Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

Like some rock stars of his gen­er­a­tion, David Bowie had a lit­er­ary cast of mind; unlike most of those col­leagues, he also made his asso­ci­a­tion with books explic­it. (Not for noth­ing did he appear on that READ poster.) When­ev­er this sub­ject aris­es, it’s tempt­ing to bring up the sto­ry of how The Man Who Fell to Earth direc­tor Nico­las Roeg poked fun at the extreme num­ber of books with which Bowie sur­round­ed him­self dur­ing the time he was act­ing in that film, as we did when we post­ed about the David Bowie book club. Launched by Bowie’s son, the film­mak­er Dun­can Jones, that project was meant to read through Bowie’s own list of top 100 books, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Now, thanks to the work of music jour­nal­ist John O’Con­nell, Bowie’s love of books has a book of its own.

Pub­lished in the UK as Bowie’s Books and in the US as Bowie’s Book­shelf, O’Con­nel­l’s essay col­lec­tion takes the 100 books the man who was Zig­gy Star­dust, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke named as favorites. In each he finds the rel­e­vant ques­tions (or at least fas­ci­nat­ing ones) to ask about each book’s rela­tion­ship to Bowie’s life and work: “How did the pow­er imbued in a sin­gle suit of armor in The Ili­ad impact a man who loved cos­tumes, shift­ing iden­ti­ty, and the siren song of the alter-ego?” Or, “How did the poems of T.S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara, the fic­tion of Vladimir Nabokov and Antho­ny Burgess, the comics of The Beano and The Viz, and the ground­break­ing pol­i­tics of James Bald­win influ­ence Bowie’s lyrics, his sound, his artis­tic out­look?”

Kirkus Reviews notes that “many of Bowie’s selec­tions speak to his obvi­ous pas­sion for music, espe­cial­ly ear­ly rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Mar­cus, Ger­ri Her­shey), his famous Japanophil­ia (Yukio Mishi­ma, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Ger­many (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich).” O’Con­nel­l’s com­pletist analy­sis of Bowie’s top-100-books list, com­posed for an exhi­bi­tion at the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um just six years ago, also reveals “the range and play­ful­ness in Bowie’s read­ing, from hefty tomes on the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion to lad­dish com­ic books like The Beano.” Oth­er essays cov­er Loli­taThe Gnos­tic GospelsA Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces, and White Noise, all part of a mix­ture that would tan­ta­lize any cul­tur­al crit­ic — much like the work of David Bowie, who still con­sti­tutes a cul­ture unto him­self.

Bowie’s Book­shelf: The Hun­dred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life can be ordered now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

The Sto­ry of How David Jones Became David Bowie Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs: Lis­ten to Them Online

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.

An Animated Introduction to Medieval Taverns: Learn the History of These Rough-and-Tumble Ancestors of the Modern Pub

When I think of the medieval tav­ern, I see grim footage from Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal and grimy drink­ing scenes from Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. While only the first of these uses an osten­si­bly his­tor­i­cal set­ting, the imagery of them all is what we think of when we think of tav­erns. Huge casks in the cor­ners, great, inde­struc­tible wood­en tables and wood­en mugs, signs with pic­tures instead of words; drunk­en singing and the occa­sion­al axe fight.

The crude­ly ani­mat­ed Sim­ple His­to­ry video above con­firms these impres­sions, describ­ing the tav­erns, inns, and ale hous­es that were ances­tors of the mod­ern pub as “places of drink­ing, gam­bling, vio­lence, and crim­i­nal activ­i­ty.” Art his­to­ry and schol­ar­ship fur­ther con­firm our impres­sion of tav­erns as rough-hewn, row­dy hous­es where brawls fre­quent­ly broke out and all sorts of shady busi­ness trans­act­ed.

Ale hous­es had an “ale stake or ale pole” that could be raised to show they had a brew ready to serve. Tav­erns had a pole with leaves, called a “bush,” for the same pur­pose. Wine might be pricey, but beer was cheap, as “tax­ing it would not have been well-received.” Bar­maids poured drinks from pitch­ers of leather into mugs of wood. Food was… well, not so good…. Maybe we can visu­al­ize tav­ern life by extrap­o­lat­ing back­wards from our local dive bars.

How­ev­er, we might find it hard to imag­ine liv­ing in a time before beer. Milan Pajic, junior research fel­low at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, found that beer made a rel­a­tive­ly late entry in the his­to­ry of Eng­lish drink, arriv­ing only in the lat­ter half of the 14th cen­tu­ry when intro­duced by Dutch immi­grants and demand­ed by sol­diers return­ing from the 100 Years War.

