Ziggy Stardust Turns 50: Celebrate David Bowie’s Signature Character with a Newly Released Version of “Starman”
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:
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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
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.
Read More...How Wealthy Women (Like the Mona Lisa) Got Dressed in Renaissance Florence
“The inhabitants of fifteenth-century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo,” writes essayist and venture capitalist Paul Graham. “There are roughly a thousand times as many people alive in the U.S. right now as lived in Florence during the fifteenth century. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us.” But “to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450”: its community of artists, and indeed everyone of all classes who constituted its uncommonly fruitful society.
Florence’s cultural flourishing lasted into the sixteenth century. Above, you can see a morning in the life of one Florentine of the 1500s recreated in a video by Crow’s Eye Productions. Previously featured here on Open Culture for their re-creations of the dressing processes of the fourteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, they show us this time how a woman would put herself together — or by the help, be put together — in turn-of-the-sixteenth-century Florence, which, “like many other Italian regions, had developed its own distinctive fashion style.” The camurra gown, the separate golden sleeves, the informal guarnello over-gown: all evoke this particular time and place.
As each garment and accessory is applied to the model, she may begin to look oddly familiar. “In 1503, a silk merchant from Florence, Francesco del Giocondo, commissioned a portrait of his young wife to adorn a wall in their new home, and perhaps to celebrate the safe arrival of their third child,” the video’s narrator tells us. “The artist commissioned was Leonardo da Vinci.” His portrait of Madonna Giacondo is “an intimate portrayal of a young married woman,” expensively but modestly dressed, wearing a smile “that seems intended for Francesco’s eyes only.” Yet until Leonardo’s death, the picture never left his own possession — perhaps because he sensed it had a destiny much greater than the wall of the del Giocondos’ bedchamber.
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Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece
How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think
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.
Read More...Danny Boyle’s New Sex Pistols Series Tells the Story of Punk Rock in the UK
“I am creating a revolution here! I don’t want musicians, I want saboteurs, I want assassins, I want shock troops!” — Malcolm McLaren in FX’s Pistol
“People are trying to make it out as a bit of a joke, but it’s not a joke. It’s not political anarchy either; it’s musical anarchy, which is a different thing.” — John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), Interview with Mary Harron, 1976
“What do you think of Steve [Jones]?” says Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) to his partner Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) before telling her his plans to manage the future Sex Pistols in Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle’s FX mini-series Pistol. “Very damaged,” says Westwood, “but that’s quite good.” This sits well with budding impresario McLaren, who sees then-lead singer Jones as exactly the bomb he needs to throw at the establishment. “He’s got nothing else to live for,” says McLaren coldly.
The kids in the UK punk scene McLaren and Westwood stage-managed may have been outcasts, but many also came from staid suburban backgrounds, as did many of the punks in the downtown New York scene. When McLaren calls Jones (Toby Wallace) “the real deal,” he means the angry, drunken teenage face of a working class with little left to lose. Boyle’s series sets Jones up as representative of what made British punk so angry and “edgy” (to use one of Jones’ favorite words). The very first scene recreates his famous theft of David Bowie’s instruments to start the band. Genius stealing from genius.
Jones not only steals famous musicians’ gear, but he joyrides in stolen cars, and tries to steal leather pants from SEX, McLaren and Westwood’s S&M‑themed boutique. There, future Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler) works the counter, and threatens to beat him with a cricket bat. The focus on Jones almost exclusively in the first episode suggests that he is the singular “Pistol” of the title.
Other characters show up eventually — frontman Johnny Rotten (Anson Boon) makes his appearance in the second episode (or “Track”) to bump Jones from vocals to guitar. The penultimate episode is titled “Nancy and Sid” in homage to Alex Cox’s cult biopic Sid and Nancy. But in the beginning, when the band was called “The Swankers,” it was all Steve Jones’ show, Boyle’s series suggests, from procuring the gear, to writing the first songs, to landing McLaren as manager.
