Watch the Last Time Peter Tork (RIP) & The Monkees Played Together During Their 1960s Heyday: It’s a Psychedelic Freakout

Peter Tork died yes­ter­day at age 77. You might not have heard the news over the deaf­en­ing alarms in your social media feeds late­ly. But a mut­ed response is also note­wor­thy because of the way Tork’s fame implod­ed at the end of the six­ties, at a time when he might have become the kind of rock star he and his fel­low Mon­kees had proved they could become, all on their own, with­out the help of any stu­dio trick­ery, thanks very much. The irony of mak­ing this bold state­ment with a fea­ture film was not lost on the band at all.

The film was Head, co-writ­ten and co-pro­duced by Jack Nichol­son, who appears along­side the Mon­kees, Teri Garr, Annette Funi­cel­lo, Frank Zap­pa, Son­ny Lis­ton, Jer­ry Lee Lewis, Fats Domi­no, and Lit­tle Richard, among many oth­er famous guest stars and musi­cians. Den­nis Hop­per and Toni Basil pop up, and the sound­track, large­ly writ­ten and played by the band, is a tru­ly groovy psych rock mas­ter­piece and their last album to fea­ture Tork until a reunion in the mid-80s.

Head was a weird, cyn­i­cal, embit­tered, yet bril­liant, attempt to tor­pe­do every­thing the Mon­kees had been to their fans—teen pop idols and goofy Bea­t­les rip-offs at a time when The Bea­t­les had maybe got­ten too edgy for some folks. And while it may have tak­en too much of a toll on the band, espe­cial­ly Tork, for them to recov­er, it’s clear that they had an absolute blast mak­ing both the movie and the record, even as their pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ships col­lapsed.

Tork’s best song­writ­ing con­tri­bu­tion to Head, and maybe to the Mon­kees cat­a­log on the whole, is “Can You Dig It,” a med­i­ta­tion on “it” that takes what might have been cheap hip­ster appro­pri­a­tion in a funky, pseu­do-deep, vague­ly East­ern direc­tion free of guile—it’s light and breezy, like the Mon­kees, but also sin­is­ter and slinky, like Dono­van or the folk rock of Bri­an Jones, and also spi­dery and jan­g­ly like Roger McGuinn. In the esti­ma­tion of many a psy­che­del­ic rock fan, this is music that deserves a place beside its obvi­ous influ­ences. That Mon­kees fans could not dig it at the time only reflects poor­ly on them, but since some of them were fans of what they thought was a slap­stick com­e­dy troupe or a back­up act for dreamy Davy Jones, they can hard­ly be blamed.

Cast as the Ringo of the gang (The Mon­kees and Head direc­tor Bob Rafel­son com­pared him to Har­po Marx), Tork brought to it a sim­i­lar­ly seri­ous whim­sy, and when he was final­ly allowed to show what he could do—both as a musi­cian and a songwriter—he more than acquit­ted him­self. Where Ringo mas­tered idiot savant one-lin­ers, Tork excelled in the kind of oblique riffs that char­ac­ter­ized his playing—he was the least tal­ent­ed vocal­ist in the band, but the most tal­ent­ed musi­cian and the only one allowed to play on the band’s first two records. Tork played bass, gui­tar, key­boards, ban­jo, harp­si­chord, and oth­er instru­ments flu­ent­ly. He honed his craft, and his “lov­able dum­my” per­sona on Green­wich Vil­lage cof­fee­house stages.

It’s not hard to argue that the Mon­kees rose above their TV ori­gins to become bona fide pop stars with the song­writ­ing and pro­mo­tion­al instincts to match, but Head, both film and album, make them a band worth revis­it­ing for all sorts of oth­er rea­sons. Now a wide­ly-admired cult clas­sic, in 1968, the movie “sur­faced briefly and then sank like a cos­tumed dum­my falling into a Cal­i­for­nia canal,” writes Petra May­er at NPR, in ref­er­ence to Head’s first scene, in which Micky Dolenz appears to com­mit sui­cide. If the Mon­kees had been try­ing in earnest to do the same to their careers, they couldn’t have had more suc­cess. Head cost $750,000 and made back $16,000. “It was clear they were in free fall,” Andy Greene writes at Rolling Stone.

