A Stand-Up Comedy Routine Discovered in a Medieval Manuscript: Monty Python Before Monty Python (1480)

in Books, Comedy, History, Literature | June 27th, 2023

A fun­ny thing hap­pened on the way to the 15th cen­tu­ry…

Dr. James Wade, a spe­cial­ist in ear­ly Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, was doing research at the Nation­al Library of Scot­land when he noticed some­thing extra­or­di­nary about the first of the nine mis­cel­la­neous book­lets com­pris­ing the Heege Man­u­script.

Most sur­viv­ing medieval man­u­scripts are the stuff of high art. The first part of the Heege Man­u­script is fun­ny.

The usu­al tales of romance and hero­ism, allu­sions to ancient Rome, lofty poet­ry and dra­mat­ic inter­ludes… even the dash­ing adven­tures of Robin Hood are con­spic­u­ous­ly absent.

Instead it’s awash with the sta­ples of con­tem­po­rary stand up com­e­dy — top­i­cal obser­va­tions, humor­ous over­shar­ing, roast­ing emi­nent pub­lic fig­ures, razz­ing the audi­ence, flat­ter­ing the audi­ence by bust­ing on the denizens of near­by com­mu­ni­ties, shag­gy dog tales, absur­di­ties and non-sequiturs.

Repeat­ed ref­er­ences to pass­ing the cup con­jure an open mic type sce­nario.

The man­u­script was cre­at­ed by cler­ic Richard Heege and entered into the col­lec­tion of his employ­ers, the wealthy Sher­brooke fam­i­ly.

Oth­er schol­ars have con­cen­trat­ed on the man­u­scrip­t’s phys­i­cal con­struc­tion, most­ly refrain­ing from com­ment on the nature of its con­tents.

Dr. Wade sus­pects that the first book­let is the result of Heege hav­ing paid close atten­tion to an anony­mous trav­el­ing minstrel’s per­for­mance, per­haps going so far as to con­sult the performer’s own notes.

Heege quipped that he was the author owing to the fact that he “was at that feast and did not have a drink” — mean­ing he was the only one sober enough to retain the min­strel’s jokes and inven­tive plot­lines.

Dr. Wade describes how the com­ic por­tion of the Heege Man­u­script is bro­ken down into three parts, the first of which is sure to grat­i­fy fans of Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail:

…it’s a nar­ra­tive account of a bunch of peas­ants who try to hunt a hare, and it all ends dis­as­trous­ly, where they beat each oth­er up and the wives have to come with wheel­bar­rows and hold them home. 

That hare turns out to be one fierce bad rab­bit, so much so that the tale’s pro­le­tar­i­an hero, the pro­saical­ly named Jack Wade, wor­ries she could rip out his throat.

Dr. Wade learned that Sir Wal­ter Scott, author of Ivan­hoe, was aware of The Hunt­ing of the Hare, view­ing it as a stur­dy spoof of high mind­ed romance, “stu­dious­ly filled with grotesque, absurd, and extrav­a­gant char­ac­ters.”

The killer bun­ny yarn is fol­lowed by a mock ser­mon  - If thou have a great black bowl in thy hand and it be full of good ale and thou leave any­thing there­in, thou puttest thy soul into greater pain —  and a non­sense poem about a feast where every­one gets ham­mered and chaos ensues.

Crowd-pleas­ing mate­r­i­al in 1480.

With a few 21st-cen­tu­ry tweaks, an enter­pris­ing young come­di­an might wring laughs from it yet.

(Pag­ing Tyler Gun­ther, of Greedy Peas­ant fame…)

As to the true author of these rou­tines, Dr. Wade spec­u­lates that he may have been a “pro­fes­sion­al trav­el­ing min­strel or a local ama­teur per­former.” Pos­si­bly even both:

A ‘pro­fes­sion­al’ min­strel might have a day job and go gig­ging at night, and so be, in a sense, semi-pro­fes­sion­al, just as a ‘trav­el­ling’ min­strel may well be also ‘local’, work­ing a beat of near­by vil­lages and gen­er­al­ly known in the area. On bal­ance, the texts in this book­let sug­gest a min­strel of this vari­ety: some­one whose mate­r­i­al includes sev­er­al local place-names, but also whose mate­r­i­al is made to trav­el, with the lack of deter­mi­na­cy designed to com­i­cal­ly engage audi­ences regard­less of spe­cif­ic locale.

Learn more about the Heege Man­u­script in  Dr. Wade’s arti­cle, Enter­tain­ments from a Medieval Minstrel’s Reper­toire Book in The Review of Eng­lish Stud­ies.

Leaf through a dig­i­tal fac­sim­i­le of the Heege Man­u­script here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nose­wise, Gar­lik, Have­g­ood­day & More

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

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

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Watch Footage of Claude Monet Painting in His Famous Garden at Giverny (1915)

in Art, Film, History | June 26th, 2023

What could be more charm­ing­ly idyl­lic than a glimpse of snowy-beard­ed Impres­sion­ist Claude Mon­et calm­ly paint­ing en plein-air in his gar­den at Giverny?

