How Humans Domesticated Cats (Twice)

in Biology, History, Nature, Travel | January 27th, 2020

Depend­ing on how you feel about cats, the feline sit­u­a­tion on the island of Cyprus is either the stuff of a delight­ful children’s sto­ry or a hor­ror film to be avoid­ed at all cost.

Despite being sur­round­ed on all sides by water, the cat pop­u­la­tion—an esti­mat­ed 1.5 mil­lion—cur­rent­ly out­num­bers human res­i­dents. The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty are fer­al, though as we learn in the above episode of PBS’ EONS, they, too, can be con­sid­ered domes­ti­cat­ed. Like the oth­er 600,000,000-some liv­ing mem­bers of Felis Catus on plan­et Earth—which is to say the type of beast we asso­ciate with lit­ter­box­es, laser point­ers, and Ten­der Vittles—they are descend­ed from a sin­gle sub­species of African wild­cat, Felis Sil­vestris Lybi­ca.

While there’s no sin­gle nar­ra­tive explain­ing how cats came to dom­i­nate Cyprus, the sto­ry of their glob­al domes­ti­ca­tion is not an uncom­mon one:

An ancient effi­cien­cy expert real­ized that herd­ing cats was a much bet­ter use of time than hunt­ing them, and the idea quick­ly spread to neigh­bor­ing com­mu­ni­ties.

Kid­ding. There’s no such thing as herd­ing cats (though there is a Chica­go-based cat cir­cus, whose founder moti­vates her skate­board-rid­ing, bar­rel-rolling, high-wire-walk­ing stars with pos­i­tive rein­force­ment…)

Instead, cats took a com­men­sal path to domes­ti­ca­tion, lured by their bel­lies and cel­e­brat­ed curios­i­ty.

Ol’ Felis (Felix!) Sil­vestris (Suf­ferin’ Suc­co­tash!) Lybi­ca couldn’t help notic­ing how human set­tle­ments boast­ed gen­er­ous sup­plies of food, includ­ing large num­bers of tasty mice and oth­er rodents attract­ed by the grain stores.

Her inad­ver­tent human hosts grew to val­ue her pest con­trol capa­bil­i­ties, and cul­ti­vat­ed the rela­tion­ship… or at the very least, refrained from devour­ing every cat that wan­dered into camp.

Even­tu­al­ly, things got to the point where one 5600-year-old spec­i­men from north­west­ern Chi­na was revealed to have died with more mil­let than mouse meat in its system—a pet in both name and pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment.

Chow chow chow.

Inter­est­ing­ly, while today’s house cats’ gene pool leads back to that one sub-species of wild mack­er­el-tab­by, it’s impos­si­ble to iso­late domes­ti­ca­tion to a sin­gle time and place.

Both arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence and genome analy­sis sup­port the idea that cats were domes­ti­cat­ed both 10,000 years ago in South­west Asia… and then again in Egypt 6500 years lat­er.

At some point, a human and cat trav­eled togeth­er to Cyprus and the rest is his­to­ry, an Inter­net sen­sa­tion and an if you can’t beat em, join em tourist attrac­tion.

Such high end island hotels as Pissouri’s Colum­bia Beach Resort and TUI Sen­satori Resort Atlanti­ca Aphrodite Hills in Paphos have start­ed cater­ing to the ever-swelling num­bers of unin­vit­ed, four-legged locals with a robust reg­i­men of health­care, shel­ter, and food, served in feline-spe­cif­ic tav­er­nas.

An island char­i­ty known as Cat P.A.W.S. (Pro­tect­ing Ani­mals With­out Shel­ter) appeals to vis­i­tors for dona­tions to defray the cost of neu­ter­ing the mas­sive fer­al pop­u­la­tion.

