The Paul McCartney is Dead Conspiracy Theory, Explained

in History, Music | September 4th, 2019

Hoax­es used to be fun, I imag­ine, before the inter­net turned them into weapons of mass dis­in­for­ma­tion. One shud­ders to think what kind of luna­cy might have result­ed had the Paul McCart­ney-is-dead-and-has-been-replaced-by-a-looka­like hoax first spread on Face­book instead of col­lege news­pa­pers, local radio sta­tions, and good-old word of mouth. The hoax is emblem­at­ic not only of how mis­in­for­ma­tion spread dif­fer­ent­ly fifty years ago, but also how the coun­ter­cul­ture fig­ured out infor­ma­tion war­fare, and used it to pro­duce reams of satir­i­cal pro­to-viral con­tent.

Whether the author of the orig­i­nal 1969 arti­cle—“Is Bea­t­le Paul McCart­ney Dead?,” from the Drake Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent news­pa­per the Times-Del­ph­ic—intend­ed to fool the pub­lic hard­ly mat­ters. His spec­u­la­tion reads like par­o­dy, like a star chart crossed with lurid tabloid gos­sip that, through a strange twist of fate cre­at­ed a net­work of peo­ple who believed that Paul was killed in a 1966 car crash and the band found an imposter named Bil­ly Shears to replace him.

It should be not­ed that Paul McCart­ney is very much alive and has not been played by an imper­son­ator for fifty years. There are no “two sides” to this sto­ry. There is the life of Paul McCart­ney and there is a strange and amus­ing rumor that nev­er harmed any­one, except the Paul McCart­ney of its imag­i­na­tion. “Paul is Dead” ranks high­ly among “music’s most WTF con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries,” also the title of the Rolling Stone video above, which aims to explain “the orig­i­nal insane rock n’ roll con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.”

The Bea­t­les had a lot of fun with the con­spir­a­cy, dou­bly hoax­ing their fans by play­ing along occa­sion­al­ly. McCart­ney respond­ed with his clas­sic wit: “If I were dead, I’d be the last to know it.” But pub­licly con­firm­ing or deny­ing Paul McCartney’s body snatch­ing did­n’t mat­ter. Like those who claimed Stan­ley Kubrick staged the moon land­ing and left clues in The Shin­ing, true believ­ers found evi­dence every­where they looked.

The cov­er of Sgt. Pepper’s sup­pos­ed­ly rep­re­sents Paul’s funer­al; his dop­pel­gänger alleged­ly wears a patch with the let­ters O.P.D.—officially pro­nounced dead.” (It’s actu­al­ly O.P.P., “Ontario Provin­cial Police.”); lyrics played back­wards spell it out: “Paul is Dead.” As with most crack­pot the­o­ries, there is one cru­cial miss­ing ele­ment: motive. Why would the band not only cov­er up Paul’s death but leave trails of bread­crumbs on every sub­se­quent record?

Why does the vil­lain explain their entire plan to the hero as soon as they get the upper hand? Why do killers leave detailed, incrim­i­nat­ing doc­u­ments called “The Plan” on their hard dri­ves on Date­line? Who can say? In the world of weird con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, con­spir­a­tors are com­pelled to place cryp­tic but deci­pher­able clues all over the place. It’s like they want to be caught, or it’s like con­spir­a­cy fans des­per­ate­ly want to believe they do. Either way, as far as con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries go, “Paul is Dead” earns its “WTF” sta­tus. It also bears the dis­tinc­tion of nev­er actu­al­ly hav­ing involved anyone’s death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the “Paul McCart­ney is Dead” Hoax Start­ed at an Amer­i­can Col­lege News­pa­per and Went Viral (1969)

The Band Every­one Thought Was The Bea­t­les: Revis­it the Klaatu Con­spir­a­cy of 1976

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Vivian Debunks the Age-Old Moon Land­ing Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry

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

How Marion Stokes, an Activist Librarian, Recorded 30 Years of TV News on 70,000 Video Tapes: It’s All Now Being Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Film, Television | August 30th, 2019

“Noth­ing is more impor­tant than tele­vi­sion,” said J.D. Salinger (as imper­son­at­ed, that is, in an episode of Bojack Horse­man). A pas­sive, paci­fy­ing medium—“cool,” as Mar­shall McLuhan called it—TV has also long been an easy tar­get for pun­dit­ry, for many decades before the per­pe­tra­tor du jour, video games. Tele­vi­sion spread igno­rance, was “the drug of the nation,” said Michael Fran­ti, ped­dled fake heroes on “chan­nel zero,” said Pub­lic Ene­my, and would lead to an “elec­tri­cal re-trib­al­iza­tion of the West,” McLuhan pre­dict­ed (and fur­ther explained in this inter­view).

Mar­i­on Stokes set out to do more than any of the men above who made pro­nounce­ments about tele­vi­sion. She ded­i­cat­ed her life to pre­serv­ing the evi­dence, tap­ing tele­vi­sion news for over 33 years, from 1979 “until the day she died,” writes the Inter­net Archive, who now hold Stokes’ “unique 71k+ video cas­sette col­lec­tion” and intend to dig­i­tize all of it. Stokes “was a fierce­ly pri­vate African Amer­i­can social jus­tice cham­pi­on, librar­i­an, polit­i­cal rad­i­cal, TV pro­duc­er, fem­i­nist, Apple Com­put­er super-fan and col­lec­tor like few oth­ers.”

She “ques­tioned the media’s moti­va­tions and rec­og­nized the insid­i­ous inten­tion­al spread of dis­in­for­ma­tion…. Ms. Stokes was alarmed. In a pri­vate her­culean effort, she took on the chal­lenge of inde­pen­dent­ly pre­serv­ing the news record of her times in its most per­va­sive and per­sua­sive form—TV.” She also pre­served three decades of tele­vised cri­tiques of tele­vi­sion. She began mak­ing her archive at the begin­ning of the Iran Hostage Cri­sis on Novem­ber 14, 1979. “She hit record and nev­er stopped,” her son Michael Metelits says in Recorder: The Mar­i­on Stokes Project, “a new­ly released doc­u­men­tary,” reports Atlas Obscu­ra, “about [Stokes] and the archival project that became her life’s work.”

