Europe’s Oldest Map: Discover the Saint-Bélec Slab (Circa 2150–1600 BCE)

in History, Maps | April 6th, 2023

Image by Paul du Châtellier, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1900, the French prehistorian Paul du Châtellier dug up from a burial ground a fairly sizable stone, broken but covered with engraved markings. Even after he put it back together, neither he nor anyone else could work out what the markings represented. “Some see a human form, others an animal one,” he wrote in a report. “Let’s not let our imagination get the better of us and let us wait for a Champollion to tell us what it says.” Champollion, as Big Think’s Frank Jacobs explains, was “the Egyptologist who in 1822 deciphered the hieroglyphics” — which he did with the aid of a more famous inscription-bearing piece of rock, the Rosetta Stone.

Still, the Saint-Bélec slab, as Châtellier’s discovery is now known, has attained a great deal of recognition in the more than 120 years since he unearthed it. But it did so relatively recently, after a long period of relative obscurity.

“In 1994, researchers revisiting du Châtellier’s original drawing found that the intricate markings on the stone looked a lot like a map,” writes Jacobs. “The stone itself, however, had gone missing.” Only in 2014 was it rediscovered in a cellar below the moat of the chateau in Saint-Germain-en-Laye once owned by du Châtellier, by which time it could be subjected to the kind of high-tech analysis unimagined in his lifetime.

Operating on the theory that the artifact was indeed created as a map, France’s INRAP (the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research) “found that the markings on the slab corresponded to the landscape of the Odet Valley” in modern-day Brittany. Then, “using geolocation technology, the researchers established that the territory represented on the slab bears an 80 percent accurate resemblance to an area around a 29-km (18-mi) stretch of the Odet river,” which seems to have been a small kingdom or principality back in the early Bronze Age, between 2150 BC and 1600 BC. This makes the Saint-Bélec slab Europe’s oldest map, and quite possibly the earliest map of any known territory — and certainly the earliest known map of a popular kayaking destination.

Drawing by Paul du Chatellier, via Wikimedia Commons

via Big Think

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Behold John Coltrane’s Handwritten Outline for His Masterpiece A Love Supreme

in Art, Music | April 6th, 2023

Above, we present an important document from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History: John Coltrane’s handwritten outline of his groundbreaking jazz composition, A Love Supreme.

Recorded in December of 1964 and released in 1965, A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s personal declaration of his faith in God and his awareness of being on a spiritual path. “No road is an easy one,” writes Coltrane in a prayer at the bottom of his own liner notes for the album, “but they all go back to God.”

If you click here and examine a larger copy of the manuscript, you will notice that Coltrane has written the same sentiment at the bottom of the page. “All paths lead to God.” The piece is made up of a progression of four suites. The names for each section are not on the manuscript, but Coltrane eventually called them “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance” and “Psalm.”

In the manuscript, Coltrane writes that the “A Love Supreme” motif should be “played in all keys together.” In the recording of “Acknowledgement,” Coltrane indeed repeats the basic theme near the end in all keys, as if he were consciously exhausting every path. As jazz historian Lewis Porter, author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music, tells NPR in the piece below:

Coltrane more or less finished his improvisation, and he just starts playing the “Love Supreme” motif, but he changes the key another time, another time, another time. This is something very unusual. It’s not the way he usually improvises. It’s not really improvised. It’s something that he’s doing. And if you actually follow it through, he ends up playing this little “Love Supreme” theme in all 12 possible keys. To me, he’s giving you a message here.

In section IV of the manuscript, for the part later named “Psalm,” Coltrane writes that the piece is a “musical recitation of prayer by horn,” and is an “attempt to reach transcendent level with orchestra rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at the end.” Indeed, in the same NPR piece which you can listen to below, Rev. Franzo Wayne King of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco describes how his congregation one day discovered that Coltrane’s playing corresponds directly to his prayer at the bottom of the liner notes.

