We all reach an age when the music of our youth becomes “the oldies.” When it comes to music as dynamic, innovative, and far-reaching as hip-hop, that age can feel surprisingly young. Or so it seemed to me, a child of the 90s, when the 21st century dawned. Now, separated from the artists I grew up listening to by a gulf of almost thirty years, I can say they are all certifiably old school, which I suppose makes me certifiably old.
But consider this—in 1993, a year I once considered something of a golden age of hip-hop—the music had already traveled twenty years and thousands of miles from its Bronx origins to become a worldwide phenomenon. Its greatest innovators, the men and women who invented the sound, were by then very much old school.
In fact, everyone who wasn’t getting down to the sound system of DJ Kool Herc in the New York of the early seventies is a latecomer to the scene, including punks like Blondie who immediately seized on its revolutionary potential.
“In 1973,” Henry Louis Gates informs us in the video at the top from the Black History in Two Minutes series, the Jamaican-born Herc “set up his turntables and introduced a technique at a South Bronx house party that would change music as many people knew it. His ability to switch from record to record—as well as isolate and repeat music breaks—led to the discovery of the hip hop genre.”
It was the sound of a thousand radios playing, all over the city, with the noise filtered out, beats made from the breaks, and the chaos cut into pieces and stitched together into music again; the sound of turntablism, a series of techniques, from Herc’s break-beats to the “Transformer scratch” to juggling beats: switching between “two identical records at lightning fast speed,” as a PBS guide explains, “looping or re-combining individual sounds to produce an entirely new beat.”
These new means of using playback devices as instruments led “from reworking existing tracks to composing music” from the components, a mad scientist approach that preceded the age of the MC, whose primary purpose was to hype the crowd in the music’s early days, instead of delivering the news of the streets in ever more-complex rhyme schemes. In the short videos above, you can learn more about Herc’s revolution. Just above, hear from the man himself and his former neighbors, who went to his first parties in the community room of his South Bronx apartment building.
Herc took the disco DJ’s technique of using two turntables, but played punk and funk records instead, seizing on the observation that the crowd went wild during instrumental breaks. “How would it be,” he thought, “if I put them all together?” Calling it “merry-go-round,” Herc showed off his new idea, after first announcing it to the crowd, and got just the reaction he’d hoped for. The rest is a history we should know. But if we leave out the turntablists, the DJs who built the beats that made the music what it is, no matter how old school they sound to us now, we’re missing something critical, an experimental revolution that changed the world.
Little of San Francisco today is as it was half a century ago. But at the corner of Turk Boulevard and Lyon Street stands a true survivor: the Church of St. John Coltrane. Though officially founded in 1971, the roots of this unique musical-religious institution (previously featured here on Open Culture) go back further still. “It was our first wedding anniversary, September 18, 1965 and we celebrated the occasion by going to the Jazz Workshop,” write founders Franzo and Marina King on the Church’s web site. “When John Coltrane came onto the stage we could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit moving with him.” Overcome with the sense that Coltrane was playing directly to them, “we did not talk to each other during the performance because we were caught up in what later would be known as our Sound Baptism.”
Or as Marina puts it in this new short documentary from NPR’s Jazz Night in America, “The holy ghost fell in a jazz club in 1965, and our lives were changed forever.” This was the year of Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme, a jazz album that, in the words of The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “isn’t merely a collection of performances. It’s both one unified composition and, in effect, a concept album. And the core of that concept is more than musical — it’s the spiritual, religious dimension.”
Coltrane, as the documentary tells it, composed the suite in isolation, determined to go cold-turkey and kick the heroin habit that got him fired from Miles Davis’ band. In the process he underwent a “spiritual awakening,” which convinced him that his music could have a much higher purpose.
It was Coltrane’s early death in 1967 that clarified the Kings’ mission in life, eventually prompting them to convert the latest in a series of jazz spaces they’d been running into a proper house of worship. “John Coltrane became their Christ, their God,” writes NPR’s Anastasia Tsioulcas. A Love Supreme“became their central text, and ‘Coltrane consciousness’ became their guiding principle.” Over the past 50 years, their church has endured its share of hardships. In the early 1980s a lifeline appeared in the form of the African Orthodox Church, whose leaders wanted to bring it into the fold but had, as Fanzo remembers it, one condition: “John Coltrane cannot be God, okay?” Then the Kings remembered a remark Coltrane conveniently made in a Japanese interview to the effect that, one day, he’d like to be a saint. Thenceforth, St. Coltrane it was: not bad at all for a sax player from North Carolina.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
It takes a certain amount of hubris to write a song like “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—to write, that is, a secular hymn, a non-religious gospel hit for burned-out sixties’ folkies. Maybe only a tragic flaw could inspire a composer “coming off the back of four hit albums and two number one singles in four years” to soothe the disaffection of down-and-out Americans who could see the bottom from where they stood in 1969, a year notorious for its cultural disaffection and political gloom.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s status as superstar hitmakers at the end of the decade perhaps made it harder for viewers of Songs of America—the television film in which “Bridge Over Troubled Water” debuted—to take them seriously.
