Bars, Beer & Wine in Ancient Rome: An Introduction to Roman Nightlife and Spirits

in History | June 30th, 2022

When they final­ly get those kinks worked out of the time machine and we can take a tourist trip back to Rome—having signed the non-inter­ven­tion paper­work, of course—we’re going to need some­one to guide us. I pro­pose that should be Gar­rett Ryan, host of the Told In Stone YouTube chan­nel, PhD in Greek and Roman His­to­ry, and author of Naked Stat­ues, Fat Glad­i­a­tors, and War Ele­phants: Fre­quent­ly Asked Ques­tions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. He has made it his job to answer the every­day ques­tions about these two ancient cul­tures that most his­to­ri­ans pass over. But these are the ques­tions we’re going to need as tourists if we think we’re going to go par­ty in Ancient Rome.

Because invari­ably some­body in our tourist group is going to ask “where’s the bars and night­clubs?” Fair ques­tion. Ryan has the answers, all told in the video above.

Much like Las Vegas or Dubai, the real par­ty­ing is hap­pen­ing at the elite lev­els, among the idle rich who could afford day long ban­quets, extrav­a­gant activ­i­ties such as live lion hunts, and import dancers from as far away as Spain. In Ryan’s recon­struc­tion of a debauched night out he fol­lows a typ­i­cal nou­veau riche who goes slum­ming in the grim­i­er parts of the city, picks fights that his body­guards sort out, and then lies his way into a par­ty at a man­sion by claim­ing to know a friend inside. (He also bribes the guards). And then it’s on and on until the break of dawn.

For the major­i­ty of Romans though, the cities weren’t bustling at night. Most peo­ple rose at dawn and slept at dusk. Bars and eater­ies did exist, how­ev­er. After the din­ner hour, these weren’t fam­i­ly-friend­ly estab­lish­ments. There was gam­bling and drink­ing, and har­ried wait­ress­es who didn’t have time for dum­mies, and the beer and wine was cheap and excep­tion­al­ly low qual­i­ty, and…wait, what exact­ly has changed? Not much, it seems.

Ryan’s oth­er videos offer quick his­to­ries on the beer and wine selec­tions you might find in Rome and in the larg­er empire. Although the upper class­es looked down their Roman noses at beer, a major­i­ty of future Europe pre­ferred it, includ­ing Gaul, also known as mod­ern day France. Tac­i­tus con­sid­ered beer (from Ger­many) as bad as spoiled wine. And indeed a lot of it was sour, improved with the addi­tion of sweet­en­ers. The physi­cian Dioscorides didn’t like beer because it caused exces­sive gas. And while that might be true, it’s not like Roman wine would win any gold medals these days.

Both the Greeks and the Romans pre­ferred their wine heav­i­ly watered down, which might have been nec­es­sary for its strong taste. Sweet­en­ers like hon­ey would also be added to improve the taste. And most wine, fer­ment­ed in vats, only last­ed up to a year before turn­ing to vine­gar.

There’s so much more to learn at these videos, you should just dive in. But when the time trav­el trip comes, please keep your 21st cen­tu­ry opin­ions to your­self until we’re safe­ly home.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An 8‑Minute Ani­mat­ed Flight Over Ancient Rome

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

The Chang­ing Land­scape of Ancient Rome: A Free Online Course from Sapien­za Uni­ver­si­ty of Rome

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Free: Watch Battleship Potemkin and Other Films by Sergei Eisenstein, the Revolutionary Soviet Filmmaker

in Film, History | June 28th, 2022

When it launched fif­teen years ago, the movie pod­cast Bat­tle­ship Pre­ten­sion took its name from two well-known sources: an atti­tude pop­u­lar­ly asso­ci­at­ed with cinephiles, and a 1925 motion pic­ture by Sergei Eisen­stein. To some, mere­ly ref­er­enc­ing a silent film made by a Sovi­et auteur in 1925 con­sti­tutes suf­fi­cient evi­dence of pre­ten­sion in and of itself. But most, even those who’ve nev­er seen a frame of Eisen­stein’s work, do rec­og­nize that Bat­tle­ship Potemkin has an impor­tant place in cin­e­ma his­to­ry — and if they actu­al­ly watch the movie, which is embed­ded just above, they’ll find that it looks and feels more famil­iar than they’d expect­ed.