Some­times they even man­age to send a fur­ry Cyprus native off to a new home with a for­eign hol­i­day­mak­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

A New Pho­to Book Doc­u­ments the Won­der­ful Home­made Cat Lad­ders of Switzer­land

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York, The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Monty Python’s Terry Jones (RIP) Was a Comedian, But Also a Medieval Historian: Get to Know His Other Side

in Comedy, History, Television | January 24th, 2020

Mon­ty Python’s sur­re­al, slap­stick par­o­dies of his­to­ry, reli­gion, med­i­cine, phi­los­o­phy, and law depend­ed on a com­pe­tent grasp of these sub­jects, and most of the troupe’s mem­bers, four of whom met at Oxford and Cam­bridge, went on to demon­strate their schol­ar­ly acu­men out­side of com­e­dy, with books, guest lec­tures, pro­fes­sor­ships, and seri­ous tele­vi­sion shows.

Michael Palin even became pres­i­dent of the Roy­al Geo­graph­i­cal Soci­ety for a few years. And Palin’s one­time Oxford pal and ear­ly writ­ing part­ner Ter­ry Jones—who passed away at 77 on Jan­u­ary 21 after a long strug­gle with degen­er­a­tive aphasia—didn’t do so bad­ly for him­self either, becom­ing a respect­ed schol­ar of Medieval his­to­ry and an author­i­ta­tive pop­u­lar writer on dozens of oth­er sub­jects.

Indeed, as the Pythons did through­out their aca­d­e­m­ic and comedic careers, Jones com­bined his inter­ests as often as he could, either bring­ing his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge to absur­dist com­e­dy or bring­ing humor to the study of his­to­ry. Jones wrote and direct­ed the pseu­do-his­tor­i­cal spoofs Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Bri­an, and in 2004 he won an Emmy for his tele­vi­sion pro­gram Ter­ry Jones’ Medieval Lives, an enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive series that incor­po­rates sketch com­e­dy-style reen­act­ments and Ter­ry Gilliam-like ani­ma­tions.

In the pro­gram, Jones debunks pop­u­lar ideas about sev­er­al stock medieval Euro­pean char­ac­ters famil­iar to us all, while he vis­its his­tor­i­cal sites and sits down to chat with experts. These char­ac­ters include The Peas­ant, The Damsel, The Min­strel, The Monk, and The Knights. The series became a pop­u­lar book in 2007, itself a cul­mi­na­tion of decades of work. Jones first book, Chaucer’s Knight: The Por­trait of a Medieval Mer­ce­nary came out in 1980. There, notes Matthew Rozsa at Salon:

[Jones] argued that the con­cept of Geof­frey Chaucer’s knight as the epit­o­me of Chris­t­ian chival­ry ignored an ugli­er truth: That the Knight was a mer­ce­nary who worked for author­i­tar­i­ans that bru­tal­ly oppressed ordi­nary peo­ple (an argu­ment not dis­sim­i­lar to the scene in which a peas­ant argues for democ­ra­cy in The Holy Grail).

In 2003, Jones col­lab­o­rat­ed with sev­er­al his­to­ri­ans on Who Mur­dered Chaucer? A spec­u­la­tive study of the peri­od in which many of the fig­ures he lat­er sur­veyed in his show and book emerged as dis­tinc­tive types. As in his work with Mon­ty Python, he didn’t only apply his con­trar­i­an­ism to medieval his­to­ry. He also called the Renais­sance “over­rat­ed” and “con­ser­v­a­tive,” and in his 2006 BBC One series Ter­ry Jones’ Bar­bar­ians, he described the peri­od we think of as the fall of Rome in pos­i­tive terms, call­ing the city’s so-called “Sack” in 410 an inven­tion of pro­pa­gan­da.

Jones’ work as a pop­u­lar his­to­ri­an, polit­i­cal writer, and come­di­an “is not the full extent of [his] oeu­vre,” writes Rozsa, “but it is enough to help us fath­om the mag­ni­tude of the loss suf­fered on Tues­day night.” His lega­cy “was to try to make us more intel­li­gent, more well-edu­cat­ed, more thought­ful. He also strove, of course, to make us have fun.” Python fans know this side of Jones well. Get to know him as a pas­sion­ate inter­preter of his­to­ry in Ter­ry Jones’ Medieval Lives, which you can watch on YouTube here.