Why release a biographical series on the Sex Pistols in 2022? The story has been told, in interviews, memoirs, and films, by the band, their entourage, hangers-on, and fans, and their manager, stylists, roadies, journalists, and photographers. It has been told so many times, so many ways, it makes the multiple perspectives of Kurosawa’s Rashomon seem easy to reconcile. (See comparisons between Boyle’s show and other documents above.) What could one more telling, streaming on a network once owned by Rupert Murdoch and now owned by the Disney Corporation, add to the living memory of 1970’s British Punk™?
We can hear some answers from series co-creator Boyle in the interview clip just above with the BBC. He describes what the band meant to him when he was a university student reading the news of the underground London in NME. “It’s only when you create true chaos,” he says, “that something new can emerge.” Does Pistol bring something new? The series is entertaining, recreating events familiar to us from any of the multiple histories of the Sex Pistols and doing so in a streamlined, hardly chaotic, narrative style.
Keeping the focus squarely on the handsome, charismatic Jones in the first episode (and to a lesser extent dapper original bassist Glen Matlock and boyish drummer Paul Cook) softens the band’s usual portrait. Maybe they seem more palatable at first to the very establishment McLaren tried to detonate in his revolution. But as Lydon, who happily took over as their spokesman, told Mary Harron in a 1976 interview, the idea that the Sex Pistols should be thought of as “socially significant” never appealed to him. “We want to be AMATEURS,” he sneered.
They wrote scathing nihilist protest songs like “EMI” and “God Save the Queen” (which they played on the Thames on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, above). But the Pistols were not actually anti-corporate anarchists. They were antisocial shock-rock theater. It is bewildering, nonetheless — because of the weight of their influence on politically-charged punk rock — to see them turned into fictionalized heroes in corporate media. And it is jarring to hear Lydon praise Trump, Nigel Farage, and the far right, without a trace of irony, as the real inheritors of punk. Never one to withhold an opinion, he’s made his views on the show clear (below): “It’s dead against everything we stood for.”
Ironically, Matlock, who is credited with writing ten of the twelve tracks on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, once said exactly the same thing about Johnny Rotten. So, what did the Sex Pistols stand for? Pissing people off, becoming absolutely hated, and getting rich? Only the last part of McLaren’s plot failed when he lost control of his monster. For all his revolutionary fervor, even McLaren was initially shocked (then delighted, then horrified and disgusted) by the band’s bad manners. Maybe writer and underground punk cartoonist John Holmstrom said it best: “It’s unbelievable that a rock group that played no more than one hundred live performances… and existed for only twenty-seven months, could become as internationally disliked as the Sex Pistols.” It’s even more unbelievable that they’ve become so internationally beloved.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: An Animated Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown of the Ancient Chinese Treatise
Though not a long book, The Art of War is nevertheless an intimidating one. Composed in the China of the fifth century BC, it comes down to us as perhaps the definitive analysis of military strategy, applicable equally to East, West, antiquity, and modernity alike. Hence the minor but still-productive industry that puts forth adaptations, extensions, and reinterpretations of The Art of War for non-military settings, transposing its lessons into law, business, sports, and other realms besides. But if you want a handle on what its author, the general and strategist Sun Tzu, actually wrote, watch the illustrated video above.
A production of Youtube channel Eudaimonia, previously featured here on Open Culture for a similarly animated exegesis of Machiavelli’s The Prince, it runs more than two and a half hours in full. Far though it exceeds the length of the average explainer video, it does reflect the tendency of Sun Tzu’s succinct observations to expand, when seriously considered, into much wider and more complex discussions. To each of the original text’s chapters the Eudaimonia video devotes a ten-to-fifteen-minute section, conveying not just the content of its lessons but also their relevance to the history of human conflict in the roughly two and a half millennia since they were written.
In chapter two, on waging war, Sun Tzu writes that “in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger.” It was in this spirit that, during the Second World War, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Information launched a media “anger campaign” meant to “increase resolve against the Germans, as until then, the British had little sense of real hostility towards the average German.” In the chapter on weaknesses and strengths, Sun Tzu recommends “the divine art of subtlety and secrecy” as a means of becoming invisible and inaudible to the enemy — much as Julius Caesar did in the Gallic Wars, when he sent scouting ships “painted in Venetian blue, which was a similar color to that of the sea.”
