Banksy’s Great British Spraycation: The Artist Spray Paints England’s Favorite Summer-Holiday Destinations
“We’re all going on a summer holiday / no more working for a week or two,” sings Cliff Richard in one of his most famous songs. “Fun and laughter on a summer holiday / no more worries for me or you.” Like The Beatles’ ultra-northern “When I’m Sixty-Four,” with its cottage rentals on the Isle of Wight (“if it’s not too dear”), Richard’s “Summer Holiday” dates from a time in Britain when tourism was, as a rule, domestic. And so it has become again over the past couple of years, what with the coronavirus pandemic and its severe curtailment of international travel. Ever tuned in to current events, the pseudonymous graffiti artist Banksy has taken the opportunity to go on a “Great British Spraycation.”
This was a busman’s holiday for Banksy, who appears to have had a detailed plan of exactly which east-coast resort towns to visit, and exactly where in each of them to surreptitiously create another of his signature pieces of high-contrast satirical art.
“The stenciled pieces are often integrated with repurposed objects from the area, highlighting the pre-planned and perfectly positioned nature of the work,” writes Designboom’s Kat Barandy. “In Lowestoft, a massive seagull dines on a box of ‘chips’ rendered by a dumpster filled with insulation material. Nearby a child is depicted building a sandcastle with a crowbar, fronted by a mound of sand on the pavement.”
That work, Arts University Bournemouth professor Paul Gough tells the BBC for its guide to the Great British Spraycation, may be a reference to the 1968 Paris student uprising and its slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage!” You can see these and other fresh works documented in the video at the top of the post, which also catches the reactions of passing locals and tourists. “That looks all like mindless vandalism, that,” says one woman, articulating a common assessment of Banksy’s artistic statements. “It looks a lot better from far away than it does when you get this close,” says another. But the most telling comment, in a variety of respects, comes from a man regarding Banksy’s addition of a cartoonish tongue and ice cream cone to the statue of 19th-century mayor Frederick Savage in King’s Lynn: “Yeah, someone’s done that, ain’t they?”
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear 45 Minutes of Funky Old Soundtracks from 1960s-70s Japanese Films & TV Shows
The life of a Japanese film composer in the 1960s and 70s was very different from their American counterparts. “For Hollywood movies, there is a three-month period to write the music after the film has been finished,” says legendary film and television composer Chumei Watanabe. When Watanabe first began working for Shintoho studios, “at first, they gave us five days. Of course, it would usually be shortened…. One time, there was a Toei movie being filmed in Kyoto. The next day was the recording day for the music…. I had less than 24 hours to write the music!”
Despite the immense pressures on composers for films and TV shows, even those primarily for children, “I kept in mind that I would not compose childish music,” says Watanabe, who worked well into his 90s composing for TV. “That’s why people in their 40s and 50s still listen to my songs and sing them at karaoke.” His music is as widely beloved as that of his prolific contemporary, Dragon Ball Z composer Shunsuke Kikuchi, who passed away this year at 89.
“Over the course of his career,” writes Okay Player, “Kikuchi wrote the music for a number of popular anime series and live-action television shows, including Abarenbo Shogun (800 episodes over 30 years,) Doraemon (26 years on the air,) and Kamen Rider, Key Hunter, and G‑Men ’75.” So iconic was Kikuchi’s music that his “Urami Bushi” — the theme for 1972 Japanese exploitation film Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion — was given pride of place in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.f
If you aren’t familiar with the music of late-20th century Japanese genre film and television, you’ll be forgiven for thinking the mix at the top of the post comes from Tarantino’s films. Described by its YouTube poster Tripmastermonk as “45 minutes of various funky old japanese soundtrack, samples, breaks, and beats. (all killer, no filler),” it includes classic compositions from Watanabe, Kikuchi, and many other composers from the period who worked as hard on anime series as they did on so-called “pink films” like the “Female Prisoner” series, a vehicle for Japanese star Meiko Kaji (of Lady Snowblood fame), who sang “Urami Bushi” and turned the song into a major hit.