For an aca­d­e­m­ic study of Jones’ medieval work, see the col­lec­tion: The Medieval Python The Pur­po­sive and Provoca­tive Work of Ter­ry Jones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry & Lega­cy of Magna Car­ta Explained in Ani­mat­ed Videos by Mon­ty Python’s Ter­ry Jones

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

Mon­ty Python’s Eric Idle Breaks Down His Most Icon­ic Char­ac­ters

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

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The Lost Neighborhood Buried Under New York City’s Central Park

in Architecture, History, Life, Travel | January 24th, 2020

New York City is in a con­stant state of flux.

For every Nets fan cheer­ing their team on in Brooklyn’s Bar­clays Cen­ter and every tourist gam­bol­ing about the post-punk, upscale East Vil­lage, there are dozens of local res­i­dents who remem­ber what—and who—was dis­placed to pave the way for this progress.

It’s no great leap to assume that some­thing had to be plowed under to make way for the city’s myr­i­ad gleam­ing sky­scrap­ers, but hard­er to con­ceive of Cen­tral Park, the 840-acre oasis in the mid­dle of Man­hat­tan, as a sym­bol of ruth­less gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.

Plans for a peace­ful green expanse to rival the great parks of Great Britain and Europe began tak­ing shape in the 1850s, dri­ven by well-to-do white mer­chants, bankers, and landown­ers look­ing for tem­po­rary escape from the urban pres­sures of dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed Low­er Man­hat­tan.

It took 20,000 workers—none black, none female—over three years to real­ize archi­tects Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed and Calvert Vaux’s sweep­ing pas­toral design.

A hun­dred and fifty years lat­er, Cen­tral Park is still a vital part of dai­ly life for vis­i­tors and res­i­dents alike.

But what of the vibrant neigh­bor­hood that was doomed by the park’s con­struc­tion?

As his­to­ri­an Cyn­thia R. Copeland, co-direc­tor of the Seneca Vil­lage Project, points out above, sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties were giv­en the heave ho in order to clear the way for the park’s cre­ation.

The best estab­lished of these was Seneca Vil­lage, which ran from approx­i­mate­ly 82nd to 89th Street, along what is known today as Cen­tral Park West. 260-some res­i­dents were evict­ed under emi­nent domain and their homes, church­es, and school were razed.

This phys­i­cal era­sure quick­ly trans­lat­ed to mass pub­lic amne­sia, abet­ted, no doubt, by the way Seneca Vil­lage was framed in the press, not as a com­mu­ni­ty of pre­dom­i­nant­ly African-Amer­i­can mid­dle class and work­ing class home­own­ers, but rather a squalid shan­ty­town inhab­it­ed by squat­ters.

As Brent Sta­ples recalls in a New York Times op-ed, in the sum­mer of 1871, when park work­ers dis­lodged two coffins in the vicin­i­ty of the West 85th Street entrance, The New York Her­ald treat­ed the dis­cov­ery as a baf­fling mys­tery, despite the pres­ence of an engraved plate on one of the coffins iden­ti­fy­ing its occu­pant, an Irish teenag­er, who’d been a parish­ioner of Seneca Village’s All Angels Epis­co­pal Church.

Accord­ing to his­to­ri­an Leslie Alexander’s African or Amer­i­can? Black Iden­ti­ty and Polit­i­cal Activism in New York City, 1784–1861, All Angels’ con­gre­ga­tion was unique in that it was inte­grat­ed, a reflec­tion of Seneca Village’s pop­u­la­tion, 2/3 of whom were African Amer­i­can and 1/3 of Euro­pean descent, most­ly Irish and Ger­man.

Copeland and her col­leagues kept Alexander’s work in mind when they began exca­vat­ing Seneca Vil­lage in 2011, focus­ing on the house­holds of two African-Amer­i­can res­i­dents, Nan­cy Moore and William G. Wil­son, a father of eight who served as sex­ton at All Angels and lived in a three-sto­ry wood-frame house. The dig yield­ed 250 bags of mate­r­i­al, includ­ing a piece of a bone-han­dled tooth­brush, an iron tea ket­tle, and frag­ments of clay pipes and blue-and-white Chi­nese porce­lain:

Archae­ol­o­gists have begun to con­sid­er the lives of mid­dle class African Amer­i­cans, focus­ing on the ways their con­sump­tion of mate­r­i­al cul­ture expressed class and racial iden­ti­ties. His­to­ri­an Leslie Alexan­der believes that Seneca Vil­lage not only pro­vid­ed a respite from dis­crim­i­na­tion in the city, but also embod­ied ideas about African pride and racial con­scious­ness.