A wide-brimmed hat and two lux­u­ri­ous­ly large patio-type umbrel­las pro­vide shade, while the artist stays cool in a pris­tine white suit.

His can­vas is off cam­era for the most part, but giv­en the coor­di­nates, it seems safe to assume the subject’s got some­thing to do with the famous Japan­ese foot­bridge span­ning Monet’s equal­ly famous lily pond.

The sun’s still high when he puts down his cat’s tongue brush and heads back to the house with his lit­tle dog at his heels, no doubt antic­i­pat­ing a deli­cious, relaxed lun­cheon.

Even in black-and-white, it’s an irre­sistible pas­toral vision!

And quite a con­trast to the recent scene some 300 km away in Ypres, where Ger­man troops weaponized chlo­rine gas for the first time, releas­ing it in the Allied trench­es the same year the above footage of Mon­et was shot.

Lendon Payne, a British sap­per, was an eye­wit­ness to some of the may­hem:

When the gas attack was over and the all clear was sound­ed I decid­ed to go out for a breath of fresh air and see what was hap­pen­ing. But I could hard­ly believe my eyes when I looked along the bank. The bank was absolute­ly cov­ered with bod­ies of gassed men. Must have been over 1,000 of them. And down in the stream, a lit­tle bit fur­ther along the canal bank, the stream there was also full of bod­ies as well. They were grad­u­al­ly gath­ered up and all put in a huge pile after being iden­ti­fied in a place called Hos­pi­tal Farm on the left of Ypres.  And whilst they were in there the ADMS came along to make his report and whilst he was siz­ing up the sit­u­a­tion a shell burst and killed him.

The ear­ly days of the Great War are what spurred direc­tor Sacha Gui­try, seen chat­ting with Mon­et above, to vis­it the 82-year-old artist as part of his 22-minute silent doc­u­men­tary, Ceux de Chez Nous (Those of Our Land).

The entire project was an act of resis­tance.

With Ger­man intel­lec­tu­als trum­pet­ing the supe­ri­or­i­ty of Ger­man­ic cul­ture, the Russ­ian-born Gui­t­ry, a suc­cess­ful actor and play­wright, sought out audi­ences with aging French lumi­nar­ies, to pre­serve for future gen­er­a­tions.

In addi­tion to Mon­et, these include appear­ances by painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, sculp­tor Auguste Rodin, writer Ana­tole France, com­pos­er Camille Saint-Saens, and actor Sarah Bern­hardt.

Although Ceux de Chez Nous was silent, Gui­t­ry care­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed the con­tent of each inter­view, revis­it­ing them in 1952 for the expand­ed ver­sion with com­men­tary, below.


Beneath his placid exte­ri­or, Mon­et, too, was quite con­sumed by the hor­rors unfold­ing near­by.

James Payne, cre­ator of the web series Great Art Explained, views Monet’s final eight water lily paint­ings as a “direct response to the most sav­age and apoc­a­lyp­tic peri­od of mod­ern history…a war memo­r­i­al to the mil­lions of lives trag­i­cal­ly lost in the First World War.”


In 1914, Mon­et wrote that while paint­ing helped take his mind off “these sad times” he also felt “ashamed to think about my lit­tle research­es into form and colour while so many peo­ple are suf­fer­ing and dying for us.”

As cura­tor Ann Dumas notes in RA Mag­a­zine:

The peace of his gar­den was some­times shat­tered by the sound of gun­fire from the bat­tle­fields only 50 kilo­me­tres away. His step­son was fight­ing at the front and his own son Michel was called up in 1915. Many of the inhab­i­tants of Giverny fled to safe­ty but Mon­et stayed behind: “…if those sav­ages must kill me, it will be in the mid­dle of my can­vas­es, in front of all my life’s work.” Paint­ing was what he did and he saw it, in a way, as his patri­ot­ic con­tri­bu­tion. A group of paint­ings of the weep­ing wil­low, a tra­di­tion­al sym­bol of mourn­ing, was Monet’s most imme­di­ate response to the war, the tree’s long, sweep­ing branch­es hang­ing over the water, an elo­quent expres­sion of grief and loss.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

1540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

Why Mon­et Paint­ed The Same Haystacks 25 Times

Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Mon­et to Paint His Final Mas­ter­pieces & Cre­ate “the World’s First Art Instal­la­tion”

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

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Watch Mall City, the Original Gonzo Documentary That Captures the Height of Shopping-Mall Culture (1983)

in Film, History | June 26th, 2023

No Amer­i­can who came of age in the nine­teen-eight­ies — or in most of the sev­en­ties or nineties, for that mat­ter — could pre­tend not to under­stand the impor­tance of the mall. Edi­na, Min­neso­ta’s South­dale Cen­ter, which defined the mod­ern shop­ping mal­l’s enclosed, depart­ment store-anchored form, opened in 1956. Over the decades that fol­lowed, liv­ing pat­terns sub­ur­ban­ized and devel­op­ers respond­ed by plung­ing into a long and prof­itable orgy of mall-build­ing, with the result that gen­er­a­tions of ado­les­cents lived in rea­son­ably easy reach of such a com­mer­cial insti­tu­tion. Some came to shop and oth­ers came to work, but if Hugh Kin­niburgh’s doc­u­men­tary Mall City is to be believed, most came just to “hang out.”