Other examples come from diverse chapters of history. These include the American Civil War, Gandhi’s negotiation of Indian independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the British defeat in Zululand, Joan of Arc’s siege of Orléans, the revolt against the Turkish led by T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), and even Steve Jobs’ turnaround of a nearly bankrupt Apple. Most of us will never find ourselves in situations of quite these stakes. But given that none of us can entirely avoid dealing with conflict, we’d could do worse than to keep the guidance of Sun Tzu on our side.
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How Many U.S. Marines Could Bring Down the Roman Empire?
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.
Read More...When David Bowie & Brian Eno Made a Twin Peaks-Inspired Album, Outside (1995)
By any measure, David Bowie was a superstar. He first rose to fame in the nineteen-seventies, a process galvanized by his creation and assumption of the rocker-from-Mars persona Ziggy Stardust. In the following decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out stadiums and dominated the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot outside the mainstream. It was in the nineties, after his aesthetically cleansing stint with guitar-rock outfit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his stardom to explore his full spectrum of interests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mundane to the macabre.
This suggests a good deal in common between Bowie and another high-profile David of his generation: David Lynch, long one of the most famous film directors alive. “There are many obvious, surface connections and intersections between Lynch and Bowie,” write film critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. “Both have dabbled in film and music, as well as painting, theatre and performance art. Both are actors — Bowie slightly more conventionally so than Lynch.” Lynch would no doubt agree with Bowie’s insistence that “my interpretation of my work is really immaterial,” that “it’s the interpretation of the listener, or the viewer, which is all-important.”
These words appear in López and Martin’s analysis of Twin Peaks, the television series Lynch created in collaboration with Mark Frost, and Outside, the album Bowie created in collaboration with Brian Eno. When it premiered on ABC in the spring of 1990, Twin Peaks became a minor sensation by conjuring a familiar yet deeply strange atmosphere such as no one had never seen on television before. It also pioneered what López and Adrian Martin call “the Dead Girl/Woman genre, which traces out a labyrinthine mystery from the discovery of a young female corpse.” What brings Special Agent Dale Cooper to Twin Peaks, Washington, we recall, is the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer.
What brings Nathan Adler, a detective in the Art Crimes unit, to Oxford Town, New Jersey is the murder of the fourteen-year-old Baby Grace Blue. Thus begins the Twin Peaks-inspired storyline of Outside, Bowie’s own 1995 entry into the genre of the Dead Girl/Woman. Like Lynch and Frost’s show, Bowie’s album has a cast of eccentrics: Adler and Baby Grace, but also the likes of criminal “outsider” Leon Blank; Algeria Touchshriek, dealer in “art-drugs and DNA prints”; and a sinister figure known as both the Artist and the Minotaur. All are played by Bowie himself, who makes use of various accents (a technique practiced with his appearance in the 1992 Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me) and voice-processing techniques.
At the time this 75-minute “non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle,” as Bowie labeled it, gave his listeners a lot to take in, to say nothing of the major media outlets attempting to publicize it. “This new project is all about sex, violence, and death,” says the CBC’s Laurie Brown in a typical piece of television coverage. But it also deals with the merging of those human eternals with art and popular culture, a process that fascinated Bowie more and more as the nineties progressed — as did “the re-emergence of Neo-Paganism, ritual body art, and the fragmentation of society,” as he puts it in Outside’s official making-of video.
Bowie and Eno intended Outside (officially 1. Outside) as the first in a series that would ultimately constitute “a diary in music and in texture of what it felt like to be around at the end of the Millennium.” In one press conference, Bowie hinted that “the narrative might fall by the wayside,” much as Lynch and Frost originally intended to leave Laura Palmer’s death unsolved. That the second volume never appeared only underscores the tantalizing incompleteness of Outside, which López and Martin highlight as another similarity to Twin Peaks: “Both works are serial and multiple, existing in various official and unofficial forms, in spin-offs, outtakes” — not least the never-properly-released “Leon suites” Bowie and Eno recorded before the album itself — “and in numerous fan commentaries.”