When the duo first appears on screen in the musical documentary, of sorts, Garfunkel “brings up the subject of America’s imminent bicentennial,” writes Dorian Lynskey for the BBC, and “a camera-conscious Simon gazes into the distance and asks solemnly: ‘Think it’s gonna make it?’”
Directed by Charles Grodin with over half a million in CBS money, the film’s “mood of pensive pomposity comes to dominate.” It won few converts, despite the showstopper of a song. “The average CBS viewer didn’t want to see the world crumbling,” again, in Songs of America.
The heaviest sequence was a dark twist on the film’s travelogue theme, juxtaposing clips of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King on the campaign trail with footage of mourners watching Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train go by. The musical accompaniment was unfamiliar: a kind of white gospel song, stately and hymn-like, building to a shattering climax as the long black train sped through America’s broken heart. One million viewers responded by turning the dial and watching the figure skating on NBC instead. Some sent hate mail. Songs of America wouldn’t be seen again for over 40 years.
While the movie failed, the song, and album, became instantly classic and rose to No. 1. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” also entered the cultural lexicon as though it had emerged from the misty pre-recording history of the 19th century, when songs were written and rewritten by anonymous folk claiming divine inspiration. “The celebrated New Orleans musician Allen Toussaint liked to say: ‘That song had two writers: Paul Simon and God.’ ”
The real story involves no supernatural intervention—it does involve a kind of “love and theft” (as Bob Dylan admitted, alluding to a book on blackface minstrelsy), through the influence of the Swan Silvertones’ recording of the 19th-century spiritual, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.” Simon listened to the record “over and over again in his Upper East Side apartment… thunderstruck by a line improvised by lead singer Claude Jeter: ‘I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.’” (When Simon met Jeter two years later, he apparently “wrote him a cheque on the spot.”)
Inspiration flowed through him. “I have no idea where it came from… It just came, all of a sudden,” he remembers in the clip further up from the 2011 documentary The Harmony Game. “I remember thinking this is considerably better than I usually write.” He recognized right away that he had penned what he would call “my greatest song”… “my ‘Yesterday.’” The comparison is notable for its contrast of attitudes.
Paul McCartney’s mega-ballad extols the virtues of nostalgia and pines for simpler times; Simon’s channels Black American gospel, looking beyond personal pain to the plight of others. It also takes its chord progression from a Bach chorale adapted by 19th-century hymn writers. That’s not to say “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” doesn’t evoke the personal. The lyrics “Sail on silver girl” speak directly to his soon-to-be wife Peggy Harper, “who had recently fretted about finding her first grey hairs.” The rest came from traditions of religious music.
Simon gave the vocal to Garfunkel because he thought “only Artie’s choirboy voice could do justice to the song,” Lynskey writes. Garfunkel felt intimidated by the song and “liked the sound of Paul’s falsetto.” Simon took his hesitation as an affront. “Such was the state of their partnership in 1969.” It’s clear in the opening minutes of Simon’s solo 1970 interview with Dick Cavett at the top that the iconic folk team would soon be parting ways, for a time at least. Cavett has some fun with Simon about the authenticity of his songwriting. “Maybe I lied… a couple of times,” he answers, some good-natured Queens defiance arising in his voice. “I was pretending to be someone else.”
Cavett then (at 5:25) asks the “impossible question”—how does one write a song like “Bridge Over Troubled Water”? Simon pulls out his guitar and obliges, showing how the chords first came from Bach. He gets big laughs and applause for his definition of feeling “stuck” before he discovered the Swan Silvertones. “Everywhere I went led me to where I didn’t want to go.” It’s maybe as universal a feeling as has ever been put in song.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” turned 50 in January of 2020, a month or so before so the nation Simon eulogized prematurely in Songs of America fell into seriously troubled waters. In our stuckness, maybe his classic ballad, and especially its call to reach beyond ourselves, can help get us over like nothing else. See Simon and Garfunkel play it live just above in their first Central Park reunion concert in 1981.
