Watch Queen’s Dragtastic “I Want to Break Free” Video: It Was More Than America & MTV Could Handle (1984)

in Music | November 29th, 2018

I remem­ber the ear­ly part of 1984 when Queen’s “Radio Gaga,” their sin­gle from The Works album with a video that mixed in clips from Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, was played near­ly every hour on MTV. Or it least it seemed that way. And then in April, the band released their fol­low-up sin­gle, “I Want to Break Free,” seen above. This is when things got weird for Queen state­side and where truth starts to split from rumor.

In the fine tra­di­tion of British pan­tomime and Mon­ty Python, the band appear in drag, with Mer­cury in a black leather skirt vac­u­um­ing the floor of a typ­i­cal Eng­lish liv­ing room, Bri­an May in curlers and night­dress; John Dea­con as a more con­ser­v­a­tive grand­moth­er; and Roger Tay­lor as a school­girl. British view­ers would have got the joke–the style and dress and set­ting was a direct par­o­dy of pop­u­lar work­ing class soap opera Coro­na­tion Street, and its first shot of chim­neys and row hous­es was a fur­ther give­away.

“We had done some real­ly seri­ous, epic videos in the past, and we just thought we’d have some fun,” said Roger Tay­lor. “We want­ed peo­ple to know that we did­n’t take our­selves too seri­ous­ly, that we could still laugh at our­selves. I think we proved that.”

But some Amer­i­cans appar­ent­ly did take it seri­ous­ly and believed the video to be pro­mot­ing cross-dress­ing. (There’s no men­tion whether they thought the mid­dle sec­tion, fea­tur­ing mem­bers of the Roy­al Bal­let and a par­o­dy of Nijinsky’s After­noon of a Faun, pro­mot­ed bal­let, leo­tards, or Claude Debussy).

Now most accounts from here on out say that MTV banned the video, despite the song being in the charts for eight weeks. It failed to be the block­buster hit like “Radio Gaga,” for sure, and Queen nev­er again real­ly had a foothold on Amer­i­can pop cul­ture until Live Aid, and even then their appear­ance meant more to the Brits than the Yanks. Queen went from a clas­sic rock act to some­thing the British got and the Amer­i­cans didn’t.

Bri­an May agreed that the video was a turn­ing point when he sat for a Ter­ry Gross inter­view in 2010:

I remem­ber doing a pro­mo tour for this song that we did, which was called “I Want to Break Free.” Now we made a video for that, which was a pas­tiche of an Eng­lish soap called “Coro­na­tion Street,” and we dressed up as the char­ac­ters in that soap, and they were female char­ac­ters. So we’re dress­ing up as girls — as women and we had a fan­tas­tic laugh doing it. It was hilar­i­ous to do it. And all around the world peo­ple laughed and they got the joke and they sort of under­stood it.

I remem­ber being on the pro­mo tour in the Mid­west of Amer­i­ca and peo­ple’s faces turn­ing ashen and they would say, no, we can’t play this. We can’t pos­si­bly play this. You know, it looks homo­sex­u­al. And I went, so? But it was a huge deal. And I know that it real­ly dam­aged our sort of whole rela­tion­ship with cer­tain­ly radio in this coun­try and prob­a­bly the pub­lic as well…

But it was very dif­fi­cult for us to sort of get back. And there’s a whole kind of gap in Queen his­to­ry if you view it from Amer­i­ca. And Fred­die was very aware of that. And we nev­er real­ly came back and toured the way we should’ve done. You know, every place else in the world, we played foot­ball sta­di­ums. But it nev­er hap­pened in the States. And Fred­die, when I played him this thing, said — (laugh­ter) well, he said, you know, it might do for us what noth­ing else would do, and he was dead right.

You know, it’s amaz­ing that even the fact that Fred­die died did­n’t make that much of a dif­fer­ence. But the fact that Wayne’s World put it in their film did make a dif­fer­ence. And I sup­pose the quote that I’m steer­ing clear of is that Fred­die, at one point, said to me, you know, I sup­pose I’ll have to [exple­tive] die before we ever get big in Amer­i­ca again.

While that is true, I’m not too sure about this “banned video” busi­ness. I saw this video a lot on MTV. I remem­ber both my par­ents laugh­ing at the video because it remind­ed them of the Pythons. And apart from a line repeat­ed over and over on the Inter­net and in some very recent Queen biogra­phies, it’s hard to find con­tem­po­rary proof that this ban hap­pened and when.