Dig the funky music of Japanese action films from the 60s and 70s in the mix, full name: “Tripmastermonk — Knocksteady Zencast Vol. 2: Ninja Funk & Gangster Ballads: Ode to the Brotherland.” And find more of Tripmastermonk’s musical concoctions on Soundcloud.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Introduction to Ancient Greek History: A Free Online Course by Yale Historian Donald Kagan (RIP)
Earlier this month, Yale historian Donald Kagan passed away at age 89 in Washington D.C. In their obituary, The New York Times writes:
Professor Kagan was considered among the country’s leading historians. His four-volume account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., was hailed by the critic George Steiner as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century.”
He was equally renowned for his classroom style, in which he peppered nuanced readings of ancient texts with references to his beloved New York Yankees and inventive, sometimes comic exercises in class participation, like having students form a hoplite phalanx to demonstrate how Greek soldiers marched into combat.
If you never sat in Kagan’s classroom, you can still experience his teaching style online. Recorded in 2007, Kagan’s course Introduction to Ancient Greek History traces “the development of Greek civilization as manifested in political, intellectual, and creative achievements from the Bronze Age to the end of the classical period.” You can watch the 24 video lectures above, or find them on YouTube. The lectures also appear on iTunes in audio and video. Find the texts used in the course below. More information about the course, including the syllabus, can be found on this Yale website.
- Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan and Roberts. Ancient Greece. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999.
- Kagan, Donald. “Problems in Ancient History.” In The Ancient Near East and Greece. 2nd ed., vol. 1. Prentice-Hall: New York, 1975.
- Herodotus, The Histories.
- Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of the Athens.
- Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.
Introduction to Ancient Greek History will be added to our collection of Free Online History courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Read More...Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Program That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Control (1953–1973)
If the CIA ever wants to change its motto to something hip and trendy that the kids’ll like, may I suggest “f*ck around and find out”? Because in this above mini-doc on the secret LSD mind-control experiments known as MK-Ultra (1953–1973), they were certainly doing a lot of the former, and then they took a lot of the latter and sent it down the old memory hole.
Could the Soviets be developing mind-control programs? The CIA, as several of these accounts tell us, became convinced they were. However, it’s never specified why they were convinced. Could it be a bit of guilt for hiring some ex-Nazi (and/or Nazi supporting) German scientists through Operation Paperclip? Or was this all just a cover because the CIA really wanted to experiment with mind control? I mean, it’s 70 years later, you can admit it. There were all these new drugs being developed that altered the mind, so why not start there?
Top among the cornucopia of pharmacologica was lysergic acid diethylamide, and the man who knew LSD the best was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the “Poisoner in Chief” as his biographer Stephen Kinzer calls him. (See his book: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.) Raised in the Bronx, Gottlieb’s love of chemistry and science earned him a prestigious place at CalTech. By the end of the 1940s he had been recruited by the CIA.
Gottlieb’s paradox was his love of LSD. He took it more than 200 times. He tended towards Buddhism, not surprising for those whose mind has been expanded by psychedelics. And he lived like a proto-hippie, growing his own vegetables and living “off the grid” for a while with his family. Yet at the same time, he had no problems with absolute devilish behavior. Once he convinced the CIA to buy up the world’s supply of LSD, he set to work. He’d dose colleagues with massive amounts and only tell them afterwards. He’d conduct experiments on sex workers, prisoners, or people with terminal illness. Many didn’t know what they were signing up for. The LSD in heavy doses were meant to annihilate the mind, and allow a new mind to be put in place. That didn’t work out that well, but Gottlieb and associates kept trying, under the aegis of then-CIA director Allen Dulles and Chief of Operations Richard Helms. In reality, Dulles and others high up in the CIA had a hands-off approach. Better not to know what Gottlieb was up to, especially when it went against the Nuremberg Code of experimenting on people against their will–the very things the Nazis did.