Between around 1350 and around 1400, Pajic claims, all of the beer drunk in Eng­lish tav­erns was import­ed from the Nether­lands. “The first evi­dence of some­one brew­ing beer” in Eng­land, Pajic writes in an arti­cle pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Medieval His­to­ry, “comes from 1398–9.” The brew­er, a “Duche­man,” was “fined for buy­ing ‘wheat in the mar­ket in order to pro­duce beer, to the great dam­age of the same mar­ket.”

Such per­se­cu­tion could not last. In a hun­dred year’s time, a few hun­dred brew­ers could be found around the coun­try, most of them immi­grants from the Low Coun­tries. But in part because the Eng­lish dis­trust­ed the Dutch, “it took almost a cen­tu­ry from the moment it was intro­duced as an import­ed com­mod­i­ty and con­sumed large­ly by immi­grants before it came to be pro­duced on Eng­lish soil and accept­ed by the natives.”

Tav­ern, inn, and ale house designs would have con­formed to local join­ery trends, but the medieval Eng­lish tavern’s chief draw—cheap, fresh­ly-brewed beer, and lots of it—was a sus­pi­cious con­ti­nen­tal import before it became a nation­al trea­sure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beer Archae­ol­o­gy: Yes, It’s a Thing

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

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

The Entire Archive of Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music Has Been Digitized and Put Online

FYI on a new dig­i­ti­za­tion project:

“Con­tact: A Jour­nal for Con­tem­po­rary Music was active from 1971–1990 and inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by its edi­tors. As with many inde­pen­dent print pub­li­ca­tions of that era, this has meant that, for read­ers and researchers oper­at­ing in a con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal land­scape, the rich­ness of its resource has been all but inac­ces­si­ble. In recog­ni­tion of this sit­u­a­tion, in the years 2016–2019, the entire jour­nal was digi­tised and made avail­able over the course of a three-year research project..”

Con­tact’s basic inten­tions – as set out ful­ly in the first issue, dat­ed Spring 1971 – were to pro­mote informed dis­cus­sion of 20th-cen­tu­ry music in gen­er­al and the music of our own time in par­tic­u­lar. Among the orig­i­nal con­cerns of the founders of the mag­a­zine were that pop­u­lar musics, jazz and con­tem­po­rary folk music should play a part in our scheme. In the ear­li­er days, espe­cial­ly, we con­tin­u­al­ly sought for good writ­ing in these fields, as well as con­tri­bu­tions on ‘seri­ous’ music.”

Enter the Con­tact online archive here

via @ide­o­forms

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

Watch the Opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Original, Unused Score

How does a movie become a “clas­sic”? Expla­na­tions, nev­er less than utter­ly sub­jec­tive, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would sub­mit that clas­sic-film sta­tus, as tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood, requires that all ele­ments of the pro­duc­tion work in at least near-per­fect har­mo­ny: the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the cast­ing, the edit­ing, the design, the set­ting, the score. Out­side first-year film stud­ies sem­i­nars and delib­er­ate­ly con­trar­i­an cul­ture columns, the label of clas­sic, once attained, goes prac­ti­cal­ly undis­put­ed. Even those who active­ly dis­like Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would sure­ly agree that its every last audio­vi­su­al nuance serves its dis­tinc­tive, bold vision — espe­cial­ly that open­ing use of “Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.”

But Kubrick did­n’t always intend to use that piece, nor the oth­er orches­tral works we’ve come to close­ly asso­ciate with mankind’s ven­tures into realms beyond Earth and strug­gles with intel­li­gence of its own inven­tion. Accord­ing to Jason Kot­tke, Kubrick had com­mis­sioned an orig­i­nal score from A Street­car Named Desire, Spar­ta­cus, Cleopa­tra, and Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf com­pos­er Alex North.

At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s open­ing with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 min­utes of his score on Spo­ti­fy. As to the ques­tion of why Kubrick stuck instead with the tem­po­rary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatch­a­turi­an he’d used in edit­ing, Kot­tke quotes from Michel Cimen­t’s inter­view with the film­mak­er:

How­ev­er good our best film com­posers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time? [ … ]  Although [North] and I went over the pic­ture very care­ful­ly, and he lis­tened to these tem­po­rary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musi­cal objec­tives of each sequence he, nev­er­the­less, wrote and record­ed a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to, and much more seri­ous than that, a score which, in my opin­ion, was com­plete­ly inad­e­quate for the film.

