An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Virtually-Recreated Streets

in History | February 13th, 2019

There are numerous ancient stories illustrating the gargantuan ego of the Emperor Nero. Some of these may rise to the level of historical character assassination. Nero did not, for example, fiddle while Rome burned. For one thing, the fiddle did not exist. For another, as the historian Tacitus records, although the emperor was miles away at his villa in Antium when the fires began, it’s said he returned to Rome and led relief efforts, paying for many of them out of his own pocket and housing the newly homeless in his garden.

But the story may have been rewritten to burnish Nero’s reputation. After the masses blamed him for starting the fire, he turned around and blamed the city’s Christians, Tacitus reports, staging elaborate spectacles of torture, burning, and dismemberment. Suetonius does record him as giving some sort of musical performance during the fires of 64 A.D., a rumor that had apparently taken hold among the people. Whatever part he played, and whatever truth there is to charges that he murdered the son of Claudius, one of his wives, and even his own mother, Nero clearly felt a pressing need to leave a different impression of himself—as a towering, bronze god-like figure nearly 100 feet high.

In the same year as the fires, he commissioned a colossal statue of himself as the sun god, inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes. The massive Nero held a rudder perched atop a globe, suggesting that his rule steered the course of the whole world. Nero killed himself before the statue was completed, but Pliny the Elder writes of seeing its creation in the studio of the sculptor, Zenodorus. It arose towering above his palace, the Domus Aurea, in 72 A.D., and in 127, Hadrian moved it near the Amphitheatrum Flavium, which subsequently became known in the statue’s honor as the Colosseum. It took up to 24 elephants to do the job, or so it’s said.

For the next few hundred years, until at least the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and a subsequent series of earthquakes, residents and visitors to the city walked beneath the looming Nero/Helios/Apollo statue, just fifty feet shy of the Statue of Liberty. It was depicted on medallions and gems. Now the statue is completely vanished, with nothing but a remnant of its pedestal remaining. But you can see it reconstructed, along with 27 other ancient Roman monuments, temples, baths, mausoleums, amphitheaters, arenas, etc.—many of them as grandiose and storied as the Colossus—in the thirty-minute video above.

No, it’s not like strolling the streets of ancient Rome. The blockily-rendered CGI recreations appear over contemporary video of the city, full of contemporary traffic and contemporary fashions. As in every historical recreation of antiquity, for which the sources are few and contradictory, we have to use our imaginations. The exercise is infinitely richer the more you learn about the vanished or ruined structures that once dominated the city. See the full list of ancient buildings and sculptures below.

0:10 Palatine Hill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatin…)

3:25 The Forum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_F…)

5:22 Basilica of Maxentius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic…)

7:18 Temple of Vesta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

7:26 House of the Vestals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_o…)

7:48 Temple of Castor and Pollux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

8:03 Temple of Caesar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

8:13 Basilica Aemilia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic…)

8:40 Basilica Julia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic…)

9:17 Temple of Saturn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

10:56 Curia Julia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curia_J…)

12:18 Forum of Augustus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_o…)

13:05 Forum of Nerva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_o…)

13:47 Trajan’s Forum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%…)

14:54 Forum of Caesar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_o…)

15:29 Colosseum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum)

17:42 Temple of Venus and Roma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

18:59 Colossus of Nero and Meta Sudans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossu… -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Su…)

19:28 Baths of Caracalla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baths_o…)

26:39 Pantheon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheo…)

28:13 Stadium of Domitian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadium…)

29:23 Mausoleum of Augustus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausole…)

29:39 Circus Maximus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_…)

30:25 Sacred area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo_d…)

31:21 Theatre of Pompey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre…)

31:56 Theatre of Marcellus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre…)

32:05 Tiber Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber_I…)

32:32 Mausoleum of Hadrian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castel_…)

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

All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

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

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In the 1920s America, Jazz Music Was Considered Harmful to Human Health, the Cause of “Neurasthenia,” “Perpetually Jerking Jaws” & More

in History, Music | February 7th, 2019

These are some interesting stories about the Nazis and jazz, including one about a very bad jazz propaganda band created by Goebbels himself. But we need not mention these at all, or even leave the shores of jazz’s birthplace to find examples of extreme reactions to jazz by authoritarian figures who hated and feared it for exactly the same reasons as the Nazis. Chief among such American enemies of jazz was raging anti-Semite Henry Ford, who feared that jazz was, you guessed it, a Jewish plot to infect the country with racially inferior “musical slush.”

