We’re taking you on a wistful trip down memory lane. Above, Shane MacGowan and Sinéad O’Connor perform “Haunted” on the British music show, The White Room. Originally recorded in 1986 with Cait O’Riordan on vocals, “Haunted” got a second lease on life in 1995 when MacGowan and O’Connor cut a new version, combining her ethereal vocals with his inimitable songwriting and whiskey-soaked voice. Below, they both appear in an interview recorded during the same period.
The two Irish musicians first met in London during the 1980s, starting a friendship that would have its ups and downs. Their collaboration on “Haunted” marked a high point. Then, in 1999, O’Connor called the police when she found MacGowan doing heroin at home. Angered at first, MacGowan later credited the intervention with helping him kick his habit. When Sinéad gave birth to her third child in 2004, she named him Shane, in honor of her friend.
MacGowan and O’Connor both died this year, just months apart from one another. As you watch their duet, you can’t help but feel the sand running through the hourglass. It leaves you feeling grateful for what we had, and sad for what we have lost. May they rest in peace.
“For most of the last two thousand years, the Bible has been virtually the only history book used in Western civilization,” writes Isaac Asimov in his Guide to the Bible. “Even today, it remains the most popular, and its view of ancient history is still more widely and commonly known than is that of any other.” As a result, “millions of people today know of Nebuchadnezzar, and have never heard of Pericles, simply because Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned prominently in the Bible and Pericles is never mentioned at all.” That same disproportionate recognition is accorded to “minor Egyptian pharaohs” like Shishak and Necho, “people whose very existence is doubtful” like Nimrod and the Queen of Sheba, and “small towns in Canaan, such as Shechem and Bethel.”
Asimov notes that “only that is known about such places as happens to be mentioned in the Bible. Ecbatana, the capital of the Median Empire, is remembered in connection with the story of Tobit, but its earlier and later history are dim indeed to most people, who might be surprised to know that it still exists today as a large provincial capital in the modern nation of Iran.” In the video from Hochelaga above, we learn that Iran, then called Persia, is celebrated in the Bible “for ending the Jewish exile and returning Israel to its homeland. The Book of Usaiah gives a special shout-out to its King, Cyrus the Great: he is given the title ‘anointed one,’ or ‘messiah.’ ”
Though “Persia has played a huge role in the history of the region, and at a time was one of the largest empires of its day,” it’s just one of the surprisingly many lands to receive Biblical acknowledgement. As Hochelaga creator Tommy Trelawny makes clear, “when the Bible was written, the countries as we know them today didn’t even exist.” But though the concept of the modern nation-state hadn’t yet come into being, the places that would give rise to a fair few of the nation-states in the twenty-first century certainly had: “shout-out to Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Persia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Spain, that still exist today, or at least go by the names that appear in the Bible.”
You may notice, Trelawny adds, that “many of these exotic lands are mentioned in the story of King Solomon’s temple, and how precious raw materials were imported from faraway places, from the strongest Lebanese cedars to the finest Indian ivories.” It hardly matters “whether King Solomon was even real; we know these geographical regions exist today, and that Biblical writers seemed to know of them as well.” As depicted in the Bible or other sources, the ancient world can seem scarcely recognizable to us. But if we make the necessary adjustments to our perspective, we can see a process of globalization not dissimilar to what we see in our own societies — whose fascination with distant lands and expensive luxuries seems hardly to have diminished over the millennia.
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.
Shane MacGowan died yesterday, less than a month shy of his 66th birthday — and thus less than a month shy of Christmas, which happened to be the same day. Though coincidental, that association has made perfect sense since 1987, when the Pogues, the Celtic punk band fronted by MacGowan, released “Fairytale of New York.” That duet between MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl (the story of whose production we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture) still reigns supreme as the United Kingdom’s Christmas song, and by now it tends also to make it onto more than a few holiday-season playlists in America and across the world.
Given the popularity of “Fairytale of New York,” many listeners know MacGowan for nothing else. But he was, in fact, a figure of considerable importance to the punk rock of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, to which he brought not just a thoroughly Irish sensibility but also a strong sense of literary craft.