In addition to Porter and King, NPR’s Eric Westervelt interviews pianist McCoy Tyner, who was the last surviving member of Coltrane’s quartet. The 13-minute piece, “The Story of ‘A Love Supreme,'” is a fascinating overview of one of the great monuments of jazz.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Watch a Jaw-Dropping Visualization of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” Solo

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Watch David Bowie’s Final Performance as Ziggy Stardust, Singing “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, on The Midnight Special (1973)

in Music, Television | April 5th, 2023

If you had to choose a living cultural figure to represent nineteen-seventies America, you could do much worse than Burt Sugarman. He made his name as a television impresario with The Midnight Special, which put on NBC’s airwaves performances by everyone from ABBA to AC/DC, REO Speedwagon to Roxy Music, and War to Weather Report. Breaking with common practice at the time, the show allowed these acts to perform live rather than lip-sync against pre-recorded tracks. Thus, even viewers who tuned in to The Midnight Special to see their favorite bands were guaranteed to hear something they’d never heard before.

They stayed up quite late to do so: The Midnight Special followed The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which meant that it aired at midnight in the Central and Mountain time zones, and 1:00 in Eastern and Pacific. In 1972, the notion of putting on a music show at that hour was unfamiliar enough that Sugarman had trouble selling it.

He ultimately had to buy the airtime himself in order to convince NBC to pick the show up, which it did soon thereafter. (For the network, the prospect of extending their programming schedule would have been sweetened by the previous year’s Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which had banned the once-lucrative airing of tobacco advertisements on television.)

Now, more than half a century after its debut, The Midnight Special has reappeared in the form of a Youtube channel, which features high-quality videos of the show’s original performances. Those uploaded so far have been organized into artist playlists dedicated to acts like the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner, and David Bowie. That last includes Bowie’s rendition of “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, seen at the top of this post, as well as his version of The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” above, part of his final performance as his space-alien alter ego Ziggy Stardust — itself originally shot for The 1980 Floor Show in London, which despite its name took place in 1973. The Midnight Special itself would run until 1981, which means that a great deal of music remains to be brought out of Sugarman’s archives for us to enjoy here in the twenty-twenties. You can watch Bowie’s complete 1973 performance on The Midnight Special below.

8 Hours of David Bowie’s Historic 1980 Floor Show: Complete & Uncut Footage

David Bowie’s Final Gig as Ziggy Stardust Documented in 1973 Concert Film

David Bowie Talks and Sings on The Dick Cavett Show (1974)

Beat Club, the 1960s TV Show That Brought Rock Music to 70 Million Kids in Germany, Hungary, Thailand, Tanzania & Beyond

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

How to Develop Photographs with Coffee

in Food & Drink, Photography | April 5th, 2023

James Hoffmann knows something about coffee. He’s authored The World Atlas of Coffee and runs a prolific YouTube channel, where he covers everything from making coffee with the AeroPress and MokaPot, to brewing the perfect espresso and also providing basic coffee making tips & tricks. Pretty bread and butter stuff, if you can use that expression when talking about coffee. But he also covers some subjects at the margins of the coffee world–like how to develop photographs with coffee. Above, Hoffmann introduces you to Caffenol, a process whereby photographs can be developed with coffee and sometimes Vitamin C. To take a deeper dive into the subject, you’ll want to explore PetaPixel’s primer, Caffenol: A Guide to Developing B&W Film with Coffee.

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Watch a Transfixing Demonstration of Kumihimo, the Ancient Japanese Artform of Making Braids & Cords

in Art, History, Travel | April 4th, 2023

It’s easy to see why kumihimo, the ancient Japanese art of silk braiding, is described as a meditative act.

The weaver achieves an intricate design by getting into a rhythmic groove, overlapping hand-dyed silken threads on a circular or rectangle wooden loom, from which up to 50 weighted-wooden bobbins dangle.

If the mind wanders too far from the task, the weaver risks screwing up the pattern or the uniformity of the threads’ tension. The word kumihimo translates to “gathering threads” – one mustn’t let them get snarled by a lack of attention.

While simple braids of tree bark or plant fiber have been found in Japanese burial sites dating back six thousand years, the Golden Age of kumihimo occurred during the Heian period (794–1185), when exquisitely detailed cords began to be incorporated into the nobility’s garments, decorative furnishings, musical instruments, religious implements, and, most famously, samurai arms and armor.