North did­n’t find out about Kubrick­’s choice until 2001’s New York City pre­miere. Not an envi­able sit­u­a­tion, cer­tain­ly, but not the worst thing that ever hap­pened to a col­lab­o­ra­tor who failed to rise to the direc­tor’s expec­ta­tions.

For more Kubrick and clas­si­cal music, see our recent post: The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2014.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What Guitars Were Like 400 Years Ago: An Introduction to the 9 String Baroque Guitar

Maybe it’s just me, but it some­times feels like gui­tar music is on the wane. Sure, there are plen­ty of gui­tar bands out there, gui­tar sales seem to hold steady, but the syn­the­siz­er, midi con­troller, and dig­i­tal audio work­sta­tion have become the dom­i­nant instru­ments of pop­u­lar music. Then again, it’s short-sight­ed to count the gui­tar out just yet, giv­en the 500-year longevi­ty of its design.

In the 17th cen­tu­ry, the Lute Soci­ety of Dart­mouth notes, the gui­tar was “cul­ti­vat­ed by play­ers and com­posers with­in the courts of princes and kings.” The Baroque gui­tar was very much like the mod­ern six string (or, as often these days, sev­en and eight string) that we know today, “aside from a dif­fer­ence of tun­ing,” writes luthi­er Clive Tit­muss. Where “the mod­ern gui­tar is a baritone/tenor… the baroque is an alto instru­ment, about the size of a vio­la.”

The dif­fer­ences in size and pitch change the sus­tain and artic­u­la­tion. The Baroque gui­tar’s tonal char­ac­ter­is­tics are much more del­i­cate, per­cus­sive, and lute-like. “The great­est music for baroque gui­tar is dif­fi­cult to ren­der ade­quate­ly on the mod­ern gui­tar because the tra­di­tions of the two instru­ments have diverged so wide­ly: They speak basi­cal­ly the same lan­guage, but with a dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lary and accent.” Ear­ly Renais­sance gui­tars had what is called a “four course” string arrange­ment, with eight dou­bled strings. The baroque gui­tar added one more for a “five course” instru­ment with nine strings.

Like its Renais­sance fore­bear, lutes, and mod­ern twelve-string gui­tars today, four of those “cours­es” were dou­bled, with pairs of strings tuned to the same note. This essen­tial­ly made it a five string gui­tar with the ring­ing sonor­i­ty of a man­dolin. In the video at the top, Bran­don Ack­er explains what this means in the­o­ry and prac­tice. The tun­ing was fair­ly close to a mod­ern six-string, but one octave up and miss­ing the low E. The lone high E string was called the chanterelle or “singing string.”

Pop­u­lar main­ly in south­ern Europe, the Baroque gui­tar “may well have been used as it fre­quent­ly is today,” the Lute Soci­ety points out: “to pro­vide a sim­ple strummed accom­pa­ni­ment for a singer or small group.” It was first held in con­tempt by ear­ly Span­ish com­posers who pre­ferred the sim­i­lar vihuela. But the gui­tar would dis­place that instru­ment, as well as the lute, in musi­cal com­po­si­tions across Spain, Italy, France and else­where in Europe.

In the videos above, you can see and hear some fine demon­stra­tions from Ack­er, who plays peri­od pieces like Suite in D Minor by Robert de Visée, court com­pos­er and musi­cian for Louis XIV and Louis XV. Below, see gui­tarist Ste­fano Maio­rana play a gor­geous Span­ish piece.

Giv­en the 400 years that sep­a­rate the mod­ern gui­tar from its Baroque ances­tor, the resem­blances are remark­able, prov­ing that the instrument’s 17th cen­tu­ry refin­ers hit on a design that per­fect­ly com­ple­ments the human voice, sounds great solo and in groups, and can han­dle both rhythm and lead. Even if most gui­tars in the future dou­ble as midi-con­trol­ling synth instru­ments, it’s prob­a­bly safe to say mod­ern music won’t give up this bril­liant, time-test­ed design any time soon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar: The Com­plete Three-Part Doc­u­men­tary

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar & Gui­tar Leg­ends: From 1929 to 1979

The Ency­clo­pe­dia Of Alter­nate Gui­tar Tun­ings

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

Are Stand-Up Comedians Our Modern Day Philosophers? Pretty Much Pop #17 Considers

In an age where the aver­age per­son can’t name a liv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic philoso­pher, it’s been claimed that the social role of an indi­vid­ual orat­ing to the mass­es and get­ting them to think about fun­da­men­tal ques­tions is actu­al­ly not per­formed by aca­d­e­mics at all, and cer­tain­ly not by politi­cians and reli­gious fig­ures who need to keep on mes­sage in one way or oth­er, but by stand-up come­di­ans.