A kind of circle closed in 1997 when Outside’s “I’m Deranged” soundtracked the opening credits of Lynch’s Lost Highway. But the work continued to hold out possibilities until the end of Bowie’s life: “We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks,” Eno said. “We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new.” Despite his Lynchian resistance to interpretation, Bowie did acknowledge even in 1995 the thematic importance of mortality itself. Outside’s first single was called “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” and “the filthy lesson in question is the fact that life is finite.” For him, “knowing that I’ve got a finite time in life on Earth actually clarifies things and makes me feel quite buoyant.” Bowie knew — or learned — that life is too short not to follow your fascinations to their limits.
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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, 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.
Read More...Watch Ella Fitzgerald Put Her Extraordinary Vocal Agility on Display, in a Live Rendition of “Summertime” (1968)
“I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” — Ira Gershwin
No one ever gave Ella Fitzgerald faint praise. We could point to cuts from nearly any one of her over 200 albums as evidence for why she is the undisputed “Queen of Jazz,” a title for which she worked hard in her nearly 60-year career. But she’s better known by another name, “The First Lady of Song,” for definitive interpretations of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and, of course, George and Ira Gershwin. Fitzgerald’s recordings of their songs played “an essential role in the broader transformation of the Gershwin’s music from show tunes to American Songbook standards,” writes the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.
What’s fascinating about that transformation is the way in which Fitzgerald’s renditions of popular songs elevated them to eternal mainstream status by drawing on the rhythmic and melodic resources of jazz, a distinctly Black American music sometimes cast as a threat to the U.S. establishment when Fitzgerald began her career. (We need look no further than the vicious persecution of Billie Holiday by the country’s first drug czar, Henry Anslinger, as case in point.) America may not always have been eager to embrace Fitzgerald, but she was happy nonetheless to gift the country its greatest music.
Fitzgerald’s 5‑LP set of Gershwin songs, produced by Norman Granz in 1959, continues to be “the most ambitious of the celebrated song books recorded by Ella,” Jazz Messengers writes, “and one of the best vocal jazz albums ever made.” Recorded two years earlier by Granz in Los Angeles, her Porgy and Bess with Louis Armstrong “remains one of the true gems in jazz history.” Fitzgerald’s voice is unparalleled. She could do almost anything with it, from reaching down low to imitate Armstrong’s growl to breaking a glass with her high C for a Memorex ad twenty years later.
Dizzy Gillespie once said that Fitzgerald could sing back anything he played for her, and she cited horns as her primary vocal inspiration. “She sang like an instrument,” says pianist Billy Taylor, who played with her in the 1940s, “like a clarinet or like a trombone or like a whatever.” The irony, of course, is that horns and many other melodic instruments achieved their timbre by trying to imitate the human voice. Fitzgerald had the original; she needed no accompaniment — she was the music, with “impeccable timing and perfect pitch,” NPR writes. “In fact, band musicians said they would tune up to her voice.”
In the video at the top from a performance in Berlin in 1968, you can see Fitzgerald “destroy” the harmonic minor scale, as the YouTube uploader puts it, while pianist Tee Carson looks on in awe. The song, from Porgy and Bess (see the full performance further up), is just one of many written by the Gershwins that “transcends its musical theatre origins” due to Fitzgerald’s improvisatory brilliance and musical sensitivity. Just above, you can hear that live vocal track stripped of instrumentation except Ella’s voice in a Wings of Pegasus analysis video of the “depth of her expression” and vocal perfection.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...1,000 Musicians Perform “My Hero” in a Moving Tribute to Foo Fighters’ Drummer Taylor Hawkins
If you follow music news, or just scan entertainment headlines, you might have noticed that a few weeks after his death, beloved Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins’ final days became a controversial subject. According to a Rolling Stone article quoting Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Hawkins was exhausted by the Foo Fighters’ touring schedule. He needed a break, and he didn’t get one. Both drummers have issued statements disavowing the article. Meanwhile, as GQ noted, a Rolling Stone “Instagram post highlighting the article is being slammed by critical fans in the comments.”