Being banned has often been great pub­lic­i­ty and often ginned up con­tro­ver­sy. But if you want to see a def­i­nite­ly banned Queen video, check out “Body Lan­guage,” from their 1982 album Hot Space. Filled with sweaty body parts, plen­ty of leather, and set in some sort of uni­sex bath­house, this indeed was banned by MTV. Believe me, I would have remem­bered see­ing this at the time if they hadn’t.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”: Take a Deep Dive Into the Icon­ic Song with Queen’s 2002 Mini Doc­u­men­tary

The Joy of Expe­ri­enc­ing Queen’s Bohemi­an Rhap­sody for the Very First Time: Watch Three Reac­tion Videos

Hear How Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” Would Sound If Sung by John­ny Cash, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Frank Sina­tra & 38 Oth­er Artists

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.

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How David Lynch Manipulates You: A Close Reading of Mulholland Drive

in Film | November 29th, 2018

David Lynch mess­es with your mind. You’ve prob­a­bly heard vari­a­tions on that obser­va­tion before, as like­ly to come from peo­ple who love Lynch’s films as from those who can’t stand them. Unlike most “nor­mal” film­mak­ers, who tell sto­ries com­fort­ably ensconced in the real­i­ty that the tra­di­tion of cin­e­ma has built, Lynch has always told his sto­ries in a cin­e­mat­ic real­i­ty of his own, built out of the exist­ing ele­ments of cin­e­ma but bolt­ed togeth­er by him in sur­pris­ing and often unset­tling ways. Hence his name’s long-ago con­ver­sion into an adjec­tive: David Lynch movies are Lynchi­an, and it falls to we who watch them to deal with the psy­cho­log­i­cal effects — fright­en­ing, thrilling, com­plete­ly dis­ori­ent­ing, or some com­bi­na­tion of those and more — that Lynchi­an­ness stirs with­in us.

In the video essay “Mul­hol­land Dri­ve: How Lynch Manip­u­lates You,” Evan Puschak, bet­ter known at the Nerd­writer, breaks down Lynch’s process of mind-mess­ing, at least as it works in one par­tic­u­lar scene of one of his best-known and most acclaimed films, Mul­hol­land Dri­ve. Lynch, Puschak explains, “uses expec­ta­tion as a tool. He wields expec­ta­tion — the expec­ta­tion that comes from what we know about film, about its his­to­ry, the his­to­ry of sto­ries, and from our human­i­ty — with the same nuance and pow­er as some­one else might use light to cre­ate a vari­ety of moods in a space.”

Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, which seems to begin as the sto­ry of a would-be blonde ingenue arriv­ing in Hol­ly­wood with dreams of mak­ing it big, gets fur­ther and fur­ther off kil­ter as it goes, lever­ag­ing the osten­si­ble stiff­ness and even corni­ness it dares to present at the begin­ning to deliv­er a much dark­er and more com­plex cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence in the end. “All through­out the film, from the over­dubbed dia­logue on down, David Lynch has made us privy to the veneer of things,” says Puschak. “It’s all curi­ous­ly two-dimen­sion­al, and that puts us on our guard, since sur­faces are what we get. Lynch encour­ages us to exam­ine those sur­faces, always remain­ing detached enough for a dis­in­ter­est­ed, crit­i­cal view of what we’re see­ing.”

But “as with every­thing that Lynch does, this two-dimen­sion­al­i­ty, this flat­ness, is also a decep­tion. While we think we’re on our guard, supe­ri­or to the cloy­ing emo­tions of Hol­ly­wood wish-ful­fill­ment, Lynch rel­ish­es drop­ping the bot­tom out, show­ing us just how unpre­pared for and sus­cep­ti­ble we are to emo­tions that our soci­ety trea­sures or deeply fears.” In Mul­hol­land Dri­ve he accom­plish­es this over and over again by using ancient Hol­ly­wood stereo­types, film noir tropes, a night­club singer lip-sync­ing to a Roy Orbi­son song in Span­ish, a cave­man liv­ing behind a Sun­set Strip din­er, Ange­lo Badala­men­ti spit­ting out an espres­so, Bil­ly Ray Cyrus, and much more besides. And as both Lynch’s fans and detrac­tors must sus­pect, he no doubt has a few more ways to drop the bot­toms out from under his audi­ences in his tool­box yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sur­re­al Film­mak­ing of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Mus­es About the Mag­ic of Cin­e­ma & Med­i­ta­tion in a New Abstract Short Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Peter Jackson Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

