What Happens When Mortals Try to Drink Winston Churchill’s Daily Intake of Alcohol

in Food & Drink, History, Life | October 17th, 2022

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. — Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill had a reputation as a brilliant statesman and a prodigious drinker.

The former prime minister imbibed throughout the day, every day. He also burned through 10 daily cigars, and lived to the ripe old age of 90.

His comeback to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s boast that he neither smoked nor drank, and was 100 percent fit was “I drink and smoke, and I am 200 percent fit.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt marveled “that anyone could smoke so much and drink so much and keep perfectly well.”

In No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, author David Lough documents Churchill’s disastrous alcohol expenses, as well as the bottle count at Chartwell, his Kentish residence. Here’s the tally for March 24,1937:

180 bottles and 30 half bottles of Pol Roger champagne

20 bottles and 9 half bottles of other champagne

100+ bottles of claret

117 bottles and 389 half bottles of Barsac

13 bottles of brandy

5 bottles of champagne brandy

7 bottles of liqueur whisky

All that liquor was not going to drink itself.

Did Churchill have a hollow leg? An extraordinarily high tolerance? An uncanny ability to mask his intoxication?

Whiskey sommelier Rex Williams, a founder of the Whiskey Tribe YouTube channel, and podcast host Andrew Heaton endeavor to find out, above, by dedicating a day to the British Bulldog’s drinking regimen.

They’re not the first to undertake such a folly.

The Daily Telegraph’s Harry Wallop documented a similar adventure in 2015, winding up queasy, and to judge by his 200 spelling mistakes, cognitively impaired.

Williams and Heaton’s on-camera experiment achieves a Drunk History vibe and telltale flushed cheeks.

Here’s the drill, not that we advise trying it at home:

BREAKFAST

An eye opener of Johnnie Walker Red — just a splash — mixed with soda water to the rim.

Follow with more of the same throughout the morning.

This is how Churchill, who often conducted his morning business abed in a dressing gown, managed to average between 1 — 3 ounces of alcohol before lunch.

Apparently he developed a taste for it as a young soldier posted in what is now Pakistan, when Scotch not only improved the flavor of plain water, ‘once one got the knack of it, the very repulsion from the flavor developed an attraction of its own.”

After a morning spent sipping the stuff, Heaton reports feeling “playful and jokey, but not yet violent.”

LUNCH

Time for “an ambitious quota of champagne!”

Churchill’s preferred brand was Pol Roger, though he wasn’t averse to Giesler, Moet et Chandon, or Pommery, purchased from the upscale wine and spirits merchant Randolph Payne & Sons, whose letterhead identified them as suppliers to “Her Majesty The Late Queen Victoria and to The Late King William The Fourth.”

Churchill enjoyed his imperial pint of champagne from a silver tankard, like a “proper Edwardian gent” according to his lifelong friend, Odette Pol-Roger.

Williams and Heaton take theirs in flutes accompanied by fish sticks from the freezer case. This is the point beyond which a hangover is all but assured.

Lunch concludes with a post-prandial cognac, to settle the stomach and begin the digestion process.

Churchill, who declared himself a man of simple tastes — I am easily satisfied with the best — would have insisted on something from the house of Hine.

RESTORATIVE AFTERNOON NAP

This seems to be a critical element of Churchill’s alcohol management success. He frequently allowed himself as much as 90 minutes to clear the cobwebs.

A nap definitely pulls our re-enactors out of their tail spins. Heaton emerges ready to “bluff (his) way through a meeting.”

TEATIME

I guess we can call it that, given the timing.

No tea though.

Just a steady stream of extremely weak scotch and sodas to take the edge off of administrative tasks.

DINNER

More champagne!!! More cognac!!!

“This should be the apex of our wit,” a bleary Heaton tells his belching companion, who fesses up to vomiting upon waking the next day.

Their conclusion? Churchill’s regimen is unmanageable…at least for them.

And possibly also for Churchill.

As fellow Scotch enthusiast Christopher Hitchens revealed in a 2002 article in The Atlantic, some of Churchill’s most famous radio broadcasts, including his famous pledge to “fight on the beaches” after the Miracle of Dunkirk, were voiced by a pinch hitter:

Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners. Perhaps Churchill was too much incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself.