Anime fans may recall how kumihimo shows up and serves as a major metaphor in Makoto Shinkai’s hit animated feature, Your Name – the braided cords representing the threads of time and the strength of the lovers’ bond.

Kumihimo is still in use today in jewelry and decorative souvenirs, and fastening obi to formal kimono, though 95% of obijime are now machine-made.

There are plenty of online tutorials for novices interested in making simple kumihimo friendship bracelets on a lightweight foam disk, but to appreciate the beauty inherent in every step of traditional kumihimo creation, watch Japan House’s above video, released in celebration of their recent exhibit, KUMIHIMO: The Art of Japanese Silk Braiding by DOMYO.

ASMR fans, prepare to be riveted by the sounds of the silken threads being swished through a dye bath, the gentle clack tama bobbins, and the tapping of the bamboo hera as it snugs the threads of the growing braid suspended from the rectangular stand, or takadai.

The circular loom, or marudai, seen later in the video produces a rounded cord via a central hole, an engineering feat that takes us back to our childhood passion for finger knitting.

Japan House reports that the industrial sector has taken inspiration from kumihimo for braiding carbon fiber and fiber-reinforced plastic:

The continuity of the kumihimo braid structure as well as the variability of the fiber orientation angle and the rigidity of the braids help produce extremely strong cords that can be used in products as diverse as aircraft, golf clubs, and artificial limbs.

Meanwhile several schools in Japan are keeping kumihimo alive as a traditional art, as is the American Kumihimo Society, in the West.

via Colossal

Watch Japanese Woodworking Masters Create Elegant & Elaborate Geometric Patterns with Wood

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

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How Michelangelo’s David Still Draws Admiration and Controversy Today

in Art, History | April 4th, 2023

Life imitates art, and by art, I mean, of course, The Simpsons. More than thirty years ago, the show took on the issue of censorship with a story in which Marge Simpson launches an impassioned campaign against cartoon violence, only to find herself on the other side of the fence when asked to support a protest against the exhibition of Michelangelo’s David. This episode returned to cultural relevance just last month, when a parent’s complaint about an image of that most renowned nude sculptures — indeed, that most renowned sculpture of any kind — being shown in a sixth-grade art-history class led to the firing of a Florida school principal.

It seems that the problem wasn’t just David: that same lesson included Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, another glorification of the unclothed human body — and so much more besides, according to the Great Art Explained video about it previously featured here on Open Culture.

That same channel’s creator, gallerist James Payne, has also put out a video on David, which you can watch at the top of the post. Though commissioned as a depiction of the Goliath-slaying Biblical hero, Payne tells us, “in Michelangelo’s hands it becomes something else entirely,” a simultaneous study and expression of the potential of mankind.

David‘s origin prefigured nothing of its legacy. Originally commissioned to decorate the Florence Cathedral (which already featured Brunelleschi’s ingenious dome), the sculpture had to be carved out of a much-less-than-pristine block of marble already owned by the institution, already missing chunks removed by sculptors who’d previously attempted the job. But to Michelangelo, as to all true artists, such limitations were the stuff of inspiration: the proportions of David‘s body, and even his iconic pose, were ultimately dictated less by Michelangelo’s imagination than by the nature of the stone itself.

httvs://youtu.be/basNf0KaOrc

Michelangelo was also paying tribute to classical Greek and Roman sculpture, hence the statue’s nudity. But as Payne says, it is a myth that “Renaissance Europeans were comfortable with nude bodies in art, particularly when displayed in public.” Florence’s city fathers “had a garland of 28 gilded copper leaves made, to protect David‘s modesty, and in later years he wore a fig leaf.” 2023 may not be the first of David‘s 500 years of existence to subject him to alteration in order to protect the supposed sensitivities of his viewers, but never before, surely, has such an incident brought him on Saturday Night Live.