Own­ing a home in Seneca Vil­lage also bestowed vot­ing rights on African Amer­i­can male heads of house­hold.

Two years before it was torn down, the com­mu­ni­ty was home to 20 per­cent of the city’s African Amer­i­can prop­er­ty own­ers and 15 per­cent of its African Amer­i­can vot­ers.

Thanks to the efforts of his­to­ri­ans like Copeland and Alexan­der, Seneca Vil­lage is once again on the public’s radar, though unlike Pig­town, a small­er, pre­dom­i­nant­ly agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ty toward the south­ern end of the park, the ori­gins of its name remain mys­te­ri­ous.

Was the vil­lage named in trib­ute to the Seneca peo­ple of West­ern New York or might it, as Alexan­der sug­gests, have been a nod to the Roman philoso­pher, whose thoughts on indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty would have been taught as part of Seneca Village’s African Free Schools’ cur­ricu­lum?

For now, there is lit­tle more than a sign to hip Park vis­i­tors to the exis­tence of Seneca Vil­lage, but that should change in the near future, after the city erects a planned mon­u­ment to abo­li­tion­ists and for­mer Seneca Vil­lage res­i­dents Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons and their daugh­ter Mar­itcha.

Learn more about this bygone com­mu­ni­ty in Copeland’s inter­view with the New York Preser­va­tion Archive Project the New York His­tor­i­cal Society’s Teacher’s Guide to Seneca Vil­lage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York: The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Flute of Shame: Discover the Instrument/Device Used to Publicly Humiliate Bad Musicians During the Medieval Period

in History, Music | January 23rd, 2020

Since human­i­ty has had music, we’ve also had bad music. And bad music can come from only one source: bad musi­cians. Despite such per­son­al tech­nolo­gies of rel­a­tive­ly recent inven­tion as noise-can­cel­ing head­phones, bad music remains nigh unavoid­able in the mod­ern world, issu­ing as it con­stant­ly does from the sound sys­tems installed in gro­cery stores, gyms, pass­ing auto­mo­biles, and so on. And against the bad musi­cians respon­si­ble we have less recourse than ever, or at least less than medieval Euro­peans did, as shown by the Rip­ley’s Believe It or Not video above on the “shame flute,” a non-musi­cal instru­ment used to pun­ish crimes against the art.

“The con­trap­tion, which is essen­tial­ly a heavy iron flute – although you prob­a­bly wouldn’t want play it – was shack­led to the musician’s neck,” writes Mad­dy Shaw Roberts at Clas­sic FM. “The musician’s fin­gers were then clamped to the keys, to give the impres­sion they were play­ing the instru­ment. Final­ly, just to fur­ther their humil­i­a­tion, they were forced to wear the flute while being parad­ed around town, so the pub­lic could throw rot­ten food and veg­eta­bles at them.” Sure­ly the mere prospect of such a fate made many music-mind­ed chil­dren of the old­en days think twice about slack­ing on their prac­tice ses­sions.

The sight of this flute of shame, which you can take in at either the equal­ly stim­u­lat­ing-sound­ing Medieval Crime Muse­um in Rothen­burg or the Tor­ture Muse­um in Ams­ter­dam, would get any of us mod­erns think­ing about con­sid­er­ing which musi­cians of our own day deserve to be shack­led to it. The Guardian’s Dave Simp­son sug­gests, among oth­ers, “all bands with sil­ly names,” “any musi­cian called Sir who is over 60,” and “any­one who has ever appeared on The X Fac­tor, ever.” In this day and age they would all prob­a­bly com­plain of cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment, but as music-relat­ed tor­ture devices go, the shame flute cer­tain­ly seems prefer­able to ancient Greece’s “brazen bull.”