“After that deba­cle,” writes Greene, they could have tried a return to the orig­i­nal for­mu­la to recoup their loss­es, but instead “they decid­ed to dou­ble down on psy­che­del­ic insan­i­ty” in an NBC tele­vi­sion spe­cial, 33⅓ Rev­o­lu­tions per Mon­kee, green­light­ed that year after the huge chart suc­cess of “Day­dream Believ­er.” Tork had already announced that he was leav­ing the band as the cam­eras rolled on the very loose­ly plot­ted vari­ety show. He stuck around till the end of film­ing, how­ev­er, and played the last live per­for­mance with The Mon­kees for almost 20 years in the bang-up finale of “Lis­ten to the Band” (top) which “quick­ly devolves into a wild psy­che­del­ic freak­out crammed with guest stars.” Tork, behind the keys, first turns the down­beat Neil Young-like, Nesmith-penned tune into the rave-up it becomes. It’s a glo­ri­ous send-off for a ver­sion of the Mon­kees peo­ple weren’t ready to hear in ’68.

via Rolling Stone

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Frank Zap­pa Play Michael Nesmith on The Mon­kees (1967)

Jimi Hen­drix Opens for The Mon­kees on a 1967 Tour; Then After 8 Shows, Flips Off the Crowd and Quits

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

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

Has the Voynich Manuscript Finally Been Decoded?: Researchers Claim That the Mysterious Text Was Written in Phonetic Old Turkish

There are still sev­er­al ancient lan­guages mod­ern schol­ars can­not deci­pher, like Minoan hiero­glyph­ics (called Lin­ear A) or Khipu, the intri­cate Incan sys­tem of writ­ing in knots. These sym­bols con­tain with­in them the wis­dom of civ­i­liza­tions, and there’s no telling what might be revealed should we learn to trans­late them. Maybe schol­ars will only find account­ing logs and inven­to­ries, or maybe entire­ly new ways of per­ceiv­ing real­i­ty. When it comes, how­ev­er, to a sin­gu­lar­ly inde­ci­pher­able text, the Voyn­ich Man­u­script, the lan­guage it con­tains encodes the wis­dom of a soli­tary intel­li­gence, or an obscure, her­mitic com­mu­ni­ty that seems to have left no oth­er trace behind.

Com­posed around the year 1420, the 240-page man­u­script appears to be in dia­logue with medieval med­ical and alchem­i­cal texts of the time, with its zodi­acs and illus­tra­tions botan­i­cal, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, and anatom­i­cal. But its script only vague­ly resem­bles known Euro­pean lan­guages.

So it has seemed for the 300 years dur­ing which schol­ars have tried to solve its rid­dles, assum­ing it to be the work of mys­tics, magi­cians, witch­es, or hoax­ers. Its lan­guage has been var­i­ous­ly said to come from Latin, Sino-Tibetan, Ara­bic, and ancient Hebrew, or to have been invent­ed out of whole cloth. None of these the­o­ries (the Hebrew one pro­posed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence) has proven con­clu­sive.

Maybe that’s because everyone’s got the basic approach all wrong, see­ing the Voynich’s script as a writ­ten lan­guage rather than a pho­net­ic translit­er­a­tion of speech. So says the Ardiç fam­i­ly, a father and sons team of Turk­ish researchers who call them­selves Ata Team Alber­ta (ATA) and claim in the video above to have “deci­phered and trans­lat­ed over 30% of the man­u­script.” Father Ahmet Ardiç, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer by trade and schol­ar of Turk­ish lan­guage by pas­sion­ate call­ing, claims the Voyn­ich script is a kind of Old Tur­kic, “writ­ten in a ‘poet­ic’ style,” notes Nick Pelling at the site Cipher Mys­ter­ies, “that often dis­plays ‘phone­mic orthog­ra­phy,’” mean­ing the author spelled out words the way he, or she, heard them.

Ahmet noticed that the words often began with the same char­ac­ters, then had dif­fer­ent end­ings, a pat­tern that cor­re­sponds with the lin­guis­tic struc­ture of Turk­ish. Fur­ther­more, Ozan Ardiç informs us, the lan­guage of the Voyn­ich has a “rhyth­mic struc­ture,” a for­mal, poet­ic reg­u­lar­i­ty. As for why schol­ars, and com­put­ers, have seen so many oth­er ancient lan­guages in the Voyn­ich, Ahmet explains, “some of the Voyn­ich char­ac­ters are also used in sev­er­al pro­to-Euro­pean and ear­ly Semit­ic lan­guages.” The Ardiç fam­i­ly will have their research vet­ted by pro­fes­sion­als. They’ve sub­mit­ted a for­mal paper to an aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nal at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty.