There were many victims too, corpses that were the cost of doing business in the Cold War, and so many we will not know about. The highest profile death—and what pulled MK-Ultra out of obscurity—was government scientist Frank Olsen. His jump from a NYC hotel room was ruled a suicide by the government, a result of work stress. (The whole Olsen affair forms the backbone of Errol Morris’ 2017 documentary series Wormwood.) The uncovering of the truth helped expose the history of MK-Ultra to a mid-‘70s America that had lost faith in its government and was ripe for conspiracy theories to take hold.
Yes, MK-Ultra was an actual thing. But because Gottlieb and his bosses had destroyed most of the records, conspiracy theories filled in the gaps. Were Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan MK-Ultra experiments gone wrong? What about Charles Manson, who author Tim O’Neill discovered was a “lab rat” for CIA experiments? Mobster Whitey Bulger was part of a LSD experiment and the FBI let him continue to commit crimes. The future Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had taken part in “brutal” psychological experiments while at Harvard.
On the other hand, the MK-Ultra experiments also affected culture in a good way. Allen Ginsberg tried his first dose in Northern California, as did Ken Kesey, who came out of it a proponent of LSD and formed the nascent hippie movement.
Gottlieb retired in 1972, and MK-Ultra’s results were lacking in any practical results. In 1999, Gottlieb passed away from unknown causes. Possibly a heart attack…but who knows, right?
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Pompeii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesuvius
We can’t regard the ruins of Pompeii, however unusually well-preserved they are, without trying to imagine what the place looked like before 79 AD. It was in that year, of course, that Mount Vesuvius erupted, entombing the ancient Roman city in ash and pumice. The exhumed Pompeii has taught modern humanity a great deal about first-century urban planning as practiced by the Roman Empire. But it’s one thing to walk the paths Pompeiians walked, and quite another to see the built environment that they must have seen. The latter experience is available in the eighteen-minute video above, which uses computer graphics to create a tour of a rebuilt Pompeii.
This production, in fact, provides views of Pompeii that Pompeiians themselves could never have seen, including drone-like flights along its streets and around its famous structures like the Temple of Apollo, the Basilica, and the Forum. But even more than its grand public buildings, the city’s private dwellings — many of them grand in their own way — have influenced the way we’ve built in recent centuries.
“With their unmistakable style, they have inspired architects of all times,” says the video’s narrator. Even as urbanization reduced the size of Pompeiian houses, they gained “richness in decorations,” reflecting the sensibility of the local culture.
“Temples, basilicas, spas, houses, and a refined, high-level lifestyle make Pompeii one of the most famous cities of the Roman Empire of the first century,” says the narrator. “All of this, however, is about to end abruptly.” We all know what happened next, but the extent of the destruction wrought by Mount Vesuvius takes a vivid form in the video just above, which compares its own CGI reconstructions of these same buildings to the ruins of today. In its time, Pompeii’s refinement made it a well-known city, and something of a showcase of Roman civilization. But nearly two millennia after its destruction, it has become much more famous as a symbol of civilization itself: its surprising continuity, but also its deceptive fragility.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Take a Trip to the LSD Museum, the Largest Collection of “Blotter Art” in the World
When Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters kicked off Haight-Ashbury’s counterculture in the 1960s, LSD was the key ingredient in their potent mix of drugs, the Hell’s Angels, the Beat poets, and their local band The Warlocks (soon to become The Grateful Dead). Kesey administered the drug in “Acid Tests” to find out who could handle it (and who couldn’t) after he stole the substance from Army doctors, who themselves administered it as part of the CIA’s MKUltra experiments. Not long afterward, Grateful Dead soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley synthesized “the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street,” writes Rolling Stone, and became the country’s biggest supplier, the “king of acid.”
Whatever uses it might have had in psychiatric settings — and there were many known at the time — LSD was made illegal in 1968 by the U.S. government, repressing what the government had itself helped bring into being. But it has since returned with newfound respectability. “Once dismissed as the dangerous dalliances of the counterculture,” writes Nature, psychedelic drugs are “gaining mainstream acceptance” in clinical treatment. Psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD “have been steadily making their way back into the lab,” notes Scientific American. “Scientists are rediscovering what many see as the substances’ astonishing therapeutic potential.”