In 1962, while shooting The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock gets a phone call. Or rather, he’s informed of a phone call, but when he makes his way off set he finds not a call but a real live caller, and a thoroughly unexpected one at that: himself, eighteen years older. Beneath this encounter — in a room the London-born, Los Angeles-resident Hitchcock recognizes as a hybrid of Chasen’s and Claridge’s — runs a current of existential tension. This owes not just to the imaginable reasons, but also to the fact that both Hitchcocks have heard the same aphorism: “If you meet your double, you should kill him.”
So goes the plot of Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, or at least that of its fictional scenes. Though feature-length, Double Take would be more accurately considered an “essay film” in the tradition of Orson Welles’ truth-and-falsity-mixing F for Fake. As Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou reveals, Welles’ pictureoffers a master class in its own form, illustrating the variety of ways cinematic cuts can connect not just events but thoughts, even as it expertly shifts between its parallel (and at first, seemingly unrelated) narratives. Double Take, too, has more than one story to tell: while Hitchcock and his doppelgänger drink tea and coffee, the Cold War reaches its zenith with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We call Hitchcock “the master of suspense,” but revisiting his filmography exposes his command of a more basic emotion: fear. It was fear, in Double Take’s conception of history, that became commoditized on an enormous scale in Cold War America: fear of the Communist threat, of course, but also less overtly ideological varieties. Hollywood capitalized on all of them with the aid of talents like Hitchcock’s and technology like the television, whose rise coincided with the embittering of U.S.-Soviet relations. Even for a man of cinema forged in the silent era, the opportunity of a TV series could hardly be rejected — especially if it allowed him to poke fun at the commercial breaks forever quashing his signature suspense.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, its namesake announced upon its premiere, would commence “bringing murder into the American home, where it has always belonged.” But along with the murder, it smuggled in the work of writers like Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, and Rebecca West. Double Take also comes inspired by literature: “The Other” and “August 25th, 1983,” Jorge Luis Borges’ tales of meeting his own double from another time. Its script was written by Tom McCarthy, whose Remainder appears with Borges’ work on the flowchart of philosophical novels previously featured here on Open Culture. However many different Hitchcocks it shows us, we know there will never truly be another — just as well as we know that we still, in our undiminished desire to be entertained by our own fears, live in Hitchcock’s world.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Art, as we understand the term, is an activity unique to homo sapiens and perhaps some of our early hominid cousins. This much we know. But the matter of when early humans began making art is less certain. Until recently, it was thought that the earliest prehistoric art dated back some 40,000 years, to cave drawings found in Indonesia and Spain. Not coincidentally, this is also when archaeologists believed early humans mastered symbolic thought. New finds, however, have shifted this date back considerably. “Recent discoveries around southern Africa indicate that by 64,000 years ago at the very least,” Ruth Schuster writes at Haaretz, “people had developed a keen sense of abstraction.”
Then came the “hashtag” in 2018, a drawing in ochre on a tiny flake of stone that archaeologists believe “may be the world’s oldest example of the ubiquitous cross-hatched pattern drawn on a silcrete flake in the Blombos Cave in South Africa,” writes Krystal D’Costa at Scientific American, with the disclaimer that the drawing’s creators “did not attribute the same meaning or significance to [hashtags] that we do.” The tiny artifact, thought to be around 73,000 years old, may have in fact been part of a much larger pattern that bore no resemblance to anything hashtag-like, which is only a convenient, if misleading, way of naming it.
The artifact was recovered from Blombos Cave in South Africa, a site that “has been undergoing excavation since 1991 with deposits that range from the Middle Stone Age (about 100,000 to 72,000 years ago) to the Later Stone Age (about 42,000 years ago to 2,000 years BCE).” These findings have been significant, showing a culture that used heat to shape stones into tools and, just as artists in caves like Lascaux did, used ochre, a naturally occurring pigment, to draw on stone. They made engravings by etching lines directly into pieces of ochre. Archaeologists also found in the Middle Stone Age deposits “a toolkit designed to create a pigmented compound that could be stored in abalone shells,” D’Costa notes.
