Back in the summer of 1975, the Talking Heads were still an unknown band, laboring away in obscurity. Amidst a stifling heat wave, they practiced in every day in a New York City loft. And so it went until they got an early break–a chance to perform live at CBGB, as the opening act for The Ramones. “Hilly [Kristal, owner of CBGB, asked Johnny [Ramone] if we could open for them, and Johnny said, ‘Sure, they’re gonna suck, so no problem,’ ” Chris Frantz (Talking Heads drummer), recalled in an interview with The New York Post. “There were very few people in the audience, maybe 10 altogether,” he adds. “Five came to see us and five came to see the Ramones.” The lucky ones.
By 1977, the bands had released their debut albums and embarked on a European tour together. Equally innovative but stylistically different, their histories would remain forever intertwined–something that’s perhaps best captured by the clip above. If we have our facts right, in January 1977, the Talking Heads opened a show at the Jabberwocky Club at Syracuse University with a cover of The Ramones’ 1976 single “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” You can listen to the complete 20 minute set below. Also, in the Relateds further down, find footage of both bands playing at CBGB in 1974 and 1975.
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In searching for a treasure trove of publications springing from the avant-garde, deliberately irrational, early 20th-century European “anti-art” art movement known as Dada, where would you first look? Many corners of the world’s historic cultural capitals may come right to mind, but might we suggest the University of Iowa? Even if you don’t feel like traveling to the middle of the United States to plunge into an archive of highly purposeful nonsense, you can view their impressive collection of Dada periodicals (36 in total), books, leaflets, and ephemera online.
“Founded in 1979 as part of the Dada Archive and Research Center, the International Dada Archive is a scholarly resource for the study of the historic Dada movement,” says its front page. The collection contains “works by and about the Dadaists including books, articles, microfilmed manuscript collections, videorecordings, sound recordings, and online resources,” and in its digital form it “provides links to scanned images of original Dada-era publications in the International Dada Archive,” including the influential Dada and 291, as well as “many of the major periodicals of the Dada movement from Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere, as well as books, exhibition catalogs, and broadsides by participants in the Dada movement.” (Note: if you click on magazines in the collection, you can download the various pages.)
The history of the archive, written by Timothy Shipe, also addresses an important question: “Why Iowa? One answer lies in a clear affinity between the Dada movement and this University. The internationalist, multilingual, multimedia nature of Dada makes Iowa, with its International Writers’ Program, its Writers’ Workshop, its Center for Global Studies, its Translation Workshop and Center, its dynamic programs in music, dance, art, theater, film, literature, and languages, an especially appropriate place to house the Dada Archive. A brief glance at the history of Dada will make this affinity clear.”
You can learn more about that history from the Dada material we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture: the video series The ABCs of Dada which explains the movement (or at least explains it as well as anyone can hope to); the material we gathered in celebration of its hundredth anniversary last year; and three essential Dadaist films by Hans Richter, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. That will put into clearer context the 36 journals you can peruse in the University of Iowa’s Digital Dada Archive, some of which put out many issues, some of which stopped after the first, and all of which offer a glimpse of an artistic spirit, scattered across several different countries, which flared up briefly but brightly with anarchic energy, destructive creativity, a forward-looking aesthetic sense, and no small amount of humor.
The punk movement gave birth to hundreds of bands in a small amount of time, like a petri dish that just explodes under the right conditions. Forty years later, we are still living in the aftermath of that explosion and sorting things out. Lists need to be made. And if you consider garage rock to be proto-punk, the list can be very long.
Four years ago, L.A. Weekly created a list of the Top 20 punk albums of all time, but purists might despair to see Green Day on there or just anything after the ‘90s.
But they also turned to their columnist, Black Flag vocalist, intense spoken word performer, and radio deejay Henry Rollins, and asked him to create his own list. See them below, and hear them above (via this playlist).
In his brief intro, Rollins mulls over the eternal genre question–where does punk stop and post-punk begin?
Could Wire, also be considered Post Punk? Where do you put bands like PIL, Joy Division, Television, Patti Smith, Suicide, and Killing Joke? What about Gang of Four, 999 and the Banshees? For me, as a lean definition, I go by the classic UK 1977 graduating class, Pistols, Clash, etc., and go from there.