Few well-known punk rockers could inhabit a place with a song in the way he could, or tap into the proper vernacular to inhabit a particular character. (Even the words he gave MacColl to sing as a hard-bitten nineteen-forties woman of the streets have caused no end of struggles with censors.) For this reason, he had the respect of many another serious songwriter: Nick Cave, for instance, with whom he recorded a cover of “What a Wonderful World” in 1992.
During much of MacGowan’s lifetime, his musical achievements were at risk of being overshadowed by the harrowing facts of his life, including his massive, sustained consumption of drugs and alcohol and the variety of injuries and ailments it brought about. In 2015, British television even aired a special about the replacement of his long-lost teeth — which, to judge by the Pogues’ performance of the folk song “The Irish Rover” with the Dubliners above, were barely hanging on even in the late eighties. But in a way, this dissolute appearance was an inseparable part of a distinctive artistic spirit. Shane MacGowan was a rare thing in the world of punk rock (to say nothing of the world of hit Christmas songs): not just an Irish literary voice, but an Irish literary character.
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.
Worried that holiday entertaining may put you in danger of overspending?
Preserve your bank account and those joyful festive feelings by serving your friends onion sandwiches.
We assure you, they come with the utmost of culinary pedigrees.
Esteemed chef and cookbook author Jacques Pépin happily demonstrates the simple recipe, above, confiding that it was a favorite of his late wife’s.
Everything tastes better when cooked with love, even if the chef’s not doing much more than slicing a couple of half moons from an onion and slathering bread with mayo.
(If you’re allergic to either of those ingredients, try swapping them out for radishes and butter.)
Pépin credits his old friend, James Beard, “America’s first foodie”, with the recipe. It caused a sensation when Beard published it in 1965’s Menus for Entertaining.
Just the other day I was enchanted to receive a box of these giant golden globes, perfectly matched in size and contour, that flourish in the volcanic soil of Oregon and Idaho. They make absolutely superb eating. I love them raw, thinly sliced, with a hamburger or cold meats or in a hearty, flavorful onion sandwich.
The day my gift box arrived I happened to have some slightly stale homemade bread, about two or three days old. I sliced this very thin, buttered it well, covered it with paper-thin slices of Spanish onion, sprinkled them with some coarse salt, and pressed another slice of bread firmed on the top—and there was my supper. I can easily make a whole meal of onion sandwiches, for to me they are one of the greatest treats I know…
It was basic but confident, and it came together with inexpensive ingredients. It was so good that you could easily eat a dozen, and so simple that it barely required a recipe. You glance at the directions, feeling a little silly rolling the sandwiches in chopped parsley, a crucial step that makes the sandwich, and that Irma Rhode said came from Beard. You’d make it once, and then the dish would be committed to memory — as James Beard’s onion sandwich.
Interesting how Ms. Wehrley takes care to note that the Toasted Cheese on Bread published directly below that Onion Sandwich is a recipe of her own invention.
It appears we all borrow from the best. Surely, there’s no reason not to get creative and make that onion sandwich your own.
You could start by varying the ingredients…
Soak some slices of red onion in cold water for 5 minutes to take away their raw bite.
Experiment with pumpernickel or dark rye.
Chop up a blend of windowsill herbs for that showy, savory edge.
Or y’know, buy an onion, a bagel and cream cheese as separate components, assemble, and boom!
As Beard remarked, “Designing hors d’oeuvres is not different from designing sets and costumes … Food is very much theater.”
Basic Onion Sandwich (serves one):
Remove the crusts from 2 slices of bread or cut them into rounds, reserving the scraps for a more involved recipe requiring breadcrumbs
Spread mayonnaise on the face of both pieces
Remove a thin slice from the thickest part of a sweet onion and place atop one of the prepared slices
.Sprinkle with sea salt and top with the other slice of bread.
Spread mayonnaise around the perimeter of the sandwich, and roll in the chopped herbs.
(Can refrigerate for up to 6 hours before serving)
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