Though still a lit­tle-known his­tor­i­cal arti­fact, the shame flute has regained some cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy in recent years. It even inspired the name of a Finnish rock group, Flute of Shame. As the band mem­bers put it in an inter­view with Vice’s Josh Schnei­der, “We were hav­ing a night out in Ams­ter­dam and found our­selves in a tor­ture muse­um whilst look­ing for the Banana Bar,” a well-known spot in the city’s red-light dis­trict. “We saw the device and the rest is his­to­ry.” Of course, any rock group that names itself after a tor­ture device will draw com­par­isons to Iron Maid­en, and jour­nal­is­tic dili­gence com­pels Schnei­der to ask Flute of Shame which band would win in a shred­ding con­test. “Prob­a­bly Iron Maid­en,” the Finns respond, “but are they hap­py?”

via Clas­sic FM

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Meet the Hur­dy Gur­dy, the Hand-Cranked Medieval Instru­ment with 80 Mov­ing Parts

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

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 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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Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

in Comedy, History | January 21st, 2020

There may be plen­ty of good rea­sons to restrict sales and lim­it pro­mo­tion of alco­hol. You can search the stats on traf­fic fatal­i­ties, liv­er dis­ease, alco­hol-relat­ed vio­lence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epi­dem­ic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dan­gers alco­hol pos­es to pub­lic health and safe­ty, its total pro­hi­bi­tion has seemed “so hos­tile to Amer­i­cans’ con­tem­po­rary sen­si­bil­i­ties of per­son­al free­dom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times, “that we strug­gle to com­pre­hend how our ances­tors could have pos­si­bly sup­port­ed it.” Pro­hi­bi­tion in the Unit­ed States began 1oo years ago–on Jan­u­ary 17, 1920–and last­ed through 1933.

How did this hap­pen? Demand, of course, per­sist­ed, but pub­lic sup­port seemed wide­spread. Despite sto­ries of thou­sands rush­ing bars and liquor stores on the evening of Jan­u­ary 16, 1920 before the 18th Amend­ment ban­ning alco­hol nation­wide went into effect, “the final tri­umph of pro­hi­bi­tion was met with shrugs…. The Unit­ed States had already been ‘dry’ for the pre­vi­ous half-year thanks to the Wartime Pro­hi­bi­tion Act. And even before that, 32 of the 48 states had already enact­ed their own statewide pro­hi­bi­tions.”

We tend to think of pro­hi­bi­tion now as a wild over­re­ac­tion and a polit­i­cal mis­cal­cu­la­tion, and frankly, it’s no won­der, giv­en how bonkers some of its most promi­nent advo­cates were. Who bet­ter to pro­file one of the most fanat­i­cal than the irre­spon­si­bly drunk come­di­ans of Com­e­dy Central’s Drunk His­to­ry? See John Lev­en­stein and friends take on the leader of the Anti-Saloon League, Wayne Wheel­er, above,

Wheel­er indi­rect­ly killed tens of thou­sands of peo­ple when his ASL pushed to have poi­son added to indus­tri­al alco­hol to deter boot­leg­ging in the 20s. His pre-pro­hi­bi­tion tac­tics (he coined the term “pres­sure group”) recall those of the Moral Major­i­ty cam­paigns that took over local and state leg­is­la­tures nation­wide in the U.S. in recent decades, and it is large­ly due to the ASL that pro­hi­bi­tion gained such sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal ground.

They allied with pro­gres­sives in the North and racists in the South; with suf­frag­ists and with the Klan, whom Wheel­er secret­ly employed to smash up bars. As Daniel Okrent writes at Smith­son­ian:

Wheeler’s devo­tion to the dream of a dry Amer­i­ca accom­mo­dat­ed any num­ber of unlike­ly allies. Bil­ly Sun­day, meet pio­neer­ing social work­er Jane Addams: you’re work­ing togeth­er now. The evan­gel­i­cal cler­gy of the age were moti­vat­ed to sup­port Pro­hi­bi­tion because of their faith; reform­ers like Addams signed on because of the dev­as­tat­ing effect that drunk­en­ness had on the urban poor. Ku Klux Klan, shake hands with the Indus­tri­al Work­ers of the World (IWW): you’re on the same team. The Klan’s anti-liquor sen­ti­ment was root­ed in its hatred of the immi­grant mass­es in liquor-soaked cities; the IWW believed that liquor was a cap­i­tal­ist weapon used to keep the work­ing class­es in a stu­por.