Or perhaps the great man merely felt he’d earned the right to unwind with a class of Graham’s Vintage Character Port, a Fine Old Amontillado Sherry or a Fine Old Liquor brandy, as was his wont.

Winston Churchill Gets a Doctor’s Note to Drink “Unlimited” Alcohol in Prohibition America (1932)

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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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How Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” Went from 80s Pop Smash to Bastion of Internet Culture: A Short Documentary

in History, Music | October 14th, 2022

It was an isolating existence, being a Rick Astley fan at the turn of the millennium. I was in high school at the time, and it was on a weekend-morning cable-TV binge that I happened first to hear his music — albeit just a few seconds of it — on a commercial for one of those order-by-phone nostalgia compilations. Intrigued by the contrast of the unabashed nineteen-eighties production, equally energetic and synthetic, against Astley’s powerful, unusually textured voice, I went straight to AudioGalaxy for the MP3. Even before I’d heard its whole three and a half minutes, I was hooked. The song of which I speak is, of course, “Together Forever.”

You’ve got to remember that, two decades ago, Astley’s debut single “Never Gonna Give You Up” hadn’t yet racked up a billion views on Youtube. Nor could you even find it on Youtube; nor, come to that, could you find anything on Youtube, since it didn’t exist. It was then quite easy to be unaware of the song, and indeed of Astley himself, given that he’d burnt out and retired from the music business in the mid-nineteen-nineties. If you’d heard of him, you might well have written him off as an eighties flash-in-the-pan. (Yet to be resurrected by the retro gods, the aesthetics of that decade were still at their nadir of fashionability.) But in its day, “Never Gonna Give You Up” was a pop phenomenon of rare distinction.

The short Vice documentary above recounts how Astley became an overnight sensation, bringing in the singer himself as well as his original production team: Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, the trio who created the sound of British eighties pop. It was while playing with a band in his small northern hometown that Astley caught Stock Aitken Waterman’s ear, and soon thereafter he found himself working as a “tea boy” in their London studio. At that time he lived at Waterman’s home, and after overhearing the latter screaming at his girlfriend through his giant eighties phone, he made a fateful remark: “You’re never gonna give her up, are you?”

From there, “Never Gonna Give You Up” seems practically to have written itself, though its producers admit to having ill sensed its potential during recording. Shelved for a time, the song was finally included on a magazine mix tape, at which point it went the eighties equivalent of viral: airplay on the independent Capital London soon crossed over to a variety of mainstream radio formats. “They hadn’t got a clue that he was a white guy,” says Waterman, nor, as Astley himself adds, that he “looked about eleven years old.” All was soon revealed by the music video — then still a novel form — hastily and somewhat amateurishly produced in the wake of the single’s chart-topping success.

These not-unappealing incongruities inspired one of my fellow Millennials, a young enlisted man named Sean Cotter, to relaunch Astley’s hit into the zeitgeist in 2007. “I immediately knew I wanted to make this thing into a meme,” he says, and so he invented “rickrolling,” the prank of sending an unrelated-looking link that actually leads to the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video. Despite originating in a spirit of mockery, it enabled the comeback Astley had been tentatively attempting in the preceding years. Today, at a distance from the eighties and the two-thousands alike, we can finally hear “Never Gonna Give You Up” for what it is: an inspired work of pop songcraft that reflects the distinctive appeal of both its era and its performer — or as Astley puts it, “a bloody hit, man.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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Behold the World’s Oldest Animation Made on a Vase in Iran 5,200 Years Ago

in Animation, History | October 13th, 2022

By some accounts, the history of animation stretches back to the turn of the twentieth century. Since that time, animators have brought an astounding variety of visions to artistic life. But looked at another way, this enterprise — which has so far culminated in feature-film spectacles by studios like Pixar and Ghibli — actually has it roots deep in antiquity. In order to find the first work of animation, broadly conceived, one must go to Shahr‑e Sukhteh, Iran’s famous “Burnt City.” Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, it dates back more than five millennia, about four of which it spent under a layer of ash and dust, which preserved a great many artifacts of interest within.