in Education, Film, History, K-12 | November 29th, 2018

There are very few work­ing direc­tors today who can do what Peter Jack­son does so well—create extra­or­di­nary spec­ta­cles on the grand­est of scales while also stay­ing tight­ly focused on char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and emo­tion­al depth. He’s made mis­steps. His Hob­bit tril­o­gy felt bloat­ed, busy and unnec­es­sary, but one rea­son it so dis­ap­point­ed was because he’d already shown him­self a mas­ter of fan­ta­sy film­mak­ing with what many con­sid­ered the unfilm­ma­ble Lord of the Rings.

Of course non-Tolkien-relat­ed Jack­son films like Heav­en­ly Crea­tures also show­case these strengths, on a small­er scale: the abil­i­ty to retain the human dimen­sion amidst cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cles and inhu­man dark­ness (a qual­i­ty he mined explic­it­ly in his years as a hor­ror direc­tor). All of these sen­si­bil­i­ties, includ­ing a pro­nounced streak of dark humor and tal­ent for manip­u­lat­ing his audi­ences, make him the ide­al direc­tor for a doc­u­men­tary on World War I.

It’s a con­flict that makes lit­tle his­tor­i­cal sense to most of us, that unfold­ed on a scale few of us can imag­ine, with few iden­ti­fi­able heroes and vil­lains and a com­pli­cat­ed geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion that can feel out of our grasp.

Many doc­u­men­taries on the war are infor­ma­tive but, frankly, quite dull. In striv­ing for objec­tiv­i­ty, they lose sight of human­i­ty. Rather than adopt the voice of god and news­reel look that char­ac­ter­izes the usu­al fare, Jack­son has tak­en an active role in shap­ing the nar­ra­tive for us with cut­ting-edge block­buster cin­e­mat­ic tech­niques. He gives us char­ac­ters to care about in show­ing the hor­ror of trench war­fare, the con­fu­sion and cama­raderie of war. Though he uses orig­i­nal footage, it is dig­i­tal­ly enhanced and col­orized, screened in 3D, with record­ings of remem­brances from the sol­diers them­selves dra­mat­i­cal­ly over­laid to cre­ate the sense that the fig­ures we see onscreen are speak­ing to us.

The result, as Guy Lodge writes at Vari­ety, “is a tech­ni­cal daz­zler with a sur­pris­ing­ly humane streak…. So daz­zling­ly trans­for­ma­tive is the restora­tion of this footage that it may as well be the prod­uct of a movie shoot.” Indeed, once the cred­its roll, view­ers see the same “ver­i­ta­ble army of mag­ic-work­ing tech­ni­cians’ names” as they would on any big-bud­get action movie. Jack­son has, in effect, pro­duced “the world’s most state-of-the-art edu­ca­tion­al film,” apply­ing all the emo­tion­al levers and pul­leys of fea­ture film­mak­ing to a his­tor­i­cal archive.

Like most of us, stu­dents have trou­ble under­stand­ing the scale of the war and con­nect­ing with the lives of peo­ple so indis­tinct­ly pho­tographed and far away in time. Jack­son makes sure that they can do both, and his film will be sent to every high school in the U.K. Those schools will not, of course, be able to repro­duce the 3D effects. Yet even these, though they sound “gim­micky on the face of it,” writes Lodge, prove “to have an expe­ri­en­tial pur­pose, con­vey­ing the jud­der­ing move­ment and chaos of a con­flict many of us have large­ly viewed through cal­ci­fied still images.”

In the inter­views and behind the scenes videos here, we learn how Jack­son and his team solved the film speed prob­lem to make the old reels look nat­ur­al, how they cre­at­ed a col­or palette and removed blur­ri­ness and blem­ish­es. Jack­son also talks about his own per­son­al stake in the project, imag­in­ing what his grand­fa­ther endured in the Great War. This con­nec­tion seems to have spurred him all the more in the effort.

