling. (This sub-genre has gone by other names including “psycho-biddy horror”, “hag horror”, and “Grande Dame Guignol”, all of which similarly revel in the idea of women developing a lunacy sparked by old age.)

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