Ford used white country music and square dancing in public schools as weapons of warfare against jazz in the 1920s, thereby displacing blackface minstrelsy as the dominant form of paranoid response to black music in middle America. Another crusader, Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics between 1930 and 1962, more or less invented the war on drugs with his reefer madness war on jazz. He said it sounded like “the jungles in the dead of night” and could “lure white women.” Anslinger relentlessly persecuted Billie Holiday and went after Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

It was within this early 20th century milieu that other institutional powers—some of the country’s most powerful—declared a war on jazz for supposed reasons of public health. (A movement, incidentally, given to an enthusiasm for eugenics and forced sterilization at the time.) Historian Russell L. Johnson has documented this campaign in the journal Health and History, and Jessie Wright-Mendoza describes many of his findings at JStor Daily.

Milwaukee’s public health commissioner claimed that the music damaged the nervous system, and a Ladies’ Home Journal article reported that it caused brain cells to atrophy. In Cincinnati, a maternity hospital successfully petitioned to have a nearby jazz club shut down, arguing that exposing newborns to the offending music would have the effect of “imperiling the happiness of future generations.”

Jazz was “unrhythmical,” opponents argued, and so was disease. Q.E.D. In 1923, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a ruling that shut down a jazz club, citing in their opinion a belief the music “wears upon the nervous system and produces that feeling which we call ‘tired.’” Doctors warned that too much jazz could cause neurasthenia, a catch-all for anxiety, depression, headaches, fatigue, etc. But jazz could also cause patients to become “nervous and fidgety” with “perpetually jerking jaws.” Whatever it did, jazz was hazardous.

Oddly, just as in the Nazi’s fervent attempts to control jazz, as Czech writer Josef Skvorecky once described it, and as in Joseph Goebbels attempts to co-opt the music for white supremacy, the architects of America’s jazz panic found the remedy for jazz in jazz. But segregated jazz. They turned “hot jazz” into “sweet jazz,” a style “interpreted by mainly white musicians to appeal to a wider commercial audience.”

It hardly needs to be said that anyone really afflicted with a passion for jazz ignored this prescription, as did every jazz musician worth listening to. Read more about Johnson’s history of the American fear of jazz at JStor Daily.

via Ted Gioia

Hear the Nazi’s Bizzaro Propaganda Jazz Band, “Charlie and His Orchestra” (1940–1943)

The Nazis’ 10 Control-Freak Rules for Jazz Performers: A Strange List from World War II

How Jazz-Loving Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany

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

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The East German Secret Police’s Illustrated Guide for Identifying Youth Subcultures: Punks, Goths, Teds & More (1985)

in Fashion, History | February 7th, 2019

Ask Germans who lived under the German Democratic Republic what they feared most in those days, and they’ll likely say the agents of the Ministry for State Security, best known as the Stasi. Ask those same Germans what they laughed at most in those days, and they may well give the same answer. As one of the most thoroughly repressive secret police forces in human history, the Stasi kept a close eye and a tight grip on East German society: as one oft-told joke goes, “Why do Stasi officers make such good taxi drivers? You get in the car and they already know your name and where you live.” But this fearsome vigilance went hand-in-hand with technological limitation as well as plain ineptitude: “How can you tell that the Stasi has bugged your apartment?” another joke asks. “There’s a new cabinet in it and a trailer with a generator in the street.”

When the Stasi turned this kind of crude but intense scrutiny to certain aspects of life, the results almost satirized themselves. Take, for instance, this circa-1985 internal guide used to identify the “types of negative decadent youth cultures in the German Democratic Republic,” posted on Twitter by musician and writer S. Alexander Reed and later translated into English by a few of his followers.

The chart breaks down the supposedly decadent youth cultures of mid-1980s East Germany into eight groups, describing their interests, appearance, political inclinations, and activities in the columns below. The rock-and-roll-oriented “Teds,” dressed in a “50s style,” don’t seem to rouse themselves for anything besides “birth and death days of idolized rock stars.” The “Tramps,” a “classic manifestation of the negative-decadent youth in the 70s,” adhere to the trends of a somewhat more recent era.