In one remark­able exam­ple of TV cri­tique, at the top, we see William Davi­don, pro­fes­sor of Physics at Haver­ford Col­lege, decry­ing tele­vi­sion for spread­ing igno­rance, social irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty, and pas­sive con­sump­tion, mak­ing peo­ple unable to par­tic­i­pate in the polit­i­cal process. The round­table dis­cus­sion took place on a 1968 episode of Input. A lit­tle over a year lat­er, writes the Inter­net Archive, Davi­don “would take an action of great social con­se­quence,” break­ing into an FBI field office with sev­en oth­ers and steal­ing the evi­dence that “revealed COINTELPRO.” (They were nev­er caught, and Davidon’s role only came out posthu­mous­ly.)

Then known as Mar­i­on Metelits, Stokes co-pro­duced Input, a local Philadel­phia Sun­day morn­ing talk show, with her future hus­band John S. Stokes Jr., and both of them appear on the pro­gram above (both cred­it­ed as rep­re­sent­ing the Well­springs Ecu­meni­cal Cen­ter). The con­ver­sa­tion ranges wide­ly, with Ms. Metelits and Davi­don spirit­ed­ly defend­ing “human poten­tial” against too-rigid sys­tems of clas­si­fi­ca­tion and manip­u­la­tion. There are a few dozen more episodes of Input cur­rent­ly at the Inter­net Archive, with pan­els fea­tur­ing aca­d­e­mics, activists, and cler­gy (such as the episode explain­ing, sort of, the “Well­springs Ecu­meni­cal Cen­ter.”)

It’s a hard-hit­ting, con­tro­ver­sial show for a local broad­cast, and it gives us a detailed view of a range of both pop­u­lar and rad­i­cal posi­tions of the time, includ­ing Stokes’, which we can learn more about in the jour­nals, notes, lists, news­pa­per and mag­a­zine clip­pings, pam­phlets, leaflets, hand­bills, and more she col­lect­ed since 1960, many of which have also been dig­i­tized at the Inter­net Archive. Stokes backed her views with action. She was “sur­veilled by the gov­ern­ment for her ear­ly polit­i­cal activism,” Atlas Obscu­ra writes, and “attempt­ed to defect to Cuba” with her first hus­band Melvin Metelits. She kept her record­ing project pri­vate, “eschewed Tivo” and “nev­er sent an email in her life.”

She also made a small for­tune in Apple stock, which fund­ed her project and “the mas­sive stor­age space she required as the sole force behind it.” Stokes left us no doubt as to why she doc­u­ment­ed thir­ty years of TV news. But those doc­u­ments get to speak for themselves—or they will, at least. Stokes record­ed far more than her own pro­gram, three decades more. And the Inter­net Archive is cur­rent­ly “endeav­or­ing to help make sure” the entire col­lec­tion “is dig­i­tized and made avail­able online to every­one, for­ev­er, for free.”

If tele­vi­sion had, and maybe still has, the pow­er ascribed to it by its many astute crit­ics, then Mar­i­on Stokes’ painstak­ing archive offers an invalu­able means of under­stand­ing how we got to where we are, if not how to change course. Stokes’ col­lec­tion, and the doc­u­men­tary about her life, show “how the news was going to evolve into an addic­tion,” as Owen Gleiber­man writes at Vari­ety. The project took over her life and frac­tured her rela­tion­ships. “Even if you’re obsessed with the inac­cu­ra­cy of TV news, it has still entrapped you, like a two-way mir­ror that won’t let you see the oth­er side.” If the medi­um is the mes­sage, the oth­er side might always be more tele­vi­sion.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­shall McLuhan’s The Medi­um is the Mas­sage (1967)

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

New Archive Makes Avail­able 800,000 Pages Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of Film, Tele­vi­sion & Radio

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

Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists

in Art, Philosophy | August 15th, 2019

Lud­wig Wittgenstein/Piet Mon­dri­an:

What do the Aus­tri­an-British philoso­pher Lud­wig Wittgen­stein and the Dutch painter Piet Mon­dri­an have in com­mon? For philoso­pher and artist Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger, the two have sim­i­lar beliefs about the log­ic of space.

“Many of Mon­dri­an’s pieces explore the rela­tion­ships between adja­cent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in par­tic­u­lar the for­ma­tive role of each on the bound­aries and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the oth­er. I based this paint­ing [see above] off of Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus, in which he devel­ops a the­o­ry of mean­ing ground­ed in the idea that propo­si­tions have mean­ing only inso­far as they con­strain the ways the world could be; a mean­ing­ful propo­si­tion is thus very like one of Mon­dri­an’s col­or squares, form­ing a bound­ary and lim­it­ing the pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions of the adja­cent spaces.”

An Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton, Bolinger stud­ied paint­ing a Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty before mak­ing phi­los­o­phy her sec­ond major. “I actu­al­ly came to phi­los­o­phy quite late in my col­lege career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was for­tu­nate to have two par­tic­u­lar­ly excel­lent and philo­soph­ic art teach­ers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Ander­son, who con­vinced me that my two pas­sions were not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, and encour­aged me to pur­sue both as I began my grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion.”

Bolinger now works pri­mar­i­ly on the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, with side inter­ests in log­ic, epis­te­mol­o­gy, mind and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. She con­tin­ues to paint. We asked her how she rec­on­ciles her two pas­sions, which seem to occu­py oppo­site sides of the mind. “I do work in ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that phi­los­o­phy and paint­ing engage oppo­site sides of the mind. The sort of real­ist draw­ing and paint­ing that I do is all about ana­lyz­ing the rela­tion­ships between the lines, shapes and col­or tones, and so still very left-brain. Nev­er­the­less, it engages the mind in a dif­fer­ent way than do the syl­lo­gisms of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy. I find that the two types of men­tal exer­tion com­ple­ment each oth­er well, each serv­ing as a pro­duc­tive break from the oth­er.”