Nicholas St. Fleur describes the tiny “hashtag” in more detail at The New York Times as “a small flake, measuring only about the size of two thumbnails, that appeared to have been drawn on. The markings consisted of six straight, almost parallel lines that were crossed diagonally by three slightly curved lines.” Its discoverer, Dr. Luca Pollarolo of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, expresses his astonishment at finding it. “I think I saw more than ten thousand artifacts in my life up to now,” he says, “and I never saw red lines on a flake. I could not believe what I had in my hands.”
The evidence points to a very early form of abstract symbolism, researchers believe, and similar patterns have been found elsewhere in the cave in later artifacts. Professor Francesco d’Errico of the French National Center for Scientific Research tells Schuster, “this is what one would expect in traditional society where symbols are reproduced…. This reproduction in different contexts suggests symbolism, something in their minds, not just doodling.”
As for whether the drawing is “art”… well, we might as well try and resolve the question of what qualifies as art in our own time. “Look at some of Picasso’s abstracts,” says Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist from the University of Bergen and the lead author of a study on the tiny artifact published in Nature in 2018. “Is that art? Who’s going to tell you it’s art or not?”
Researchers at least agree the markings were deliberately made with some kind of implement to form a pattern. But “we don’t know that it’s art at all,” says Henshilwood. “We know that it’s a symbol,” made for some purpose, and that it predates the previous earliest known cave art by some 30,000 years. That in itself shows “behaviorally modern” human activities, such as expressing abstract thought in material form, emerging even closer to the evolutionary appearance of modern humans on the scene.
In 2013, a boat traveled from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, with a timelapse camera installed 30 meters high. The resulting film “gives a unique and stunning view of the old Dutch waterways, in 4K.” And lots of bridges along the way.
All images were shot with a Canon 550d at an interval of 3 seconds. 30,000 pictures were taken in total. Initially, “the film couldn’t be published due to restrictions. After a few years it was forgotten.” But now it has been resurrected, and it’s online.
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Those in a position to know suggest that vermin shy away from yellowish-greens such as that favored by the Emperor because they “resemble areas of intense lighting.”
We’d like to offer an alternate theory.
Could it be that the critters’ ancestors passed down a cellular memory of the perils of arsenic?
Napoleon, like thousands of others, was smitten with a hue known as Scheele’s Green, named for Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the German-Swedish pharmaceutical chemist who discovered oxygen, chlorine, and unfortunately, a gorgeous, toxic green pigment that’s also a cupric hydrogen arsenite.
Scheele’s Green, aka Schloss Green, was cheap and easy to produce, and quickly replaced the less vivid copper carbonate based green dyes that had been in use prior to the mid 1770s.
The color was an immediate hit when it made its appearance, showing up in artificial flowers, candles, toys, fashionable ladies’ clothing, soap, beauty products, confections, and wallpaper.
A month before Napoleon died, he included the following phrase in his will: My death is premature. I have been assassinated by the English oligopoly and their hired murderer…”
His exit at 51 was indeed untimely, but perhaps the wallpaper, and not the English oligopoly, is the greater culprit, especially if it was hung with arsenic-laced paste, to further deter rats.
When Scheele’s Green wallpaper, like the striped pattern in Napoleon’s bathroom, became damp or moldy, the pigment in it metabolized, releasing poisonous arsenic-laden vapors.
Napoleon’s First Valet Louis-Joseph Marchand recalled the “childish joy” with which the emperor jumped into the tub where he relished soaking for long spells:
The bathtub was a tremendous oak chest lined with lead. It required an exceptional quantity of water, and one had to go a half mile away and transport it in a barrel.
Baths also figured in Second Valet Louis Étienne Saint-Denis’ recollections of his master’s illness:
His remedies consisted only of warm napkins applied to his side, to baths, which he took frequently, and to a diet which he observed from time to time.
In Napoleon’s case, arsenic was likely just one of many compounds taxing an already troubled system. In the course of treatments for a variety of symptoms—swollen legs, abdominal pain, jaundice, vomiting, weakness—Napoleon was subjected to a smorgasbord of other toxic substances. He was said to consume large amounts of a sweet apricot-based drink containing hydrocyanic acid. He had been given tarter emetic, an antimonal compound, by a Corsican doctor. (Like arsenic, antimony would also help explain the preserved state of his body at exhumation.) Two days before his death, his British doctors gave him a dose of calomel, or mercurous chloride, after which he collapsed into a stupor and never recovered.
As Napoleon was vomiting a blackish liquid and expiring, factory and garment workers who handled Scheele’s Green dye and its close cousin, Paris Green, were suffering untold mortifications of the flesh, from hideous lesions, ulcers and extreme gastric distress to heart disease and cancer.
