Discover the Oldest Book of the Americas: A Close Look at the Astronomical Maya Codex of Mexico
From the mighty Maya civilization, which dominated Mesoamerica for more than three and a half millennia, we have exactly four books. Only one of them predates the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century: the Códice Maya de México, or Maya Codex of Mexico, which was created between 1021 and 1152. Though incomplete, and hardly in good shape otherwise, its artwork — colored in places with precious materials — vividly evokes an ancient worldview now all but lost. In the video above from the Getty Museum and Smarthistory, art historians Andrew Turner and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank tell us what we’re looking at when we behold the remains of this sacred Mayan book, the oldest ever found in the Americas.
“This book has a controversial history,” says Turner. “It was long considered to be a fake due to the strange circumstances in which it surfaced.” After its discovery in a private collection in Mexico City in the nineteen-sixties, it was rumored to have been looted from a cave in Chiapas.
At first pronounced a fake by experts, due to its lack of resemblance to the other extant Mayan texts, it was only verified as the genuine article in 2018. For a non-specialist, the question remains: what is the Códice about? Its purpose, as Kilroy-Ewbank puts it, is astronomical, relaying as it does “information about the cycle of the planet Venus” — which, as Turner adds, “was considered a dangerous planet” by the Mayans.
The Códice contains records of Venus’ 584-day cycle over the course of 140 years, testifying to the scrutiny Mayan astronomers gave to its complicated pattern of rising and falling. They thus managed to determine — as many ancient civilizations did not — that it was both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, although they seem to have been more interested in what its movements revealed about the intentions of the deities they saw as controlling it, and thus the likelihood of events like war or famine. Those gods weren’t benevolent: one page shows “a frightful skeletal deity that has a blunt knife sticking out of his nasal cavity,” holding “a giant jagged blade up” with one hand and “the hair of a captive whose head he’s freshly severed” with the other. That’s hardly the sort of image that comes to our modern minds when we gaze up at the night sky, but then, we don’t see things like the Mayans did.
via Aeon
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...How Marlon Brando Changed Acting: Inside a Scene from On the Waterfront
Marlon Brando has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thoroughgoing was his impact on the art of film acting that younger generations of movie-lovers may have trouble pinning down what, exactly, he did so differently on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak shows them — and reminds us — using a single scene from Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. No, it’s not the scene you’re thinking of even if you’ve never seen the movie: Puschak selects an earlier one, a conversation between Brando’s prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy and Eva Marie Saint’s young Edie Doyle, the sister of the colleague Terry unknowingly lured to his death.
When Edie asks Terry how he got into boxing, Terry glances at the floor while launching into his answer. “It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary a choice like this was in 1954,” says Puschak. “Actors just didn’t get distracted in this way. Trained in theatrical techniques, they hit their spots, articulated their lines, and performed instantly legible emotions for the audience. They didn’t pause a conversation to look under the table, turning their head away from the microphone in the process, and they certainly didn’t speak while chewing food.” Just a few years earlier, “the famous Brando mumble” would have been unthinkable in a feature film; after On the Waterfront, it became an enduring part of popular culture.
Much of the evolution of the motion picture is the story of its liberation from the tropes of theater. The earliest narrative films amounted to little more than documentations of stage performances, statically framed from the familiar perspective of a spectator’s seat. Just as the development of the technology and techniques for camera movement and editing allowed cinema to come into its own on the visual level, the nature of the actors’ performances also had to change. In the mid-nineteen-forties, the electrified microphone allowed Frank Sinatra to sing with the cadence and subtlety of speech; not long thereafter, Brando took similar advantage of the technological capability of film to capture a range of what would come to be known as his own signature idiosyncrasies.