“To memo­ri­al­ize these sol­diers a hun­dred years lat­er,” he says, “is to try to bring some of their human­i­ty back into the world again, to stop them being a black and white cliché.” In cre­at­ing this mov­ing memo­r­i­al, Jack­son goes far beyond the man­date of an edu­ca­tion­al film. He has used all the tech­niques at his dis­pos­al to make good on the promise in Robert Lau­rence Binyon’s 1914 poem “For the Fall­en,” from which the doc­u­men­tary takes its title:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years con­demn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morn­ing
We will remem­ber them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Fea­tures Incred­i­ble Dig­i­tal­ly-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

The Great War: Video Series Will Doc­u­ment How WWI Unfold­ed, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch 99 Movies Free Online Courtesy of YouTube & MGM: Rocky, The Terminator, Four Weddings and a Funeral & More

in Film | November 28th, 2018

We all have those major motion pic­tures we’re sure we’ll see one day, but some­how haven’t seen yet. Usu­al­ly they’ve had such a huge influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture, inspir­ing decades of ref­er­ences, homages, and jokes, that we feel like we’ve seen them any­way. Back in the days of yore when tele­vi­sion reigned supreme, we might occa­sion­al­ly catch one of them (or most of one of them) while flip­ping chan­nels at night, albeit in a form re-edit­ed to remove sen­si­tive con­tent and fit the image onto a square screen. Giv­en how dra­mat­i­cal­ly those view­ing prac­tices have migrat­ed to the inter­net in the 21st cen­tu­ry, it only makes good sense that Youtube — that vast tem­ple of mod­ern-day chan­nel-flip­ping — would strike a deal with a Hol­ly­wood stu­dio to make more than a few of these movies avail­able, free to view.

Just this month, MGM put near­ly 100 of its films up on Youtube, some of the best known of which include The Ter­mi­na­tor, the Rocky and Pink Pan­ther movies, Legal­ly Blonde, Dirty Rot­ten Scoundrels, and Four Wed­dings and a Funer­al. Some of them you’ve almost cer­tain­ly seen (and quite pos­si­bly want to see again), and oth­ers you’ve been mean­ing to see for ten, twen­ty, thir­ty, maybe even forty years.

Just like on tele­vi­sion, the fact that you can watch them for free means that they come with ads, albeit ads less intru­sive than tra­di­tion­al com­mer­cial breaks — unless you pay the month­ly $9.99 USD for Youtube Pre­mi­um, in which case they’ll play ad-free. (And in any case, they’re avail­able at the moment only to view­ers in the Unit­ed States.) And also, as in the days of wee-hours chan­nel-surf­ing, you’ll find the acclaimed clas­sics mixed in with less­er-known pic­tures, even odd­i­ties, that may hold even more cin­e­mat­ic fas­ci­na­tion.

Some of the unex­pect­ed titles among MGM’s free movies on Youtube include doc­u­men­taries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi — the one about the most stern­ly and obses­sive­ly ded­i­cat­ed sushi chef in Tokyo, and prob­a­bly the world, you may remem­ber every­one talk­ing about a few years ago — and With Great Pow­er: The Stan Lee Sto­ry, post­ed no doubt in trib­ute to the recent­ly deceased com­ic book-indus­try leg­end. Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly-inclined read­ers who remem­ber with amuse­ment the inter­net and our per­cep­tions of the inter­net back in the cable-TV days should take note that the free MGM col­lec­tion on Youtube Movies also includes Hack­ers, Hol­ly­wood’s most vivid depic­tion of the fear and opti­mism that swirled around com­put­ers and their con­nect­ed­ness in the mid-1990s. We had a fair few unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions of the inter­net back then, which that movie and movies like it now reveal, but how many of us dared imag­ine that it would take over the role of the tele­vi­sion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

60 Free Film Noir Movies

New York­ers Can Now Stream 30,000 Free Movies, Includ­ing the Entire Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, with Their Library Cards

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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“More Barn!” The Story of How Neil Young First Played Harvest for Graham Nash (1972)

in Music | November 28th, 2018

Image by Dar­ren Swim, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Every­one knows the punch­line “more cow­bell” from SNL’s affec­tion­ate jab at the Blue Öys­ter Cult’s enthu­si­asm. But how many peo­ple know the true sto­ry of “more barn”?

Too pre­cious few, I’d say.