Bolinger has cre­at­ed a series of philoso­pher por­traits, each one pair­ing a philoso­pher with an artist, or art style, in an intrigu­ing way. In addi­tion to Wittgen­stein, she paint­ed ten philoso­phers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her web site, where high qual­i­ty prints can be ordered.

G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pol­lock:

Bolinger says she paired the British ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher Eliz­a­beth Anscombe with the Amer­i­can abstract painter Jack­son Pol­lock for two rea­sons: “First, the loose style of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ing fits the argu­men­ta­tive (and orga­ni­za­tion­al) style of Wittgen­stein’s Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instru­men­tal in pub­lish­ing. Sec­ond, her pri­ma­ry field of work, in which she wrote a sem­i­nal text, is phi­los­o­phy of action, which has obvi­ous con­nec­tions to the themes present in any of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ings.”

Got­t­lob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:

Bolinger paired the Ger­man logi­cian, math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher Got­t­lob Frege with the Dutch painter Vin­cent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence to Van Gogh’s famous paint­ing The Star­ry Night and Frege’s puz­zle con­cern­ing iden­ti­ty state­ments such as “Hes­pe­rus is Phos­pho­rus,” or “the evening star is iden­ti­cal to the morn­ing star.”

Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:

Bolinger paint­ed the British logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell in the Art Deco style. “This pair­ing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit hard­er to artic­u­late,” says Bolinger. “The sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of form and reduc­tion to angled planes that takes place in the back­ground of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Rus­sel­l’s locial atom­ism (the reduc­tion of com­plex log­i­cal propo­si­tions to their fun­da­men­tal log­i­cal ‘atoms’).”

Kurt Gödel/Art Nou­veau:

Bolinger paired the Aus­tri­an logi­cian Kurt Gödel with Art Nou­veau. “The Art Nou­veau move­ment devel­oped around the theme of mech­a­niza­tion and the rep­e­ti­tion of forms,” says Bolinger, “and cen­tral­ly involves a del­i­cate bal­ance between organ­ic shapes — typ­i­cal­ly a fig­ure that dom­i­nates the por­trait — and schema­tized or abstract­ed pat­terns, often derived from organ­ic shapes, but made uni­form and repet­i­tive (often seen in the flower motifs that orna­ment most Art Nou­veau por­traits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was ded­i­cat­ed to defin­ing com­putabil­i­ty in terms of recur­sive func­tions, and using the notion to prove the Com­plete­ness and Incom­plete­ness the­o­rems.”

To see more of Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger’s philoso­pher por­traits, click here to vis­it her site.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site back in 2013.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Released by Archives at Cam­bridge

180+ Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The Therapeutic Benefits of Ambient Music: Science Shows How It Eases Chronic Anxiety, Physical Pain, and ICU-Related Trauma

in Health, Music, Neuroscience, Psychology | July 30th, 2019

“In forty years of med­ical prac­tice,” wrote Dr. Oliv­er Sacks near the end of his famous career, “I have found only two types of non-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ‘ther­a­py’ to be vital­ly impor­tant for patients with chron­ic neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases: music and gar­dens.” The com­ment might not sur­prise us, com­ing from such an unortho­dox thinker as Sacks. But we might be sur­prised by the con­sid­er­able amount of tra­di­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic research link­ing music and men­tal health.

Six­ty years ago, when Sacks was still in med­ical school, avant-garde jazz band­leader Sun Ra had a very Sacks-like expe­ri­ence when he played for an audi­ence of patients in a men­tal hos­pi­tal, and inspired a cata­ton­ic woman who hadn’t spo­ken for years to stand up and say ‘Do you call that music?’” The gig, booked by his man­ag­er, con­sti­tut­ed a fringe exper­i­ment in alter­na­tive med­i­cine at the time, not a seri­ous sub­ject of study among med­ical doc­tors and neu­ro­sci­en­tists.

How things have changed in the last half-cen­tu­ry.

Sev­er­al recent stud­ies, for exam­ple, have linked drum­ming, the old­est and most uni­ver­sal form of music-mak­ing, to reduced anx­i­ety, pain relief, improved mood, and improved learn­ing skills in kids with autism. Lis­ten­ing to and play­ing jazz and oth­er forms of syn­co­pat­ed music, have been shown in study after study to pro­mote cre­ativ­i­ty, enhance math skills, and sup­port men­tal and emo­tion­al well-being.

But what about ambi­ent music, a genre often char­ac­ter­ized by its lack of syn­co­pa­tion, and almost cer­tain to fea­ture as back­ground music in guid­ed med­i­ta­tion and stress reduc­tion record­ings; in slow, relax­ing yoga videos; and thou­sands of YouTube videos pro­mot­ing sup­pos­ed­ly stress-reduc­ing fre­quen­cies and stereo effects? Ambi­ent seems pur­pose-built to com­bat ten­sion and dis-ease, and in a sense, it was.

Bri­an Eno, the artist who named the genre and often gets cred­it for its inven­tion, wrote in the lin­er notes to Ambi­ent 1: Music for Air­ports, “[this record is] designed to induce calm and space to think.” Whether he meant to make a sci­en­tif­ic claim or only an artis­tic state­ment of pur­pose, research has val­i­dat­ed his infer­ences about the salu­tary effects of long, slow, atmos­pher­ic music.

Noisey Asso­ciate Edi­tor Ryan Bassil, a long­time suf­fer­er of anx­i­ety and pan­ic attacks, found the state­ment to be true in his own life, as he explains in the video above (illus­trat­ed by Nathan Cowdry). Music from ambi­ent com­posers like Eno, William Bassin­s­ki, and Fen­nesz helped him “ground” him­self dur­ing extreme­ly anx­ious moments, bring­ing him back into sen­so­ry con­tact with the present.