None of this comes as news to San Francisco fixture Mark McCloud. “In the same moralistic manner many San Franciscans pontificate on the health benefits of marijuana,” writes Gregory Thomas at Mission Local, “McCloud and his friends tout the merits of acid.” Next to curing “anxiety, depression and ‘marital problems,’” it is also an important source of folk art, says McCloud, the owner and sole proprietor of the informally-named “LSD Museum” housed in his three-story Victorian home in San Francisco.
His mission in creating and maintaining the museum formally called the Institute of Illegal Images, he says, is to “preserve a ‘skeletal’ remnant of San Francisco’s drug-induced 1960s legacy, ‘so maybe our children can better understand us.’”
Specifically, as Culture Trip explains, McCloud preserves the art on sheets of blotter acid. As is clear from the many pop cultural references on blotter art — like Beavis and Butthead and techno artist Plastikman (who named his debut album Sheet One) — the 60s blotter acid legacy extended far beyond its founders’ vision in underground scenes throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, and oughts.
Also known as the Blotter Barn or the Institute of Illegal Images, McCloud’s house is located on 20th Street between Mission and Capp. The house preserves over 33,000 sheets of LSD blotter, treating them like tiny little works of art. Most of the sheets are framed and hanging on McCloud’s walls, decorating the home with vibrant colors and patterns, and the rest are kept safe in binders. The house also features a perforation board, allowing McCloud to turn any work of art sized 7.5 by 7.5 inches into 900 pieces, as is typical for LSD blotter sheets.
McCloud has faced intense scrutiny from the FBI, and on a couple of occasions — in 1992 and again in 2001 — arrest and trial by “not very sympathetic” juries, who nonetheless acquitted him both times. Despite the fact that he has a larger collection of blotter acid sheets than the DEA, he and his museum have withstood prosecution and attempts to shut them down, since all the sheets in his possession have either never been dipped in LSD or have become chemically inactive over time. (The museum’s website explains the origins of “blotter” paper as a means of preparing LSD doses after the drug was criminalized in California in 1966.)
“What fascinates me about blotter is what fascinates me about all art. It changes your mind,” says McCloud in the Wired video at the top of the post. None of his museum’s artwork will change your mind in quite the way it was intended, but the mere association with hallucinogenic experiences is enough to inspire the artists “to build the myriad of subject matter appearing on the blotters,” Atlas Obscura writes, “ranging from the spiritual (Hindu gods, lotus flowers) to whimsical (cartoon characters), as well as cultural commentary (Gorbachev) and the just plain demented (Ozzy Osbourne).”
The museum does not keep regular hours and was only open by appointment before COVID-19. These days, it’s probably best to make a virtual visit at blotterbarn.com, where you’ll find dozens of images of acid blotter paper like those above and learn much more about the history and culture of LSD during long years of prohibition — a condition that seems poised to finally end as governments give up the wasteful, punishing War on Drugs and allow scientists and psychonauts to study and explore altered states of consciousness again.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Sound of Subways Around the World: A Global Collection of Subway Door Closing Announcements, Beeps & Chimes
The next L train is now arriving on the Manhattan bound track. Please stand away from the platform edge.
Thus begins Brooklyn saxophone-percussion trio Moon Hooch’s “Number 9.”
Anyone who’s taken the train into the city from Bushwick or Williamsburg two or three times, you should be able to chant along with no trouble.
“Mind the gap!” is a sentimental favorite of both native Londoners and first time visitors navigating The Tube with freshly purchased Oyster Cards.
Residents of Montreal are justly proud that their Metro’s closing doors signal is a near twin of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
Civil engineer Ted Green has been documenting the mass transit sounds that cue passengers that the subway doors are about to close since 2004, when he logged 26 seconds on the Piccadilly Line in London’s Russell Square Station:
In 2003 I used the Russell Square station daily for a week and it’s the first announcement that caught my attention… Back then the Piccadilly Line did not have on-train station and door closing announcements, it had the beeps, but the stations in central London had automatic announcements from platform speakers aimed at the open train door. Once the Piccadilly Line received on-train announcements a few years later, this announcement was phased out.