On the Waterfront opened fairly close on the heels of the Brando-starring A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One; still to come were the likes of One-Eyed Jacks, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, and Apocalypse Now. While Brando didn’t appear exclusively in acclaimed pictures — especially in the later decades of his career — never did he give a wholly uninteresting performance. Incorporating the tics, hitches, and self-stifling impulses that afflict all our real-life communication, he understood the potential of both realism and oddity to bring a character’s interiority out into the open, usually against that character’s will. But he never could’ve done it without his fellow performers to act and react against, not least the formidable Eva Marie Saint: at 101 years old, one of our few living connections to the vital, deceptively harrowing realm of postwar Hollywood cinema.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Celebrate Halloween with Michael Jackson’s Horrifically Entertaining “Thriller” Music Video—and a Behind-the-Scenes Documentary
Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, and not by a particularly slim margin. The most recent figures have it registered at 51.3 million copies, as against the 31.2 million notched by the runner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would surely be a closer call without the title song’s celebrated music video, thirteen John Landis-directed minutes full of not just singing and dancing, but also classic-style Hollywood monsters, some of them doing that singing and dancing themselves. Halloween night is, of course, the best time to revisit Michael Jackson’s Thriller, as it’s officially titled. This year, why not chase it with the behind-the-scenes documentary below, Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller?
Younger fans may not know that “Thriller” wasn’t even released as a single until November of 1983: about a year after the album itself, which had already spun off six songs, including enormous hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.” In fact, Jackson’s unprecedented vision for the album had been that every song could be a hit, with no filler in between.
The higher-ups at Epic Records felt that its popularity, however sensational to that point, had just about run its course. That made them unwilling, at first, to put out “Thriller” on its own, as did the song’s campy scary-movie lyrics, sound effects, and “rap” by none other than Vincent Price, the embodiment of old-Hollywood horror. (This sort of thing wasn’t without precedent: with his siblings, Jackson had created a similar spooky atmosphere in “This Place Hotel,” from 1980.)
Still, at that point in his rise to the kind of fame no cultural figure may ever know again, Jackson understood much that the old guard didn’t. He knew that “Thriller” could succeed, not just as a song on the radio, but a multimedia cultural phenomenon. It would, of course, need a music video, but not one that merely met the (still fairly lax) standards of MTV. Impressed by the horror, comedy, and visual effects of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, Jackson called up Landis and asked him to direct what he’d been envisioning for “Thriller” at feature-film production values. The $500,000 budget came from television networks like MTV and Showtime, officially for broadcasting rights to Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The documentary captures various aspects of the video’s creation, from casting to choreography to shooting to makeup, that last being an especially painstaking process overseen by industry master Rick Baker. Whatever the rigors of the production, Jackson displays undisguised enjoyment of it all in this footage, perhaps foreseeing that it would culminate in the kind of expression that could come from no other artist. Though an intensely collaborative effort, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is true to its name in ultimately being the product of a single, guiding performative sensibility, somehow both universally appealing and highly idiosyncratic at the same time. Jackson’s insistence on calling his music videos “short films” may have been regarded as a typical eccentricity, but never was the label more appropriate than when he brought back the old-school monster movie one last, funky time.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Leck Mich Im Arsch (“Kiss My Ass”): Listen to Mozart’s Scatological Canon in B Flat (1782)
We all know the manchild Mozart of Milos Forman’s 1984 biopic Amadeus. As embodied by a manic, braying Thomas Hulce, the precocious and haunted composer supposedly loved nothing more than scandalizing, amusing, or exasperating friends and enemies alike with juvenile pranks and scatological humor. Surely a fiction, eh? Gross exaggeration, no? Undoubtedly Mozart comported himself with more dignity? Those familiar with the composer’s biography know otherwise.
We have, for example, a ridiculously dirty letter that the 21-year-old “poop-loving musical genius” wrote to his 19-year-old cousin Marianne—a missive Letters of Note prefaces with the disclaimer “if you’re easily offended, please do not read any further” (oh, but how can you resist?). This piece of correspondence is but one of many “shockingly crude letters” Mozart wrote to his family. And if these slightly insane documents don’t convince you, we offer as further evidence of Mozart’s exuberantly childish sensibility the above canon in B flat for six voices, Leck Mich Im Arsch, which translates roughly to “Kiss My Ass.”