Intro­duced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City con­sists of inter­views con­duct­ed by Kin­niburgh and his NYU Film School col­lab­o­ra­tors dur­ing one day in 1983 at the Roo­sevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, their inter­vie­wees tend to be young, stren­u­ous­ly coiffed, and dressed with stud­ied non­cha­lance in striped T‑shirts and Mem­bers Only-style wind­break­ers.

A trip to the mall could offer them a chance to expand their wardrobe, or at the very least to cal­i­brate their fash­ion sense. You go to the mall, says one styl­ish young lady, “to see what’s in, what’s out,” and thus to devel­op your own style. “You look for ideas,” as the inter­view­er sum­ma­rizes it, “and then recom­bine them in your own way, try to be orig­i­nal.”

One part of the val­ue propo­si­tion of the mall was its shops; anoth­er, larg­er part was the pres­ence of so many oth­er mem­bers of your demo­graph­ic. In explain­ing why they come to the mall, some teenagers dis­sim­u­late less than oth­ers: “It’s like, where the cool peo­ple are at,” says one girl, with notable forth­right­ness. “You’re fakin’ this all. I mean, you’re just tryin’ to meet peo­ple.” Kin­niburgh and his crew chat with a group of bare­ly ado­les­cent-look­ing boys — each and every one smok­ing a cig­a­rette — about what encoun­ter­ing girls has to do with the time they spend hang­ing out at the mall. One answers with­out hes­i­ta­tion: “That’s the main rea­son.” (Yet these labors seem often to have borne bit­ter fruit: as one for­mer employ­ee and cur­rent hang­er-out puts it, “Mall rela­tion­ships don’t last.”)

Opened just two months after South­dale Cen­ter, Roo­sevelt Field is actu­al­ly one of Amer­i­ca’s most ven­er­a­ble shop­ping malls. (It also pos­sess­es unusu­al archi­tec­tur­al cred­i­bil­i­ty, hav­ing been designed by none oth­er than I. M. Pei.) By all appear­ances, it also man­aged to recon­sti­tute cer­tain func­tions of a gen­uine urban social space — or at least it did forty years ago, at the height of “mall cul­ture.” Asked for his thoughts on that phe­nom­e­non, one post-hip­pie type describes it as “prob­a­bly the wave of the future. Maybe the end of the future, the way things are going.” Here in that future, we speak of shop­ping malls as decrepit, even van­ish­ing relics of a lost era, one with its own pri­or­i­ties, its own folk­ways, even its own accents. Could such a vari­ety of pro­nun­ci­a­tions of the very word “mall” still be heard on Long Island? Clear­ly, fur­ther field­work is required.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Col­or Footage of America’s First Shop­ping Mall Open­ing in 1956: The Birth of a Beloved and Reviled Insti­tu­tion

Feel Strange­ly Nos­tal­gic as You Hear Clas­sic Songs Reworked to Sound as If They’re Play­ing in an Emp­ty Shop­ping Mall: David Bowie, Toto, Ah-ha & More

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Punks, Goths, and Mods on TV (1983)

Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers: Hear 90 Hours of Back­ground Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Hey­day

The Walk­man Turns 40: See Every Gen­er­a­tion of Sony’s Icon­ic Per­son­al Stereo in One Minute

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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An Animated Introduction to the Avant-Garde Music of John Cage

in History, Music | June 23rd, 2023

We all know music when we hear it — or at least we think we do — but how, exact­ly, do we define it? “Imag­ine you’re in a jazz club, lis­ten­ing to the rhyth­mic honk­ing of horns,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above. “Most peo­ple would agree that this is music. But if you were on the high­way, hear­ing the same thing, many would call it noise.” Yet the clos­er we get to the bound­ary between music and noise, the less clear it gets. The com­pos­er John Cage, to whose work this video pro­vides an intro­duc­tion, spent his long career in those very bor­der­lands: he “glee­ful­ly dared lis­ten­ers to ques­tion the bound­aries between music and noise, as well as sound and silence.”

The best-known exam­ple of this larg­er endeav­or is “4’33”,” Cage’s 1952 “solo piano piece con­sist­ing of noth­ing but musi­cal rests for four min­utes and thir­ty-three sec­onds.” Though known as a “silent” com­po­si­tion, it actu­al­ly makes its lis­ten­ers focus on all the inci­den­tal sounds around them: “Could the open­ing and clos­ing of a piano lid be music? What about the click of a stop­watch? The rustling, and per­haps even the com­plain­ing, of a crowd?”