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculptures

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Ryuichi Sakamoto, RIP: Watch Him Create Groundbreaking Electronic Music in 1984

in Music | April 3rd, 2023

Ryuichi Sakamoto was born and raised in Japan. He rose to prominence as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the most influential Japanese band in pop-music history. Last week, he died in Japan. But he also claimed not to consider himself Japanese. That reflects the dedication of his life’s work as a composer and performer to cross-cultural inspiration, collaboration, and synthesis. How fitting that the announcement of his death this past weekend should elicit an outpouring of tributes from fans and colleagues around the world, sharing his work from a variety of different stylistic and technological periods in a variety of different languages.

Fitting, as well, that the first documentary made about Sakamoto as a solo artist should have been directed by a Frenchwoman, the photographer Elizabeth Lennard. Shot in 1984, Tokyo melody: un film sur Ryuichi Sakamoto captures not only Sakamoto himself on the rise as an international cultural figure, but also a Japan that had recently become the red-hot center — at least in the global imagination — of wealth, technology, and even forward-looking imagination. It was in the Japanese capital that Sakamoto recorded Ongaku Zukan, or Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, the album that showed the listening public, in Japan and elsewhere, what it really sounded like to make music not just in but of the late twentieth century.

Or perhaps it was music for the End of History. “Japan has become the leading capitalist country,” Sakamoto says in Tokyo Melody. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. The season of politics is over. People don’t think of rebelling. On the other hand they have a real hunger for culture.” Then comes the footage of wax model food and obsessively ersatz nineteen-fifties-style greasers: clichéd representations of urban Japan at the time, yes, but also genuine reflections of the somehow refined mix-and-match retro-kitsch sensibility that had come to prevail there. “Mainstream culture has lost its authority,” Sakamoto adds. “There is a floating notion of values. Technology is progressing by itself. The gears move more and more efficiently. We feel possibilities appearing that exceed our imagination and our horizons.”

For nearly forty years therafter, Sakamoto would continue to explore this range of possibilities — sublime, bizarre, or even threatening — through his music, whether on his own releases, his projects with other artists, or his many film soundtracks for a range of auteurs including Nagisa Ōshima (for whom he also acted, alongside David Bowie, in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence), Brian De Palma, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Alejandro Iñarritu. In Tokyo Melody he reveals one secret of his success: “When I work with Japanese, I become Japanese. When I work with Westerners, I try to be like them.” Hence the way, no matter the artistic or cultural context, Sakamoto’s music was never identifiable as either Japanese or Western, but always identifiable as his own.

Infinite Escher: A High-Tech Tribute to M.C. Escher, Featuring Sean Lennon, Nam June Paik & Ryuichi Sakamoto (1990)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Most Popular Song from Each Month Since January 1980: 40+ Years of Changing Musical Tastes in 50 Minutes

in History, Music | April 3rd, 2023

As Helen Reddy sang in the 70s:

You live your life in the songs you hear

On the rock n’ roll radio…

The 80s ushered in a new era, leaving the music industry forever changed, though the songs themselves retained their power to speak to us on a deeply personal level.

In 1979, the English New Wave band The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” – which famously became the very first song played on MTV the following year (1980) – was getting a lot of attention.

40 years later Puerto Rican rapper and reggaeton artist Bad Bunny dominates, which speaks not only to the public’s evolving musical tastes but also to the expanded access and opportunities of the Internet age.

Listening to all 512 songs on Boogiehead’s mashup Most Popular Song Each Month Since January 1980 in their entirety would take over 24 hours, so Boogiehead settles instead on a single representative phrase, getting the job done in a whirlwind 50 minutes. Watch it above.

For many of us, that’s all it takes to unleash a flood of memories.

Queen, Madonna, David Bowie, and Michael Jackson make strong showings, as do, more recently, Rhianna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, and Ariana Grande.

Elsewhere, there are reminders that fame is not just fleeting, but often tethered to a single hit.

That said, sometimes those hits have remarkable staying power.

Witness Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come On Eileen from 1982, with its prescient lyric “I’ll hum this tune forever…”

And some songs turn out to be an unexpected slow burn. How else to explain one of the third-to-last earworms on Boogiehead’s list, “Running Up That Hill” from English singer-songwriter Kate Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love?