When Bassil looked into the rea­sons why ambi­ent music had such a calm­ing effect on his over-stim­u­lat­ed ner­vous sys­tem, he found research from artist and aca­d­e­m­ic Luke Jaaniste, who described an “ambi­ent mode,” a “per­va­sive all-around field, with­out any­thing being pri­or­i­tized into fore­ground and back­ground.” Immer­sion in this space, writes Bassil, “can help the lis­ten­er put aside what’s on their mind and use their sens­es to focus on their sur­round­ings.”

We may not—and should not—ask music to be a use­ful tool, but ambi­ent has shown itself par­tic­u­lar­ly so when treat­ing seri­ous neu­ro­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tions. Foren­sic psy­chi­a­trist Dr. John Tul­ly of London’s Insti­tute of Psy­chi­a­try, Psy­chol­o­gy and Neu­ro­science traces the form back to Bach and Chopin, and espe­cial­ly Erik Satie, who “was the first to express the idea of music specif­i­cal­ly as back­ground sound,” and who had no qualms about music serv­ing a spe­cial­ized pur­pose.

The pur­pose of what we broad­ly call ambi­ent has evolved and changed as clas­si­cal, min­i­mal­ist avant-garde, and elec­tron­ic musi­cians have penned com­po­si­tions for very dif­fer­ent audi­ences. But no mat­ter the intent, or where we draw the genre bound­aries, all kinds of atmos­pher­ic, instru­men­tal music has the ther­a­peu­tic pow­er not only to reduce anx­i­ety, but also to ease pain in sur­gi­cal patients and reduce agi­ta­tion in those suf­fer­ing with demen­tia.

When he per­formed with his group Dark­room at the Crit­i­cal Care Unit at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don Hos­pi­tal, writer and psy­chol­o­gist Charles Fer­ny­hough found out that ambi­ent music had sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits for patients trapped in what he calls “a sub­urb of hell”: the ICU. Stays in inten­sive care units cor­re­late close­ly with lat­er PTSD and what was once called “ICU psy­chosis” in the midst of trau­mat­ic emer­gency room expe­ri­ences. Seda­tion turns out to be a major cul­prit. But music, espe­cial­ly ambi­ent music, brought patients back to them­selves.

Hear the 2016 Dark­room per­for­mance at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don Hos­pi­tal ICU fur­ther up, and read more about Fernyhough’s research and per­for­mance at Aeon. The sci­ence of how and why ambi­ent works the way it does is hard­ly set­tled. Where Fer­ny­hough found that patients ben­e­fit­ed from a lack of pre­dictabil­i­ty and an abil­i­ty to “escape the present moment,” Bassil’s research and expe­ri­ence uncov­ered the opposite—a sense of safe pre­dictabil­i­ty and enhanced sen­so­ry aware­ness.

Phys­i­o­log­i­cal respons­es from per­son to per­son will vary, as will their tastes. “One person’s easy lis­ten­ing is another’s aur­al poi­son,” Fer­ny­hough admits. But for a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple suf­fer­ing severe anx­i­ety and trau­ma, the dron­ing, min­i­mal, word­less sound­scapes of ambi­ent are more effec­tive than any med­ica­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

The 50 Best Ambi­ent Albums of All Time: A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Stream 72 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopi­an Future

The Health Ben­e­fits of Drum­ming: Less Stress, Low­er Blood Pres­sure, Pain Relief, and Altered States of Con­scious­ness

Why Do Sad Peo­ple Like to Lis­ten to Sad Music? Psy­chol­o­gists Answer the Ques­tion in Two Stud­ies

This is Your Brain on Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: The Neu­ro­science of Cre­ativ­i­ty

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

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscript Archive Is Online: Explore Handwritten Drafts of Persuasion, The Watsons & More

in Archives, Literature, Writing | July 24th, 2019

I first came to Jane Austen pre­pared to dis­like her, reared as I had been to think of good fic­tion as social­ly trans­gres­sive, exper­i­men­tal, full of heavy, life-or-death moral con­flicts and exis­ten­tial­ist anti-heroes; of extremes of dread and sor­row or alien­at­ed extremes of their lack. Austen’s char­ac­ters seemed too perky and per­fect, too cir­cum­scribed and whole­some, too untrou­bled by inner despair or out­er calami­ty to offer much in the way of inter­est or exam­ple.

This is an opin­ion shared by more per­cep­tive read­ers than myself, includ­ing Char­lotte Bron­të, who called Pride and Prej­u­dice “an accu­rate daguerreo­type por­trait of a com­mon­place face.” Bron­të “dis­liked [Austen] exceed­ing­ly,” writes author Mary Stolz in an intro­duc­tion to Emma. The author of Jane Eyre pro­nounced that “Miss Austen is only shrewd and obser­vant,” where a nov­el­ist like George Sand is “saga­cious and pro­found.”

A cur­so­ry read­ing of Austen can seem to con­firm Brontë’s faint praise. Con­sid­er the first descrip­tion of her hero­ine match­mak­er, Emma:

Emma Wood­house, hand­some, clever, and rich, with a com­fort­able home and hap­py dis­po­si­tion, seemed to unite some of the best bless­ings of exis­tence, and had lived near­ly twen­ty-one years in the world with very lit­tle to dis­tress or vex her.

No great, shock­ing dis­as­ters befall Emma. She is buf­fet­ed nei­ther by war nor pover­ty, crime, dis­ease, oppres­sion or any oth­er essen­tial­ly dra­mat­ic con­flict. She ends the nov­el join­ing hands in mar­riage with charm­ing gen­tle­man farmer Mr. Knight­ly, con­tent, maybe ever-after, in “per­fect hap­pi­ness.”