It’s a clas­sic from that icon of clas­sic rock, Neil Young, a yarn—as told by Gra­ham Nash—that defies par­o­dy, and beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trates the absur­di­ty of Neil Young’s com­mit­ment to raw, rus­tic authen­tic­i­ty. For his ded­i­cat­ed fans, Neil’s ram­shackle meth­ods always yield wor­thy results. Even when he’s off, he’s so damned into it, it’s hard to ever fault him.

And when he’s on—in mas­ter­pieces like 1972’s Har­vest—Neil does no wrong. His tal­ents stretch beyond intense­ly impas­sioned songcraft and deliv­ery to a holis­tic appre­ci­a­tion of sound in all its forms (and a loathing for tech­nol­o­gy that does sound an injus­tice).

In the inter­view above with NPR’s Ter­ry Gross after the pub­li­ca­tion of his book Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, Young’s erst­while CSNY band­mate Nash recounts the day Young first played him Har­vest:

The man is total­ly com­mit­ted to the muse of music. And he’ll do any­thing for good music. And some­times it’s very strange. I was at Neil’s ranch one day just south of San Fran­cis­co, and he has a beau­ti­ful lake with red-wing black­birds. And he asked me if I want­ed to hear his new album, “Har­vest.” And I said sure, let’s go into the stu­dio and lis­ten.

Oh, no. That’s not what Neil had in mind. He said get into the row­boat.

I said get into the row­boat? He said, yeah, we’re going to go out into the mid­dle of the lake. Now, I think he’s got a lit­tle cas­sette play­er with him or a lit­tle, you know, ear­ly dig­i­tal for­mat play­er. So I’m think­ing I’m going to wear head­phones and lis­ten in the rel­a­tive peace in the mid­dle of Neil’s lake.

Oh, no. He has his entire house as the left speak­er and his entire barn as the right speak­er. And I heard “Har­vest” com­ing out of these two incred­i­bly large loud speak­ers loud­er than hell. It was unbe­liev­able. Elliot Maz­er, who pro­duced Neil, pro­duced “Har­vest,” came down to the shore of the lake and he shout­ed out to Neil: How was that, Neil?

And I swear to god, Neil Young shout­ed back: More barn!

Now, whether or not that last bit is a Nash inven­tion, it must for­ev­er remain the punch­line of the sto­ry, which must always be referred to as “more barn.” But there’s no rea­son to think it didn’t hap­pen just the way Nash tells it.

In the film at the top, Young lis­tens to play­back of Har­vest through the barn, com­ments on the “nat­ur­al echo” of its rever­ber­a­tions from yon­der hill­side, drinks a Coors, and lounges in the straw. (He also talks in earnest depth about the eth­i­cal and per­son­al chal­lenges of being a “rich hip­pie.”)

I’ve heard this album count­less times through head­phones and stereo, sur­round, and car speak­ers, but until I can yell out “more barn!” I’m con­vinced I have not tru­ly heard it at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Per­forms Clas­sic Songs in 1971 Con­cert: “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold” & More

Neil Young Busk­ing in Glas­gow, 1976: The Sto­ry Behind the Footage

When Neil Young & Rick James Cre­at­ed the 60’s Motown Band, The Mynah Birds

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the Inca Used Intricately-Knotted Cords, Called Khipu, to Write Their Histories, Send Messages & Keep Records

in Harvard, History | November 28th, 2018

Those of us who learned to write in a (most­ly) pho­net­ic lan­guage learned to take it for grant­ed that writ­ing should cor­re­spond (rough­ly) to sound. Then we learned of the pic­tographs, ideo­graphs, and logograms of the Chi­nese alpha­bet, or of Ancient Egypt­ian or Mayan, or of oth­er non-phone­mic orthogra­phies, and we were forced to revise ear­li­er assump­tions. Those who pur­sue the study of sym­bol­ic sys­tems even fur­ther will even­tu­al­ly come to meet khipu, the Incan sys­tem of record-keep­ing that uses intri­cate­ly knot­ted rope.

Khipu, long thought an aba­cus-like means of book­keep­ing, has recent­ly been acknowl­edged as much more than that, coun­ter­ing a schol­ar­ly view Daniel Cossins sum­ma­rizes at New Sci­en­tist as the belief that the Incas, despite their tech­no­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal “sophis­ti­ca­tion… nev­er learned to write.” This Euro­pean logo­cen­trism (in the Der­ridean sense), per­sist­ed for cen­turies despite some evi­dence to the con­trary four hun­dred years ago.