A few years lat­er, he implic­it­ly asked sim­i­lar ques­tions about what does and does not count as music to tele­vi­sion view­ers across Amer­i­ca by per­form­ing “Water Walk” —  whose instru­ments includ­ed “a bath­tub, ice cubes, a toy fish, a pres­sure cook­er, a rub­ber duck, and sev­er­al radios” — on CBS’ I’ve Got a Secret.

Many who watched that broad­cast in 1960 would have asked the same ques­tion: “Is this even music?” This may have well have been the out­come for which Cage him­self hoped. “Like the white can­vas­es of his paint­ing peers” in that same era, his work “asked the audi­ence to ques­tion their expec­ta­tions about what music was.” As he explored more and more deeply into the ter­ri­to­ry of uncon­ven­tion­al meth­ods of instru­men­ta­tion, nota­tion, and per­for­mance, he drift­ed far­ther and far­ther from the com­poser’s tra­di­tion­al task: “to orga­nize sound in time for a spe­cif­ic inten­tion­al pur­pose.” Sev­en decades after “4’33”,” some still insist that John Cage’s work isn’t music — but then, some say the same about Ken­ny G.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stream a Free 65-Hour Playlist of John Cage Music and Dis­cov­er the Full Scope of His Avant-Garde Com­po­si­tions

Watch John Cage Play His “Silent” 4’33” in Har­vard Square, Pre­sent­ed by Nam June Paik (1973)

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

John Cage Per­forms “Water Walk” on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)

An Impres­sive Audio Archive of John Cage Lec­tures & Inter­views: Hear Record­ings from 1963–1991

How to Get Start­ed: John Cage’s Approach to Start­ing the Dif­fi­cult Cre­ative Process

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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Is Coffee Good for You?: A Coffee Connoisseur Reviews the Scientific Research

in Food & Drink, Health | June 23rd, 2023

Accord­ing to NPR, “Caf­feine is the most wide­ly con­sumed drug in the world. Here in the U.S., accord­ing to a 2022 sur­vey, more than 93% of adults con­sume caf­feine, and of those, 75% con­sume caf­feine at least once a day.” Giv­en the preva­lence of cof­fee world­wide, it pays to ask a sim­ple ques­tion: Is cof­fee good for you? Above, James Hoff­mann, the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, pro­vides an overview of research exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ship between cof­fee and var­i­ous dimen­sions of health, includ­ing the gut/microbiome, sleep, can­cer, cog­ni­tion, mor­tal­i­ty and more. If you want to explore this sub­ject more deeply, Hoff­mann has cre­at­ed a list of the research papers reviewed here.

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 

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

How Cof­fee Affects Your Brain: A Very Quick Primer

Why Cof­fee Naps Will Perk You Up More Than Either Cof­fee, or Naps, Alone

Paul Gia­mat­ti Plays Hon­oré de Balzac, Hopped Up on 50 Cof­fees Per Day

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Watch the Oldest Japanese Anime Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

in Animation, Film, History | June 22nd, 2023

In 1981, the philoso­pher Mary Midg­ley argued against cul­tur­al rel­a­tivism in an arti­cle titled “Try­ing Out One’s New Sword.” In it, she makes ref­er­ence to “a verb in clas­si­cal Japan­ese which means ‘to try out one’s new sword on a chance way­far­er.’ (The word is tsu­ji­giri, lit­er­al­ly ‘cross­roads-cut.’) A samu­rai sword had to be tried out because, if it was to work prop­er­ly, it had to slice through some­one at a sin­gle blow, from the shoul­der to the oppo­site flank. Oth­er­wise, the war­rior bun­gled his stroke. This could injure his hon­or, offend his ances­tors, and even let down his emper­or.” Those of us who feel unable to con­demn this prac­tice due to cul­tur­al dis­tance have fall­en vic­tim, in Midg­ley’s view, to “moral iso­la­tion­ism.”

One could object to Midg­ley’s use of this par­tic­u­lar exam­ple: the his­tor­i­cal record does­n’t sug­gest that tsu­ji­giri was ever com­mon prac­tice, and cer­tain­ly not that it was approved of by the wider soci­ety of feu­dal Japan. About half a cen­tu­ry after the abo­li­tion of the samu­rai class in the eigh­teen-sev­en­ties, how­ev­er, it does seem to have become the stuff of com­e­dy.

This is evi­denced by The Dull Sword (なまくら刀), a 1917 short film by Japan­ese ani­ma­tor Jun’ichi Kōuchi. When its luck­less ronin pro­tag­o­nist buys the tit­u­lar weapon and attempts to try it out, he ends up defeat­ed by his unsus­pect­ing would-be vic­tim, a blind flute-play­ing beg­gar. (He has no bet­ter luck after night­fall, as shown in a final sequence in sil­hou­ette rem­i­nis­cent of the work of Lotte Reiniger.)