Dogged, uncom­pro­mis­ing, shrewd, and seem­ing­ly amoral, Wheel­er was once described by the Cincin­nati Enquir­er as a cru­sad­er who “made great men his pup­pets.” Pro­hi­bi­tion may be impos­si­ble to imag­ine one hun­dred years lat­er, but we sure­ly rec­og­nize Wayne Wheel­er as a peren­ni­al fig­ure in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Don’t trust a drunk come­di­an to give you the straight sto­ry? Get a sober his­to­ry above in the excerpt from the Ken Burns’ doc­u­men­tary Pro­hi­bi­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miran­da Reimag­ines Hamil­ton as a Girl on Drunk His­to­ry

Drunk His­to­ry: An Intox­i­cat­ed Look at the Famous Alexan­der Hamil­ton – Aaron Burr Duel

Ben Franklin’s List of 200 Syn­onyms for “Drunk”: “Moon-Ey’d,” “Ham­mer­ish,” “Stew’d” & More (1737)

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

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When People Gave Anti-Valentine’s Day Cards: Revisit the “Vinegar Valentines” That Spread Ridicule and Contempt

in History, Life | January 16th, 2020

Krampus—the Christ­mas “half goat, half demon” of Ger­man­ic folklore—has become a fig­ure of some fas­ci­na­tion in pop­u­lar cul­ture recent­ly. We might call the appetite for this “anti-St. Nicholas… who lit­er­al­ly beats peo­ple into being nice and not naughty,” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic writes, a tes­ta­ment to a wide­spread sen­ti­ment: Hang the forced cheer, Christ­mas can be dread­ful.

How much more so can Valentine’s Day feel like a big con, cooked up by mar­keters and choco­latiers? Though estab­lished 200 years after the saint’s 3rd cen­tu­ry A.D. mar­tyr­dom, and linked with roman­tic love by Geof­frey Chaucer in the 14th cen­tu­ry, its sta­tus as a day to over­spend has more mod­ern ori­gins. Even some of us who duti­ful­ly buy jew­el­ry, flow­ers, and cards each year may wish for a Valentine’s Day Kram­pus.

If you count your­self among those hum­bugs, you’ll be hap­py to learn about a once-rich anti-Valentine’s Day tra­di­tion “dur­ing the Vic­to­ri­an era and the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry,” as Becky Lit­tle writes at Smith­son­ian, “Feb­ru­ary 14 was also a day in which unlucky vic­tims could receive ‘vine­gar valen­tines’ from their secret haters.” Like the choic­es of San­ta or Kram­pus, tricks or treats, one could make the hol­i­day about love or hate.

One schol­ar, Annebel­la Pollen, who has writ­ten on the sub­ject “says that peo­ple often ask her whether these cards were an ear­ly form of ‘trolling.’” Per­haps that’s not an entire­ly accu­rate com­par­i­son. Trolls like hoax­es, and most­ly like to wit­ness the reac­tions to their provo­ca­tions. But Valen­tines cyn­ics pro­ceed­ed with the same cru­el glee. As Atlas Obscu­ra notes, anti-Valen­tines were meant to wound and shame, Kram­pus-like. Their appeal proved prof­itable:

Vine­gar valen­tines were com­mer­cial­ly bought post­cards that were less beau­ti­ful than their love-filled coun­ter­parts, and con­tained an insult­ing poem and illus­tra­tion. They were sent anony­mous­ly, so the receiv­er had to guess who hat­ed him or her; as if this weren’t bruis­ing enough, the recip­i­ent paid the postage on deliv­ery. In Civ­il War Humor, Cameron C. Nick­els wrote that vine­gar valen­tines were “taste­less, even vul­gar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bach­e­lors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and pen­ny pinch­ers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-mind­ed valen­tines and these sour notes were split at a major New York valen­tine pub­lish­er.