For exam­ple, the poet Gar­cila­so de la Vega, son of an Incan princess and Span­ish con­quis­ta­dor, wrote in 1609 that the Incas “record­ed on knots every­thing that could be count­ed, even men­tion­ing bat­tles and fights, all the embassies that had come to vis­it the Inca, and all the speech­es and argu­ments they had uttered.” There may be some hyper­bole here. In any case, the point “was moot,” notes Cossins, “because no one could read any of them.”

Like most­ly illit­er­ate cul­tures in the West and East that relied on scribes for record-keep­ing, Incan civ­i­liza­tion relied on khipumayuq, “or the keep­ers of the khi­pus, a spe­cial­ly trained caste who could tie and read the cords.” As explor­er Ale­jan­dro Chu and Patri­cia Lan­da, Con­ser­va­tor of the Inc­ahuasi Arche­o­log­i­cal Project, explain in the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic video at the top, these spe­cial­ists died, or were killed off, before they could pass their knowl­edge to the next gen­er­a­tions.

But the lin­guis­tic code, it seems, may have been cracked—by an under­grad­u­ate fresh­man eco­nom­ics major at Har­vard named Man­ny Medra­no. As Atlas Obscu­ra report­ed last year, Medra­no, work­ing under his pro­fes­sor of Pre-Columbian stud­ies, Gary Urton, spent his spring break match­ing a set of six khipu against a colo­nial-era Span­ish cen­sus doc­u­ment. He was able to con­firm what schol­ars had long assumed, that khipu kept track of cen­sus and oth­er admin­is­tra­tive data.

More­over, though, Medra­no “noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to cor­re­spond to the social sta­tus of the 132 peo­ple record­ed in the cen­sus doc­u­ment. The col­ors of the strings also appeared to be relat­ed to the people’s first names.” (Now a senior, Medrano’s find­ings have been pub­lished in the jour­nal Eth­no­his­to­ry; he is first author on the paper, “indi­cat­ing that he con­tributed the bulk of the research”).

This research shows how khipu can tell sto­ries as well as record data sets. Medra­no built upon decades of work done by Urton and oth­er schol­ars, which Cossins sum­ma­rizes in more detail. Oth­er ethno­g­ra­phers like St. Andrews’ Sabine Hyland have had sim­i­lar epipha­nies. Hyland chanced upon a woman in Lima who point­ed her to khi­pus in the vil­lage of San Juan de Col­la­ta. The vil­lagers “believe them to be nar­ra­tive epis­tles,” writes Cossins, “cre­at­ed by local chiefs dur­ing a rebel­lion against the Span­ish in the late 18th cen­tu­ry.”

After care­ful analy­sis, Hyland found that the khi­pus’ pen­dant cords “came in 95 dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of colour, fibre type and direc­tion of ply. That is with­in the range of sym­bols typ­i­cal­ly found in syl­lab­ic writ­ing sys­tems.” She has since hypoth­e­sized that khipu “con­tain a com­bi­na­tion of pho­net­ic sym­bols and ideo­graph­ic ones, where a sym­bol rep­re­sents a whole word.”

Hyland grants it’s pos­si­ble that lat­er khi­pus made after con­tact with the Span­ish may have absorbed an alpha­bet from Span­ish writ­ing. Nev­er­the­less, these find­ings should make us won­der what oth­er arti­facts from around the world pre­serve a lan­guage West­ern schol­ars have nev­er learned how to read.

Attempts to deci­pher khi­pus use all sorts of com­par­a­tive meth­ods, from com­par­ing them with each oth­er to com­par­ing them with con­tem­po­rary Span­ish doc­u­ments. But one inno­v­a­tive method at MIT began by com­par­ing Incan khipu with stu­dent attempts to cre­ate their own rope lan­guage, in a 2007 course led by the “Khipu Research Group,” a col­lec­tion of schol­ars, includ­ing Urton, from arche­ol­o­gy, elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, and com­put­er sci­ence.