Upon its redis­cov­ery in an Osa­ka antique shop fif­teen years ago, The Dull Sword became the old­est sur­viv­ing exam­ple of what we now know as ani­me. Aes­thet­i­cal­ly, it resem­bles a news­pa­per com­ic strip come to life, much as, after the advent of tele­vi­sion, more ambi­tious pro­duc­tions would adapt the look and feel of full-scale man­ga books. Ani­me has devel­oped and expand­ed immense­ly over the past cen­tu­ry, but it still — at least in cer­tain of its sub­gen­res — retains a pen­chant for tak­ing acts of vio­lence and thor­ough­ly styl­iz­ing them, in the process often ren­der­ing them com­ic or even iron­ic. You could say The Dull Sword, despite its mod­est scale, does all of that at once. And how­ev­er dif­fer­ent its time and place are from ours, we can nev­er­the­less laugh at the fate that befalls its bungling anti­hero.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

How to Be a Samu­rai: A 17th Cen­tu­ry Code for Life & War

The Aes­thet­ic of Ani­me: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tra­di­tion of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Watch the First Chi­nese Ani­mat­ed Fea­ture Film, Princess Iron Fan, Made Under the Strains of WWII (1941)

A Vin­tage Short Film about the Samu­rai Sword, Nar­rat­ed by George Takei (1969)

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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When David Bowie Starred in The Elephant Man on Broadway (1980)

in Theatre | June 22nd, 2023

Joseph Mer­rick, one of the most severe­ly deformed indi­vid­u­als record­ed in med­ical his­to­ry, would hard­ly seem like the role David Bowie was born to play. The lat­ter looked and act­ed as if des­tined for nine­teen-sev­en­ties rock star­dom; the for­mer so hor­ri­fied his fel­low Vic­to­ri­ans that he was exhib­it­ed under the name “The Ele­phant Man.” But what­ev­er their out­ward dif­fer­ences, these Eng­lish­men did both know fame, a con­di­tion Bowie rued along­side John Lennon in 1975. Yet in the fol­low­ing years he con­tin­ued to expand his pub­lic pro­file, not least by turn­ing to act­ing, and even came off as a viable movie star in Nico­las Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth — not that play­ing a frag­ile but mag­net­ic vis­i­tor from anoth­er world would have been much of a stretch.

In fact, it was The Man Who Fell to Earth that con­vinced the­ater direc­tor Jack Hof­siss to offer Bowie the lead in The Ele­phant Man, Bernard Pomer­ance’s play about the life of Joseph Mer­rick (referred to, in the script, as John Mer­rick). Hof­siss sus­pect­ed that Bowie “would under­stand Mer­rick­’s sense of oth­er­ness and alien­ation,” writes Loud­er’s Bill DeMain; he may or may not have known that Bowie’s expe­ri­ence study­ing mime, of which he made plen­ty of use in his con­certs, would place him well to evoke the char­ac­ter’s mis­shapen body.

The Ele­phant Man explic­it­ly calls for no pros­thet­ic make­up; begin­ning with David Schofield, who starred in its first pro­duc­tions, all the actors play­ing Joseph Mer­rick have had to embody him with their act­ing skills alone.

You can see how Bowie did it in clips above. “I got a call with­in two weeks of hav­ing to go over and start rehearsal,” his web site quotes him as say­ing. “So I went to the Lon­don Hos­pi­tal and went to the muse­um there. Found the plas­ter casts of the bits of Merrick’s body that were inter­est­ing to the med­ical pro­fes­sion and the lit­tle church that he’d made, and his cap and his cloak.” These arti­facts gave him enough suf­fi­cient sense of “the gen­er­al atmos­phere” of Mer­rick­’s life and times to make the role his own by the time of his first per­for­mances in Den­ver and Chica­go in the sum­mer of 1980. “Advance word on Bowie’s per­for­mance was encour­ag­ing, with box office records bro­ken at the the­aters in both cities,” writes DeMain; The Ele­phant Man soon made it to Broad­way, open­ing at the Booth The­atre in the fall.

It was there, in Decem­ber of 1980, that Mark David Chap­man saw Bowie play Mer­rick, just two nights before he assas­si­nat­ed Lennon — and he also had anoth­er tick­et, in the front row, for the very next night’s show. “John and Yoko were sup­posed to sit front-row for that show too,” said Bowie, “so the night after John was killed there were three emp­ty seats in the front row. I can’t tell you how dif­fi­cult it was to go on. I almost did­n’t make it through the per­for­mance.” Hav­ing been num­ber two on Chap­man’s hit list sure­ly did its part to inspire Bowie’s deci­sion to recuse him­self from live per­for­mance — to stop dis­play­ing him­self for a liv­ing, as the char­ac­ter of Joseph Mer­rick would have put it — for the next few years. But it was only the ear­ly eight­ies, and Bowie could hard­ly have known that his real heights of fame, for bet­ter or worse, were yet to come.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Film Role, a Short Hor­ror Flick Called The Image (1967)