Like any work of wide and deep influ­ence, Bat­tle­ship Potemkin has often been par­o­died over its near­ly 100 years of exis­tence. But none of its scenes has been paid as much homage, tongue in cheek or else­where, than the mas­sacre on the Odessa Steps, the sym­bol­ic entry­way to that city in what’s now Ukraine.

“Czarist troops march down a long flight of steps, fir­ing on the cit­i­zens who flee before them in a ter­ri­fied tide,” as Roger Ebert describes it. “Count­less inno­cents are killed, and the mas­sacre is summed up in the image of a woman shot dead try­ing to pro­tect her baby in a car­riage — which then bounces down the steps, out of con­trol.”

The con­tent of this sequence is as har­row­ing as its form is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. That’s true in the pro­pa­gan­dis­tic sense, but even more so in the artis­tic one: the Odessa Steps mas­sacre, like the whole of Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, func­tions as a proof-of-con­cept for Eisen­stein’s the­o­ries of mon­tage. Today we take for grant­ed — and in some cas­es have even come to resent — that movies so expert­ly jux­ta­pose their images so as to pro­voke the most intense emo­tion­al response pos­si­ble with­in us. That was­n’t so much the case a cen­tu­ry ago, when most exam­ples of the still-nov­el art form of cin­e­ma used their visu­als sim­ply to make their nar­ra­tives leg­i­ble.

Eisen­stein, how­ev­er, under­stood cin­e­ma’s true poten­tial. He explored it in a range of pic­tures that also includ­ed Ten Days That Shook the World, a drama­ti­za­tion of the 1917 Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion; Alexan­der Nevsky, on the repul­sion of invaders by the epony­mous thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry prince; and the epic his­tor­i­cal dra­ma Ivan the Ter­ri­ble, the sto­ry of the first tsar of all Rus­sia (and idol of Stal­in, who com­mis­sioned the project).

You can watch these films, as well as Eisen­stein’s unfin­ished trib­ute to the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion ¡Que viva Méx­i­co!, free on the Youtube chan­nel of Mos­film, the pre­em­i­nent stu­dio in the Sovi­et era. That Eisen­stein’s tech­niques have sur­vived not just him but the Sovi­et Union itself under­scores a truth he might have sus­pect­ed, but nev­er admit­ted: cin­e­ma is more pow­er­ful than pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Sergei Eisenstein’s Sem­i­nal Bat­tle­ship Potemkin Gets a Sound­track by Pet Shop Boys

Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russ­ian Stu­dio Mos­film: Clas­sic Films, Beloved Come­dies, Tarkovsky, Kuro­sawa & More

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics

in History, Science | June 27th, 2022


For her ground­break­ing research on radioac­tiv­i­ty, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize. Or rather, she won two, one for physics and anoth­er for chem­istry, mak­ing her the only Nobel Lau­re­ate in more than one sci­ence. What’s more, her first Nobel came in 1903, the very same year she com­plet­ed her PhD the­sis at the Sor­bonne. In Recherch­es sur les sub­stances radioac­tives (or Research on Radioac­tive Sub­stances), Curie “talks about the dis­cov­ery of the new ele­ments radi­um and polo­ni­um, and also describes how she gained one of the first under­stand­ings of the new phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non of radioac­tiv­i­ty.”

So says sci­ence Youtu­ber Toby Hendy in the intro­duc­tion below to Curie’s the­sis–a the­sis that made her the first woman in France to receive a doc­tor­al degree in physics. “Fol­low­ing on from the dis­cov­ery of X‑rays by Wil­helm Roent­gen in 1895 and Hen­ri Becquerel’s dis­cov­ery that ura­ni­um salts emit­ted sim­i­lar pen­e­tra­tion prop­er­ties,” says The Doc­u­ment Cen­tre, Curie “inves­ti­gat­ed ura­ni­um rays as a start­ing point, but in the process dis­cov­ered that the air around ura­ni­um rays is made to con­duct elec­tric­i­ty.”