This is the premise of the Mod­ern Day Philoso­phers pod­cast, where come­di­an Daniel Lobell inter­views some of our best known and loved comics. How­ev­er, as Daniel has dis­cov­ered in the course of that show, only some come­di­ans are try­ing to express orig­i­nal views on the world. Many are just try­ing to tell good jokes. So do the rou­tines of those more idea-based come­di­ans count as phi­los­o­phy? Or does telling the whole truth (instead of a fun­ny one-side or exag­ger­at­ed take on truth) rule out being fun­ny? 

Daniel joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er (of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life phi­los­o­phy pod­cast), actor Eri­ca Spyres, and sci-fi author/linguist Bri­an Hirt to con­sid­er ques­tions of authen­tic­i­ty and offen­sive humor.  We look at how philoso­phers and comics can use some of the same com­mu­nica­tive tools like invent­ing new words, irony, and auto­bi­og­ra­phy. We touch on Dave Chap­pelle, Bill Burr, Han­nah Gads­by, George Car­lin, Emo Phillips, Rod­ney Dan­ger­field, Louis CK, Between Two Ferns, Berke­ley, Socrates, Kierkegaard, and more.

A few sources:

Find out about Dan­ny’s pod­casts, graph­ic nov­el, album, and videos at dannylobell.com.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion (includ­ing some out-takes from the inter­view where we got too off-top­ic) that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

 

Frank Zappa’s Surreal Movie 200 Motels: The First Feature Film Ever Shot on Videotape (1971)

As a famous first, Frank Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels set a stan­dard for hun­dreds of wacky exper­i­men­tal, B‑movies to come. The first full-length film shot entire­ly on video­tape, the cheap alter­na­tive to film that had thus far been used pri­mar­i­ly for TV shows and news broad­casts, the movie exploit­ed the medium’s every pos­si­bil­i­ty. “If there is more that can be done with video­tape,” wrote Roger Ebert in his review at the time, “I do not want to be there when they do it.”

The movie is not only a “joy­ous, fanat­ic, slight­ly weird exper­i­ment in the uses of the col­or video­tape process”; it is also a visu­al encap­su­la­tion of Zappa’s most com­i­cal­ly juve­nile, most musi­cal­ly vir­tu­osic sen­si­bil­i­ties, with Ringo Star play­ing “Zap­pa as ‘a very large dwarf,’” the Moth­ers of Inven­tion play­ing them­selves, Kei­th Moon appear­ing as a nun, the Roy­al Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra tak­ing abuse from Zap­pa, and a series of row­dy, raunchy mis­ad­ven­tures piled one atop the oth­er.

“It assaults the mind with every­thing on hand,” Ebert both mar­veled and half-com­plained. “Video­tape report­ed­ly allowed Zap­pa to film the entire movie in about a week, to do a lot of the edit­ing and mon­tage in the cam­era and to use cheap video­tape for his final edit­ing before trans­fer­ring the whole thing to a sur­pris­ing­ly high-qual­i­ty 35mm image.” As the mak­ing-of doc­u­men­tary below notes, the movie was edit­ed with­out “the use of com­put­er facil­i­ties,” and its lay­ers of effects helped invent new aes­thet­ic forms which now feel quite famil­iar.

Hyper­ki­net­ic, sur­re­al­ist, and bizarre, 200 Motels is a mélange of ani­ma­tion, musi­cal per­for­mance, crude jokes, and “a kind of mag­i­cal mys­tery trip,” wrote Ebert, “through all the motels, con­cert halls, cities, states and groupies of a road tour.” It was not beloved by crit­ics then (though Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars) and still gets a mixed recep­tion. It may or may not be the “kind of movie you have to see more than once,” giv­en its full-on sen­so­ry assault.

But Zappa’s exper­i­men­tal tour de force is essen­tial view­ing for Zap­pa fans, and also for stu­dents of the video­tape aes­thet­ic that has become an almost clas­sic style in its own right. We can see in 200 Motels the roots of the music video—Zappa was a decade ahead of MTV—though, for bet­ter or worse, its “whim­si­cal­ly impen­e­tra­ble plot­line and absur­dist sub-Mon­ty Python humor,” as Ian Git­tens writes at The Guardian, “were met with wide­spread baf­fle­ment and it sank with­out a trace.”