Rarely if ever in Austen do we find the tor­ments, spir­i­tu­al striv­ings, sub­lime and grotesque imag­in­ings, pro­to-sci­ence-fic­tion, and world-his­tor­i­cal con­scious­ness of con­tem­po­raries like William Blake, Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, or Mary Shel­ley. Austen is “famous,” writes Stolz, “for hav­ing lived through the peri­od of the French Rev­o­lu­tion with­out ever men­tion­ing it in her writ­ings.”

To see this as a cri­tique, how­ev­er, is to seri­ous­ly mis­judge her. “She did not deal in rev­o­lu­tions of this order. Not a trav­eled woman, she wrote only of what she knew”: life in Eng­lish coun­try vil­lages, the tra­vails of “love and mon­ey,” as she put it, the every­day long­ings, cour­te­sies, and dis­cour­te­sies that make up the major­i­ty of our every­day lives.

We can see Austen doing just that in her own hand at the Jane Austen’s Fic­tion Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tal Edi­tion. A col­lec­tion of scanned man­u­scripts from the Bodleian, British Library, Pier­pont Mor­gan Library, pri­vate col­lec­tors, and King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, this project “rep­re­sents every stage of her writ­ing career and a vari­ety of phys­i­cal states: work­ing drafts, fair copies, and hand­writ­ten pub­li­ca­tions for pri­vate cir­cu­la­tion.”

This is pri­mar­i­ly a resource for schol­ars; much of this work has been pub­lished in print­ed edi­tions, includ­ing the Juve­nil­ia (read some of that writ­ing here) and unfin­ished drafts like The Wat­sons and her last, uncom­plet­ed, nov­el, San­di­ton. (One still-in-print 1975 edi­tion col­lects the three unfin­ished nov­els found at the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion). Each dig­i­tal edi­tion of the man­u­script includes a head note on the tex­tu­al his­to­ry, prove­nance, and phys­i­cal struc­ture, as well as a tran­scrip­tion of the text. There is also an option to view a “diplo­mat­ic edi­tion” that tran­scribes the text with all of Austen’s cor­rec­tions and addi­tions.

Yet any Austen fan will appre­ci­ate see­ing her wit­ty, inci­sive style change and take shape in her own neat script. In an age of super­heroes, his­tor­i­cal and fan­ta­sy epics, and dystopi­an fan­tasies, we are beset by “the big Bow-Wow strain,” as Wal­ter Scott self-effac­ing­ly called his own nov­els. In Austen’s writ­ing, we find what Scott described as an “exquis­ite touch which ren­ders com­mon­place things and char­ac­ters inter­est­ing from the truth of the descrip­tion and the sen­ti­ment.” She wraps her truths in wicked irony and a satir­i­cal voice, but they are truths we rec­og­nize as wise and com­pas­sion­ate in her domes­tic dra­mas and our own.

Austen knew well that her set­tings and char­ac­ters were lim­it­ed. She made no apolo­gies for it and clear­ly needn’t have. “Three or four fam­i­lies in a coun­try vil­lage,” she wrote to her niece Anna, “is the very thing to work on.” She also knew well the uni­ver­sal ten­den­cies that blind us to the vari­ety found with­in the every­day, whether our every­day is a sleepy coun­try vil­lage life or a tech-laden, 21st-cen­tu­ry city.

She almost seems to sigh weari­ly in Emma when she observes, “human nature is so well dis­posed toward those who are in inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tions” … so much so that we fail to notice what’s going on all around us all the time. She wrote nei­ther for mon­ey nor fame, and her work wasn’t even pub­lished with her name until after her death in July 1817, but she has since become fierce­ly beloved for the very qual­i­ties Bron­të dis­par­aged.

Austen didn’t miss a thing, which makes her nov­els as can­ny and insight­ful (and big-screen and fan-fic­tion adapt­able) as when they were first writ­ten over two-hun­dred years ago. Enter the Jane Austen’s Fic­tion Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tal Edi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Man­u­scripts: Before the Word Proces­sor & White-Out

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

The First Museum Dedicated Exclusively to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

in Art, Design, History, Museums | July 1st, 2019

How times have changed since our late 80s col­lege days. Under­grads do research online, upload assign­ments to a serv­er, stream music, down­load affir­ma­tive sex­u­al con­sent con­tracts, and turn to Face­book when it’s time to find a ride home for the hol­i­days.

But one aspect of the col­le­giate lifestyle remains unchanged.

They still fes­toon their dorm rooms with posters—the actu­al paper arti­cle, affixed to the walls with blue put­ty, a care­ful­ly curat­ed col­lec­tion of taste and aspi­ra­tion.

As Cait Munro writes in Refin­ery 29:

Fresh­man, already scram­bling to find and loud­ly artic­u­late an iden­ti­ty, can leave the poster sale with two or three plas­tic tubes hous­ing scrolls that rep­re­sent the very essence of their new, par­ent-free, on-cam­pus selves. Posters become an afford­able, demon­stra­ble expres­sion of who they are as a per­son — or, in the tra­di­tion of peo­ple eager to leave behind their home­town selves, who they want to be.

Legions of style blogs have decreed that these posters should be giv­en the heave-ho along with the plas­tic milk crate shelv­ing, come grad­u­a­tion.

Per­son­al­ly, I would rather gaze upon the tat­tered repro­duc­tion of the first paint­ing that spoke to me at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go than any­thing the design experts float as an accept­ably grown up alter­na­tive.

Is Alphonse Mucha’s Byzan­tine 1896 ad for Job rolling papers some­how unwor­thy because legions of dewy eyed under­grads have giv­en it a peren­ni­al place of unframed hon­or?