Shahr‑e Sukhteh was first excavated in 1967. About a decade later, an Italian archaeological team unearthed the pottery vessel bearing designs now considered the earliest example of animation. “The artifact bears five images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree,” says the web site of the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies. “Several years later, Iranian archaeologist Dr. Mansur Sadjadi, who became later appointed as the new director of the archaeological team working at the Burnt City discovered that the pictures formed a related series.” The animal depicted is a member of Capra aegagrus, “also known as ‘Persian desert Ibex’, and since it is an indigenous animal to the region, it would naturally appear in the iconography of the Burnt City.”

Image by Emesik, via Wikimedia Commons

This amusingly decorated goblet, now on display at the National Museum of Iran, is hardly the only find that reflects the surprising development of the early civilization that produced it. “The world’s first known artificial eyeball, with two holes in both sides and a golden thread to hold it in place, has been unearthed from the skeleton of a woman’s body in Shahr‑e Sukhteh,” says Mehr News. Excavations have also turned up “the oldest signs of brain surgery,” as well as evidence that “the people of Shahr‑e Sukhteh played backgammon,” or at least some kind of table game involving dice. But only the Burnt City’s pioneering work of flip-book-style art “means that the world’s oldest cartoon character is a goat.” Historians of animation, update your files accordingly.

The Early Days of Animation Preserved in UCLA’s Video Archive

Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917–1931)

700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Painting the Earliest Form of Cinema?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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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Watch Vintage Videos Capturing Life in Japan from the 1960s Through Today

in Film, History, Travel | October 12th, 2022

Just yesterday, Japan fully re-opened its borders to tourism after a long period of COVID-19-motivated closure. This should prove economically invigorating, given how much demand to visit the Land of the Rising Sun has built up over the past couple of years. Even before the pandemic, Japan had been a country of great interest among world travelers, and for more than half a century at that. Much of that attractiveness has, of course, to do with its distinctive nature, which manifests both deep tradition and hyper-modernity at once.

But some of it also has to do with the fact that, since rising from the devastation of the Second World War, Japan has hardly shied away from self-promotion. “A Day in Tokyo,” the short film at the top of the post, was produced by the Japan National Tourism Organization in 1968.

Its vivid color footage of Japan’s great metropolis, “the world’s largest and liveliest,” captures everyday life as it was then lived in Tokyo’s department stores, stock exchanges, construction sites, and zoos.

The film puts a good deal of emphasis on the capital’s still-ongoing postwar transformation: “In a constant metabolic cycle of destruction and creation, Tokyo progresses at a dizzying pace,” declares the film’s narrator. “People who haven’t seen Tokyo for ten years, or even five, would scarcely recognize it today.” And if Tokyo was dizzying in the late nineteen-sixties, it became positively disorienting in the eighties. On the back of that era’s economic bubble, Japan looked about to become the wealthiest country in the world, and Tokyoites both worked and played accordingly hard.

This two-part compilation of scenes from Japan in the eighties conveys that time with footage drawn from a variety of sources, including feature films (not least Itami Jūzō’s beloved 1985 ramen comedy Tampopo.) “It was a magical place at a magical time,” remembers one American commenter who lived in Japan back then. “Everything seemed possible. Everybody was prospering. Almost every crazy business idea seemed to succeed. People were happy and shared their happiness and good fortune with others. It was like no other place on earth.”

As dramatically as the bubble burst at the end of the eighties, Japanese life in the subsequent “lost decades” has also possessed a richness of its own. You can see it in this compilation of footage of Japan in the nineties and two-thousands from the same channel, TRNGL. Though it no longer seemed able to buy up the rest of the world, the country had by that era built up a global consciousness of its culture by exporting its films, its animation, its music, its video games, and much more besides. Even if you haven’t seen this Japan in person, you’ve come to know it through its art and media.

If you’re considering making the trip, this video of “Japan nowadays” will give you a sense of what you’ve been missing. The Tokyo of the twenty-first century shown in its clips certainly isn’t the same city it was in 1968. Yet it remains “an intermingling of Orient and Occident, seemingly new, but actually old,” as the narrator of “A Day in Tokyo” puts it. “Beneath its modern exterior, there still lingers an atmosphere of past glories. The citizens remain unalterably Japanese, and yet this great city is able to accommodate and understand people of all races, languages, and beliefs” — people now arriving by the thousands once again.