David Bowie’s Mys­ti­cal Appear­ances in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

The Thin White Duke: A Close Study of David Bowie’s Dark­est Char­ac­ter

How Nico­las Roeg (RIP) Used David Bowie, Mick Jag­ger & Art Gar­funkel in His Mind-Bend­ing Films

David Bowie Per­forms “Life on Mars?” and “Ash­es to Ash­es” on John­ny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (1980)

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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The Tarot Card Deck Created by Salvador Dalí

in Art | June 21st, 2023

The Tarot has long been a tool of char­la­tans. But it has also long been embraced by bril­liant, uncon­ven­tion­al thinkers, many of whom them­selves have a touch of the char­la­tan about them (and who would just as like­ly admit it with a smile). William But­ler Yeats was a fan, as is vision­ary Chilean film­mak­er, artist, writer, and psy­cho­naut Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, who has record­ed his own Youtube series explain­ing his take on this clas­sic mode of div­ina­tion. With its arche­typ­al sym­bol­ism, the Tarot’s appeal to artists should be obvi­ous. Most of them, like Jodor­owsky, find far more inter­est­ing uses for it than for­tune-telling. “You must not talk about the future,” Jodor­owsky tells us in his series, “the future is a con. The tarot is a lan­guage that talks about the present.”

What might anoth­er vision­ary artist, Sal­vador Dalí, think of Jodorowsky’s Tarot inter­pre­ta­tions? We’ll nev­er know, but I sus­pect he would find them enchant­i­ng. Not only do the two seem like kin­dred spir­its, but Dalí devot­ed some part of his life to the Tarot, design­ing his own deck in the 70s.

Ini­tial­ly, the project arrived as a com­mis­sion from pro­duc­er Albert Broc­coli for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. “Like­ly inspired by his wife Gala, who nur­tured his inter­est in mys­ti­cism,” writes Chicago’s Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, “Dalí eager­ly got to work, and con­tin­ued the project of his own accord when the con­trac­tu­al deal fell through.”

It was just around this time that the Tarot saw a mas­sive resur­gence in pop­u­lar­i­ty. The occult inter­ests of the 60s coun­ter­cul­ture were main­streamed in the 70s thanks to books like Stu­art Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and For­tune Telling. But while Dalí had chan­neled the vivid psy­che­delia of the age in an ear­li­er illus­tra­tion project, 1969’s Alice and Won­der­land, his Tarot deck, writes Lisa Rain­wa­ter at Galo mag­a­zine, “actu­al­ly shows reserve. Yes, reserve—as if his rev­er­ence for the tarot near­ly hum­bles him.” His knack for “fanat­i­cal self-pro­mo­tion” does get the bet­ter of him even­tu­al­ly: he choos­es his own face to rep­re­sent the Magi­cian (above).

Over­all, the deck com­bines the eclec­tic ori­gins of occult prac­tices with Dalí’s own unmis­tak­able sen­si­bil­i­ty. Dalí’s Tarot is “a pas­tiche of old-world art, sur­re­al­ism, kitsch, Chris­t­ian iconog­ra­phy and Greek and Roman sculp­ture. Many of his recur­ring motifs such as the rose, the fly and the bull’s head are found through­out the deck.” First pub­lished in a lim­it­ed edi­tion in 1984—and reis­sued since in edi­tions by TASCHEN and in book form by oth­er pub­lish­ers—the deck includ­ed an intro­duc­to­ry book­let that reads, in Span­ish, Eng­lish, and French:

The Wiz­ard (Arcanum I), Sal­vador Dalí, has trans­formed with his excep­tion­al art and his mar­velous tal­ent the 78 gold­en plates of ‘The fab­u­lous book of Thot’ into as many artis­tic mar­vels, each one of them duly signed by the hand of this unmatch­able, inter­nal­ly famous painter … such an extra­or­di­nary artis­tic cre­ation does not detract, in any way, from the Tarot’s close sym­bol­ism. On the con­trary, it enhances with its cap­ti­vat­ing beau­ty, the Tarot’s eso­teric and plas­tic mean­ing.

See a pre­view video of the full Dalí deck above, pur­chase a lim­it­ed edi­tion set here, or a much more afford­able ver­sion here.

NOTE: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philip K. Dick Tarot Cards: A Tarot Deck Mod­eled After the Vision­ary Sci-Fi Writer’s Inner World

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

The Pulp Tarot: A New Tarot Deck Inspired by Mid­cen­tu­ry Pulp Illus­tra­tions

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

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How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread from 79 AD: A Video Introduction

in Food & Drink, History | June 21st, 2023

Ecce panis—try your hand at the kind of loaf that Mel Brooks’ 2000-year-old man might have sunk his teeth into. Lit­er­al­ly.