In the 80s, how­ev­er, 200 Motels found new life in a for­mat that seemed well suit­ed to its look, VHS. Then it found a home on the inter­net, that Val­hal­la of ancient video of every kind. A tout­ed DVD boxset, it appears, will not be com­ing. (Seems the dis­trib­uter has been slapped with a “wind­ing up order” of some kind.) But you can find it on disc, “intact and with the cor­rect aspect ratio” as one hap­py review­er notes.

What­ev­er medi­um you hap­pen to watch 200 Motels on, your expe­ri­ence of it will very much depend on your tol­er­ance for Zappa’s brand of scat­o­log­i­cal satire. But if you’re will­ing to take Roger Ebert’s word for such things, you should try to see this odd­ball piece of movie his­to­ry at least once.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Frank Zap­pa Explains the Decline of the Music Busi­ness (1987)

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Frank Zappa’s Amaz­ing Final Con­certs: Prague and Budapest, 1991

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

How Monument Valley Became the Most Iconic Landscape of the American West

The Amer­i­can West has nev­er been a place so much as a con­stel­la­tion of events—incursion, set­tle­ment, seizure, war, con­tain­ment, and exter­mi­na­tion in one order or anoth­er. These bloody his­to­ries, san­i­tized and seen through anti-indige­nous ide­ol­o­gy, formed the back­drop for the Amer­i­can Western—a genre that depends for its exis­tence on cre­at­ing a con­vinc­ing sense of place.

But where most West­erns are sup­posed to be set—Colorado, Cal­i­for­nia, Texas, Kansas, or Montana—seems less impor­tant than that their scenery con­form to a stereo­type of what The West should look like. That image has, in film after film, been sup­plied by the tow­er­ing buttes of Mon­u­ment Val­ley. The Vox video above tells the sto­ry of how this par­tic­u­lar place became the sym­bol of the Amer­i­can West, begin­ning with the iron­ic fact that Mon­u­ment Val­ley isn’t actu­al­ly part of the U.S., but a trib­al park on the Nava­jo Nation reser­va­tion, inside the states of Utah and Ari­zona.

“For cen­turies, only Native Amer­i­cans, specif­i­cal­ly the Paiute and Nava­jo, occu­pied this remote land­scape, field­ing con­flicts with the U.S. gov­ern­ment.” That would change when set­tlers and sheep traders Har­ry and Leone “Mike” Gould­ing set up a trad­ing post right out­side Nava­jo ter­ri­to­ry on the Utah side. Gould­ing tried tire­less­ly to attract tourists to Mon­u­ment Val­ley dur­ing the Great Depres­sion but didn’t get any trac­tion until he took pho­tos of the land­scape to Hol­ly­wood.

The movie world imme­di­ate­ly saw poten­tial, and West­ern direct­ing leg­end John Ford chose the stun­ning loca­tion for his 1939 film Stage­coach. It would be the first of scores of films shot in Mon­u­ment Val­ley and the ori­gin of cin­e­mat­ic iconog­ra­phy now insep­a­ra­ble from our idea of the rugged Amer­i­can West. The land­scape, and Ford’s vision, ele­vat­ed the West­ern from low-bud­get pulp to “one of Hollywood’s most pop­u­lar gen­res for the next 20 years.”

Pho­to by Dsdugan, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Stage­coach pro­vid­ed the “break­out role for Amer­i­can icon John Wayne” (who once declared that Native peo­ple “self­ish­ly tried to keep their land” for them­selves and thus deserved to be dis­pos­sessed.) And just as Wayne became the face of the West­ern hero, Mon­u­ment Val­ley became the cen­tral icon of its mythos. Ford used Mon­u­ment Val­ley sev­en more times in his films, most notably in The Searchers, set in Texas, wide­ly praised as one of the best West­erns ever made.

Ford’s final film to fea­ture the land­scape takes place all over the coun­try, appro­pri­ate­ly, giv­en its title, How the West Was Won. Its all-star cast, includ­ing Wayne, sold this major 1962 epic, mar­ket­ed with the tagline “24 great stars in the might­i­est adven­ture ever filmed.” But it wouldn’t have been a true West­ern at that point, or not a true John Ford West­ern, with­out Mon­u­ment Val­ley as one of its many land­scapes. The imagery may have become cliché, but “clichés are use­ful for sto­ry­telling,” sig­nal­ing to audi­ences “what kind of sto­ry this is.”