Her deduc­tion that “the process was caused by prop­er­ties of the atoms them­selves” — a rev­o­lu­tion­ary find­ing that over­turned pre­vi­ous­ly held notions in physics — led her even­tu­al­ly to dis­cov­er radi­um and polo­ni­um, which would get her that sec­ond Nobel in 1911.

Unlike her Nobel Prize in physics, which she shared with her hus­band Pierre and the physi­cist Hen­ri Bec­quer­el, Marie Curie won her Nobel Prize in chem­istry alone. By 1911 Pierre had been dead for half a decade, but Marie’s sci­en­tif­ic genius could­n’t be stopped from con­tin­u­ing their pio­neer­ing research as far as she could take it in her own life­time. She clear­ly knew how vast a field her work, with and with­out her hus­band, had opened up: “Our research­es upon the new radio-active bod­ies have giv­en rise to a sci­en­tif­ic move­ment,” she writes at the end of Recherch­es sur les sub­stances radioac­tives. That move­ment con­tin­ues to make dis­cov­er­ies more than a cen­tu­ry lat­er — and her orig­i­nal the­sis itself remains radioac­tive.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Lau­re­ate

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

Marie Curie Invent­ed Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wound­ed Sol­diers in World War I

How Amer­i­can Women “Kick­start­ed” a Cam­paign to Give Marie Curie a Gram of Radi­um, Rais­ing $120,000 in 1921

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioac­tive 100+ Years Lat­er

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Color Footage of the Liberation of Paris, Shot by Hollywood Director George Stevens (1944)

in Film, History | June 24th, 2022

The above footage of Paris’ lib­er­a­tion in August 1944 looks and feels not dis­sim­i­lar to a Hol­ly­wood movie. Part of its pow­er owes to its being in col­or, a van­ish­ing­ly rare qual­i­ty in real film of World War II. But we must also cred­it its hav­ing been shot by a gen­uine Hol­ly­wood film­mak­er, George Stevens. Hav­ing got his start in pic­tures as a teenag­er in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties (not long before mak­ing the cin­e­mat­ic-his­tor­i­cal accom­plish­ment of fig­ur­ing out how to get Stan Lau­rel’s light-col­ored eyes to show up on film), Stevens became a respect­ed direc­tor in the fol­low­ing decade. Swing Time, Gun­ga Din, The More the Mer­ri­er: with hits like that, he would seem to have had it made.

But it was just then, as F. X. Feeney tells it in the DGA Quar­ter­ly, that the war became unig­nor­able. “The dan­ger­ous artistry of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 valen­tine to Adolf Hitler, Tri­umph of the Will, moved Stevens to vol­un­teer for front­line ser­vice in World War II despite his being old enough to dodge a uni­form and sit things out.”

In vivid col­or, Stevens and his U.S. Army Sig­nal Corps crew shot “the D‑Day land­ings, where he was one of the first ashore; the lib­er­a­tion of Paris; the snowy ruins of bombed-out vil­lages en route to the Bat­tle of the Bulge; and, most unfor­get­tably, the lib­er­a­tion of the death camp at Dachau.” (Even the cel­e­bra­to­ry events in Paris had their har­row­ing moments, such as the sniper attack cap­tured at 11:54.)