“To gain insight into this ques­tion” of how the code might work, the syl­labus notes, “this class will explore how you would record lan­guage with knots in rope.” Maybe you’d rather skip the guess­work and learn how to make a khipu the way the Inca may have done? If so, see the series of six videos above by Har­vard Ph.D. stu­dent in arche­ol­o­gy, Jon Clin­daniel. And to learn as much about khipu as you might ever hope to know, check out the Khipu Data­base Project at Har­vard, whose goal is to col­lect “all known infor­ma­tion about khipu into one cen­tral­ized repos­i­to­ry.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Machu Pic­chu, One of the New 7 Won­ders of the World

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Trigonom­e­try Dis­cov­ered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Baby­lon­ian Tablet

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Alan Watts Dispenses Wit & Wisdom on the Meaning of Life in Three Animated Videos

in Animation, Philosophy, Religion | November 27th, 2018

Since his death in 1973, the pop­u­lar British philoso­pher, writer, speak­er, and one­time-Epis­co­pal-priest-turned-stu­dent-of-Zen-and-wild­ly-eclec­tic-coun­ter­cul­tur­al-spir­i­tu­al-thinker Alan Watts has become a cot­tage indus­try of sorts. And if you were unfa­mil­iar with his work, you might think—given this descrip­tion and the men­tion of the word “industry”—that Watts found­ed some sort of self-help sem­i­nar series, the kind in which peo­ple make a con­sid­er­able invest­ment of time and mon­ey.

In a sense, he did: the Alan Watts Orga­ni­za­tion (pre­vi­ous­ly known as the Alan Watts Elec­tron­ic Uni­ver­si­ty, the Alan Watts Cen­ter, or the Alan Watts Project) main­tains Watts’ pro­lif­ic audio and video archives. Found­ed in the last year of his life by Watts and his son Mark, the Orga­ni­za­tion charges for access to most of his work. The col­lec­tions are pricey. Albums of talks on such sub­jects as Bud­dhism and Com­par­a­tive Phi­los­o­phy and Reli­gion are exten­sive, but come at a cost.

Though the orga­ni­za­tion offers free con­tent, you could find your­self spend­ing sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars to hear the col­lect­ed Watts lec­tures. It’s mon­ey the Mark Watts sug­gests cov­ers the “sub­stan­tial under­tak­ing” of dig­i­tiz­ing hun­dreds of hours of record­ings on lac­quered disks and mag­net­ic reels. These are noble and nec­es­sary efforts, but fans of Watts will know that hun­dreds of selec­tions from his deeply engag­ing talks are also freely avail­able on YouTube, many of them with nifty ani­ma­tions and musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, like the videos here from After Skool.

Watts would like­ly have been pleased with this situation—he loved to give out wis­dom wide­ly and kept no eso­teric trade secrets. But he was also, by his own admis­sion, “a spiritual/philosophical enter­tain­er,” who made a liv­ing telling peo­ple some of the most unset­tling, coun­ter­in­tu­itive meta­phys­i­cal truths there are. He did it with humor, eru­di­tion and com­pas­sion, with intel­lec­tu­al clar­i­ty and rhetor­i­cal aplomb.

So what did he have to tell us? That we should join the church of Alan Watts? Attend his next lec­ture and buy his book? Shape our lives into an emu­la­tion of Alan Watts? Though he wore the trap­pings of a West­ern expos­i­tor of East­ern thought, and embraced all kinds of non-tra­di­tion­al beliefs and prac­tices, Watts was too iron­i­cal and detached to be a guru. He couldn’t take him­self seri­ous­ly enough for that.

If there’s any one thread that runs through the incred­i­bly broad range of sub­jects he cov­ered, it’s that we should nev­er take our­selves too seri­ous­ly either. We buy into sto­ries and ideas and think of them as con­crete enti­ties that form the bound­aries of iden­ti­ty and exis­tence: sto­ries like think­ing of life as a “jour­ney” on the way to some spe­cif­ic denoue­ment. Not so, as Watts says in the ani­mat­ed video at the top. Life is an art, a form of play: “the whole point of the danc­ing is the dance.”

But what about the mean­ing of life? Is Alan Watts going to reveal it in the last course of his ten-week ses­sion (payable in install­ments)? Will we dis­cov­er it in a series of self-improve­ment pack­ages? No. The mean­ing of life he says, is life. “The sit­u­a­tion of life is opti­mal.” But how is any­one sup­posed to judge what’s good with­out unchang­ing exter­nal stan­dards? A clas­sic Zen sto­ry about a Chi­nese farmer offers a con­cise illus­tra­tion of why we may have no need—and no real ability—to make any judg­ments at all.