From Stage­coach to Marl­boro Ads to Thel­ma and Louise to The Lego Movie to the Cohen Broth­ers’ com­ic clas­sic West­ern trib­ute The Bal­lad of Buster Scrug­gs, the image of Mon­u­ment Val­ley has become short­hand for free­dom, adven­ture, and the risks of the fron­tier. But like oth­er icon­ic places in oth­er for­bid­ding land­scapes around the world, the myth of Mon­u­ment Val­ley cov­ers over the his­tor­i­cal and present-day strug­gles of real peo­ple. We get a lit­tle bit of that sto­ry in the Vox explain­er, but most­ly we learn how Mon­u­ment Val­ley became an end­less­ly repeat­ing “back­drop” that “could be any­where in the West.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

The Great Train Rob­bery: Where West­erns Began

John Wayne: 26 Free West­ern Films Online

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

Peruvian Scholar Writes & Defends the First Thesis Written in Quechua, the Main Language of the Incan Empire

We hear many trag­ic sto­ries of dis­ap­pear­ing indige­nous lan­guages, their last native speak­ers dying out, and the sym­bol­ic and social worlds embed­ded in those lan­guages going with them, unless they’re record­ed (or recov­ered) by his­to­ri­ans and archived in muse­ums. Such report­ing, sad but nec­es­sary, can some­times obscure the mil­lions of liv­ing indige­nous lan­guage speak­ers who suf­fer from sys­temic neglect around the world.

The sit­u­a­tion is begin­ning to change. The UN has called 2019 the Year of Indige­nous Lan­guages, not only to raise aware­ness of the loss of lan­guage diver­si­ty, but also to high­light the world’s con­tin­ued lin­guis­tic rich­ness. A 2015 World Bank report esti­mat­ed that 560 dif­fer­ent lan­guages are spo­ken in Latin Amer­i­ca alone.

The South Amer­i­can lan­guage Quechua—once a pri­ma­ry lan­guage of the Incan empire—claims one of the high­est num­ber of speak­ers: 8 mil­lion in the Andean region, with 4 mil­lion of those speak­ers in Peru. Yet, despite con­tin­ued wide­spread use, Quechua has been labeled endan­gered by UNESCO. “Until recent­ly,” writes Frances Jen­ner at Latin Amer­i­can Reports, “the Peru­vian gov­ern­ment had few lan­guage preser­va­tion poli­cies in place.”

“In 2016 how­ev­er, TV Perú intro­duced a Quechua-lan­guage dai­ly news pro­gram called Ñuqanchik mean­ing ‘All of us,’ and in Cus­co, the lan­guage is start­ing to be taught in some schools.” Now, Peru­vian schol­ar Rox­ana Quispe Col­lantes has made his­to­ry by defend­ing the first doc­tor­al the­sis writ­ten in Quechua, at Lima’s 468-year old San Mar­co Uni­ver­si­ty. Her project exam­ines the Quechuan poet­ry of 20th cen­tu­ry writer Alen­cas­tre Gutiér­rez.

Col­lantes began her the­sis pre­sen­ta­tion with a tra­di­tion­al thanks­giv­ing cer­e­mo­ny,” writes Naveen Razik at NITV News, “and pre­sent­ed her study titled Yawar Para (Blood Rain),” the cul­mi­na­tion of sev­en years spent “trav­el­ing to remote com­mu­ni­ties in the moun­tain­ous Canas region” to “ver­i­fy the words and phras­es used in Gutiérrez’s works.” The exam­in­ers asked her ques­tions in Quechua dur­ing the near­ly two hour exam­i­na­tion, which you can see above.

The project rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant per­son­al achieve­ment for Col­lantes who “grew up speak­ing Quechua with her par­ents and grand­par­ents in the Aco­mayo dis­trict of Cus­co,” reports The Guardian. Col­lante’s work also rep­re­sents a step for­ward for the sup­port of indige­nous lan­guage and cul­ture, and the recog­ni­tion of Quechua in par­tic­u­lar. The lan­guage is foun­da­tion­al to South Amer­i­can cul­ture, giv­ing Spanish—and English—words like puma, con­dor, lla­ma, and alpaca.

But it is “rarely—if ever—heard on nation­al tele­vi­sion or radio sta­tions.” Quechua speak­ers, about 13% of Peru­vians, “are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly rep­re­sent­ed among the country’s poor with­out access to health ser­vices.” The stig­ma attached to the lan­guage has long been “syn­ony­mous with dis­crim­i­na­tion” and “social rejec­tion” says Hugo Coya, direc­tor of Peru’s tele­vi­sion and radio insti­tute and the “dri­ving force” behind the new Quechua news pro­gram.