Stevens went to war a film­mak­er and came home a film­mak­er. The long post­war act of his career opened with no less acclaimed a pic­ture than I Remem­ber Mama, and went on to include the likes of A Place in the Sun, Shane, and The Diary of Anne Frank, whose mate­r­i­al no doubt res­onat­ed even more with Stevens giv­en what he’d seen in Europe. Not all of it, of course, was the after­math of death and destruc­tion. These Paris lib­er­a­tion clips alone offer glimpses of such admirable fig­ures as resis­tance fight­er Simone Segouin, Gen­er­als de Gaulle and Leclerc, and even Lieu­tenant Colonel Stevens him­self. He appears pre­sid­ing over the shoot just as he must once have done back in Cal­i­for­nia — and, with the war’s end in sight, as he must have known he would do again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Albert Camus, Edi­tor of the French Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, Writes Mov­ing­ly About Life, Pol­i­tics & War (1944–47)

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

in Architecture, History, Museums, Video - Arts & Culture | June 23rd, 2022

Most 21st-cen­tu­ry Brook­lyn pub­lic ele­men­tary school­ers have tak­en or will take a field trip to the Wyck­off House, a mod­est wood­en cab­in sur­round­ed by tire shops and fast food out­lets.

The old­est build­ing in NYC by a long­shot, it was also the first struc­ture in the five bor­oughs to achieve his­toric land­mark sta­tus.

Pri­ma­ry sources place the orig­i­nal occu­pants, Pieter Clae­sen Wyck­off and his wife, Gri­et­je Van Ness-Wyck­off, in the orig­i­nal part of the house around 1652. A sin­gle room with a packed earth floor, unglazed win­dows, a large open hearth, and doors at either end, it would have been pret­ty tight quar­ters for a fam­i­ly of 13, as host Thi­js Roes of the his­to­ry series New Nether­land Now notes, dur­ing his above tour of the premis­es.

Two par­lors were added in the 18th-cen­tu­ry, and three bed­rooms in the ear­ly 19th. Typ­i­cal Dutch Colo­nial fea­tures include an H frame struc­ture, shin­gled walls, split Dutch doors, and deep, flared “spring” eaves.

Its sur­vival is a mir­a­cle in a metrop­o­lis known for its con­stant flux.

In the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry, descen­dants of Pieter and Gri­et­je part­nered with com­mu­ni­ty activists to save the home from demo­li­tion, even­tu­al­ly donat­ing it to the New York City Parks Depart­ment.

A late 70s fire (pos­si­bly not the first) neces­si­tat­ed major ren­o­va­tions. (And last year, flood­ing from Hur­ri­cane Ida clob­bered its HVAC and elec­tri­cal sys­tem, putting a tem­po­rary kibosh on pub­lic vis­its to the inte­ri­or.)

Back in 2015, Roes’ com­pan­ion, archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Heleen West­er­hui­js, was invit­ed to inspect the attic, where she dis­cov­ered impres­sive orig­i­nal beams along­side 20th-cen­tu­ry rein­force­ments.

While the direc­tors of the home­stead active­ly rec­og­nize the com­mu­ni­ty that now sur­rounds it with events like an upcom­ing cel­e­bra­tion of Hait­ian cul­ture and Vodou, and hands on activ­i­ties include urban farm­ing and com­post­ing, the orig­i­nal set­tlers of New Nether­land (aka New Ams­ter­dam, aka New York City) remain a major focus.

Any Amer­i­can or Cana­di­an with the sur­name Wyck­off (or one of its more than 50 vari­ants) can and should con­sid­er it their ances­tral home, as they are almost cer­tain­ly descend­ed from Pieter and Gri­et­je. While many thou­sands now bear the name, Pieter was the first. Vol­un­teer geneal­o­gist Lynn Wyck­off explains:

After the Eng­lish assumed con­trol of New Nether­land, res­i­dents prac­tic­ing patronymics (a nam­ing sys­tem that uti­lized one’s father’s name in place of a sur­name) were required to adopt, or freeze, sur­names that could be passed down each gen­er­a­tion. Pieter Clae­sen chose the name Wykhof, which most of his descen­dants have spelled Wyck­off. Despite many unfound­ed claims over the years regard­ing both Pieter’s ances­try and choice of sur­name, there is no record of Pieter’s parent­age; but there is sub­stan­tial evi­dence that he chose the name Wykhof in recog­ni­tion of a farm by the same name out­side of Marien­hafe, Ger­many where his fam­i­ly were like­ly ten­ants.