Some vine­gar valen­tines pub­lish­ers had anoth­er thing in com­mon with mod­ern-day trolls: they cap­i­tal­ized on a hatred of fem­i­nism. “The women’s suf­frage move­ment of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry brought anoth­er class of vine­gar valen­tines, tar­get­ing women who fought for the right to vote.” These por­trayed suf­frag­ists as ugly, abu­sive, and unde­sir­able, a stereo­type found in the world of sin­cere valen­tines as well. One such card “depict­ed a pret­ty woman sur­round­ed by hearts, with a plain appeal: ‘In these wild days of suf­fragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er over­look a girl who can’t be mil­i­tant, but sim­ply loves to cook.’”

Vine­gar valen­tines (a lat­er name—they were called “com­ic valen­tines” at the time) prompt­ed all the sorts of con­cerns we’re used to see­ing. Teach­ers wor­ried about the effect of such com­mer­cial­ized emo­tion­al cru­el­ty on their stu­dents. One mag­a­zine enjoined teach­ers to make Valentine’s Day “a day for kind remem­brance than a day for wreck­ing revenge.” But where’s the fun in that? Vine­gar valen­tines, says Pollen, “were designed to expand this hol­i­day into some­thing that could include a whole range of dif­fer­ent peo­ple and a whole range of dif­fer­ent emo­tions,” includ­ing some very un-Valen­tine’s Day-like con­tempt.

Find a big col­lec­tion of Vine­gar Valen­tines at Col­lec­tor’s Week­ly.

via 41 Strange

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cel­e­brate Valentine’s Day with a Charm­ing Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion of an E.E. Cum­mings’ Love Poem

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

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

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How Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring Incited a Riot? An Animated Introduction

in Dance, History, Music | January 16th, 2020

There was a time when a bal­let could start a riot — specif­i­cal­ly, the night of May 29th, 1913. The place was Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the bal­let was The Rite of Spring, com­posed by Igor Stravin­sky for the Bal­lets Rus­es com­pa­ny. Pop­u­lar his­to­ry has remem­bered this debut per­for­mance as too bold, too dar­ing, too avant-garde for its gen­teel audi­ence to han­dle — and so, with the bour­geois duly épaté, we can freely appre­ci­ate Stravin­sky’s rad­i­cal work from our posi­tion of 21st-cen­tu­ry sophis­ti­ca­tion. But whether The Rite of Spring incit­ed a riot, a “near-riot” (as some source describe it), or mere­ly a wave of dis­sat­is­fac­tion, what aspects of its art were respon­si­ble?

May 29th, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées comes alive again in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above, which exam­ines all the ways The Rite of Spring broke vio­lent­ly with the bal­let form as it had estab­lished itself in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Les­son cre­ator Iseult Gille­spie (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for her explana­to­ry work on every­thing from Shake­speare and Guer­ni­ca to Fri­da Kahlo and Haru­ki Muraka­mi) writes of its “harsh music, jerky danc­ing, and uncan­ny stag­ing,” all in ser­vice of a high­ly un-gen­teel Pagan premise that “set audi­ences on edge and shat­tered the con­ven­tions of clas­si­cal music.”

Among Stravin­sky’s musi­cal provo­ca­tions — or rather, “for­mal exper­i­ments,” — Gille­spie names “syn­co­pa­tion, or irreg­u­lar rhythm,” “atonal­i­ty, or the lack of a sin­gle key,” and “the pres­ence of mul­ti­ple time sig­na­tures,” as well as the inclu­sion of aspects of the Russ­ian folk music that was Stravin­sky’s cul­tur­al inher­i­tance. Along with the music, already star­tling enough, came visu­al design by Nicholas Roerich, a painter-philoso­pher “obsessed with pre­his­toric times” and pro­fes­sion­al­ly con­cerned with human sac­ri­fice and ancient tomb exca­va­tion.