Col­lantes’ work may be less acces­si­ble to the aver­age Quechua speak­er than TV news, but she hopes that it will make major cul­tur­al inroads towards greater accep­tance. “I hope my exam­ple will help to reval­ue the lan­guage again and encour­age young peo­ple, espe­cial­ly young women, to fol­low my path, “she says. “My great­est wish is for Quechua to become a neces­si­ty once again. Only by speak­ing it can we revive it.” Maybe in part due to her exten­sive efforts, UNESCO can take Quechua off its list of 2,860 endan­gered lan­guages.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

The Atlas of Endan­gered Alpha­bets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Pre­serve Writ­ing Sys­tems That May Soon Dis­ap­pear

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

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

The Beauty of Degraded Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wobbly VHS & Other Analog-Media Imperfection

“What­ev­er you find weird, ugly, or nasty about a medi­um will sure­ly become its sig­na­ture,” writes Bri­an Eno in his pub­lished diary A Year with Swollen Appen­dices. “CD dis­tor­tion, the jit­ter­i­ness of dig­i­tal video, the crap sound of 8‑bit — all these will be cher­ished as soon as they can be avoid­ed.” Eno wrote that in 1995, when dig­i­tal audio and video were still cut­ting-edge enough to look, sound, and feel not quite right yet. But when DVD play­ers hit the mar­ket not long there­after, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to watch movies in flaw­less dig­i­tal clar­i­ty, few con­sumers with the means hes­i­tat­ed to make the switch from VHS. Could any of them have imag­ined that we’d one day look back on those chunky tapes and their wob­bly, mud­dy images with fond­ness?

Any­one with much expe­ri­ence watch­ing Youtube has sensed the lengths to which its cre­ators go in order to delib­er­ate­ly intro­duce into their videos the visu­al and son­ic arti­facts of a pre-dig­i­tal age, from VHS col­or bleed and film-sur­face scratch­es to vinyl-record pops and tape hiss. “Why do we grav­i­tate to the flaws that we’ve spent more than a cen­tu­ry try­ing to remove from our media?” asks Noah Lefevre, cre­ator of the Youtube chan­nel Poly­phon­ic, in his video essay “The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Media.” He finds exam­ples every­where online, even far away from his plat­form of choice: take the many faux-ana­log fil­ters of Insta­gram, an app “built around arti­fi­cial­ly adding in the blem­ish­es and dis­col­orations that dis­ap­peared with the switch to dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy.”

Lefevre even traces human­i­ty’s love of degrad­ed media to works and forms of art long pre­dat­ing the inter­net: take now-mono­chro­mat­ic ancient Greek stat­ues, which “were orig­i­nal­ly paint­ed with bold, bright col­ors, but as the paints fad­ed, the art took on a new mean­ing. The pure white seems to car­ry an immac­u­late beau­ty to it that speaks to our per­cep­tion of Greek philoso­phies and myths cen­turies lat­er.” He likens what he and oth­er dig­i­tal-media cre­ators do today to a kind of reverse kintsu­gi, the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art of repair­ing bro­ken pot­tery with con­spic­u­ous gold and sil­ver seams: “Instead of fill­ing in flaws in imper­fect objects, we’re cre­at­ing arti­fi­cial flaws in per­fect objects.” Whether we’re stream­ing video essays and vapor­wave mix­es or watch­ing VHS tapes and spin­ning vinyl records, “we want our media to feel lived in.”

Or as Eno puts it, we want to hear “the sound of fail­ure.” And we’ve always want­ed to hear it: “The dis­tort­ed gui­tar is the sound of some­thing too loud for the medi­um sup­posed to car­ry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emo­tion­al cry too pow­er­ful for the throat that releas­es it. The excite­ment of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excite­ment of wit­ness­ing events too momen­tous for the medi­um assigned to it.” This leads into advice for artists, some­thing that Eno — who has made as much use of delib­er­ate imper­fec­tion in his role as a pro­duc­er for acts like U2 and David Bowie as he has in his own music and visu­al art — has long excelled at giv­ing: “When the medi­um fails con­spic­u­ous­ly, and espe­cial­ly if it fails in new ways, the lis­ten­er believes some­thing is hap­pen­ing beyond its lim­its.” It was true of art in the 90s, and it’s even truer of art today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

When Mistakes/Studio Glitch­es Give Famous Songs Their Per­son­al­i­ty: Pink Floyd, Metal­li­ca, The Breed­ers, Steely Dan & More

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

How Com­put­ers Ruined Rock Music

Kintsu­gi: The Cen­turies-Old Japan­ese Craft of Repair­ing Pot­tery with Gold & Find­ing Beau­ty in Bro­ken Things

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

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.