Over the course of a decade, the project has expanded to encompass announcements on suburban rail, railways, trams, and light rail.
His travels have taken him to Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, where curiosity compels him to document what happens during “dwell time,” the brief period when a train is disgorging some riders and taking on others.
Whether the canned recording is verbal or non-verbal, the intent is to keep things moving smoothly, and prevent injuries, though passengers can become blasé, attempting to force their way on or off by thrusting a limb between closing doors at the absolute last minute.
Green’s incredibly popular video compilations aren’t nearly so harrowing.
As he told The New York Times’ Sophie Haigney and Denise Lu:
I think the appeal is the simplicity. You wonder, how can there be so many different variations of beeps? And then you listen, and they’re all so different.
The pandemic only increased his audience, as locked down commuters found themselves longing for the soundtrack of normal life.
It’s the same impulse that led software developer Evan Lewis to make an app of New York City subway sounds.
For those who want to bone up on their lines, information designer Ilya Birman, author of Designing Transit Maps, has scripted lists of London Underground and New York City subway announcements.
And Brooklyn-based Metropolitan Transit Authority worker Fred Argoff’s zine Watch the Closing Doors ushered civilians behind the scenes, sometimes exploring other cities’ subway systems or, in the case of Cincinnati, lack thereof.
Readers, do you have a fondness for a particular underground sound? Tell us what and why in the comments.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)
Some public intellectuals associated with science court disagreement with religious believers; others cultivate suites of rhetorical techniques expressly in order to avoid it. While Carl Sagan didn’t shrink from, say, debating a creationist on talk radio, he always engaged with characteristic aplomb. But dealing with belligerent callers-in is easier, in a way, than responding to an earnest, straightforwardly expressed curiosity about one’s own religious beliefs. In the Q&A clip above, taken from his 1994 “lost lecture,” Sagan receives just such a question: “What is your personal religion? Is there any type of God to you? Like, is there a purpose, given that we’re just sitting on this speck in the middle of this sea of stars?”
“Now, I don’t want to duck any questions,” Sagan replies, “and I’m not going to duck this one.” Nevertheless, he requests a trifling clarification: “What do you mean when you use the word God?” Pressed by none other than Carl Sagan to define God, few of us would presumably hold up well.
Here the questioner changes his angle, drawing on Sagan’s own definition in Pale Blue Dot of the “Great Demotions,” those “down-lifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo’s facts, delivered to human pride.” And so, “given all these demotions,” the man asks, “why don’t we just blow ourselves up?”
“If we do blow ourselves up,” Sagan asks, “does that disprove the existence of God?” This is an intriguing reversal, but Sagan doesn’t simply reply to questions with questions. Scientific knowledge increasingly leaves us “on our own,” he says, which is a state “much more responsible than hoping someone will save us from ourselves.” What if we’re wrong, and a deity does indeed step in to save us? “Okay, that’s all right, I’m for that; we, you know, hedged our bets. It Pascal’s bargain run backwards.” The problem lies with God itself, “a word so ambiguous, that means so many different things,” and one used “to seem to agree with someone else with whom you do not agree.” Despite its importance, not least for “social lubrication,” no term can be useful to truth that encompasses so many different personal conceptions — billions and billions of them, one might say.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch an Exquisite 19th Century Coffee Maker in Action
Coffee snobbery may seem like a recent phenomenon, but the quest for the perfectly brewed cup has been going on for a very long time.
Behold the Continental Balancing Siphon, above — a completely automatic, 19th-century table top vacuum brewer.
There’s an unmistakable element of coffee making as theater here… but also, a fascinating demonstration of physical principles in action.
Vintage vacuum pot collector Brian Harris breaks down how the balancing siphon works:
Two vessels are arranged side-by-side, with a siphon tube connecting the two.
Coffee is placed in one side (usually glass), and water in the other (usually ceramic).