The fans of “extremely hard rock” known as “Heavies” once held a “deprecative attitude towards state and society,” but seemed at the time to become “increasingly society-conforming.” Other youth cultures considered decadent by the Stasi bore labels that might still sound familiar across the world. The “Goths,” a “satanic and death cult,” are noted for their “glorification of creepy effects” and for being “fans of the group The Cure.” Though they may have been “hardly noticed operationally,” the “punks” presented a more clear and present threat, what with their “deprecative to hostile political attitude, rejection of all state forms and societal norms,” “anarchist thoughts,” and belief in “total freedom.”

You can see the chart in a larger size here, and if you’d like to examine the real thing, you have only to visit Leipzig’s Museum in der Runden Ecke (or view it online here). The document resides in its collection of the tools of the Stasi trade, including, in the words of Atlas Obscura, “old surveillance cameras, collections of confiscated personal letters, and crisp uniforms letting visitors get a glimpse into the world of brutal state espionage.” Germans who remember all the power the Stasi could potentially wield over their lives — a power, for all they knew, about to descend on them any moment — must still feel a chill upon seeing one of those crisp uniforms. Now we know that their wearers might, upon laying eyes on Birkenstocks (“literally: ‘Jesus slippers‘”), red and black worn together (“contrasts as a symbol of anarchy”), or a mohawk (or “Iriquois”) haircut, have felt apprehensive themselves.

Soviets Bootlegged Western Pop Music on Discarded X‑Rays: Hear Original Audio Samples

How Jazz-Loving Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany

The Nazis’ 10 Control-Freak Rules for Jazz Performers: A Strange List from World War II

The Nazis’ Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937

1980s Metalhead Kids Are All Right: New Study Suggests They Became Well-Adjusted Adults

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 Faceboo k.

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The “Slave Bible” Removed Key Biblical Passages In Order to Legitimize Slavery & Discourage a Slave Rebellion (1807)

in Books, History, Religion | February 4th, 2019

Photo via the Museum of the Bible

In an 1846 speech to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass summed up the twisted bond between slavery and religion in the U.S. He began with a short summary of atrocities that were legal, even encouraged, against enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, including hanging, beheading, drawing and quartering, rape, “and this is not the worst.” He then made his case:

No, a darker feature is yet to be presented than the mere existence of these facts. I have to inform you that the religion of the Southern states, at this time, is the great supporter, the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred. While America is printing tracts and Bibles; sending missionaries abroad to convert the heathen; expending her money in various ways for the promotion of the gospel in foreign lands, the slave not only lies forgotten, uncared for, but is trampled underfoot by the very churches of the land.

Douglass did not intend his statement to be taken as an indictment of Christianity, but rather the hypocrisy of American religion, both that “of the Southern states” and of “the Northern religion that sympathizes with it.” He speaks, he says, to reject “the slaveholding, the woman-whipping, the mind-darkening, the soul-destroying religion” of the country, while professing a religion that “makes its followers do unto others as they themselves would be done by.”

Douglass harshly condemns slave society in the U.S., but, perhaps given his audience, he also politically elides the extensive role many churches in the British Empire played in the slave trade and Atlantic slave economy—a continued role, to Douglass’s dismay, as he found during his UK travels in the 1840s. I’m not sure if he knew that forty years earlier, British missionaries traveled to slave plantations in the Caribbean armed with heavily-edited Bibles in which “any passage that might incite rebellion was removed,” as Brigit Katz writes at Smithsonian. But he would hardly have been surprised.

The use of religion to terrorize and control rather than liberate was something Douglass understood well, having for decades keenly observed slaveowners finding what they needed in the text and ignoring or suppressing the rest. In 1807, the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves went so far as to literally excise the central narrative of the Old Testament, creating an entirely different book for use by missionaries to the West Indies. “Gone,” Katz points out, “were references to the exodus of enslaved Israelites from Egypt,” references that were integral to the self-understanding of millions of Diaspora Africans.

Gone also were verses that might explicitly contradict the few proof texts slaveholders quoted to justify themselves. Especially dangerous was Exodus 21:16: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” The typical 66 books of a Protestant Bible had been reduced to parts of just 14. How is it possible to publish a Bible without what amounts to the mythic origin story of ancient Israel? One answer is that this was a different religion, one whose aim, says Anthony Schmidt, curator of the Museum of the Bible, was to make “better slaves.”