Fashion-first women who spent the day corseted in voluminous green dresses were keeling over from skin-to-arsenic contact. Their seamstresses’ green fingers were in wretched condition.
In 2008, an Italian team tested strands of Napoleon’s hair from four points in his life—childhood, exile, his death, and the day thereafter. They determined that all the samples contained roughly 100 times the arsenic levels of contemporary people in a control group.
Napoleon’s son and wife, Empress Josephine, also had noticeably elevated arsenic levels.
Had we been alive and living in Europe back then, ours likely would have been too.
All that green!
But what about the wallpaper?
A scrap purportedly from the dining room, where Napoleon was relocated shortly before death, was found by a woman in Norfolk, England, pasted into a family scrapbook above the handwritten caption, This small piece of paper was taken off the wall of the room in which the spirit of Napoleon returned to God who gave it.
In 1980, she contacted chemist David Jones, whom she had recently heard on BBC Radio discussing vaporous biochemistry and Victorian wallpaper. She agreed to let him test the scrap using non-destructive x‑ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The result?
.12 grams of arsenic per square meter. (Wallpapers containing 0.6 to 0.015 grams per square meter were determined to be hazardous.)
Dr. Jones described watching the arsenic levels peaking on the lab’s print out as “a crazy, wonderful moment.” He reiterated that the house in which Napoleon was imprisoned was “notoriously damp,” making it easy for a 19th century fan to peel off a souvenir in “an inspired act of vandalism.”
Death by wallpaper and other environmental factors is definitely less cloak and dagger than assassination by the English oligopoly, hired murderer, and other conspiracy theories that had thrived on the presence of arsenic in samples of Napoleon’s hair.
As Dr. Jones recalled:
…several historians were upset by my claim that it was all an accident of decor…Napoleon himself feared he was dying of stomach cancer, the disease which had killed his father; and indeed his autopsy revealed that his stomach was very damaged. It had at least one big ulcer…My feeling is that Napoleon would have died in any case. His arsenical wallpaper might merely have hastened the event by a day or so. Murder conspiracy theorists will have to find new evidence!
We can’t resist mentioning that when the emperor was exhumed and shipped back to France, 19 years after his death, his corpse showed little or no decomposition.
Green continues to be a noxious color when humans attempt to reproduce it in the physical realm. As Alice Rawthorn observed The New York Times:
The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
There was a time in America when you could sit down in the evening, turn on a television talk show, and hear a conversation with Akira Kurosawa. That time was the early 1980s, and that talk show came hosted, of course, by Dick Cavett, to whom no cultural current — and indeed no culture — was too foreign for broadcast. With pictures like Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, and Throne of Blood, Kurosawa established himself in the 1950s as the most acclaimed Japanese auteur alive, with prominent admirers all over the world, Cavett included. “Kurosawa no dai-fan desu,” he says in the filmmaker’s native language before living the Kurosawa dai-fan’s dream of having a chat with the master himself.
Kurosawa, Cavett also notes, had never been interviewed on television in Japan, a fact that might have struck a Western cinephile as indicative of the bewildering lack of support he suffered in his home country. “Why does he think he is so revered in the West as a filmmaker,” Cavett asks his interpreter (Japanese Film Directors author Audie Bock), yet “has trouble getting money up in Japan to make a film?”
To this inquiry, which must have struck him as unusually or even refreshingly direct, Kurosawa first replies thus: “I certainly can’t explain that either.” In fact his then-most recent film Kagemusha had taken years to reach production; while unable to shoot, a despairing but undeterred Kurosawa hand-painted its every scene.
Only with the support of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola (who went on to co-star with Kurosawa in a Suntory whiskey commercial) could Kagemusha eventually be realized. The picture thus escaped the realm of such unmade Kurosawa as an adaptation of Masuji Ibuse’s novel Black Rain, which would at the end of the 1980s pass into the hands of his more eccentric but also-acclaimed contemporary Shohei Imamura. Kurosawa tells the story when asked if he’d ever considered making a film about Hiroshima, just one aspect of the director’s mind and experiences about which Cavett expresses curiosity. Others include the prewar Tokyo in which he grew up, his family’s samurai lineage, his pacifist detestation of violence (perhaps the source of his own films’ violent power), and his Western influences. “Would he like to have made a film with John Wayne and Toshiro Mifune?” Cavett asks. Though the notion strikes Kurosawa as “very difficult,” it’s surely the stuff of a dai-fan’s dreams.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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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