Its appearance on the hit series Stranger Things led it to go viral on TikTok, netting the 64-year-old Bush a host of new fans in their teens and 20s as well as a couple million dollars. Talk about old wine in new bottles!

Forbes’ Peter Suciu observes how songs’ shelf lives and in-roads are longer and wider than they were in the 80s and 90s:

Running Up That Hill has certainly become more popular now than it was when it was released – and one factor could be that social media has changed the way people listen to music. In 1985, when Michael Jackson was the undisputed King of Pop, Kate Bush would have been relegated to “alternative” music radio stations, which were few and far between, or college radio.

Readers, what song from Boogiehead’s Most Popular Song Each Month Since January 1980 do you most wish would make a comeback? Which of the newer songs could you imagine listening to forty years from now? Let us know in the comments.

Listen to the playlist of every song featured on the Most Popular Song Each Month Since January 1980 here.

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Wes Anderson Goes Sci-Fi in 1950s America: Watch the Trailer for His New Film Asteroid City

in Film | March 31st, 2023

Wes Anderson has been making feature films for 27 years now, and in that time his work has grown more temporally and geographically specific. Though shot in his native Texas in the late nineteen-nineties, his breakout picture Rushmore seemed to take place in no one part of the United States — and even more strikingly, no one identifiable era. Few filmgoers had seen anything like Anderson’s clean-edged retro sensibility before, and in subsequent projects like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, it intensified considerably. Then, in 2012, came Moonrise Kingdom, which took the Andersonian aesthetic to a particular time and place: New England in the fall of 1965.

Since then, Anderson and his collaborators have told stories in their distinctive visions of Eastern Europe, Japan, and France — but always, explicitly or implicitly, in one period or another of the mid-twentieth century. Judging by its newly released trailer, the events of Anderson’s next film Asteroid City occur in perhaps the most mid-twentieth-century year imaginable, 1955, and in small-town America at that.

Or rather, very small-town America: Asteroid City itself appears to be located in the middle of the Arizona desert (though shot in Spain, in keeping with Anderson’s increasingly Europe-oriented production habits), and with nothing more exciting going on — apart from the occasional distant nuclear-weapons test — than an annual “junior stargazer competition.”

The film “tells the story of a beleaguered widower (Jason Schwartzman) who’s busy schlepping his four children across the country to see their grandfather (Tom Hanks) when their car suddenly breaks down,” writes The Verge’s Charles Pulliam-More. This strands the family in the titular town, with its “strange earthquakes that no one knows the true cause of, fears about whether aliens might be lurking among the humans living in Asteroid City, and multiple sightings of a celebrity (Scarlett Johansson).” As fans can already guess from this summary, the ensemble cast includes more than a few Anderson regulars, also including Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Bob Balaban. A case of COVID-19 kept Bill Murray from participating, but even so, nobody who sees the trailer can doubt that the viewing experience of Asteroid City will be highly Andersonian indeed.

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The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers

Wes Anderson’s Breakthrough Film, Rushmore, Revisited in Five Video Essays: It Came Out 20 Years Ago Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Carl Sagan Explains How the Ancient Greeks, Using Reason & Math, Discovered That the Earth Isn’t Flat Over 2,000 Years Ago

in History, Science | March 31st, 2023

The denial of science suffuses American society, and no matter what the data says, some conservative forces refuse efforts to curtail, or even study, climate change. Astrophysicist Katie Mack calls this retrenchment a form of “data nihilism,” writing in an exasperated tweet, “What is science? How can a thing be known? Is anything even real???” Indeed, what can we expect next from what Isaac Asimov called the United States’ anti-intellectual “cult of ignorance”? A flat earth lobby?

Welp… at least a couple celebrity figures have come out as flat-earthers, perhaps the vanguard of an anti-round earth movement. Notably, [Dallas Mavericks] guard Kyrie Irving made the claim on a podcast, insisting, Chris Matyszczyk writes, that “we were being lied to about such basic things by the global elites.” Is this a joke? I hope so. Neil DeGrasse Tyson—who hosted the recent Cosmos remake to try and dispel such scientific ignorance—replied all the same, noting that Irving should “stay away from jobs that require… understanding of the natural world.” The weird affair has played out like a sideshow next to the mainstage political circus, an unsettling reminder of Carl Sagan’s prediction in his last book, The Demon Haunted World, that Americans would soon find their “critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true.”