A hand­ful of Wyck­off fam­i­ly mem­bers left com­ments on the New Nether­land Now video, includ­ing Don­ald, who wrote of his vis­it:

It was an odd  feel­ing to touch the hand-hewn sur­face of a sup­port­ing beam cut and installed by my ances­tor, hun­dreds of years ago.  Since I am a Wyck­off, I was allowed to see some of the “off tour” bits of the house.  I live over 3k miles away, so my feet will prob­a­bly nev­er touch the ground there again.  But I’m glad NY and a lot of won­der­ful peo­ple have main­tained my ances­tral home so well and for so many years.  Hope­ful­ly it has many hun­dreds of years of life remain­ing so that peo­ple can recall a time when Flat­bush was more of a farm than a city.

If you are a Wyck­off (or one of its vari­ants), you’re invit­ed to keep the Wyck­off Association’s fam­i­ly tree up to date by send­ing word of births, deaths, mar­riages, and any per­ti­nent genealog­i­cal details such as edu­ca­tion, mil­i­tary ser­vice, pro­fes­sion, places of res­i­dence and the like.

Explore a col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties, lessons, and col­or pages relat­ed to the Wyck­off House here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

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

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Her family’s trips to the Wyck­off House were includ­ed in the lat­est, NYC muse­um-themed issue of her zine, the East Vil­lage Inky. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

in Art, History, Poetry, Religion | June 22nd, 2022

Giv­en his achieve­ments in the realms of both poet­ry and paint­ing, to say noth­ing of his com­pul­sions to reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal inquiry, it’s tempt­ing to call William Blake a “Renais­sance man.” But he lived in the Eng­land of the mid-eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry to the near mid-nine­teenth, mak­ing him a Roman­tic Age man — and in fact, accord­ing to the cur­rent his­tor­i­cal view, one of that era’s defin­ing fig­ures. “Today he is rec­og­nized as the most spir­i­tu­al of artists,” say the nar­ra­tor of the video intro­duc­tion above, “and an impor­tant poet in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture.” And whether real­ized on can­vas or in verse, his visions have retained their pow­er over the cen­turies.

That pow­er, how­ev­er, went prac­ti­cal­ly unac­knowl­edged in Blake’s life­time. Most who knew him regard­ed him as some­thing between an eccen­tric and a mad­man, a per­cep­tion his grand­ly mys­ti­cal ideas and vig­or­ous rejec­tion of both insti­tu­tions and con­ven­tions did lit­tle to dis­pel.

Blake did­n’t believe that the world is as we see it. Rather, he sought to access much stranger under­ly­ing truths using his for­mi­da­ble imag­i­na­tion, exer­cised both in his art and in his dreams. Cul­ti­vat­ing this capac­i­ty allows us to “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heav­en in a Wild Flower / Hold Infin­i­ty in the palm of your hand / And Eter­ni­ty in an hour.”

Those words come from one of Blake’s “Auguries of Inno­cence.” Despite being one of his best-known poems, it mere­ly hints at the depth and breadth of his world­view — indeed, his view of all exis­tence. His entire cor­pus, writ­ten, paint­ed, and print­ed, con­sti­tutes a kind of atlas of this rich­ly imag­ined ter­ri­to­ry to which “The Oth­er­world­ly Art of William Blake” pro­vides an overview. Though very much a prod­uct of the time and place in which he lived, Blake clear­ly drew less inspi­ra­tion from the world around him than from the world inside him. Real­i­ty, for him, was to be cul­ti­vat­ed — and rich­ly — with­in his own being. Still today, the chimeri­cal con­vic­tion of his work dares us to cul­ti­vate the real­i­ty with­in our­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fan­tas­ti­cal “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books”: The Images Are Sub­lime, and in High Res­o­lu­tion