The “Slave Bible” did not cut out the subject completely. Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt remains, but this is likely as an example, says Schmidt, of someone who “accepts his lot in life” and is rewarded for it, a story U.S. churches used in a similar fashion. Passages in the New Testament that seemed to emphasize equality were cut, as was the entire book of Revelation. The infamous Ephesians 6:5—“servants be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, in fear and trembling”—remained.

Whether or not the Bible really did sanction slavery is a question still up for debate—and maybe an unanswerable one given differences in interpretive frameworks and the patchwork nature of the disparate, redacted texts stitched together as one. But the fact that British and American churches deliberately used it as a weaponized tool of propaganda and indoctrination is beyond dispute. The so-called “Slave Bible” is both a fascinating historical artifact, a very literal symbol of a practice that was integral to the institution of slavery—the total control of the narrative.

Such practices became more extreme after the Haitian Revolution and the many bloody slave revolts in the U.S., as the planter class became increasingly desperate to hold on to power. One of only three extant “Slave Bibles,” the abridged version—called Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands—is now on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, on loan from Fisk University. In the NPR interview above, Schmidt explains the book’s history to All Things Considered’s Michel Martin, who herself describes the text’s purpose in the most concise way: “To associate human bondage and human slavery with obedience to the higher power.”

via The Smithsonian

1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

Cornell Creates a Database of Fugitive Slave Ads, Telling the Story of Those Who Resisted Slavery in 18th & 19th Century America

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

How the Clavichord & Harpsichord Became the Modern Piano: The Evolution of Keyboard Instruments, Explained

in History, Music | February 1st, 2019

Though different modern pianos may not sound exactly the same as one another, they all sound more or less like pianos to our ears. But the piano didn’t appear fully formed in the world of music as the instrument we know today: it has a variety of predecessors, not all of which sound very similar to the modern piano at all, and a few distinctive-sounding examples of which you can hear demonstrated in these videos from BaroqueBand. In the first, musician and educator David Schrader plays the first two: a replica of a German clavichord, “the oldest stringed keyboard instrument we know of,” dating from around 1600, and a harpsichord, built according to plans dating back to 1617.

The clavichord strikes its strings like a modern piano, but the harpsichord plucks them, using a series of “tiny little guitar picks” called plectrums. Schrader explains this while offering a look inside the workings of these instruments, just as he does with their descendants in the second video: a replica of an early Viennese piano built by Alton Walter, who in the 1780s built an instrument for a certain Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a modern Steinway grand piano made in Hamburg.

The eight bars of one of Mozart’s piano sonata we hear on the Steinway sound good, especially performed by Schrader’s skilled hands, but the Viennese piano offers additional controls that enable the player to achieve a kind of “tone color” that modern pianos don’t.

Hence the interest some musicians and groups (such as the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, recently featured here on Open Culture) have in playing classical music with the same instruments from the eras in which the pieces were composed. “Each of these historical instruments served the music of its own time best,” as Schrader puts it. “After all, you wouldn’t necessarily restore an old oil painting with acrylic paint. Even if you choose not to play the historical instruments, if you study them and how they work, it will modify your approach to make for a clearer, nicer performance on the modern instrument.” But of course, “those of us who choose to eat everything on the plate will play all the instruments” — and will enjoy a performing experience closer to that which the composer intended as a result.

Newly Discovered Piece by Mozart Performed on His Own Fortepiano

Hear Music Played on the Viola Organista, a Piano That Sounds Like a Violin, Which Leonardo da Vinci Invented, But Never Heard

Visit an Online Collection of 61,761 Musical Instruments from Across the World

Hear the Sounds of the Actual Instruments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Handel Originally Composed Their Music

How an 18th-Century Monk Invented the First Electronic Instrument

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 Faceboo k.

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A History of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Minutes

in Animation, History, Technology | February 1st, 2019

Thanks for watching history. I hope I mentioned everything. — Bill Wurtz

Here at Open Culture, we happily acknowledge that learning is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

The internet may be doing a number on our attention spans, but as the world has grown smaller, the educational buffet has grown richer, more varied, and vastly more affordable.

Take for example the History of the World.

Geography fans can approach the subject via Ollie Bye’s year-by-year animated map.

John Green’s playful Crash Course series offers a wonderful respite for any kid grinding their way through AP World History.