One of three naughty canons composed in 1782 with lyrics like “Good night, sleep tight, / And stick your ass to your mouth,” this piece was discovered in 1991 at Harvard University. Harvard librarian Michael Ochs, with a clear penchant for understatement, said at the time: “These are minor works. They’re not the Requiem, or ‘Don Giovanni.’ They were written for the amusement of Mozart and his friends, and they show another side of him.” The first edition of Mozart’s complete works, published in 1804, bowdlerized the texts and removed the racy humor, changing the title of Leck Mich Im Arsch to “Let us be glad!”—likely, writes Lucas Reilly at Mental Floss, “the complete opposite of what this tune means.”
Reilly also points out that Mozart’s “potty mouth” was probably not, as some have supposed, evidence of Tourette’s syndrome, but rather of an especially strong current in German humor, shared by Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, and Mozart’s equally brilliant contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In fact, Leck Mich Im Arsch alludes to Goethe’s serious dramatic work, Götz Von Berlichingen. The chorus reads as follows in English:
Kiss my arse!
Goethe, Goethe!
Götz von Berlichingen! Second act;
You know the scene too well!
Let’s sing out now summarily:
Here is Mozart literary!
Hear two additional dirty choral pieces—Bona Nox and Difficile Lectu—at Mental Floss. Some other scatological canons thought to be Mozart’s, such as Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber (“Lick my ass right well and clean”), have since been attributed to amateur composer and physician Wenzel Trnka, yet it appears that the three featured at Mental Floss are genuine.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Explore 1,100 Works of Art by Georgia O’Keeffe: They’re Digitized and Free to View Online
Lake George Reflection (circa 1921) via Wikimedia Commons
What comes to mind when you think of Georgia O’Keeffe?
Bleached skulls in the desert?
Aerial views of clouds, almost cartoonish in their puffiness?
Voluptuous flowers (freighted with an erotic charge the artist may not have intended)?
Probably not Polaroid prints of a dark haired pet chow sprawled on flagstones…
Or watercolor sketches of demurely pretty ladies…
Or a massive cast iron abstraction…
If your knowledge of America’s most celebrated female artist is confined to the gift shop’s greatest hits, you might enjoy a leisurely prowl through the 1100+ works in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s digital collection.
A main objective of this collection is to provide a more complete understanding of the life and work of the iconic artist, who died in 1986 at the age of 98.
Her evolution is evident when you search by materials or date.
You can also view works by other artists in the collection, including two very significant men in her life, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and ceramicist Juan Hamilton.
Each item’s listing is enhanced with information on inscriptions and exhibitions, as well as links to other works produced in the same year.
Visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s online collection here. And watch a documentary introduction to O’Keeffe, narrated by Gene Hackman, below:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist in NYC.
Read More...
When a Salvador Dalí Sketch Was Stolen from Rikers Island Prison (2003)
In 2003, a Salvador Dalí drawing was stolen from Rikers Island, one of the most formidable prisons in the United States. That the incident has never been used as the basis for a major motion picture seems inexplicable, at least until you learn the details. A screenwriter would have to adapt it as not a standard heist movie but a comedy of errors, beginning with the very conception of the crime. It seems that a few Rikers guards conspired surreptitiously to replace the artwork, which hung on a lobby wall, with a fake. Unfortunately for them, they made a less-than-convincing replacement, and even if it had been detail-perfect, how did they expect to sell a unique work whose criminal provenance would be so obvious?
Yet the job was, in some sense, a success, in that the drawing was never actually found. Dalí created it in 1965, when he was invited by Department of Correction Commissioner Anna Moscowitz Kross to meet with Rikers Island’s inmates. “Kross, the first female commissioner of the jail system, believed in rehabilitating prisoners with art, including painting sessions and theater productions,” writes James Fanelli, telling the story in Esquire. As for the artist, “as long as the city’s newspapers would be there to capture his magnanimous act, he was game” — but in the event, a 101-degree fever kept him from getting on the ferry to the prison that day. Instead, he dashed off an image of Christ on the cross (not an unfamiliar subject for him) and sent it in his stead.