The list, he says, is in no particular order, but it’s not a surprise to see the first Clash album at the top, followed by the debut albums of the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Damned, X, Wire, The Buzzcocks, The Saints, The Germs, X‑Ray Spex, The Adverts, and Stiff Little Fingers. Very few on that list went on to top their debut, or even–such as the Pistols and The Germs–record a follow-up.
Rollins talked about this in an essay (also for the L.A. Weekly) on why he loves another band on his list, the U.K. Subs.
How some of those bands were able to follow up with another album is a fascinating bit of musical history, as well as a study of talent, vision and integrity. It is where the rubber truly meets the road. After the explosive excitement of the initial batch of songs has settled, the band often is left with a success-derived self-awareness that hangs like a cloud over the practice room. The awfulness of expectation enters the equation, and the results are not always good.
Rollins is a fan of the first four U.K. Subs LPs–“they are like desert island LPs. Records you can’t do without,” he once said.
Other interesting choices on Rollins’ list: the shameless Ramones-copyists The Lurkers, The Minutemen’s first album (instead of the undisputed classic Double Nickels on the Dime), the lesser-known Eater, the Ruts, and the Fall’s Hex Enduction Hour, which is punk in aesthetic, but certainly not in production.
For a man who usually has something to say, it would have been cool to have some commentary from Rollins on his choices. On the other hand, maybe he’d just tell us to shut up. The music speaks for itself.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
In the ancient world, the language of philosophy—and therefore of science and medicine—was primarily Greek. “Even after the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and the demise of paganism, philosophy was strongly associated with Hellenic culture,” writes philosophy professor and History of Philosophy without any Gaps host Peter Adamson. “The leading thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek literature.” And in the eastern empire, “the Greek-speaking Byzantines could continue to read Plato and Aristotle in the original.”
Greek thinkers also had significant influence in Egypt. During the building of the Library of Alexandria, “scholars copied and stored books that were borrowed, bought, and even stolen from other places in the Mediterranean,” writes Aileen Das, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of Michigan. “The librarians gathered texts circulating under the names of Plato (d. 348/347 BCE), Aristotle and Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), and published them as collections.” The scroll above, part of an Aristotelian transcription of the Athenian constitution, was believed lost for hundreds of years until it was discovered in the 19th century in Egypt, in the original Greek. The text, writes the British Library, “has had a major impact in our knowledge of the development of Athenian democracy and the workings of the Athenian city-state in antiquity.”
Alexandria “rivalled Athens and Rome as the place to study philosophy and medicine in the Mediterranean,” and young men of means like the 6th century priest Sergius of Reshaina, doctor-in-chief in Northern Syria, traveled there to learn the tradition. Sergius “translated around 30 works of Galen [the Greek physician]” and other known and unknown philosophers and ancient scientists into Syriac. Later, as Syriac and Arabic came to dominate former Greek-speaking regions, the Greek texts became intense objects of focus for Islamic thinkers, and the caliphs spared no expense to have them translated and disseminated, often contracting with Christian and Jewish scholars to accomplish the task.
The transmission of Greek philosophy and medicine was an international phenomenon, which involved bilingual speakers from pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish backgrounds. This movement spanned not only religious and linguistic but also geographical boundaries, for it occurred in cities as far apart as Baghdad in the East and Toledo in the West.
In Baghdad, especially, by the 10th century, “readers of Arabic,” writes Adamson, “had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today” thanks to a “well-funded translation movement that unfolded during the Abbasid caliphate, beginning in the second half of the eighth century.” The work done during the Abbasid period—from about 750 to 950—“generated a highly sophisticated scientific language and a massive amount of source material,” we learn in Harvard University Press’s The Classical Tradition. Such material “would feed scientific research for the following centuries, not only in the Islamic world but beyond it, in Greek and Latin Christendom and, within it, among the Jewish populations as well.”