Those of a more traditional mindset, who prefer a statelier pace can lose themselves in 46 lectures by Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University.

And then there’s world history according Bill Wurtz, above, a creator of short, anachronistic-looking videos, whose YouTube fame was kindled by Vine, a now defunct app for sharing short-form videos.

Chafing at Vine’s 7‑second time constraints, Wurtz undertook a more ambitious project, a condensed History of Japan that would employ the same techniques he brought to bear in his shorter works: graphic text, clip art, and Microsoft Paint drawings. He zeroed in on the subject because he knew precious little about Japan, and looked forward to doing some virgin research.

Wurtz followed up the 9‑minute History of Japan, above, with History of the Entire World, I guess.

The nonchalance of the title is reflected in Wurtz’s offhanded narration. Any word or phrase over two syllables runs a risk of being transformed into an infomercial-worthy musical jingle: space dust, the moon, Egypt…

You may bridle at first, but stick it out. Its charms sneak up on you.

Time is not particularly relative in Wurtz’s compressed universe. Whether it’s 10 minutes passing before some major development or 500 million years, their passage is accorded equal heft.

Humans show up around the four minute mark, grabbing stuff, banging rocks, figuring out agriculture…

(Mesopotamia’s characterization as a “sweet dank valley” between the Tigris and Euphrates is a particular highlight.)

This is the rare history video where science plays a major role. It takes time out for weather updates—the floor is no longer lava, the entire world is now an ocean… it’s sobering to remember that ozone is what made it safe for multi-celled life forms to venture forth on land.

Empires rise and fall, unconquerable rulers are unseated and forgotten.

(That’s the Tamil Kings. Nobody conquers the Tamil Kings. Who are the Tamil Kings? Merchants probably and they’ve got spices…)

Of course the problem with a great overview such as this is the back end’s shelf life can prove rather short. It’s been a little over a year and a half since Wurtz posted the video, and thus far, his parting shots still feel pretty relevant: armed drones, 3d printing, plastic-choked oceans, and a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the desire to save the world and an actual plan for doing so.

Fried by 11 months of intensive research and labor on History of the Entire World, I guess, Wurtz is currently taking a leave of absence from history. These days, he’s pouring his energies into original music videos like “At the Airport Terminal.” He also devotes a bit of every day to answering fans’ questions, routinely turning in upwards of a dozen succinct humble, all-lowercase replies:

1.18.19 7:00 pm what inspired you to make “the entire world, i guess”? was it a project you already had in mind from before or did you start it when you saw you could do more than just japan

it’s always a nice idea to try to explain the whole world in one video. it’s surely something i’ve always wanted to do, but wasn’t confident/experienced/stupid enough to believe i could do it until after i had done japan which worked so well

1.18.19 12:53 am are you ever going to make anything else as in depth as history of japan or the world?

that would take so much time that by the time it was done you probably wouldn’t care anymore, but someone else will so i still might do it

Unsurprisingly, he’s the subject of a lively sub-reddit. One fan, reddit user n44m, was inspired to plot the timeline of History of the Entire World, I Guess, below.

To learn more about some of the civilizations, events and persons featured in History of the Entire World, I Guess, check out another fan’s annotated transcription here.

And rather than nitpick about certain critical bits of history that were left on the cutting room floor, try writing a script for your own history based animation:

The more you learn, the more you find out how much you’re gonna have to leave out. It’s like 99%. That was painful. — Bill Wurtz

A Crash Course in World History

The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City in February as host of Theater of the Apes book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Evolution of the Alphabet: A Colorful Flowchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

in History | January 31st, 2019

No matter our native language, we all have to learn a writing system. And whichever language we learn, its writing system had to come from somewhere. Take English, the language you’re reading right now and one written in Latin script, which it shares with a range of other tongues: the European likes of French, Spanish, and German, of course, but now also Icelandic, Swahili, Tagalog, and a great many more besides. The video above by Matt Baker of UsefulCharts explains just where this increasingly widespread writing system came from, tracing its origins all the way back to the Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt in 1750 BCE.

As revealed in the video, or by the poster available for purchase from UsefulCharts, the letters used to write English today evolved from there “through Phoenician, early Greek and early Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some letters were dropped and others ended up evolving into more than one letter.”