Arguing over hearsay about a musician’s state of mind before his death seems like a poor way to remember him soon after he’s gone. If you’d rather steer clear of this scene, the original Rolling Stone piece is still worth checking out for its introduction: a feelgood story from three days before Hawkins, 50, was found in his Bogotá hotel room.
After Foo Fighters canceled a headlining concert in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay, due to weather, Hawkins ended up hanging out with nine-year-old drummer Emma Sofía Peralta outside the Sheraton. She’d brought her drum kit and played for him. He posed for a photo with her, “crouching next to her and flashing the sort of warm, toothy smile that established him as one of the most beloved drummers in rock.”
More details of Hawkins’ death may become public, or they may not. But they shouldn’t obscure the reason he was famous in life. Like everyone else in the band, but most especially his “twin” Dave Grohl, Hawkins always looked like he was having the time of his life, whether onstage or meeting fans. The band won mass devotion not only through stellar songwriting and performances but through sheer, unbridled enthusiasm: the kind of spirit that drove 1000 musicians to stage a concert covering “Learn to Fly” in 2015, in a bid to bring the Foo Fighters to the town of Cesena, Italy. It worked, and thus was born the Rockin’ 1000 concept.
Getting a handful of rock musicians to show up on time is a feat in itself, much less 1000 of them, all playing not only on time but in time as well. Rockin’ 1000 has pulled this off consistently since they started, and their tribute above to Hawkins above is no different — a stadium-sized cover version of “My Hero” that conveys all the emotion of the original while multiplying it by the amplitude of a hundred marching bands. A fitting remembrance of what Hawkins meant to his fans if ever there was one.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Discover the Dystopian Surrealist Art of Polish Painter & Photographer Zdzisław Beksiński
“In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh — whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish — thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.” — Guillermo del Toro
The life and death of Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor Zdzisław Beksiński has been sensationalized, made into a cursed tragedy in the telling of events late in his life that, taken together, all seem horrifying enough: the death of the artist’s wife from cancer in 1998, the suicide of his son, Tomasz, one year later, and, finally, his own stabbing death in 2005 at the hands of his caretaker’s teenage son. If we add to this account Beksiński’s childhood in Nazi-occupied, then Soviet-occupied Poland, we have ample reason to speculate about the meaning of his nightmarish visions.
But the “Nightmare Artist,” as he’s called in the video above, wants us to stay away from making meaning of any kind. Unlike artists whose work can seem inseparable from their statements of purpose (or personal or historical tragedies), Beksiński had nothing to say about his art or his life.
He preferred that others keep silent as well, though he himself hated silence, working to loud classical music and rock. Music, he said — not literature, film, history, or even other artists — was his only inspiration. The impression we get from these scant details and Beksiński’s disturbing work, is of an individual probably best left alone.
Judging an artist’s body of work by the worst things that have happened to them, however, is manifestly unfair. For the majority of his life, Beksiński embodied the famous Flaubert quote about a regular, orderly creative life. He studied architecture, went on to supervise construction projects and then design buses. Like many people, he hated his job (he left the bus company in 1967). He developed a passion for photography, sculpture, and painting. With no formal art training, he struck out on a successful fifty-year career as a prolific Surrealist, becoming a master of oil painting. Was he tormented? Those who knew him describe him as mild-mannered, pleasant, even funny. He seems to have been quite content.