You’ll find many more free excerpts of Watts’ lectures—of vary­ing lengths and with or with­out ani­ma­tions, on YouTube. To get a fur­ther taste of his spir­i­tu­al and philo­soph­i­cal dis­til­la­tions, see the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Take a Break from Your Fran­tic Day & Let Alan Watts Intro­duce You to the Calm­ing Ways of Zen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Jeff Beck Smash His Guitar While Jimmy Page & the Yardbirds Jam By His Side: A Classic Scene from Antonioni’s Blowup (1966)

in Film, Music | November 27th, 2018

Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soul­mates of a kind, with many an acclaimed direc­tor turn­ing to musi­cians as actors, com­mis­sion­ing rock stars as sound­track artists, and film­ing scenes with bands. Before Nico­las Roeg, Jim Jar­musch, David Lynch, Mar­tin Scors­ese and oth­er rock-lov­ing auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, who bar­reled into the Eng­lish-lan­guage mar­ket, under con­tract with Metro-Gold­wyn-May­er, with a tril­o­gy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of six­ties coun­ter­cul­ture.

Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Her­bie Han­cock, promi­nent­ly fea­tured the Yardbirds—with both Jim­my Page and Jeff Beck. In the mem­o­rable scene above, Beck smash­es his gui­tar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Ital­ian direc­tor “envi­sioned a scene sim­i­lar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous rit­u­al of smash­ing his gui­tar on stage,” notes Gui­tar­world’s Jonathan Gra­ham. “Anto­nioni had even asked The Who to appear in the film,” but they refused.

In stepped the Yard­birds, dur­ing a piv­otal moment in their career. The year before, they released mega-hit “For Your Love,” and said good­bye to lead gui­tarist Eric Clap­ton. Beck, his replace­ment, her­ald­ed a much wilder, more exper­i­men­tal phase for the band. Jeff Beck, it seemed, could play any­thing, but what he didn’t do much of onstage is emote. Next to the gui­tar-smash­ing Town­shend or the fire-set­ting Hen­drix (see both below), he was a pret­ty reserved per­former, though no less thrilling to watch for his vir­tu­os­i­ty and style.

But as he tells it, Anto­nioni wouldn’t let the band do their “most excit­ing thing,” a cov­er of “Smoke­stack Light­ning” that “had this incred­i­ble buildup in the mid­dle which was just pow!” That moment would have been the nat­ur­al pre­text for a good gui­tar smash­ing.

Instead, the set piece with the bro­ken amp gives the intro­vert­ed Beck a rea­son to get agi­tat­ed. As Gra­ham describes it, he also played a gui­tar spe­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed as a prop:

Due to issues over pub­lish­ing, the Yard­birds clas­sic “Train Kept A‑Rollin’,” was reworked as “Stroll On” for the per­for­mance, and as the scene involved the destruc­tion of an instru­ment, Beck’s usu­al choice of his icon­ic Esquire or Les Paul was swapped for a cheap, hol­low-body stand-in that he was direct­ed to smash at the song’s con­clu­sion.

The scene is more a tantrum than the orgias­tic onstage freak-out Town­shend would prob­a­bly have deliv­ered. Its chief virtue for Yard­bird’s fans lies not in the fun­ny, out-of-char­ac­ter moment (which SF Gate film crit­ic Mick LaSalle calls “one of the weird­est scenes in the movie”). Rather, it was “the chance,” as one fan tells LaSalle, “in the days before MTV and YouTube, to see the Yard­birds, with Jeff Beck and Jim­my Page.” Anto­nioni had seized the moment. In addi­tion to fir­ing “the open­ing sal­vo of the emerg­ing ‘film gen­er­a­tion,’” as Roger Ebert wrote, he gave con­tem­po­rary fans a rea­son (in addi­tion to explic­it sex and nudi­ty), to go see Blowup again and again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Lost” Pink Floyd Sound­track for Michelan­ge­lo Antonioni’s Only Amer­i­can Film, Zabriskie Point (1970)

13-Year-Old Jim­my Page Plays Gui­tar on TV in 1957, an Ear­ly Moment in His Spec­tac­u­lar Career

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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