William Blake’s Paint­ings Come to Life in Two Ani­ma­tions

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

William Blake Illus­trates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Lit­er­a­ture, Orig­i­nal Sto­ries from Real Life (1791)

William Blake: The Remark­able Print­ing Process of the Eng­lish Poet, Artist & Vision­ary

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Revolutionary Paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Video Essay

in Art, History | June 17th, 2022

“The idea of the unrec­og­nized genius slav­ing away in a gar­ret is a deli­cious­ly fool­ish one,” says artist and crit­ic Rene Ricard, as por­trayed by Michael Win­cott, in Julian Schn­abel’s Basquiat. “We must cred­it the life of Vin­cent Van Gogh for real­ly send­ing this myth into orbit.” And “no one wants to be part of a gen­er­a­tion that ignores anoth­er Van Gogh. In this town, one is at the mer­cy of the recog­ni­tion fac­tor.” The town to which he refers is, of course, New York, in which the tit­u­lar Jean-Michel Basquiat lived the entire­ty of his short life — and cre­at­ed the body of work that has con­tin­ued not just to appre­ci­ate enor­mous­ly in val­ue, but to com­mand the atten­tion of all who so much as glimpse it.

As a film Basquiat has much to rec­om­mend it, not least David Bowie’s appear­ance as Andy Warhol. But as one would expect from a biopic about an artist direct­ed by one of his con­tem­po­raries, it takes a sub­jec­tive view of Basquiat’s life and career. “The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Paint­ings of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” the video essay by Youtube Blind Dweller above, adheres more close­ly to the his­tor­i­cal record, telling the sto­ry of how his wild imag­i­na­tion spurred him on to become the hottest phe­nom­e­non on the New York art scene of the nine­teen-eight­ies. By the mid­dle of that decade, the young Brook­lynite who’d once lived on the street after drop­ping out of school found him­self mak­ing over a mil­lion dol­lars per year with his art.

At that time Basquiat “had col­lec­tors knock­ing on his door near­ly every day demand­ing art from him, yet simul­ta­ne­ous­ly ask­ing for spe­cif­ic col­ors or imagery to match their fur­ni­ture,” which result­ed in “him slam­ming the door in a lot of col­lec­tors’ faces.” He refused to pro­duce art to order, con­sumed as he was with his own inter­ests — the law, saint­hood, African cul­ture, black Amer­i­can his­to­ry, the built envi­ron­ment of New York City — and their incor­po­ra­tion into his work. He also pos­sessed a keen sense of how to main­tain a tan­ta­liz­ing dis­tance between him­self and his pub­lic, for instance by delib­er­ate­ly cross­ing out text in his paint­ings on the the­o­ry that “when a word is more obscured, the more like­ly an observ­er will be drawn to it.”

This would have been evi­dent to Warhol, him­self no incom­pe­tent when it came to audi­ence man­age­ment. His asso­ci­a­tion with Basquiat secured both of their places in the zeit­geist of eight­ies Amer­i­ca, but his death in 1987 marked, for his young pro­tégé, the begin­ning of the end. “He began dis­so­ci­at­ing him­self from his down­town past, attend­ing more par­ties reserved for the super-rich, and becom­ing increas­ing­ly obsessed with the idea of being accept­ed by cer­tain crowds,” says Blind Dweller, and his final hero­in over­dose occurred the very next year. Basquiat is remem­bered as both ben­e­fi­cia­ry and vic­tim of the phe­nom­e­non to which we refer (now almost always pos­i­tive­ly) as hype — count­less cycles of which have since done noth­ing to dimin­ish the vital­i­ty exud­ed by his most strik­ing paint­ings.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Basquiat’s Unti­tled Great Art: One Paint­ing Says Every­thing Basquiat Want­ed to Say About Amer­i­ca, Art & Being Black in Both Worlds

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Chaot­ic Bril­liance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Home­less Graf­fi­ti Artist to Inter­na­tion­al­ly Renowned Painter

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Par­ty Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Pub­lic Access TV (1978–82)

When David Bowie Played Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Film, Basquiat