“For nearly two decades, it hung in the prisoners’ mess hall,” writes Fanelli. “In 1981, after an inmate lobbed a coffee cup at the painting, breaking its glass casing and leaving a stain, the Dalí was taken down.” It then went from appraiser to gallery to storage to the trash bin, from which it was saved by a guard. By 2003, it had ended up in the lobby of one of the ten jails that constitute the Rikers Island complex, hung by the Pepsi machine. That no one paid the work much mind, and more so that it has been appraised at one million dollars, was clearly not lost on the employee who masterminded the heist. Yet though they managed to catch his accomplices, the investigators were never able legally to determine who that mastermind was.
Readers of Fanelli’s story, or viewers of the Inside Edition video at the top of the post, may well find themselves suspecting a particular corrections offer, who successfully maintained his innocence despite being named by all his colleagues who did get convictions. Any dramatization of the Rikers Island Dalí heist would have to make its own determination about whether he or someone else was really the ringleader, and it might even have to make a guess as to the ultimate fate of the stolen drawing itself. One isn’t entirely displeased to imagine it hanging today in a hidden room in the outer-borough home of some retired prison guard: made in haste and with scant inspiration, damaged by coffee and poor storage conditions, and possibly ripped apart and put back together again, but a Dalí nonetheless.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...78 Great Directors Who Shaped the History of Cinema: An Introduction
When first we take an interest in movies, we must figure out our own method of deciding what to watch next. The central factor may be box office performance, the presence of a favorite performer, adherence to a favorite genre, or the use of a familiar story from other media. Such paths through cinema can lead to entertaining viewing experiences, no doubt, but it’s safe to say that very few movie-lovers become bona fide cinephiles without eventually switching their allegiance to directors. In eras past, a properly organized video store — that is, one whose tapes, Laserdiscs, or DVDs were ordered alphabetically, by the director’s name — could provide a gateway. (Mine was Scarecrow Video.) Today’s budding cinephiles have YouTube channels like The House of Tabula.
Formerly known as The Cinema Cartography (and before that as Channel Criswell), The House of Tabula has produced many video essays on film previously featured on Open Culture. More than a few closely examine particular directors: Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino, to name just four that appear in The House of Tabula’s new three-and-a-half-hour video “The Masters of Cinema.”
A journey through the evolution of film as reflected in the work of 78 different directors, it covers Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Lynch, and Tarantino in its later chapters on “the Modern Masters” and “the New School.” The earlier chapters examine pictures by everyone from Georges Méliès, Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin to Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, and Orson Welles.
This view of cinema subscribes to “auteur theory,” which holds the director to be the guiding artistic intelligence, or “author,” of a film. Most of us accept at least a version of this idea relatively early in our journey into cinephilia, and soon thereafter encounter the varieties of objection to it that have been lodged for decades and decades. Some directors may operate their own cameras, but most don’t; a few directors act in their own movies, but the vast majority wouldn’t even consider it (which is probably all to the good). With some notable exceptions, cinema is an intensely collaborative art, but as House of Tabula co-creator Lewis Bond puts it, the director is still the “voice” of a film. Together, the voices of the auteur filmmakers like the ones featured in this video define the language of cinema, or perhaps the language that is cinema — one that every cinephile spends a lifetime learning to understand.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Marc Maron Wraps Up the WTF Podcast: Watch His Final Interview with Barack Obama
Back in 2015, President Obama joined Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, marking the first time a sitting president took part in this new kind of broadcasting format. It was a watershed moment—a moment when podcasting went mainstream and became, soon enough, a big business. A decade later, and after nearly 1,700 episodes, Marc Maron has decided to bring WTF to an end, saying: “It really comes down to the fact that we’ve put up a new show every Monday and Thursday for almost sixteen years and we’re tired. We’re burnt out. And we are utterly satisfied with the work we’ve done. We’ve done great work.” On Monday, Maron dropped his final episode, bringing things full circle and talking once again with Barack Obama. If you’re going to leave your audience, especially during these dystopian times, it’s nice to leave them with some perspective and hope, and that’s what Obama does best. Watch the final episode above.