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Recorded in 1913: Caught Between the Traditional and the Modern

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An Introduction to Japanese Kabuki Theatre, Featuring 20th-Century Masters of the Form (1964)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How to Predict What the World Will Look Like in 2122: Insights from Futurist Peter Schwartz

in Harvard, History, Technology | October 10th, 2022

“It’s very easy to imagine how things go wrong,” says futurist Peter Schwartz in the video above. “It’s much harder to imagine how things go right.” So he demonstrated a quarter-century ago with the Wired magazine cover story he co-wrote with Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom.” Made in the now techno-utopian-seeming year of 1997, its predictions of “25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for a whole world” have since become objects of ridicule. But in the piece Schwartz and Leyden also provide a set of less-desirable alternative scenarios whose details — a new Cold War between the U.S. and China, climate change-related disruptions in the food supply, an “uncontrollable plague” — look rather more prescient in retrospect.

The intelligent futurist, in Schwartz’s view, aims not to get everything right. “It’s almost impossible. But you test your decisions against multiple scenarios, so you make sure you don’t get it wrong in the scenarios that actually occur.” The art of “scenario planning,” as Schwartz calls it, requires a fairly deep rootedness in the past.

His own life is a case in point: born in a German refugee camp in 1946, he eventually made his way to a place then called Stanford Research Institute. “It was the early days that became Silicon Valley. It’s where technology was accelerating. It was one of the first thousand people online. It was the era when LSD was still being used as an exploratory tool. So everything around me was the future being born,” and he could hardly have avoided getting hooked on the future.

That addiction remains with Schwartz today: most recently, he’s been forecasting the shape of work to come for Salesforce. The key question, he realized, “was not what did I think about the future, but what did everybody else think about the future?” And among “everybody else,” he places special value on the abilities of those possessed of imagination, collaborative ability, and “ruthless curiosity.” As for the greatest threat to scenario planning, he names “fear of the future,” calling it “one of the worst problems we have today.” There will be more setbacks, more “wars and panics and pandemics and so on.” But “the great arc of human progress, and the gain of prosperity, and a better life for all, that will continue.” Despite all he’s seen – and indeed, because of all he’s seen — Peter Schwartz still believes in the long boom.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Behold a 21st-Century Medieval Castle Being Built with Only Tools & Materials from the Middle Ages

in Architecture, Design, History, Video - Arts & Culture | October 7th, 2022

Construction sites are hives of specialized activity, but there’s no particular training needed to ferry 500 lbs of stone several stories to the masons waiting above. All you need is the stamina for a few steep flights and a medieval treadwheel crane or “squirrel cage.”

The technology, which uses simple geometry and human exertion to hoist heavy loads, dates to ancient Roman times.

Retired in the Victorian era, it has been resurrected and is being put to good use on the site of a former sandstone quarry two hours south of Paris, where the castle of an imaginary, low ranking 13th-century nobleman began taking shape in 1997.

There’s no typo in that timeline.

Château de Guédelon is an immersive educational project, an open air experimental archeology lab, and a highly unusual working construction site.

With a project timeline of 35 years, some 40 quarrypeople, stonemasons, woodcutters, carpenters, tilers, blacksmiths, rope makers and carters can expect another ten years on the job.

That’s longer than a medieval construction crew would have taken, but unlike their 21st-century counterparts, they didn’t have to take frequent breaks to explain their labors to the visiting public.

A team of archeologists, art historians and castellologists strive for authenticity, eschewing electricity and any vehicle that doesn’t have hooves.

Research materials include illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, financial records, and existing castles.

The 1425-year-old Canterbury Cathedral has a non-reproduction treadmill crane stored in its rafters, as well as a levers and pulleys activity sheet for young visitors that notes that operating a “human treadmill” was both grueling and dangerous:

Philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that they were “unequalled in the modern annals of legalized torture.”

Good call, then, on the part of Guédelon’s leadership to allow a few anachronisms in the name of safety.