The dri­ving forces behind the new­ly opened Poster House in New York City would say no. The first Amer­i­can muse­um ded­i­cat­ed exclu­sive­ly to poster art, its cura­tors cast a wide net through the form’s 160 year his­to­ry, whether the end goal of the work was war bond sales, pub­lic health edu­ca­tion, or straight-up box office sales. As the Poster House writes:

For a poster to suc­ceed, it must com­mu­ni­cate. By com­bin­ing the pow­er of images and words, posters speak to audi­ences quick­ly and per­sua­sive­ly. Blend­ing design, adver­tis­ing, and art, posters clear­ly reflect the place and time in which they were made.

What did the best-sell­ing poster of actress Far­rah Faw­cett in a red tank suit say to—and about—teenage boys in 1976? What did it say about Amer­i­can val­ues and gen­der norms in that Bicen­ten­ni­al year? Why no posters of Bet­sy Ross?

How does the offi­cial poster for Juras­sic Park, above, com­pare to the hand-paint­ed, pre­sum­ably unau­tho­rized image used to mar­ket it to audi­ences in Ghana?

(End­less grat­i­tude to illus­tra­tor and mon­ster movie fan Aeron Alfrey for bring­ing this and oth­er Ghan­ian spins on Amer­i­can film releas­es to our atten­tion.)

Some posters have remark­able stay­ing pow­er, reap­pear­ing in a num­ber of guis­es. Wit­ness Rosie the Riv­et­er and James Mont­gomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam-themed WWI recruit­ment poster, to say noth­ing of the Barack Oba­ma “Hope” poster by Shep­ard Fairey, the poster that launched a thou­sand par­o­dies, most­ly dig­i­tal, but even so.

To learn more about vis­it­ing Poster House, its inau­gur­al Alphonse Mucha exhib­it and upcom­ing events such as Drink and Draw, click here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film Posters of the Russ­ian Avant-Garde

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

Chill­ing and Sur­re­al Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the NSA Are Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

The Library of Con­gress Makes Thou­sands of Fab­u­lous Pho­tos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Queen Guitarist Brian May Is Also an Astrophysicist: Read His PhD Thesis Online

in Astronomy, Music, Physics | July 1st, 2019

Pho­to by ESO/G. Huede­pohl, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Queen could­n’t pos­si­bly have been Queen with­out Fred­die Mer­cury, nor could it have been Queen with­out Bri­an May. Thanks not least to the recent biopic, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the band’s already larg­er-than-life lead singer has become even larg­er still. But its gui­tarist, despite the film’s sur­face treat­ment of his char­ac­ter, is in his own way an equal­ly implau­si­ble fig­ure. Not only did he show musi­cal promise ear­ly, form­ing his first group while still at school, he also got his A Lev­els in physics, math­e­mat­ics, and applied math­e­mat­ics, going on to earn a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Physics with hon­ors at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don.

Nat­u­ral­ly, May then went for his PhD, con­tin­u­ing at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege where he stud­ied the veloc­i­ty of, and light reflect­ed by, inter­plan­e­tary dust in the Solar Sys­tem. He began the pro­gram in 1970, but “in 1974, when Queen was but a princess in its infan­cy, May chose to aban­don his doc­tor­ate stud­ies to focus on the band in their quest to con­quer the world.” So wrote The Tele­graph’s Felix Lowe in 2007, the year the by-then 60-year-old (and long world-famous) rock­er final­ly hand­ed in his the­sis. “The 48,000-word tome, Radi­al Veloc­i­ties in the Zodi­a­cal Dust Cloud, which sounds sus­pi­cious­ly like a Spinal Tap LP, was stored in the loft of his home in Sur­rey.” You can read it online here.

Accord­ing to its abstract, May’s the­sis “doc­u­ments the build­ing of a pres­sure-scanned Fab­ry-Per­ot Spec­trom­e­ter, equipped with a pho­to­mul­ti­pli­er and pulse-count­ing elec­tron­ics, and its deploy­ment at the Obser­va­to­rio del Tei­de at Iza­ña in Tener­ife, at an alti­tude of 7,700 feet (2567 m), for the pur­pose of record­ing high-res­o­lu­tion spec­tra of the Zodi­a­cal Light.” Space.com describes the Zodia­cial Light as “a misty dif­fuse cone of light that appears in the west­ern sky after sun­set and in the east­ern sky before sun­rise,” one that has long tricked casu­al observers into “see­ing it as the first sign of morn­ing twi­light.” Astronomers now rec­og­nize it as “reflect­ed sun­light shin­ing on scat­tered space debris clus­tered most dense­ly near the sun.”

In his abstract, May also notes the unusu­al­ly long peri­od of study as 1970–2007, made pos­si­ble in part by the fact that lit­tle oth­er research had been done in this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject area dur­ing Queen’s reign on the charts and there­after. Still, he had catch­ing up to do, includ­ing obser­va­tion­al work in Tener­ife (as much of a hard­ship post­ing as that isn’t). Since being award­ed his doc­tor­ate, May’s sci­en­tif­ic activ­i­ties have con­tin­ued, as have his musi­cal ones and oth­er pur­suits besides, such as ani­mal-rights activism and stere­og­ra­phy. (Some­times these inter­sect: the 2017 pho­to­book Queen in 3‑D, for exam­ple, uses a VR view­ing device of May’s own design.) The next time you meet a young­ster dither­ing over whether to go into astro­physics or found one of the most suc­cess­ful rock bands of all time, point them to May’s exam­ple and let them know doing both isn’t with­out prece­dent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch 94 Free Lec­tures From the Great Cours­es: Dystopi­an Fic­tion, Astro­physics, Gui­tar Play­ing & Much More

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

What Did Old English Sound Like? Hear Reconstructions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casual Conversations

in English Language | June 7th, 2019

What is the Eng­lish lan­guage? Is it Anglo-Sax­on? It is tempt­ing to think so, in part because the def­i­n­i­tion sim­pli­fies a lin­guis­tic his­to­ry that defies lin­ear sum­ma­ry. Over the course of 1000 years, the lan­guage came togeth­er from exten­sive con­tact with Anglo-Nor­man, a dialect of French; then became heav­i­ly Latinized and full of Greek roots and end­ings; then absorbed words from Ara­bic, Span­ish, and dozens of oth­er lan­guages, and with them, arguably, absorbed con­cepts and pic­tures of the world that can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from the lan­guage itself.