A spirit lamp heats the water, forcing it through the tube and into the other vessel, where it mixes with the coffee.
As the water is transferred from one vessel to the other, a balancing system based on a counterweight or spring mechanism is activated by the change in weight. This in turn triggers the extinguishing of the lamp. A partial vacuum is formed, which siphons the brewed coffee through a filter and back into the first vessel, from which is dispensed by means of a spigot.
(Still curious? We direct you to Harris’ website for a lengthier, more eggheaded explanation, complete with equations, graphs, and calculations for saturated vapor pressure and the approximate temperature at which downward flow begins.)
The balancing siphon was to 1850’s Paris and Vienna what Blue Bottle’s three-foot tall Japanese slow-drip iced coffee-making devices are to early 21st-century Brooklyn and Oakland.
Does the flavor of coffee brewed in a balance siphon merit the time and, if purchased in a cafe, expense?
Yes, according to Maria Tindemans, the CEO of Royal Paris, whose 24-carat gold and Bacarrat glass balancing siphon retails for between $17,500 and $24,000:
The coffee from a syphon can best be described as “crystal clear,” with great purity of flavor and aroma and no bitterness added by the brewing process.
More affordable balancing siphons can be found online, though be forewarned, all siphons are a bitch to clean, according to Reddit.
If you do invest, be sure to up the coffee snobbery by telling your captive audience that you’ve named your new device “Gabet,” in honor of Parisian Louis Gabet, whose 1844 patent for a counterweight mechanism kicked off the balancing siphon craze.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Why Civilization Collapsed in 1177 BC: Watch Classicist Eric Cline’s Lecture That Has Already Garnered 7.6 Million Views
Eric Cline is a man of the Bronze Age. “If I could be reincarnated backwards,” he says in the lecture above, “I would choose to live back then. I’m sure I would not live more than about 48 hours, but it’d be a good 48 hours.” He may give himself too little credit: as he goes on to demonstrate in the hour that follows, he has as thorough an all-around knowledge of life in the Bronze Age as anyone alive in the 21st century. But of course, his prospects for survival in that era — or indeed anyone’s — depend on which part of it we’re talking about. The Bronze Age lasted a long time, from roughly 3300 to 1200 BC — at the end of which, ancient-history specialists agree, civilization collapsed.
What the specialists don’t quite agree on is how it happened. Cline makes his own case in the book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. The title, which seems to have been the result of the publishing industry’s invincible enthusiasm for naming books after years, may soon need an update: as Cline admits, it reflects a convention among scholars about how to label the titular event that has just been revised, and has since been revised back. And in any case, the collapse of civilization among the distinct but interconnected Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians of the Bronze Age took not a year, he explains, but more like a century.
This complicated process has no one explanation — and more to the point, no one cause. Many flourishing cities of Bronze Age civilization were indeed destroyed by 1177 BC or soon thereafter. The “old, simple explanation” for this was that “a drought caused famine, which eventually caused the Sea Peoples to start moving and creating havoc, which caused the collapse.” Cline opts to include these factors and others, including earthquakes and rebellions, whose effects spread to afflict all parts of this early “globalized” part of the world. The result was a “systems collapse,” involving the breakdown of “central administrative organization,” the “disappearance of the traditional elite class,” the “collapse of the centralized economy,” as well as “settlement shifts and population decline.”
Systems collapses have also happened in other places and at other times. Given the enormous intensification of globalization since the Bronze Age and the continued threats issued by the natural world, could another happen here and now? Pointing to the climate change, famines and droughts, earthquakes, rebellions, acts of bellicosity, and economic troubles in evidence today, Cline adds that “the only thing missing are the Sea Peoples” — and even then suggests that ISIS and refugees from Syria could be playing a similarly disruptive role. Given that this talk has racked up more than seven and a half million views so far, it seems he makes a convincing case, though the appeal could owe as much to his jokes. Not all of us, he acknowledges, will accept the relevance of the subject: “It’s history,” as we reassure ourselves. “It never repeats itself.”
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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 or on Facebook.
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