The Paintings of Miles Davis: Discover Visual Art Inspired by Kandinsky, Basquiat, Picasso, and Joni Mitchell

Few artists have lived as many cre­ative life­times as Miles Davis did in his 65 years, con­tin­u­ing to evolve even after his death with the posthu­mous release of a lost album Rub­ber­band ear­li­er this year. The album’s cov­er, fea­tur­ing an orig­i­nal paint­ing by Davis him­self, may have turned fans on to anoth­er facet of the composer/bandleader/trumpeter’s artis­tic evolution—his career as a visu­al artist, which he began in earnest just a decade before his 1991 death.

“Dur­ing the ear­ly 1980s,” writes Tara McGin­ley at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Davis “made cre­at­ing art as much a part of his life as mak­ing music…. He was said to have worked obses­sive­ly each day on art when he wasn’t tour­ing and he stud­ied reg­u­lar­ly with New York painter Jo Gel­bard.” Nev­er one to do any­thing by half-mea­sures, Davis turned out can­vas after can­vas, though he didn’t exhib­it much in his life­time.

He paint­ed main­ly for him­self. “It’s like ther­a­py for me,” he said, “and keeps my mind occu­pied with some­thing pos­i­tive when I’m not play­ing music.” Being the intim­i­dat­ing Miles Davis, how­ev­er, it wasn’t exact­ly easy for him to find artis­tic peers with whom he could com­mune. When he first approached Gel­bard, the artist says, “I was scared to death! I could bare­ly speak.”

The two lived in the same New York build­ing and Gel­bard even­tu­al­ly relaxed enough to give Davis lessons, then lat­er became his girl­friend, col­lab­o­rat­ing with him on work like the cov­er of the 1989 album Amand­la. As she char­ac­ter­izes his style:

The way Miles paint­ed was not the way he played or the way he sketched. He was so min­i­mal and light-hand­ed in his sound, in his walk. His body was very light; he was a slight man, a del­i­cate kind of guy. His sketch­es are light and airy and min­i­mal, but when he took his brush and paint, he was dead­ly – he was like a child with paints in kinder­garten. He would pour it on and mix it until it got too mud­dy and over-paint. He just loved the tex­ture and the feel. It got all over his clothes and his hands and his hair and it was just fun for him…

Miles also found a peer in fel­low painter Joni Mitchell. She describes how he called her one day and said, “Joni, I like that paint­ing that you did. Nice col­ors. I want to come over and watch you paint.” Davis, her musi­cal hero, wouldn’t record with her (though she found out lat­er that he owned all her records). “He would talk paint­ing but he wouldn’t talk music with me.”

Davis’ paint­ings are rough and expres­sion­is­tic, a coun­ter­point to the for­mal dis­ci­pline of his music. (McGin­ley suc­cinct­ly describes them as a “sharp, bold and mas­cu­line mix­ture of Kandin­sky, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Picas­so and African trib­al art”.) He didn’t make inroads in the art world, but paint­ing did become “a prof­itable side­line,” not­ed the L.A. Times in ’89. Friends and fel­low musi­cians like Lionel Richie and Quin­cy Jones bought his work. “A mag­a­zine called Du in Zurich bought some of my sketch­es for a spe­cial edi­tion they’re putting out on me,” he said.

In 2013, a hard­cov­er edi­tion of his col­lect­ed paint­ings appeared, with a fore­word by Jones, per­haps the most avid of Miles Davis col­lec­tors. There are many oth­er voic­es in the book, includ­ing author Steve Gutterman—who inter­viewed Davis before his death and writes an introduction—and var­i­ous fam­i­ly mem­bers who con­tribute per­son­al sto­ries. Miles sums up his own “refresh­ing­ly unpre­ten­tious atti­tude” toward his art­work in one brief state­ment: “It ain’t that seri­ous.”

Pick up a copy of Miles Davis: The Col­lect­ed Art­work here.

Note: This post updates mate­r­i­al that first appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

Hear a 65-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Miles Davis’ Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jazz Albums

Lis­ten to The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970

The Influ­ence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visu­al­iza­tion: For His 90th Birth­day Today

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


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