Shake­speare and oth­er writ­ers filled in the gaps (and still do), invent­ing words where they were lack­ing. Why do we then refer to the long-dead Anglo-Sax­on lan­guage as “Old Eng­lish,” if it is only a dis­tant ances­tor, and one, you’ll note, no Eng­lish speak­er today under­stands? There are many tech­ni­cal rea­sons for this, but to put it in plain terms: if Eng­lish were a body, Anglo-Sax­on might be the bones and lig­a­ments: not only for the hard­ness of its con­so­nants and its blunt, unadorned poet­ry, but because it con­tains the most com­mon words in the lan­guage, the struc­tur­al bits that hold togeth­er all those pan-lin­guis­tic bor­row­ings.

Observe the piece of verse known as Cædmon’s Hymn, below. Amidst the tan­gle of unfa­mil­iar phonemes and extinct let­ters like the “þ,” you can­not miss such bedrock words as “and,” “his,” “or,” “He,” and “to.” In oth­er texts, you’ll find rec­og­niz­able equiv­a­lents of “father,” “moth­er,” “hus­band,” “wife,” “good,” “god,” and many oth­er com­mon house­hold words.

Nu scu­lon her­ian     heo­fon­rices Weard,
Metodes mihte     and his mod­geþanc,
weorc Wul­dor­fæder,     swa he wun­dra
gehwæs
ece Dry­ht­en,     or onstealde.
He ærest scop     eorþan bear­num
heo­fon to hrofe     halig Sci­ep­pend.
þa mid­dan­geard     man­cynnes Weard
ece Dry­ht­en,     æfter teode
firum foldan     Frea ælmi­htig.

Despite shar­ing many words with mod­ern Eng­lish, how­ev­er, Anglo Sax­on is anoth­er lan­guage, from an entire­ly dif­fer­ent world long dis­ap­peared. No one liv­ing, of course, knows exact­ly what it sound­ed like, so schol­ars make their best edu­cat­ed guess­es using inter­nal evi­dence in the scant lit­er­a­ture, sec­ondary sources in oth­er lan­guages from the time, and sim­i­lar­i­ties to oth­er, liv­ing lan­guages. Now that you’ve seen what Old Eng­lish looks like, hear how it sounds to mod­ern ears.

In the video at the top, stu­dent of the lan­guage Stephen Rop­er reen­acts a casu­al con­ver­sa­tion with an Anglo-Sax­on speak­er, one who can under­stand but can­not speak con­tem­po­rary Eng­lish. The oth­er exam­ples here come from lit­er­ary con­texts. Fur­ther up, Justin A. Jack­son, Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Hills­dale Col­lege, reads the open­ing lines of Beowulf, and just above, hear an unnamed nar­ra­tor read the epic poem’s full Pro­logue.

Just below—backed by a dra­mat­ic, dron­ing score and recit­ed over footage of misty Eng­lish moors—a read­ing of “The Lord’s Prayer” in 11th cen­tu­ry Old Eng­lish. In this text, you’ll pick out quite a few more famil­iar words, though the fact that most read­ers know the mod­ern Eng­lish equiv­a­lent prob­a­bly doesn’t hurt. But if you feel con­fi­dent after lis­ten­ing to these spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tions of the lan­guage, enough to take a crack at read­ing it aloud your­self, head over this Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow col­lec­tion of Old Eng­lish read­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

These Four Man­u­scripts Con­tain All of the Lit­er­a­ture Writ­ten in Old English–and Beyond That, There’s Noth­ing More

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Orig­i­nal Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

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

136 Maps Reveal Where Tourists & Locals Take Photos in Major Cities Across the Globe

in Maps | June 5th, 2019

How to tell the tourists in a city from the locals? Poten­tial­ly reli­able indi­ca­tors include the lan­guage they speak, the terms they use, the way they dress, the way they walk, and whether they’re stand­ing in the mid­dle of the side­walk squint­ing at a map. But few fac­tors draw the line between tourist and local more stark­ly than where they go and don’t go: no mat­ter the city, one will soon­er or lat­er hear talk of places locals know that tourists don’t, places locals don’t go because tourists do know about them, places tourists go when they want to act like locals, places locals go when they want to act like tourists, and so on.

In his project “Tourists and Locals,” Eric Fis­ch­er has found one way of quan­ti­fy­ing this great divide: where do the mem­bers of each group take the pho­tos they upload to the inter­net? You can view the results in 136 dif­fer­ent city maps or explore a whole world map, both of which use the same col­or cod­ing: “The red bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by tourists,” says Bril­liant Maps, “while the blue bits indi­cate pho­tos tak­en by locals and the yel­low bits might be either.”

Using “Map­Box and Twit­ter data from Gnip to cre­ate the maps,” Fis­ch­er defined locals as “those who tweet­ed from the same loca­tion for at least a month” and tourists as “those who were con­sid­ered local in anoth­er city but were tweet­ing in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion.”

Here, from the top of the post down, we have Fis­cher’s maps of Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, and San Fran­cis­co, all cities with vary­ing degrees of over­lap between the realm of the local and that of the tourist. Parisian attrac­tions like the Parc de Belleville and the Bassin de la Vil­lette show a rel­a­tive­ly healthy tourist-local bal­ance, where­as out­siders dom­i­nate in places like La Défense with its high­ly pho­tograph­able sky­scrap­ers, and of course the Lou­vre (to say noth­ing of the red-sat­u­rat­ed Ver­sailles, not pic­tured in this seg­ment of the map). Com­pare that with Tokyo, which of course has world-famous spots — the quaint­ly his­toric Asakusa, the sub­lime­ly urban Shibuya Cross­ing — but whose form does­n’t encour­age quite as strict a phys­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion of tourist and local.