Indeed this “Byzantine humanism,” as it’s called, “helped the classical tradition survive, at least to the large extent that it has.” As ancient texts and traditions disappeared in Europe during the so-called “Dark Ages,” Arabic and Syriac-speaking scholars and translators incorporated them into an Islamic philosophical tradition called falsafa. The motivations for fostering the study of Greek thought were complex. On the one hand, writes Adamson, the move was political; “the caliphs wanted to establish their own cultural hegemony,” in competition with Persians and Greek-speaking Byzantine Christians, “benighted as they were by the irrationalities of Christian theology.” On the other hand, “Muslim intellectuals also saw resources in the Greek texts for defending, and better understanding their own religion.”
One well-known figure from the period, al-Kindi, is thought to be the first philosopher to write in Arabic. He oversaw the translations of hundreds of texts by Christian scholars who read both Greek and Arabic, and he may also have added his own ideas to the works of Plotinus, for example, and other Greek thinkers. Like Thomas Aquinas a few hundred years later, al-Kindi attempted to “establish the identity of the first principle in Aristotle and Plotinus” as the theistic God. In this way, Islamic translations of Greek texts prepared the way for interpretations that “treat that principle as a Creator,” a central idea in Medieval scholastic philosophy and Catholic thought generally.
The translations by al-Kindi and his associates are grouped into what scholars call the “circle of al-Kindi,” which preserved and elaborated on Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Thanks to al-Kindi’s “first set of translations,” notes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “learned Muslims became acquainted with Plato’s Demiurge and immortal soul; with Aristotle’s search for science and knowledge of the causes of all the phenomena on earth and in the heavens,” and many more ancient Greek metaphysical doctrines. Later translators working under physician and scientist Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son “made available in Syriac and/or Arabic other works by Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, some philosophical writings by Galen,” and other Greek thinkers and scientists.
This tradition of translation, philosophical debate, and scientific discovery in Islamic societies continued into the 10th and 11th centuries, when Averroes, the “Islamic scholar who gave us modern philosophy,” wrote his commentary on the works of Aristotle. “For several centuries,” writes the University of Colorado’s Robert Pasnau, “a series of brilliant philosophers and scientists made Baghdad the intellectual center of the medieval world,” preserving ancient Greek knowledge and wisdom that may otherwise have disappeared. When it seems in our study of history that the light of the ancient philosophy was extinguished in Western Europe, we need only look to North Africa and the Near East to see that tradition, with its humanistic exchange of ideas, flourishing for centuries in a world closely connected by trade and empire.
The New Yorker has posted a very neat split-screen tour of the same streets in New York City, letting you see the Big Apple in the 1930s and today. Times Square, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge–they’re all on display. What a difference 80 years make.
Below you can find other historical videos and photos of NYC … and London and Berlin too. Enjoy.
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In the days of popular retrofuturism—say, the first half of the twentieth century—people tended to imagine the world of tomorrow looking very much like the world of today, only with a lot more flying cars, monorails, and videophones. This is true whether those doing the imagining were titans of industry, marketing mavens, idealistic Soviets, or subjects of the Tsar, though we might think that people living under an ancient monarchical system might not expect much change. In some ways we might be right, but as we can see in the 1914 postcards here—printed as Russia entered World War I—the country did anticipate a modern, technological future, though one that still closely resembled its present.
Perhaps few but the most far-sighted of Russians predicted what the ailing empire would endure in the years to come—the disaster of the Great War, and the waves of Revolution and Civil War. Certainly, whoever painted these images foresaw no such catastrophic upheaval.
Although purporting to show us a view of Moscow in the 23rd century, they show the city very happily “still under monarchical rule,” writes A Journey Through Russian Culture, going about its daily life just as it did over three hundred years earlier, “with the addition of everything from subways to airborne public transportation, things probably seen as standard methods of transport for the future.”
Of course, there would be hot-rodded sleds on St. Petersburg Highway with headlights, fancy windshields, and what look like Christmas elves perched in them. Lubyanska Square, further up, would still host military parades of men on horseback, as children whizzed by on motorbikes and subway trains rumbled underneath. The Central Railway Station, above, might seem entirely unchanged, until one looks up, and sees elevated trams streaming out of the terminal like spider’s silk. Red Square, however, just below, would apparently host drag races, while people in trams and giant dirigibles looked on from above.