Do we resist interpretation as Beksiński wanted? How can we, when the imagery of death in his work seems itself to interpret events that inevitably shaped his world? Beksiński was born in Sanok, in southern Poland, in 1929. When the Nazis came to Poland a decade later, Sanok’s population was “about 30% Jewish,” notes the Collector, “nearly all of which was eliminated by the war’s end.” Decades later, Nazi iconography and crowds of gaunt, corpse-like figures began to recur in Beksiński’s paintings, which he described as “photographing dreams.” These horrors predominate in his most popular work, even though Beksiński’s vision had more breadth than casual fans might know.
His sense of humor is evident in his photography, and in early, more abstract, paintings, he displays a much lighter touch. (See a broad sampling of Beksiński’s work at Artnet.) In the 90s, he began experimenting with computer graphics and “was granted his wish of being able to add surrealistic alterations to photographs,” bringing his career “full circle as he returned to his first medium,” notes Culture.pl. Yet, like his contemporary H.R. Giger, where Beksiński’s name is known, he’s usually known as a painter of nightmares and heavy metal album covers — and for good reason.
The Several Circles video on Beksiński above (which opens with a content warning) shows why his “epic universe of hellscapes” has proven so inescapable to the critics who embraced his work, the gallerists who sold it, and those who have discovered it since the artist’s tragic death.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Greatest Hits of Alan Watts: Stream a Carefully-Curated Collection of Alan Watts Wisdom
“My name, ‘Alan,’ means ‘harmony’ in Celtic and ‘hound’ in Anglo-Saxon. Accordingly, my existence is, and has been, a paradox, or better, a coincidence of opposites.”
Zen Buddhism is full of paradoxes: practical, yet mystical; seriously formal, yet shot through with jokes and plays on words; stressing intricate ceremonial rules and communal practices, yet just as often brought to life by “wild fox” masters who flout all convention. Such a Zen master was Alan Watts, the teacher, writer, philosopher, priest, and calligrapher who embraced contradiction and paradox in all its forms.
Watts was a natural contrarian, becoming a Buddhist at 15 — at least partly in opposition to the fundamentalist Protestantism of his mother — then, in the 1940s, ordaining as an Episcopal priest. Though he left the priesthood in 1950, he would continue to write and teach on both Buddhism and Christianity, seeking to reconcile the traditions and succeeding in ways that offended leaders of neither religion. His book of theology, Behold the Spirit, “was widely hailed in Christian circles,” David Guy writes at Tricycle magazine. “One Episcopal reviewer said it would ‘prove to be one of the half dozen most significant books on religion in the twentieth century.’ ”
As a Buddhist, Watts has come in for criticism for his use of psychedelics, addiction to alcohol, and unorthodox practices. Yet his wisdom received the stamp of approval from Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese Zen teacher often credited with bringing formal Japanese Zen practice to American students. Suzuki called Watts “a great bodhisattva” and died with a staff Watts had given him in hand. Watts didn’t stay long in any institution because he “just didn’t want his practice to be about jumping through other people’s hoops or being put in their boxes,” writes a friend, David Chadwick, in a recent tribute. Nonetheless, he remained a powerful catalyst for others who discovered spiritual practices that spoke to them more authentically than anything they’d known.
Watts, a self-described trickster, “saw the true emptiness of all things,” said Suzuki’s American successor Richard Baker in a eulogy — “the multiplicities and absurdities to the Great Universal Personality and Play.” It was his contrarian streak that made him the ideal interpreter of esoteric Indian, Chinese, and Japanese religious ideas for young Americans in the 1950s and 60s who were questioning the dogmas of their parents but lacked the language with which to do so. Watts was a serious scholar, though he never finished a university degree, and he built bridges between East and West with wit, erudition, irreverence, and awe.
Many of Watts’ first devotees got their introduction to him through his volunteer radio broadcasts on Berkeley’s KPFA. You can hear several of those talks at KPFA’s site, which currently hosts a “Greatest Hits Collection” of Watts’ talks. In addition to his 1957 book The Way of Zen, these wonderfully meandering lectures helped introduce the emerging counterculture to Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, forgotten mystical aspects of Christianity, and the Jungian ideas that often tied them all together.