The path a tourist takes through Dublin might over­lap a great deal with the one Leopold Bloom took on June 16, 1904, but less so with the paths an aver­age Dublin­er takes in the 2010s. The Irish cap­i­tal also offers a host of must-sees apart from the Ulysses tour — the Guin­ness Store­house, Trin­i­ty Col­lege’s Old Library, home of The Book of Kells— but vis­i­tors would do well to fol­low the exam­ple of Dublin’s locals and get a bit more dis­tance from the city cen­ter. They could do the same in San Fran­cis­co, a city of icon­ic tourist attrac­tions on which, before the tech boom, its very sur­vival seemed to depend. But do true trav­el­ers, as opposed to tourists, need this kind of data pro­cess­ing and infor­ma­tion design to know their time would be bet­ter spent some­where oth­er than Fish­er­man’s Wharf?

See 136 dif­fer­ent city maps here.

via Bril­liant Maps

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

The Shift­ing Pow­er of the World’s Largest Cities Visu­al­ized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Hear the Song That Two Teenage Musicians, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, Recorded Together in 1958

in Music | May 28th, 2019

Rock and roll needs its out­siders, its prodi­gious weirdos, trick­sters and pas­tiche artists to rein­vig­o­rate mori­bund gen­res and put things togeth­er no one thought would go. No two peo­ple fit the descrip­tion bet­ter than Frank Zap­pa and Cap­tain Beef­heart (Don Van Vli­et), some­time col­lab­o­ra­tors, fren­e­mies, and par­al­lel evil genius­es with crack teams of musi­cal hench­men at the ready—Zappa the genre-hop­ping vir­tu­oso and music busi­ness supervil­lain; Beef­heart the mad blues­man with a Beat poet’s heart and Mer­ry Prankster’s sense of humor….

Their intense on-again-off-again musi­cal rela­tion­ship threat­ened to come apart for good dur­ing the record­ing of Beefheart’s Zap­pa-pro­duced weirdo mas­ter­piece Trout Mask Repli­ca. These trou­bled stages of their asso­ci­a­tion are what we often talk about when we talk about Zappa/Beefheart, when they dis­cov­ered, writes Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, “that their cre­ative process­es and work habits—Zappa was dis­ci­plined and exact­ing, while Beef­heart pre­ferred to be spon­ta­neous and freeform—couldn’t have been more at odds.”

A lit­tle over a decade ear­li­er, before either of them had musi­cal careers neces­si­tat­ing work habits, the two began record­ing togeth­er in “either late 1958 or ear­ly 1959,” notes Dan­ger­ous Minds. They had known each oth­er since high school in Lan­cast­er, Cal­i­for­nia, where their shared sen­si­bil­i­ties brought them togeth­er: “The two found they had a sim­i­lar taste in music, and quick­ly bond­ed over a shared love of blues, doo-wop, and R&B records.”

Pre­sag­ing all of the ways they would go on to warp, can­ni­bal­ize, and mash up these gen­res, “Lost in a Whirlpool,” with music by Zap­pa and lyrics by Van Vli­et, was one of sev­er­al songs they had begun writ­ing while still teenagers. Zap­pa tells the sto­ry of the record­ing in a 1989 inter­view:

“Lost in a Whirlpool” was taped on one of those tape recorders that you have in a school in the audio/visual depart­ment. We went into this room, this emp­ty room at the junior col­lege in Lan­cast­er, after school, and got this tape record­ed, and just turned it on. The gui­tars are me and my broth­er (Bob­by Zap­pa) and the vocal is Don Vli­et.

The sto­ry of “Lost in a Whirlpool” goes back even far­ther. When I was in high school in San Diego in ‘55, there was a guy who grew up to be a sports writer named Lar­ry Lit­tle­field. He, and anoth­er guy named Jeff Har­ris, and I used to hang out, and we used to make up sto­ries, lit­tle skits and stuff, you know, dumb lit­tle teenage things. One of the plots that we cooked up was about a per­son who was skindiving—San Diego’s a surfer kind of an area—skindiving in the San Diego sew­er sys­tem [laugh­ter], and talk­ing about encoun­ter­ing brown, blind fish. [laugh­ter] It was kind of like the Cousteau expe­di­tion of its era. [laugh­ter] So, when I moved to Lan­cast­er from San Diego, I had dis­cussed this sce­nario with Vli­et, and that’s where the lyrics come from. It’s like a musi­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of this oth­er skin­div­ing sce­nario.

Scat­o­log­i­cal skin­div­ing seems like such a per­fect con­cep­tu­al sum­ma­ry of the shared Zappa/Beefheart ethos it’s a won­der they didn’t use the title them­selves. Despite their grow­ing cre­ative dif­fer­ences and incom­pat­i­ble tem­pera­ments, they col­lab­o­rat­ed into the mid-70s.

In 1975, twen­ty years after cook­ing up the sto­ry of skin­div­ing in the San Diego sew­ers, they “regaled their fans with the amus­ing­ly titled (most­ly) live album, Bon­go Fury,” Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock writes, “a his­toric cease­fire in their oth­er­wise tur­bu­lent rela­tion­ship that would sad­ly prove all too fleet­ing.” The record is the result of an “inten­sive, 30-date tour” in which “Beef­heart con­tributed har­mon­i­ca, occa­sion­al sax, and numer­ous dis­plays of his eccen­tric poet­ry and one-of-a-kind vocals to the [Zap­pa] ensemble’s reper­toire.” Above, hear Bon­go Fury’s “Advance Romance,” as clas­sic a slice of Zappa/Beefheart odd­ball blues as their very first record­ings from the late 50s.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds/Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Case for Why Cap­tain Beefheart’s Awful Sound­ing Album, Trout Mask Repli­ca, Is a True Mas­ter­piece

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969)

Hear a Rare Poet­ry Read­ing by Cap­tain Beef­heart (1993)

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