The images have a children’s book quality about them and the festive air of holiday cards. (If you read Russian, you can learn more about them here and here.) They were apparently rediscovered only recently when a chocolate company called Eyinem reprinted them on their packaging. Like so much retrofuturism, these seem—in their bustling, yet safe, cheerful orderliness—tailor-made for nostalgic trips through Petrovsky Park, rather than imaginative leaps into the great unknown. For that, we must turn to Russian Futurism, which, both before and after World War and the Revolution, imagined, helped bring about, but didn’t quite survive the massive technological and political disruption of the next two decades.
See more of these Tsarist-futurist postcards at the site Meet the Slavs.
Back in 2014, we told you about how The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI) launched IAI Academy — an online educational platform that features free courses from world-leading scholars “on the ideas that matter.” They have since put online a number of philosophy courses, many striving to address questions that affect our lives today. We’ve listed a number of them below, and added them to our list of 150+ Free Online Philosophy courses. For a complete list of IAI Academy courses, visit this page.
Heidegger Meets Van Gogh: Art, Freedom and Technology — Web video — Simon Glendinning, London School of Economics
Dark Matter of the Mind — Web video — Daniel Everett, Bentley University
Fear and Trembling in the 21st Century — Web video — Clare Carlisle, King’s College London
Knowledge and Rationality — Web Video — Corine Besson, University of Sussex
Life, Meaning and Morality — Web video — Christopher Hamilton, King’s College, London
Minds, Morality and Agency — Web video — Mark Rowlands, University of Miami
On Romantic Love — Web video — Berit Brogaard, University of Miami
The Meaning of Life — Web video — Steve Fuller, University of Warwick
The Universe As We Find It — Web video — John Heil, Washington University in St Louis
Unveiling Reality — Web video — Bryan Roberts, London School of Economics
Why the World Does Not Exist — Web video — Markus Gabriel, Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study.
Note: The courses are all free. However, to take a course you will need to create a user account.
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Mr. Watson, come here! I want you to tell me why I keep showing up in television commercials. Is it because they think I invented the television?
Not at all, my dear Mr. Bell. A second’s worth of research reveals that a 21-year-old upstart named Philo Taylor Farnsworth invented television. By 1927, when he unveiled it to the public, you’d already been dead for five years.
You invented the telephone, a fact of which we’re all very aware.
Though you might want to look into intellectual property law.… Historic figures make popular pitchmen, especially if — like Lincoln, Copernicus, and a red hot Alexander Hamilton, they’ve been in the grave for over 100 years. (Hint — you’ve got five years to go.)
Or you could take it as a compliment! You’ve made an impression so lasting, the briefest of establishing shots is all we television audiences need to understand the advertiser’s premise.
Thusly can you be co-opted into selling the American public on the apparently revolutionary concept of chicken for breakfast, above.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
Mr. Watson gets a cameo in your 1975 ad for Carefree Gum. You definitely come off the better of the two.
You’re an obvious choice for a recent AT&T spot tracing a line from your revelatory moment to 20-something hipsters wielding smartphones and sparklers on a Brooklyn rooftop. Their devices aren’t the only thing connecting you. It’s also the beards…
Apologies for the beardlessness of this 10 year old, low-budget spot for Able Computing in Papua New Guinea. Possibly the costumer thought Einstein invented the phone? Or maybe the creative director was counting on the local viewing audience not to sweat the small stuff. Your invention matters more than your facial hair.
Lego took a cue from the 80s Muppet Babies craze by sending you back to childhood. They also saddled you and your mom with American accents, a regrettably common practice. I bet you would’ve liked Legos, though. They’re like blocks.
As for this one, your guess is as good as mine.
Readers, please share your favorite ads featuring historic figures in the comments below.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, an indictment of the Trump administration that adapts and mangles Goethe’s Faust (Parts 1 and 2) and the Gospels in the King James translation, as well as bits of Yeats, Shakespeare, Christmas carols, Stephen Foster, John Donne, Heiner Müller, Julia Ward Howe, and Abel Meeropol. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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