Their the­o­ry, as Pelling puts it, may be one more “to throw onto the (already blaz­ing) hearth” of Voyn­ich spec­u­la­tion. Or it may turn out to be the final word on the trans­la­tion. Promi­nent Medieval schol­ar Lisa Fagin Davis, head of the Medieval Acad­e­my of America—who has her­self cast doubt on anoth­er recent trans­la­tion attempt—calls the Ardiçs’ work “one of the few solu­tions I’ve seen that is con­sis­tent, is repeat­able, and results in sen­si­cal text.”

We don’t learn many specifics of that text in the video above, but if this effort suc­ceeds, and it seems promis­ing, we could see an author­i­ta­tive trans­la­tion of the Voyn­ich, though there will still remain many unan­swered ques­tions, such as who wrote this strange, some­times fan­tas­ti­cal man­u­script, and to what end?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

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

Hear the First Musical Composition Created by a Computer: The Illiac Suite (1956)

Think “Gen­er­a­tive Music” and what may come to mind is Bri­an Eno, push­ing a but­ton and let­ting music flow from his stu­dio com­put­er. But the idea is much old­er than that.

The “Illi­ac Suite” from 1952 is named after the cash-reg­is­ter-look­ing ILLIAC com­put­er on which it was com­posed, and is one of the first exam­ples of bring­ing com­put­er pro­gram­ming into the task of cre­at­ing music with­in some well defined para­me­ters. The result­ing score was then played by humans. You can hear the first exper­i­ment above.

The pro­gram­mers were Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaac­son, who met at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Urbana-Cham­pagne, where the ILLIAC com­put­er was built. Inter­est­ing­ly, Hiller con­sid­ered him­self a chemist first, a com­pos­er sec­ond. He had stud­ied clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion under Mil­ton Bab­bitt and, even while work­ing at DuPont labs in Vir­ginia, was com­pos­ing string quar­tets and vocal works. Bab­bitt and oth­er teach­ers had encour­aged him to keep com­pos­ing even while he turned to chem­istry. Per­haps they knew that the art and the sci­ence would dove­tail?

Because indeed they did. While work­ing on the ILLIAC, Hiller real­ized that the method­ol­o­gy he was using in chem­istry prob­lems were the same as those used by com­posers, and decid­ed to exper­i­ment. Isaac­son would help pro­gram the new com­put­er.

The first exper­i­ment sounds the most tra­di­tion­al, the most like Bach. The two cre­at­ed sim­ple rules: a melody that only used notes with­in an octave, har­monies that tend­ed towards the major and the minor with no dis­so­nance, and a few oth­er para­me­ters.

The sec­ond exper­i­ment fea­tured four-voice polypho­ny with slight­ly more com­plex rules. The third exper­i­ment is where it gets inter­est­ing, and starts to sound very “mod­ern,” very Pen­derec­ki. Here Hiller and Isaac­son tried to intro­duce rhythm and dynam­ics, although admit­ted­ly they had to shape a lot of the deci­sions out­side the pro­gram and intro­duce some cor­rec­tive algo­rithms.

The fourth and final exper­i­ment was to then replace the “musi­cal” rules of the first three with rules from non-musi­cal dis­ci­plines, and to show that a score could be cre­at­ed from pret­ty much any­thing. Hiller and Isaac­son used Markov Chains to com­pose the final more repet­i­tive and puls­ing piece. (Markov Chains are beyond the scope of this arti­cle, but we encounter them when Google ranks search results or when our iPhones pre­dict what we are going to type next.)

The first three scores were then per­formed by mem­bers of the University’s stu­dent orches­tra in August of 1956 while the fourth was being com­plet­ed. The fin­ished works caught the inter­est of Vladimir Ussachevsky, who would set up the influ­en­tial Colum­bia-Prince­ton Elec­tron­ic Music Cen­ter in New York City and begin releas­ing his own com­po­si­tions the fol­low­ing year.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Christ­mas Car­ols Made by Alan Turing’s Com­put­er: Cut­ting-Edge Ver­sions of “Jin­gle Bells” and “Good King Wences­las” (1951)

Hear the First Record­ing of Com­put­er Gen­er­at­ed Music: Researchers Restore Music Pro­grammed on Alan Turing’s Com­put­er (1951)

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

A Huge Anthol­o­gy of Noise & Elec­tron­ic Music (1920–2007) Fea­tur­ing John Cage, Sun Ra, Cap­tain Beef­heart & More

Peefeey­atko: A Look Inside the Cre­ative World of Frank Zap­pa

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

23 Million Patrons of California’s Public Libraries Can Now Read The New York Times for Free Online

More and more, you can get access to valu­able elec­tron­ic resources through your friend­ly local library. In the past, we’ve men­tioned how any­one with a New York Pub­lic Library card can get free access to thou­sands of ebooks, more than 30,000 movies (includ­ing many clas­sics from the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion), and even suits and brief­cas­es for job inter­views.