Guédelon’s treadmill cranes, including a double drum model that pivots 360º to deposit loads of up to 1000 lbs wherever the stonemasons have need of them, have been outfitted with brakes. The walkers inside the wooden wheels wear hard hats, as are the overseer and those monitoring the brakes and the cradle holding the stones.

The onsite worker-educators may be garbed in period-appropriate loose-fitting natural fibers, but rest assured that their toes are steel-reinforced.

Château de Guédelon guide Sarah Preston explains the reasoning:

Obviously, we’re not trying to discover how many people were killed or injured in the 13th-century.

Learn more about Château de Guédelon, including how you can arrange a visit, here.

Explore the history of treadmill cranes here.

And see how the Château de Guédelon has housed Ukrainian refugees here.

via The Kids Should See This

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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Why Monet Painted The Same Haystacks 25 Times

in Art, History | October 6th, 2022

In the nineteen-twenties, as George Orwell remembers it, “Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population.” Along stretches of the Seine, “it was almost impossible to pick one’s way between the sketching-stools.” Legitimate or otherwise, these artists were genuine descendants of Claude Monet, at least in the sense that the latter pioneered painting en plein air, distilling art directly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pigments or buy paints contained in fragile pig bladders,” says Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much easier to work in a studio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flexible zinc tubes invented by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a portability that made outdoor painting easy and feasible.” As usual in modernity, a development in technology enabled a development in culture, but to show what kind of possibilities had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazenness: more specifically, an artist like Monet.

“Obsessed, most of all, with light and color, and the ways they register in the human mind,” Monet “rejected the popular conventions of his time, which prioritized line, color, and blended brushstrokes that concealed the artist’s hand in favor of several short, thick applications of solid color placed side by side, largely unblended.” His paintings, which we now credit with launching the Impressionist movement, show us not so much colors as “color relationships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the canvas.” But then, so does real life, whose constantly changing light ensures that “every few minutes, we experience a subtly different color palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Monet’s artistic enterprise more clearly demonstrated than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series consists of 25 paintings depicting just what that name suggests (and which, belonging to Monet’s neighbor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each painted at a different time of day. Each image represents Monet’s attempt to capture the light colors just as he perceived them at a particular moment, straight from nature. Taken together, they constitute “maybe the definitive expression of the Impressionist movement” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we never truly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now purchase a copy of the Nerdwriter’s new book, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Artist Makes Astonishing Armor for Cats & Mice

in Art, Design, History, Uncategorized, Video - Arts & Culture | October 5th, 2022

As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet metal fabricator, was fascinated by the European plate armor collection in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum:

There was something magical or mystical about that empty form, that contained something. So what would it contain? A hero? Do we all contain that in ourselves?

After graduating from high school wearing a partial suit of armor he constructed for the occasion, De Boer completed seven full suits, while majoring in jewelry design at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

A sculpture class assignment provided him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.

Using steel, silver, brass, bronze, nickel, copper, leather, fiber, wood, and his delicate jewelry making tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armorer, spending anywhere from 50 to 200 hours producing each increasingly intricate suit of feline armor. A noble pursuit, but one that inadvertently created an “imbalance in the universe”:

The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.

“The suit of armor is a transformation vehicle. It’s something that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.

Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no convincing, though no real mouse has had the misfortune to find its way inside one of his astonishing, custom-made creations.

Not even a taxidermy specimen, he revealed on the Making, Our Way podcast:

It’s not an altogether bad idea. The only reason I don’t do it is that hollow suit of armor like you might see in a museum, your imagination will make it do a million things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s nothing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good experience for the cat. It does not fulfill any fantasies about a cat wearing a suit of armor.

Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sympathies seem aligned with the underdog — er, mice. Equipping humble, hypothetical creatures with exquisitely wrought, historical protective gear is a way of pushing back against being perceived differently than one wishes to be.

Accepting an Honorary MFA from his alma mater earlier this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongoing cat and mouse relationship with the world of fine art…a mischievous, rebellious being who dares to compete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”

Each tiny piece is preceded by painstaking research and many reference drawings, and may incorporate special materials like the Japanese silk haori-himo cord lacing the shoulder plates to the body armor of a Samurai mouse family.

Additional creations have referenced Mongolian, gladiator, crusader, and Saracen styles — this last perfect for a Persian cat.