Rebecca Onion, who occasionally contributes to Open Culture, runs The Vault, a blog residing at Slate.com that’s “dedicated to history at its most beautiful, strange, funny, and moving.” It’s a great place to spend time if you enjoy revisiting archival documents of historical interest — photographs, pamphlets, buttons, toys and, yes, maps, like the one above. Featured on The Vault last week, this curious map was issued by the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940 and depicts the “geographical locations, typical employment, and religious commitments” of ethnic groups living in the United States at the time time. A copy of the map was owned and annotated by poet Langston Hughes, the American poet, social activist, playwright, who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. If you enlarge the image (click here, then click again) and look carefully, you can see that he annotated the map with a red pen. One such annotation — where he placed a burning cross and “K.K.K.” in the vicinity of African Americans living in the South — appears in the image below. Head over to The Vault to get more on this story.
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Today, I was eavesdropping on a young couple in a cafe. The man asked the woman to recommend a book, something he wouldn’t be able to put down on a long, upcoming plane ride. The woman seemed stymied by this request. Exhausted, even. (A stroller in which a fairly newborn baby slumbered was parked next to them).
It must’ve been obvious that my wheels were turning for the woman turned to me, remarking, “He doesn’t like books.”
“I’m all about magazines,” the man chimed in.
Hmm. Perhaps Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Foolswasn’t such a good idea after all. What would this stranger like? Without giving it very much thought at all, I reached for The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning non-fiction account of a Western doctor’s tussle with the family of an epileptic Hmong child. It seems unlikely my impromptu elevator pitch convinced him to nip round the corner to see if Greenlight Bookstore had a copy in stock. More probably, I impressed him as one of those New Age‑y matrons eager to publicly identify with whatever tribal culture lays within reach.
(Lest you think me an insufferable busybody, the man at the next table horned in on the conversation too, recommending a collection of modern-day Sherlock Holmes stories and a novel, which we all said sounded great. Because really, what else were we going to say?
A reader’s taste is so subjective, is it any wonder I felt leery going into “How to Build a Fictional World,” an animated Ted-Ed talk by children’s book author and former middle school teacher, Kate Messner? The titles she name-checks—The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and the Harry Potter series—are all wildly successful, and far—as in light years—from of my cup of tea.
That’s not to say I’m opposed to fantasy. I adore Dungeon, Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar’s outrageously funny, anthropomorphic graphic novel series. Animal Farm… A Clockwork Orange…all of these personal favorites are easy to deconstruct using Messner’s recipe for fictional world-building. (Those whose tastes run similar to mine may want to jump ahead to the 3:15 minute mark above.)
Kudos to animator Avi Ofer, for the wit with which he conceptualizes Messner’s ideas. The way he chooses to represent the inhabitants’ relationships with the plants and animals of their fictional world (4:13) is particularly inventive. His contributions alone are enough to make this must-see viewing for any reluctant — or stuck — creative writer.
For those of you who enjoy fantasy and science fiction, how do your favorite titles cleave to Messner’s guidelines? Let us know in the comments below.
We’ve previously brought you the origin story of Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie’s first and most flamboyant rock & roll character, as well as his later recollections of those times in a 1977 interview on Canadian television. Above, see the documentary that marked the end of that pivotal era, D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a concert film of Bowie’s last show as the glam rock kabuki space alien. (Part 1 can be found above, remaining parts reside here.) Bowie had grown tired of the character, feeling forced by his manager Tony DeFries to put on bigger, more elaborate stage shows (though there is speculation that record company RCA refused to finance planned US and Canadian stadium shows). In a later recollection, Bowie stated he was ready to move on:
I wanted the whole MainMan thing away from me. It was circusy. I was never much of an entourage person — I hated all of that. It’s a relief for all these years … not have a constant stream of people following me around to the point where, when I sat down, fifteen other people sat down. It was unbearable. I think Tony [DeFries] saw himself as a Svengali type, but I think I would have done okay anyway. Now, I look back on it with amusement more than anything else.