Sagan devoted much of his life to countering anti-science trends with warmth and enthusiasm, parking himself “repeatedly, arguably compulsively, in front of TV cameras,” writes Joel Achenbach at Smithsonian. We most remember him for his original 1980 Cosmos miniseries, his most public role as a “gatekeeper of scientific credibility,” as Achenbach calls him. I think Sagan may have chafed at the description. He wanted to open the gates and let the public into scientific inquiry. He charitably listened to unscientific theories, and patiently took the time to explain their flaws.

In the very first episode of Cosmos, Sagan addressed the flat-earthers, indirectly, by explaining how Eratosthenes (276-194 BC), a Libyan-Greek scholar and chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, discovered over 2000 years ago that the earth is a sphere. Given the geographer, mathematician, poet, historian, and astronomer’s incredible list of accomplishments—a system of latitude and longitude, a map of the world, a system for finding prime numbers—this may not even rank as his highest achievement.

In the Cosmos clip above, Sagan explains Eratosthenes’ scientific method: he made observations of how shadows change length given the position of the sun in the sky. Estimating the distance between the cities of Syene and Alexandria, he was then able to mathematically calculate the circumference of the earth, as Cynthia Stokes Brown explains at Khan Academy. Although “several sources of error crept into Eratosthenes’ calculations and our interpretation of them,” he nonetheless succeeded almost perfectly. His estimation: 250,000 stadia, or 25,000 miles. The actual circumference: 24,860 miles (40.008 kilometers).

No, of course the Earth isn’t flat. But Sagan’s lesson on how one scientist from antiquity came to know that isn’t an exercise in debunking. It’s a journey into the movement of the solar system, into ancient scientific history, and most importantly, perhaps, into the scientific method, which does not rely on hearsay from “global elites” or shadowy figures, but on the tools of observation, inference, reasoning, and math. Professional scientists are not without their biases and conflicts of interest, but the most fundamental intellectual tools they use are available to everyone on Earth.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017. This version has been lightly edited and updated.

Hear Carl Sagan Artfully Refute a Creationist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Darwinian Concept of Evolution is Profoundly Verified”

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

David Byrne Explains How the “Big Suit” He Wore in Stop Making Sense Was Inspired by Japanese Kabuki Theatre

in Fashion, Film, Music | March 30th, 2023

In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film that came out two years later. “Music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head,” Byrne says in a bizarre contemporary self-interview previously featured here on Open Culture. To make that fact visible onstage, “I wanted my head to appear smaller, and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger.”

Hence costume designer Gail Blacker’s creation of what Talking Heads fans have long referred to as the “big suit.” Byrne has always been willing discuss its origins, which he traces back to a trip to Japan. There, as he put it to Entertainment Weekly in 2012, he’d “seen a lot of traditional Japanese theater, and I realized that yes, that kind of front-facing outline, a suit, a businessman’s suit, looked like one of those things, a rectangle with just a head on top.”

A friend of his, the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl, said that “everything is bigger on stage.” “He was referring to, I think, gestures and the way you walk and what not,” Byrne told David Letterman in 1984. But he took it literally, thinking, “Well, that solves my costume problem right there.”

Though Byrne only wore the big suit for one number, “Girlfriend Is Better” (from whose lyrics Stop Making Sense takes its title), it became the acclaimed film’s single most iconic element, referenced even in children’s cartoons. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called it “a perfect psychological fit,” remarking that “when he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.” The association hasn’t been without its frustrations; he once speculated that his tombstone would be inscribed with the phrase “Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?” But now that Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters in a new 4K restoration, nearly 40 years after its first release, he’s accepted that the time has finally come to pick it up from the cleaner’s. Unsurprisingly, it still fits.

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

How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant

Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

How Jonathan Demme Put Humanity Into His Films: From The Silence of the Lambs to Stop Making Sense

Talking Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Concert Film You Haven’t Seen

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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