Many pub­lic libraries also now give patrons access to Kanopy, the provider of high-qual­i­ty doc­u­men­taries, indie and clas­sic films. Take for exam­ple this col­lec­tion of clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary Ger­man films.

Now con­sid­er this: The New York Times announced this week that near­ly 1,200 pub­lic libraries across Cal­i­for­nia will offer their 23 mil­lion patrons free access to the New York Times online. They write:

California’s 23 mil­lion library card hold­ers in the state may access NYTimes.com by vis­it­ing nytimes.com/register on a library com­put­er, or on their own device while con­nect­ed to the library’s Wi-Fi. Library card hold­ers can access nytimes.com from any­where through their library’s web­site.” Res­i­dents with­out a library card may vis­it their local branch to apply for one. The pro­gram will also include month­ly events at select library branch­es.

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it this page. And if you know of oth­er great deals offered by pub­lic libraries, please men­tion them in the com­ments sec­tion below.

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!

via David Beard

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Down­load 300,000 eBooks

New York­ers Can Now Stream 30,000 Free Movies, Includ­ing the Entire Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, with Their Library Cards

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Down­load 300,000 eBooks

Stream 48 Clas­sic & Con­tem­po­rary Ger­man Films Free Online: From Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis to Mar­garethe von Trotta’s Han­nah Arendt

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The History of Ancient Greece in 18 Minutes: A Brisk Primer Narrated by Brian Cox

Ancient Greece nev­er exist­ed. Before you click away, fear­ing a tru­ly brazen attempt at his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism, let’s put that state­ment in con­text. Ancient Greece “was no state with an estab­lished bor­der or cap­i­tal, but rather a mul­ti­tude of dis­tinct and com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent cities.” So says the video above, “Ancient Greece in 18 Min­utes,” which makes his­tor­i­cal cor­rec­tions — and often humor­ous ones — to that and a vari­ety of oth­er com­mon mis­per­cep­tions about per­haps the main civ­i­liza­tions to give rise to West­ern cul­ture as we know it.

“We might think we already know every­thing about Ancient Greece,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, actor Bri­an Cox. “The Parthenon, the 300 Spar­tans, and blind Home­r’s Ili­ad and Odyssey are famil­iar to all, yet there were far more than 300 Spar­tans, the Parthenon was actu­al­ly built as a kind of cen­tral bank, and no such uni­fied state as ancient Greece, with Athens as its cap­i­tal, ever exist­ed.”

Some of our unwar­rant­ed intel­lec­tu­al con­fi­dence about Ancient Greece sure­ly comes from the movies that draw on its his­to­ry and its sto­ries, such as the com­ic-book Bat­tle of Ther­mopy­lae drama­ti­za­tion 300 or, a cou­ple years ear­li­er, Troy, which deliv­ered Home­r’s Ili­ad in true Hol­ly­wood fash­ion — with Cox him­self as Agamem­non, com­man­der of the unit­ed Greek forces in the Tro­jan War.

That nine-year long siege, of course, fig­ures into “Ancient Greece in 18 Min­utes” as one of its most impor­tant episodes. The oth­er chap­ters cov­er the Cre­to-Myce­naean era that pre­ced­ed Ancient Greece, the bar­bar­ian attacks that plunged the region into a 400-year dark age, the Archa­ic Peri­od that saw the begin­ning of Greece’s far-flung agri­cul­ture-dri­ven col­o­niza­tion, the rise of the famous Athens and Spar­ta, the Grae­co-Per­sian Wars (as seen, in a sense, in 300), the Gold­en Age of Athens (the age of the con­struc­tion of the Parthenon, with­out which “the Greek clas­sics would­n’t have exist­ed at all: no sculp­ture, dra­ma, phi­los­o­phy”), the Pelo­pon­nesian War, and the time of Alexan­der the Great.