Boomer lives. Monkey and Lafonda. Cat angels everywhere.
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Read More...When David Bowie Starred in—and Created Music for—a Dystopian Cyberpunk Video Game: Discover Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999)
When it was announced that SARS-CoV‑2, the virus at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, had evolved into an even more contagious variant called Omicron, public reactions varied. For those of us with long memories of computer and video gaming, it brought to mind a title we hadn’t thought about in quite some time: Omikron: The Nomad Soul, released for Windows in 1999 and the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. More than a few gamers know it as the debut of controversial designer David Cage, whose studio Quantic Dream has gone on to produce various games of considerable cinematic and emotional ambit (if also an often frustrating eccentricity). But it made a wider cultural impact at the time by incorporating the performance of none other than David Bowie.
Or rather, it incorporated performances, plural, by David Bowie: in the game, he used motion capture technology to play both Boz, the wholly digital leader of an ancient religious order, and the lead singer of the band The Dreamers, whose concerts (shown in the video above) the player can view here and there around the dystopian cyberpunk city of Omikron.
Originally, the developers had only gone to Bowie in order to license his songs for the game’s soundtrack, but, as explained in the mrixrt video below, the project so appealed to his technophilia that he proposed a much deeper involvement. That included recording a set of original songs, later included on his album Hours… (which is itself notable in the history of technology and culture for being one of the first downloadable releases by a major artist).
Among its many novel qualities, including pioneering the “open world” environment now standard in big-budget games, Omikron grants the player — as the titular “nomad soul” — the ability to inhabit the bodies of a host of other characters (including one played by Bowie’s wife Iman). It isn’t hard to imagine the concept’s appeal for a performer who made his name with frequent changes of identity — and who even suggested, at one point, that he leave that name behind in the reality of the game, re-emerging into public life as David Jones. By the time he died, the better part of two decades later, his role in gaming was mostly forgotten, but one of the many tributes paid to him included a free re-release of Omikron. Those who took the chance to revisit the game would have remembered the feeling it first gave them that its digital world continued even when they weren’t playing — accompanied by a sense that, somehow, Bowie continues to live within it.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Discover the Oldest, Weirdest Instrument On Earth: The Lithophone
Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned, but chances are you haven’t had much occasion to remember it since. Still, it would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of Virginia, home of the Great Stalacpipe Organ. As its name suggests, that attraction is an organ made out of stalactites, the geological formations that grow from cave ceilings. Not long after the discovery of Luray Caverns itself in 1878, its stalactites were found to resonate through the underground space in an almost musical fashion when struck — a property Leland W. Sprinkle took to its logical conclusion in the mid-nineteen fifties.
“During a tour of this world-famous natural wonder, Mr. Sprinkle watched in awe, which was still customary at the time, as a tour guide tapped the ancient stone formations with a small mallet, producing a musical tone,” says Luray Caverns’ official site. “Mr. Sprinkle was greatly inspired by this demonstration and the idea for a most unique instrument was conceived.”
Conception was one thing, but execution quite another: it took him three years to locate just the right stalactites, shave them down to ring out at just the right frequency, and rig them up with electronically activated, keyboard-controlled mallets. For the technically minded Sprinkle, who worked at the Pentagon as a mathematician and electronics scientist, this must not have been quite as tedious a labor as it sounds.
The result was the biggest, the oldest (at least according to the age of the cave itself), and arguably the weirdest musical instrument on Earth, a lithophone for the mid-twentieth century’s heroic age of engineering. You can see the Great Stalacpipe Organ in the video from Veritasium at the top of the post, and hear a recording of Sprinkle himself playing it below that. In the video just above, YouTuber and musician Rob Scallon gets a chance to take it for a spin. Viewers of his channel know how much experience he has with exotic instruments (including the glass armonica, originally invented by Ben Franklin, which we’ve featured here on Open Culture), but even so, the opportunity to play a cave — and to make use of its surround sound avant la lettre — hardly comes every day. Here we have proof that the old, weird America endures, and that the Great Stalacpipe Organ is its ideal soundtrack.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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