In 1930 a loaf of bread dat­ing to AD 79 (the year Vesu­vius claimed two pros­per­ous Roman towns) was exca­vat­ed from the site of a bak­ery in Her­cu­la­neum.

Eighty-three years lat­er, the British Muse­um invit­ed Lon­don chef Gior­gio Locatel­li, above, to take a stab at cre­at­ing an edi­ble fac­sim­i­le for its Pom­peii Live exhi­bi­tion.

The assign­ment wasn’t as easy as he’d antic­i­pat­ed, the telegenic chef con­fess­es before whip­ping up a love­ly brown miche that appears far more mouth-water­ing than the car­bonized round found in the Her­cu­la­neum oven.

His recipe could be mis­tak­en for mod­ern sour­dough, but he also has a go at sev­er­al details that speak to bread’s role in ancient Roman life:

Its perime­ter has a cord baked in to pro­vide for easy trans­port home. Most Roman homes were with­out ovens. Those who didn’t buy direct from a bak­ery took their dough to com­mu­ni­ty ovens, where it was baked for them overnight.

The loaf was scored into eight wedges. This is true of the 80 loaves found in the ovens of the unfor­tu­nate bak­er, Mod­es­tus. Locatel­li spec­u­lates that the wedges could be used as mon­e­tary units, but I sus­pect it’s more a busi­ness prac­tice on par with piz­za-by-the-slice.

(Nowa­days, Roman piz­za is sold by weight, but I digress.)

The crust bears a tell­tale stamp. Locatel­li takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to brand his with the logo of his Miche­lin-starred restau­rant, Locan­da Locatel­li. His inspi­ra­tion is stamped ‘Prop­er­ty of Cel­er, Slave of Q. Gra­nius Verus.’ To me, this sug­gests the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the bread was found in a com­mu­nal oven.

Locatel­li also intro­duces a Flintston­ian vision when he alludes to spe­cial­ly-devised labor-sav­ing machines to which Roman bak­ers yoked “ani­mals,” pre­sum­ably donkeys…or know­ing the Romans and their class sys­tem, slaves.

His pub­lished recipe is below.  Here is a con­ver­sion chart for those unfa­mil­iar with met­ric mea­sure­ments.

INGREDIENTS

400g biga aci­da (sour­dough)

12g yeast

18g gluten

24g salt

532g water

405g spelt flour

405g whole­meal flour

Melt the yeast into the water and add it into the biga. Mix and sieve the flours togeth­er with the gluten and add to the water mix. Mix for two min­utes, add the salt, and keep mix­ing for anoth­er three min­utes. Make a round shape with it and leave to rest for one hour. Put some string around it to keep its shape dur­ing cook­ing. Make some cuts on top before cook­ing to help the bread rise in the oven and cook for 30–45 min­utes at 200 degrees.

For an even more arti­sanal attempt (and extreme­ly detailed instruc­tions) check out the Arti­san Pom­peii Miche recipe on the Fresh Loaf bread enthu­si­ast com­mu­ni­ty.

True Roman bread for true Romans!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Cook Real Recipes from Ancient Rome: Ostrich Ragoût, Roast Wild Boar, Nut Tarts & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Hear a Recently-Discovered 12,000-Year-Old Flute That Musically Mimics the Sound of Raptor Calls

in History, Music | June 20th, 2023

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve fea­tured ancient wind instru­ments going back 9,000, 18,000, even 43,000 years. Just this month, archae­o­log­i­cal research has just added a new item to this ven­er­a­ble line­up: a set of 12,000-year-old flutes made from the bones of birds. “The instru­ments are among the old­est in the world and, accord­ing to the researchers, rep­re­sent the first to be found in the Lev­ant, the region that fos­tered the first stages of the Neolith­ic Rev­o­lu­tion approx­i­mate­ly 12,000 years ago,” writes Dis­cov­er’s Sam Wal­ters. They’re cre­ations of the Natu­fi­an civ­i­liza­tion, which “bridged the dif­fer­ence between the for­ag­ing of the Pale­olith­ic peri­od and the agri­cul­ture of the Neolith­ic,” and which was “the first to adopt a seden­tary lifestyle in the Lev­ant.”

The bones were unearthed in Eynan-Mal­la­ha, which is part of mod­ern-day north­ern Israel’s Hula Val­ley. It was “dur­ing a recent exam­i­na­tion of the arti­facts,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Tere­sa Nowakows­ki, that “sci­en­tists noticed that sev­en had strange fea­tures — like fin­ger holes and mouth­pieces — that would have allowed them to func­tion as musi­cal instru­ments.”

You can read in detail about the dis­cov­ery and study of these ancient instru­ments in the arti­cle pub­lished ear­li­er this month in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. Nowakows­ki quotes its co-author Tal Sim­mons as say­ing that “the sound they pro­duce is very sim­i­lar to that of two spe­cif­ic birds of prey that were hunt­ed by the peo­ple liv­ing at the site where they were dis­cov­ered, name­ly the kestrel and the spar­rowhawk.”