Along with brothers Albert and David Maysles, who made Gimme Shelter, Pennebaker had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at exactly the right time in music history. His Dont Look Back defined Bob Dylan for a generation and launched the much-imitated proto-music video with cue cards for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
The eponymous Monterey Pop documented the explosive 1967 festival that “crystallize[d] the energy of a counterculture that by then seemed both blessedly inevitable and dangerously embattled,” according to Robert Christgau. In 1973, Pennebaker found himself again positioned perfectly to document a pivotal moment—the end of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in what became known as “The Retirement Gig.”
Pennebaker, who’d only just signed on during the final London leg of the tour to make a full-length film and who knew little of Bowie’s music, was as surprised as anyone when Bowie announced Ziggy’s retirement by saying “this show will stay the longest in our memories, not just because it is the end of the tour but because it is the last show we’ll ever do.” No one knew at the time that Bowie would return, transformed into Aladdin Sane in an album of the same name that year (with the same band—watch them do a version of Lou Reed’s “White Light/White Heat” above at 1:18:10, a track recorded for, but cut from, 1973 covers album Pin Ups). The farewell concert opened with a medley of Bowie songs on solo piano performed by Mike Garson, who called the show “phenomenal” (hear Garson’s medley above, beginning at 2:30, after the introduction).
The retirement gig was the 60th of 40 tour dates on the third Ziggy UK tour and was, in fact, a replacement for a cancelled gig at Earl’s Court. Find a full list of the set here. Bowie and the Spiders were joined onstage by Jeff Beck for two songs before Bowie’s farewell speech, but Beck later had himself cut from Pennebaker’s film, unhappy with his solos, and perhaps his wardrobe. Though Beck was Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson’s hero, Ronson remembers being too distracted to be overwhelmed: “I was too busy looking at his flares. Even by our standards, those trousers were excessive!” See grainy bootleg footage from the show of Beck and his trousers in “Jean Genie,” and a snippet of “Love Me Do” (above), and Chuck Berry’s “Round and Round” (below).
If you believe that artistic collaborations occur in the afterlife, few could sound more intriguing than one between the creators pictured, in life, above: Federico Fellini, born 94 years ago today and gone for the past twenty, and Jean Giraud, who passed in 2012. The Italian director Fellini, we need hardly explain, made such hauntingly flamboyant films as La Dolce Vita, 8½, and Satyricon. The Franco-Belgian comic artist Giraud, better known as Mœbius, took his form to its highest aesthetic level with works like Arzach, The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, The Incal, and, under his alternate pseudonym Gir, the unconventional Wild-West series Blueberry. (You can learn more by watching the documentary In Search of Mœbius, previously featured here.) Reflect, for a moment, on what bizarre, fantastical, yet psychologically concrete visions these two imaginations could together realize.
Click for larger image
Fellini quite admired Giraud, considering him at the level of Picasso and Matisse. On Italian television, he once called him “a unique talent endowed with an extraordinary visionary imagination that’s constantly renewed and never vulgar” who “disturbs and consoles” and possesses “the ability to transport us into unknown worlds where we encounter unsettling characters.” The 1979 letter above, which Fellini wrote while shooting City of Women, continues this line of praise in a direct manner. “Everything you do pleases me,” he says. “Even your name pleases me.” He describes the qualities of Mœbius’ work that continue to win him admirers, from “the joy and enthusiasm your drawings exude” (which “demand of me a great precision”) to “the lighting technique you use” to feeling “suspended weightlessly in one of your oblique universes.” But above all the other lines, one aside in particular gets my own imagination running: “What a great film director you would make! Have you ever thought about it?”
Good thing Austin-based designer Michael Yates studied abroad. Three months spent in the vicinity of Kyoto as a Texas A&M electrical engineering student ultimately inspired him to abandon the profession for which he had trained, in order to pursue woodworking. “…the sacredness of the process and attention to detail resonated with me in a way that nothing had before,” he recalls in an Apartment Therapy profile. “I’ve since learned in practice what I saw evidence of in the temples—that completely focusing on where you are will get you the best product at the end. Every step of the process is precious.”
Had he not changed horses in midstream, his grandmother would have likely stuck to the plan too, departing for the afterlife in a standard-issue coffin or urn, rather than asking Yates to build her something special. In his mind, it was a collaboration, a process documented above, at the behest of Whole Foods’ online magazine,Dark Rye.(Indicating, perhaps, that artisanal, upcycled coffins will soon be available for purchase beside bamboo cutting boards and locally sourced, grass-fed, beef jerky?)