Alexan­der the Great died young in 323 BC, and Ancient Greece as we con­ceive of it today is thought not to have sur­vived him. But in anoth­er sense, it not only sur­vived but thrived: the Romans con­quered Greece in 146 BC, but “Greek cul­ture was vic­to­ri­ous even here: spread by the Romans, it final­ly con­quered the world. Romans began to read The Ili­ad and Odyssey in Greek, fol­lowed by the Greek New Tes­ta­ment.” (You can find out much more about the Romans in the same cre­ators’ video “Ancient Rome in 20 Min­utes.”) When in 330 the Roman emper­or Con­stan­tine built his new cap­i­tal on the site of the Greek colony of Byzan­tium, he start­ed the Byzan­tine Empire, “which extend­ed the life of Greek cul­ture anoth­er thou­sand years.” This left a for­mi­da­ble cul­tur­al lega­cy of its own — includ­ing, as this Russ­ian-made video makes a spe­cial point of telling us, “the weird Russ­ian alpha­bet.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

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

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

Con­cepts of the Hero in Greek Civ­i­liza­tion (A Free Har­vard Course)

The Gold­en Age of Ancient Greece Gets Faith­ful­ly Recre­at­ed in the New Video Game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

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 History of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Minutes: A Primer Narrated by Brian Cox

Two thou­sand years ago, Rome was half the world. A thou­sand years before that, it was “a tiny trib­al set­tle­ment of the Latins by the riv­er Tiber.” So, what hap­pened? An awful lot. But nar­ra­tor Bri­an Cox makes the his­to­ry and longevi­ty of Ancient Rome seem sim­ple in 20 min­utes in the Arza­mas video above, which brings the same tal­ent for nar­ra­tive com­pres­sion as we saw in an ear­li­er video we fea­tured with Cox describ­ing the his­to­ry of Russ­ian Art.

This is a far more sprawl­ing sub­ject, but it’s one you can absorb in 20 min­utes, if you’re sat­is­fied with very broad out­lines. Or, like one YouTube com­menter, you can spend six hours, or more, paus­ing for read­ing and research after each morsel of infor­ma­tion Cox toss­es out. The sto­ry begins with trade—cultural and economic—between the Latins and the Etr­uscans to the north and Greeks to the south. Rome grows by adding pop­u­la­tions from all over the world, allow­ing migrants and refugees to become cit­i­zens.

Indeed, the great Roman epic, the Aeneid, relates its found­ing by refugees from Troy. From these begin­nings come mon­u­men­tal inno­va­tions in build­ing and engi­neer­ing, as well as an alpha­bet that spread around the world and a lan­guage that spawned dozens of oth­ers. The Roman numer­al sys­tem, an unwieldy way to do math­e­mat­ics, nonethe­less gave to the world the stateliest means of writ­ing num­bers. Rome gets the cred­it for these gifts to world civ­i­liza­tion, but they orig­i­nat­ed with the Etr­uscans, along with famed Roman mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline and style of gov­ern­ment.

After Tar­quin, the last Roman king, com­mit­ted one abuse too many, the Repub­lic began to form, as did new class divides. Plebs fought Patri­cians for expand­ed rights, Sen­a­tus Pop­u­lusque Romanus (SPQR)—the sen­ate and the peo­ple of Rome—expressed an ide­al of uni­ty and polit­i­cal equal­i­ty, of a sort. An age of impe­r­i­al war ensues, con­quered peo­ples are osten­si­bly made allies, not colo­nials, though they are also made slaves and sup­ply the legions with “a nev­er end­ing sup­ply of recruits.”

These sketch­es of major cam­paigns you may remem­ber from your World Civ class: The Punic Wars with Carthage, and their com­man­der Han­ni­bal, con­duct­ed under the mot­to of Cato, the sen­a­tor who beat the drums of war by repeat­ing Cartha­go delen­da est—Carthage must be destroyed. The con­quer­ing of Corinth and the absorp­tion of Alexander’s Hel­lenist empire into Rome.

The sto­ry of the Empire resem­bles that of so many oth­ers: tales of hubris, fero­cious bru­tal­i­ty, geno­cide, and end­less build­ing. But it is also a sto­ry of polit­i­cal genius, in which, grad­u­al­ly, those peo­ples brought under the ban­ners of Rome by force were giv­en cit­i­zen­ship and rights, ensur­ing their loy­al­ty. Rel­a­tive peace—within the bor­ders of Rome, at least—could not hold, and the Repub­lic implod­ed in civ­il wars and the ruina­tion of a slave econ­o­my and extreme inequal­i­ty.