No matter the tradition Watts found himself discussing on his broadcasts, listeners found him turning back to paradox. Hear him do so in talks on the “Fundamentals of Buddhism”, and other talks like the “Spiritual Odyssey of Aldous Huxley,” the “Reconciliation of Opposites” and a talk entitled “Way Beyond the West,” also the name of his lecture series, more of which you can find at KPFA’s “Greatest Hits” collection here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction
Regular readers of Open Culture know a thing or two about maps if they’ve paid attention to our posts on the history of cartography, the evolution of world maps (and why they are all wrong), and the many digital collections of historical maps from all over the world. What does the seven and a half-minute video above bring to this compendium of online cartographic knowledge? A very quick survey of world map history, for one thing, with stops at many of the major historical intersections from Greek antiquity to the creation of the Catalan Atlas, an astonishing mapmaking achievement from 1375.
The upshot is an answer to the very reasonable question, “how were (sometimes) accurate world maps created before air travel or satellites?” The explanation? A lot of history — meaning, a lot of time. Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in most geographies of the ancient world.
Then came the Greek Anaximander, “the first person to publish a detailed description of the world.” He knew of three continents, Europe, Asia, and Libya (or North Africa). They fit together in a circular Earth, surrounded by a ring of ocean. “Even this,” says Jeremy Shuback, “was an incredible accomplishment, roughed out by who knows how many explorers.” Sandwiched in-between the continents are some known large bodies of water: the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Phasis (modern-day Rioni) and Nile Rivers. Eventually Eratosthenes discovered the Earth was spherical, but maps of a flat Earth persisted. Greek and Roman geographers consistently improved their world maps over succeeding centuries as conquerers expanded the boundaries of their empires.
Some key moments in mapping history involve the 2nd century AD geographer and mathematician Marines of Tyre, who pioneered “equirectangular projection and invented latitude and longitude lines and mathematical geography.” This paved the way for Claudius Ptolemy’s hugely influential Geographia and the Ptolemaic maps that would eventually follow. Later Islamic cartographers “fact checked” Ptolemy, and reversed his preference for orienting North at the top in their own mappa mundi. The video quotes historian of science Sonja Brenthes in noting how Muhammad al-Idrisi’s 1154 map “served as a major tool for Italian, Dutch, and French mapmakers from the sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century.”
The invention of the compass was another leap forward in mapping technology, and rendered previous maps obsolete for navigation. Thus cartographers created the portolan, a nautical map mounted horizontally and meant to be viewed from any angle, with wind rose lines extending outward from a center hub. These developments bring us back to the Catalan Atlas, its extraordinary accuracy, for its time, and its extraordinary level of geographical detail: an artifact that has been called “the most complete picture of geographical knowledge as it stood in the later Middle Ages.”
Created for Charles V of France as both a portolan and mappa mundi, its contours and points of reference were not only compiled from centuries of geographic knowledge, but also from knowledge spread around the world from the diasporic Jewish community to which the creators of the Atlas belonged. The map was most likely made by Abraham Cresques and his son Jahuda, members of the highly respected Majorcan Cartographic School, who worked under the patronage of the Portuguese. During this period (before massacres and forced conversions devastated the Jewish community of Majorca in 1391), Jewish doctors, scholars, and scribes bridged the Christian and Islamic worlds and formed networks that disseminated information through both.
In its depiction of North Africa, for example, the Catalan Atlas shows images and descriptions of Malian ruler Mansa Musa, the Berber people, and specific cities and oases rather than the usual dragons and monsters found in other Medieval European maps — despite the cartographers’ use of the works like the Travels of John Mandeville, which contains no shortage of bizarre fiction about the region. While it might seem miraculous that humans could create increasingly accurate views of the Earth from above without flight, they did so over centuries of trial and error (and thousands of lost ships), building on the work of countless others, correcting the mistakes of the past with superior measurements, and crowdsourcing as much knowledge as they could.
To learn more about the fascinating Catalan Atlas, see the Flash Point History video above and the scholarly description found here. Find translations of the map’s legends here at The Cresque Project.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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