Wear­ing Roerich’s awk­ward­ly-hang­ing peas­ant gar­ments in front of his “vivid back­drops of primeval nature full of jagged rocks, loom­ing trees, and night­mar­ish col­ors,” the bal­let’s dancers per­formed steps by Vaslav Nijin­sky, whose sense of rig­or brought him to cre­ate dances “to rethink the roots of move­ment itself.” His chore­og­ra­phy “con­tort­ed tra­di­tion­al bal­let, to both the awe and hor­ror of his audi­ence” — but then, that pos­si­bly overde­ter­mined awe and hor­ror could have arisen from sev­er­al num­ber of artis­tic sources at once. The Rite of Spring’s ten­sion and urgency still today reflects the his­tor­i­cal moment of its com­po­si­tion, “the cusp of both the first world war and the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion,” and we could also take the ear­ly reac­tion to its inno­va­tions as a reflec­tion of its cre­ators’ genius — or per­haps those first view­ers, as Stravin­sky him­self put it, were sim­ply “naïve and stu­pid peo­ple.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Igor Stravin­sky Remem­bers the “Riotous” Pre­miere of His Rite of Spring in 1913: “They Were Very Shocked. They Were Naive and Stu­pid Peo­ple”

Hear The Rite of Spring Con­duct­ed by Igor Stravin­sky Him­self: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1929

Hear 46 Ver­sions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Min­utes: A Clas­sic Mashup

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct the Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece that First Made Him Famous (1965)

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

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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The Amazing Artistry & Ingenuity of the Furniture Enjoyed by 18th Century Aristocrats

in Design, History | January 15th, 2020

What­ev­er did peo­ple do with them­selves all day before social media and stream­ing video? Before TV, film, and radio? If you were most peo­ple in Europe, before var­i­ous rev­o­lu­tions, you worked from dawn to dusk and col­lapsed in bed, with rare hol­i­days to break up the monot­o­ny.

But if you were an aris­to­crat, you not only had the plea­sures of juicy gos­sip, live­ly cor­re­spon­dence, and bawdy nov­els to look for­ward to, but you might also—just as mil­lions do now—encounter such plea­sures while gam­ing.

The gam­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the time was all hand­craft­ed, and said aris­to­crats might find them­selves trad­ing wicked barbs while seat­ed around the height of tech above, a table that unfolds a series of leaves to reveal a felt sur­face for card games, a board for chess or check­ers, and a leather writ­ing sur­face that offers the option of a bookrest, for prop­ping up a scan­dalous book of verse.

If you think that’s impres­sive, the table hasn’t fin­ished yet. It fur­ther opens into a backgam­mon board, with slid­ing lids reveal­ing com­part­ments for game pieces. Then, the whole thing folds back to its size as a small side table, with detach­able legs that can be stored inside it for easy portage.

The ani­mat­ed video of the ulti­mate 18th cen­tu­ry gam­ing sys­tem at the top comes to us from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, demon­strat­ing a piece in their col­lec­tion designed by Ger­man cab­i­net­mak­er David Roent­gen that “once graced the inti­mate inte­ri­or of an aris­to­crat­ic Euro­pean home.” Not to be out­done, the Get­ty Muse­um brings us the 3D ani­ma­tion above of an 18th-cen­tu­ry French mechan­i­cal table, with intri­cate work­ings designed by Jean-François Oeben.

“An afflu­ent lady might spend hours at a fash­ion­able table, engaged in leisure or work,” notes a com­pan­ion video above. It illus­trates the point with a pair of ghost­ly ani­mat­ed hands com­pos­ing a let­ter on the table’s silk writ­ing sur­face.

One can imag­ine these hands spilling the ink while open­ing juniper-scent­ed draw­ers, and prop­ping up the book stand; los­ing their place in a book while search­ing through com­part­ments, ear­ly forms of scrolling or open­ing mul­ti­ple tabs.

We may now car­ry mechan­i­cal tables in our pock­ets and right­ly think of gam­ing sys­tems as por­tals to oth­er worlds, but there’s no deny­ing that these bespoke ances­tors of our devices offered plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty for pleas­ant dis­trac­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ladies & Gen­tle­men Got Dressed in the 18th Cen­tu­ry: It Was a Pret­ty Involved Process

The Sights & Sounds of 18th Cen­tu­ry Paris Get Recre­at­ed with 3D Audio and Ani­ma­tion

Restora­tion and 18th Cen­tu­ry Poet­ry: From Dry­den to Wordsworth (Free Course) 

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

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