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Ziggy Stardust Turns 50: Celebrate David Bowie’s Signature Character with a Newly Released Version of “Starman”

in History, Music | June 17th, 2022

David Bowie’s fans have now been enjoy­ing the char­ac­ter of Zig­gy Star­dust for a full five decades. That’s hard­ly a bad run, giv­en that the open­ing track of The Rise and Fall of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars announces that the end of the world will come in just five years. Released on June 16th, 1972, that album gave the pub­lic its intro­duc­tion to the title char­ac­ter, an androg­y­nous rock star from a dis­tant star who one day arrives, mes­si­ah-like, on the dying Earth. But as the musi­cal sto­ry goes, the result­ing fame proves too much for him: the hap­less Zig­gy ends up in sham­bles, vic­tim­ized by Earth­ly desires in all their man­i­fes­ta­tions.

One could read into all this cer­tain aspi­ra­tions and fears on the part of Zig­gy Star­dust’s cre­ator-per­former, the young David Bowie. Broad crit­i­cal con­sen­sus holds that it was on the pre­vi­ous year’s Hunky Dory that Bowie first showed his true artis­tic poten­tial.

Though that album, his fourth, boast­ed sig­na­ture-songs-to-be like “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, Bowie declared (no doubt to the label’s frus­tra­tion) that he would­n’t both­er pro­mot­ing it, since he was just about to change his image. This turned out to be a shrewd move, since his sub­se­quent trans­for­ma­tion into Zig­gy Star­dust launched him out of the realm of the respect­ed niche singer-song­writer and into the stratos­phere of the bona fide rock star.

Why did Zig­gy Star­dust dri­ve so many lis­ten­ers to near-mani­ac appre­ci­a­tion half a cen­tu­ry ago? In Bowie’s native Eng­land, many cite his July 1972 per­for­mance of “Star­man” the BBC’s Top of the Pops as the turn­ing point. Though only mild­ly psy­che­del­ic, the seg­ment cel­e­brat­ed the col­or­ful­ly askew glam­our of Bowie-as-Zig­gy and his band the Spi­ders from Mars just when it was des­per­ate­ly need­ed. As music crit­ic Simon Reynolds writes, “It is hard to recon­struct the drab­ness, the visu­al deple­tion of Britain in 1972, which fil­tered into the music papers to form the grey and grub­by back­drop to Bowie’s phys­i­cal and sar­to­r­i­al splen­dor.” Today you can hear a new­ly released 2022 mix of “Star­man” con­struct­ed from the tracks record­ed for Top of the Pops those 50 years ago.

Imag­ine the impact on a young Eng­lish pop-music fan in 1972 who hap­pened to be watch­ing on col­or (or rather, colour) tele­vi­sion, itself intro­duced only a few years ear­li­er. Though Bowie may have cho­sen just the right his­tor­i­cal moment to debut the first of his musi­cal per­son­ae, he did­n’t cre­ate Zig­gy Star­dust ex nihi­lo. Ele­ments of the char­ac­ter have clear prece­dents ear­li­er in Bowie’s career, not least in the pro­mo­tion­al film for 1968’s “Space Odd­i­ty,” the 2001-inspired sin­gle that first asso­ci­at­ed him with the realms beyond our plan­et. But Zig­gy was Bowie’s first gen­uine alter ego, a char­ac­ter per­fect­ly suit­ed to the era of “glam rock” who could con­ve­nient­ly be retired when that era passed. Glam rock may be long gone, but Zig­gy Star­dust still looks and sounds as if he’d only just land­ed on Earth.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Became Zig­gy Star­dust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Orig­i­nal Footage

Hear Demo Record­ings of David Bowie’s “Zig­gy Star­dust,” “Space Odd­i­ty” & “Changes”

David Bowie Remem­bers His Zig­gy Star­dust Days in Ani­mat­ed Video

How David Bowie Deliv­ered His Two Most Famous Farewells: As Zig­gy Star­dust in 1973, and at the End of His Life in 2016

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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