Only the most bird-ori­ent­ed among us could eas­i­ly imag­ine what that sounds like. But they’d sure­ly also be inter­est­ed to hear the Natu­fi­an flute itself, and how close­ly it, in fact, mim­ics those calls. The video above offers about a minute of the sound of a repli­ca, the cre­ation of which would have involved a con­sid­er­able amount of small-detail work, giv­en the tiny size of the bird bones from which the orig­i­nals were craft­ed. “Though there were plen­ty of big­ger bird bones pre­served at the site, which would have been bet­ter for turn­ing into instru­ments as well as for play­ing, the Natu­fi­ans specif­i­cal­ly select­ed small­er bones that pro­duced a screechy sound sim­i­lar to a bird of prey,” writes Wal­ters. They thus cre­at­ed a use­ful hunt­ing tool — but they also opened to their civ­i­liza­tion a whole new dimen­sion of music.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute — the World’s Old­est Playable Instru­ment — Get Played Again

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Hear the Sound Of Endan­gered Birds Get Turned Into Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear a Pre­his­toric Conch Shell Musi­cal Instru­ment Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

Google Uses Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Map Thou­sands of Bird Sounds Into an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

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 a 19th-Century Atlas of the United States, Designed for Blind Students (1837)

in Books, Education, Maps | June 20th, 2023

In 1835, the New Eng­land Insti­tu­tion for Edu­ca­tion of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a print­ing press.

Under the lead­er­ship of its first direc­tor, Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe, the press was cus­tomized in order to print in raised text that allowed blind and visu­al­ly impaired peo­ple to read unas­sist­ed.

Inclu­siv­i­ty was a prime moti­va­tor for Howe, who strove to make sure his stu­dents would not be “doomed to inequal­i­ty” or regard­ed as “mere objects of pity.”

After inves­ti­gat­ing Euro­pean tac­tile print­ing sys­tems, he devel­oped Boston Line Type, an embossed Roman alpha­bet that could be read with the fin­gers.

It eschewed flour­ish­es and cap­i­tal let­ters, but read­ing it required a lot of train­ing and even then, was like­ly to be slow going. Howe esti­mat­ed that read­ing it would take three times as long as a sight­ed per­son would take to read an equiv­a­lent amount of tra­di­tion­al­ly print­ed text.

Ulti­mate­ly it proved far less user-friend­ly than braille.

Text accom­pa­ny­ing the exhi­bi­tion Touch This Page! Mak­ing Sense of the Ways We Read, notes that braille had been in use in Great Britain and France for decades before being wide­ly adopt­ed in the US:

The amount of time and mon­ey that Perkins and oth­er Amer­i­can schools had invest­ed into Boston Line Type made them resis­tant to adopt­ing a new sys­tem. Boston Line Type was, how­ev­er, much hard­er to learn than braille, and only braille allowed indi­vid­u­als with visu­al impair­ments to read and write tac­tile­ly.

The school used its Boston Line Type press to pub­lish his­to­ry, gram­mar, and spelling books, as well as the New Tes­ta­ment, and a com­plete Bible.

After a vis­it to the school, Charles Dick­ens paid to have 250 Boston Line Type copies of his nov­el The Old Curios­i­ty Shop print­ed for dis­tri­b­u­tion to blind Amer­i­cans.

In light of Touch This Page!’s asser­tion that Boston Line Type’s print forms were “designed to be uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble rather than in those [print forms] most acces­si­ble to the touch”, we sus­pect that the school’s 1837 Atlas of the Unit­ed States offered its read­ers the best val­ue.

While there were many dense descrip­tive pas­sages in Boston Line Type to wade through, it also boast­ed embossed maps to ori­ent geog­ra­phy stu­dents with raised out­lines of each state.

Rivers were chart­ed as sol­id raised lines, while oceans were indi­cat­ed with par­al­lel lines. Sets of tri­an­gles rep­re­sent­ed moun­tains.

Lon­gi­tudes, lat­i­tudes, and city loca­tions were also not­ed, but the pres­ence of neg­a­tive space gave blind and low vision stu­dents the oppor­tu­ni­ty to grasp infor­ma­tion quick­ly.

50 copies were print­ed, of which four sur­vive.

Explore the Atlas of the Unit­ed States Print­ed for the Use of the Blind here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Tac­tile Map of the Roman Empire: An Inno­v­a­tive Map That Allowed Blind & Sight­ed Stu­dents to Expe­ri­ence Geog­ra­phy by Touch (1888)

Please Touch the Art: Watch a Blind Man Expe­ri­ence His Own Por­trait for the First Time

Braille Neue: A New Ver­sion of Braille That Can Be Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly Read by the Sight­ed and the Blind

Helen Keller Had Impec­ca­ble Hand­writ­ing: See a Col­lec­tion of Her Child­hood Let­ters

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

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