The color-coding and direction dotted lines help to make clearly legible what was, in reality, an evolution that happened organically over about two millennia. Enough changed over that time, as Jason Kottke writes, that “it’s tough to see how the pictographic forms of the original script evolved into our letters; aside from the T and maybe M & O, there’s little resemblance.”

Baker’s design for this poster, notes Colossal’s Kate Sierzuputowski, “was created in association with his Writing Systems of the World chart which takes a look at 51 different writing systems from around the world.” All of the research for both those posters informs his video on the history of the alphabet, which looks at writing systems as they’ve developed across a variety of civilizations. You’ll notice that all of them respond in different ways to the needs of the times and places in which they arose, and some possess advantages that others don’t. (In Korea, where I live, one often hears the praises sung of the Korean alphabet, “the most scientific writing system in the world.”) But what the strengths of the descendant of modern Latin 2000 years on will be — and whether it will contain anything resembling emoji — not even the most astute linguist knows.

via Colossal/Kottke

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

CBGB’s Heyday: Watch The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Bad Brains, Talking Heads & Blondie Perform Live (1974–1982)

in History, Music | January 31st, 2019

There are, I guess, still many things people can do these days to tap into the legacy of CBGB, but I wouldn’t recommend going near most of them. The merchandising empire (do, however, new parents, get your tot a CBGB bib and onesie); the “thuddingly banal” 2013 film version, which… the less said about the better; yes, and CBGB, the restaurant, in the Newark Airport Terminal C—proceed at your own risk.

We must sadly also mention this past summer’s “Potemkin village from hell,” a pop-up “TRGT” shop for the grand opening of the East Village’s new Target at 14th St. and Avenue A. This abomination—which sold CBGB-styled “TRGT” shirts and proffered Target-branded Band-Aids (get it? Bands) sent “Vanishing New York” blogger Jeremiah Moss into “a state of confusion and dysphoria… to see the artifacts of my own life, my cultural and spiritual awakening, my home, displayed above the cash registers in a Target store.”

One cannot get too upset. The venue had been in a decline for a long time. The best of grassroots American culture all ends up in a Target or Starbucks eventually, gets green lit for a biopic and turned into an interactive gallery. At least the CBGB building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Maybe a boost for the sales of John Varvatos who moved a store into the former club in 2007, the very same year CBGB’s founder Hilly Kristal died of lung cancer.

Ever-tasteful New York Post announced the takeover with the headline Hobo Goes Haute. “All of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords,” said Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome. Twelve years later, the lament seems understated. But time moves on and so should we, the CBGB of the past was a moment in history never to be seen again, as fervid and fertile as late 19th century Symbolism or the Beats—movements that just happened to have very much influenced New York punk.

Like the life and work of Arthur Rimbaud or William S. Burroughs, the only way to commune with the legend of CBGB is through its primary sources. There is no shortage. Recordings, photographs, interviews, and much excellent live footage of the bands that made the T‑shirt famous in the years of punk rock’s glory: The Dead Boys and The Ramones in 1977, Bad Brains, inventing hardcore, in 1982, a very awkward Talking Heads and confident Blondie playing the Velvet Underground all the way back in 75….

Turning cultural moments into monuments and merchandise is shallow, of course, but it’s more than that—it’s impoverishing. It makes us think we understand something without ever having seen it. It’s not enough to know that it happened, we should know how it happened. How was the edgy electrified disco stomper “Psycho Killer” once a rickety, “tense and nervous” acoustic strummer? How did The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators from Cleveland more or less invent the moves front men and women in punk almost universally adopted? How did Washington DC’s Bad Brains break every unspoken rule of punk—with complex breakdowns, tempo shifts, and shredding solos—yet still conquer every punk stage? How did the Ramones play entire live sets shorter than some of the single songs certain other bands played onstage at the time? How was it to witness Blondie as a killer live covers act? How was it to see The Ramones play “Judy is a Punk” in 1974?

Forget the graveyard of CBGB kitsch out there. If you’re interested in punk rock as a cultural phenomenon, you owe it to yourself to see as much of this historic footage as possible, and to listen to as many live recordings of far-too-often unsung CBGB bands like Television. And if you were there, condolences. Maybe you owe it to the rest of us to tell how it really was.

AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Metal Being Played on Punk’s Hallowed Grounds

1976 Film Blank Generation Documents CBGB Scene with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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