The wealthy gob­bled up arable land. The tri­bunes of the peo­ple, the Grac­chi broth­ers, sug­gest­ed a redis­tri­b­u­tion scheme. The sen­a­tors respond­ed with force, killing thou­sands. Two mass-mur­der­ing con­quer­ing gen­er­als, Pom­pey and Julius Cae­sar, fought over Rome. Cae­sar crossed the Rubi­con with his legions to take the city, assum­ing the title Imper­a­tor, a move that cost him his life.

But his mur­der didn’t stop the march of Empire. Under his nephew Augus­tus, a dic­ta­tor who called him­self a sen­a­tor, Rome spread, flour­ished, and estab­lished a 200-year Pax Romana, a time of thriv­ing arts and cul­ture, pop­u­lar enter­tain­ments, and a well-fed pop­u­lace.

Augus­tus had learned from the Grac­chi what nei­ther the venal sen­a­to­r­i­al class nor so many sub­se­quent emper­ors could. In order to rule effec­tive­ly, you’ve got to have the peo­ple on your side, or have them so dis­tract­ed, at least, by bread and cir­cus­es, that they won’t both­er to revolt. Watch the full video to learn about the next few hun­dred years, and learn more about Ancient Rome at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play Cae­sar: Trav­el Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Inter­ac­tive Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

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

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Barely Known, to Suddenly the Most Famous Painting in the World (1911)

Is the Mona Lisa real­ly “ten times bet­ter than every oth­er paint­ing”? No one seri­ous­ly believes this, and how would any­one mea­sure such a thing? There may be no such crit­i­cal scale, but there is a pop­u­lar one. The Lou­vre, where the famous Leonar­do da Vinci—maybe the most famous paint­ing of all time—hangs, says that 80 per­cent of its vis­i­tors come just to see the Mona Lisa. Her enig­mat­ic smile adorns mer­chan­dise the world wide. Books, essays, doc­u­men­taries, songs, cof­fee mugs—hers may be the most rec­og­niz­able face in West­ern art.

Learn in the Vox video above, how­ev­er, how that fame came about as the result of a dif­fer­ent kind of publicity—coverage of the Mona Lisa theft in 1911. It became an overnight sen­sa­tion. “Before its theft,” notes NPR, “the ‘Mona Lisa’ was not wide­ly known out­side the art world. Leonar­do da Vin­ci paint­ed it in 1507, but it was­n’t until the 1860s that crit­ics began to hail it as a mas­ter­work of Renais­sance paint­ing. And that judg­ment did­n’t fil­ter out­side a thin slice of French intel­li­gentsia.”

Though the paint­ing once hung in the bed­room of Napoleon, in the 19th cen­tu­ry, it “wasn’t even the most famous paint­ing in its gallery, let alone in the Lou­vre,” his­to­ri­an James Zug tells All Things Con­sid­eredWrit­ing at Vox, Phil Edwards describes how an essay by Vic­to­ri­an art crit­ic Wal­ter Pater ele­vat­ed the Mona Lisa among art crit­ics and intel­lec­tu­als like Oscar Wilde. His over­wrought prose “popped up in guide­books to the Lou­vre and read­ing clubs in Pad­u­c­ah.” Yet it was not art crit­i­cism that sold the paint­ing to the gen­er­al pub­lic. It was the intrigue of an art heist.

In 1911, an Ital­ian con­struc­tion work­er, Vin­cen­zo Peru­gia, was work­ing for the firm Cobier, engaged in putting sev­er­al paint­ings, includ­ing the Mona Lisa, under glass. While at the Lou­vre, he hatched a plan to steal the paint­ing with two accom­plices, broth­ers Vin­cen­zo and Michele Lancelot­ti. The crime was lit­er­al­ly noto­ri­ous overnight. The theft occurred on Mon­day morn­ing, August 21. By late Tues­day, the sto­ry had been picked up by major news­pa­pers all over the world.