Yate’s grandma placed her request pre-need, in the industry lingo, a move that afforded him plenty of time to study—and reject—the overly ornate vessels that have become a cultural norm. Luxurious details have no place, he feels, when the user can derive no enjoyment from them. (Guess he and Grandma weren’t considering going with the off-the-wall Ghana approach.)
The coffin is the most meaningful piece he’s ever created, even before it could be beta tested. It caused him to think deeply about our relationship with death and each other. The soundtrack hints that something very sad is about to happen, as do the photos of his grandmother as a vibrant, younger woman. (Such shots have become de rigeur for anyone mourning an older relative on Facebook.) Yates mentions that his grandmother, healthy when she hatched this scheme, has been diagnosed with cancer. I think we can assume where this is going, right?
At the risk of a spoiler, I’d like to commend the filmmakers for allowing some key scenes to occur off-camera. Yates remarks that after all that went into making the coffin, it would be “a terrible miss” if his grandmother did not get a chance to see it. He’s filmed loading it into his truck, but viewers are not privy to its delivery. Some things, it would seem, are still personal.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2014 edition asks the question, “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” The question came prefaced by this thought:
Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?
A theory of merit states that Neil Young reinvents himself every 10 years or so, but the work in-between isn’t always pretty. Yet for an artist with a somewhat limited range, he remains one of the most interesting singers and songwriters in rock and roll well over four decades after his start. Young once played guitar in a garage band with Rick James in 1965 called the Mynah Birds; released a surprisingly listenable electro album in 1982 complete with Giorgio Morodor-like synths and vocoders; and last year, recorded a collection of folk standards like “Oh, Susanna” and “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” in the style of 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps (an album, Paul Nelson wrote at the time, that “burns [rock & roll] to the ground”). In-between the stylistic leaps and innovations are some painfully mediocre albums and some that define, or rather redefine, genres. One of the latter, Young’s 1972 Harvest picked up and refined the folk-rock of his first band Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled 1966 debut—an album widely credited with the creation of folk-rock.
Harvest—by any account one of Young’s best albums and the highest-selling of ’72—produced “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” and, indirectly led to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” (written in response to Harvest’s anti-segregation rocker, “Alabama”). It’s a surprisingly quiet album for the impact it’s had, and it set the standard for later folk-acoustic Young albums like 1992’s Harvest Moon and 2000’s Silver & Gold. And as much as Young can destroy a venue with a full-on electric attack (even now!), he can mesmerize an audience with just an acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica, and casual banter, even while playing a suite of songs they’d never heard before. See him do so above in a 1971 concert live at the BBC’s Shepherds Bush Empire Theatre. Young plays four songs that would appear on Harvest: “Out on the Weekend,” “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” and “A Man Needs a Maid.” He also does “Journey Through the Past” and “Love in Mind,” which would appear two years later on the bleak 1973 Time Fades Away, and “Don’t Let it Bring You Down,” a song from 1970’s brilliant After the Gold Rush. Young performed the last song, “Dance Dance Dance,” with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but it went unreleased in a studio version until the 2009 box set The Archives, Volume 1: 1963–1972.
Some further evidence of Young’s continued relevance: just last week, he performed a series of shows at Carnegie Hall, and audience members took video of several songs, including the title track to Harvest (above). It’s a song Young almost never played live until 2007. Onstage, alone, with acoustic and harp, he is still, forty-three years later, a mesmerizing presence.
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Rebecca Onion, who occasionally contributes to Open Culture, runs The Vault, a blog residing at Slate.com that’s “dedicated to history at its most beautiful, strange, funny, and moving.” It’s a great place to spend time if you enjoy revisiting archival documents of historical interest — photographs, pamphlets, buttons, toys and, yes, maps, like the one above. Featured on The Vault last week, this curious map was issued by the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940 and depicts the “geographical locations, typical employment, and religious commitments” of ethnic groups living in the United States at the time time. A copy of the map was owned and annotated by poet Langston Hughes, the American poet, social activist, playwright, who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. If you enlarge the image (click here, then click again) and look carefully, you can see that he annotated the map with a red pen. One such annotation — where he placed a burning cross and “K.K.K.” in the vicinity of African Americans living in the South — appears in the image below. Head over to The Vault to get more on this story.