Pablo Picas­so and poet Guil­laume Apol­li­naire went on tri­al for the theft (their case was dis­missed). Con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries popped up all over the place, claim­ing, as per usu­al, that the whole thing was a hoax or a dis­trac­tion engi­neered by the French gov­ern­ment. “Want­ed posters for the paint­ing appeared on Parisian walls,” Zug writes at Smith­son­ian. “Crowds massed at police head­quar­ters. Thou­sands of spec­ta­tors, includ­ing Franz Kaf­ka, flood­ed the Salon Car­ré when the Lou­vre reopened after a week to stare at the emp­ty wall with its four lone­ly iron hooks.”

Once the paint­ing was restored, the crowds kept com­ing. News­pa­per pho­tos and police posters gave way to t‑shirts and mousepa­ds. The paint­ing’s undoubt­ed excel­lence seemed inci­den­tal; it became, like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, famous for being famous. Learn more about the Mona Lisa’s long strange trip through his­to­ry in the short Great Big Sto­ry video above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Mona Lisa Self­ie: A Mon­tage of Social Media Pho­tos Tak­en at the Lou­vre and Put on Insta­gram

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

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

Haruki Murakami Announces an Archive That Will House His Manuscripts, Letters & Collection of 10,000+ Vinyl Records

Image by wakari­m­a­sita, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It has become the norm for notable writ­ers to bequeath doc­u­ments relat­ed to their work, and even their per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence, to an insti­tu­tion that promis­es to main­tain it all, in per­pe­tu­ity, in an archive open to schol­ars. Often the insti­tu­tion is locat­ed at a uni­ver­si­ty to which the writer has some con­nec­tion, and the case of the Haru­ki Muraka­mi Library at Toky­o’s Wase­da Uni­ver­si­ty is no excep­tion: Muraka­mi grad­u­at­ed from Wase­da in 1975, and a dozen years lat­er used it as a set­ting in his break­through nov­el Nor­we­gian Wood.

That book’s por­tray­al of Wase­da betrays a some­what dim view of the place, but Muraka­mi looks much more kind­ly on his alma mater now than he did then: he must, since he plans to entrust it with not just all his papers but his beloved record col­lec­tion as well. If you want­ed to see that col­lec­tion today, you’d have to vis­it him at home. “I exchanged my shoes for slip­pers, and Muraka­mi took me upstairs to his office,” writes Sam Ander­son, hav­ing done just that for a 2011 New York Times Mag­a­zine pro­file of the writer. “This is also, not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, the home of his vast record col­lec­tion. (He guess­es that he has around 10,000 but says he’s too scared to count.)”

Hav­ing announced the plans for Waseda’s Muraka­mi Library at the end of last year, Muraka­mi can now rest assured that the count­ing will be left to the archivists. He hopes, he said at a rare press con­fer­ence, “to cre­ate a space that func­tions as a study where my record col­lec­tion and books are stored.” In his own space now, he explained, he has “a col­lec­tion of records, audio equip­ment and some books. The idea is to cre­ate an atmos­phere like that, not to cre­ate a repli­ca of my study.” Some of Murakami’s stat­ed moti­va­tion to estab­lish the library comes out of con­vic­tions about the impor­tance of “a place of open inter­na­tion­al exchanges for lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture” and “an alter­na­tive place that you can drop by.” And some of it, of course, comes out of prac­ti­cal­i­ty: “After near­ly 40 years of writ­ing, there is hard­ly any space to put the doc­u­ments such as man­u­scripts and relat­ed arti­cles, whether at my home or at my office.”

“I also have no chil­dren to take care of them,” Muraka­mi added, “and I didn’t want those resources to be scat­tered and lost when I die.” Few of his count­less read­ers around the world can imag­ine that day com­ing any time soon, turn 70 though Muraka­mi did last month, but many are no doubt mak­ing plans even now for a trip to the Wase­da cam­pus to see what shape the Muraka­mi Library takes dur­ing the writer’s life­time, espe­cial­ly since he plans to take an active role in what goes on there. “Muraka­mi is also hop­ing to orga­nize a con­cert fea­tur­ing his col­lec­tion of vinyl records,” notes The Vinyl Fac­to­ry’s Gabriela Helfet. Until he does, you can have a lis­ten to the playlists, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, of 96 songs from his nov­els and 3,350 from his record col­lec­tion — but you’ll have to recre­ate the atmos­phere of his study your­self for now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A 26-Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Lat­est Nov­el, Killing Com­menda­tore

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Vinyl Col­lec­tion and His Strange Lit­er­ary Worlds

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Became a DJ on a Japan­ese Radio Sta­tion for One Night: Hear the Music He Played for Delight­ed Lis­ten­ers

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.

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