The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: A Guidebook for Surviving the Afterlife
The saying “You can’t take it with you” may be a cliché to all of us here in the twenty-first century, but it would hardly have made sense to an ancient Egyptian. One of the most widely known qualities of that civilization’s upper crust, after all, is that its members spared no expense trying to do just that. The most compelling evidence includes the tombs of the pharaohs, lavishly stocked as they were with everything from daily necessities to religious artifacts to servants (in effigy or otherwise). And nobody who was anybody in ancient Egypt would be seen shuffling off this mortal coil — or whatever the shape in which their poets cast it — without a Book of the Dead.
“A standard component in Egyptian elite burials, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the modern sense of the term but a compendium of some 200 ritual spells and prayers, with instructions on how the deceased’s spirit should recite them in the hereafter,” writes the New York Times’ Franz Lidz.
“Compiled and refined over millenniums since about 1550 B.C.,” the text “provided a sort of visual map that allowed the newly disembodied soul to navigate the duat, a maze-like netherworld of caverns, hills and burning lakes.” Each of its “spells” addressed a particular situation the deceased might encounter on that journey: a snake attack, decapitation, a turning upside down that “would reverse your digestive functions and cause you to consume your own waste.”
We can certainly understand why these high-status ancient Egyptians didn’t want to take their chances. In the animated Ted-ED video above, you can follow the journey of one such individual, a scribe from thirteenth-century-BC Thebes called Anees. After his body undergoes two months of mummification, his spirit makes its harrowing journey through the underworld, calling upon the spells he’d thought to include in his Book of the Dead when alive. Then comes moral judgment by a battery of 42 “assessor gods” and a weighing of his heart, the final step before his admittance to a lush wheat field that is the Egyptian afterlife. Whether Anees got that far remains an open question, but modern physical and digital enshrinement of Books of the Dead (more of which you can see up-close at Google Arts & Culture), has granted him and his compatriots a kind of immortality after all.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Herbie Hancock Explains the Big Lesson He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mistake in Music, as in Life, Is an Opportunity
One thing they don’t teach you in parenting school is how to guide a young child into making fewer mistakes in her homework, while also communicating to her that mistakes are not “bad” but often “good” in that they can be conduits for creative thinking and intuitive pathways to progress. This lesson presents even more problems if your child has perfectionist tendencies. (If you have sound pedagogical methods, I’m all ears.)
The problem isn’t just that adults constantly telegraph binary “yes/no,” “good/bad” messages to everyone and everything around them, but that most adults are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, and thus deeply afraid of mistakes, as a result of imbibing so many binary messages themselves. Improvisation frightens trained and untrained musicians alike, for example, for this very reason. Who wants to screw up publicly and look like… well, a screw up?
We think that doing something well, and even “perfectly,” will win us the pat on the head/gold star/good report card we have been taught to crave all our lives. Surely there are excellent reasons to strive for excellence. But according to one who should know—the most excellent Miles Davis—excellence by nature obviates the idea of mistakes. How’s that, you ask? Let us attend to one of Davis’ former sidemen, Herbie Hancock, who tells one of his favorite stories about the man above.
Loose improvisation is integral to jazz, but we all know Miles Davis as a very exacting character. He could be mean, demanding, abrasive, cranky, hypercritical, and we might conclude, given these personal qualities, and the consistent excellence of his playing, that he was a perfectionist who couldn’t tolerate screw ups. Hancock gives us a very different impression, telling the tale of a “hot night” in Stuttgart, when the music was “tight, it was powerful, it was innovative, and fun.”
Making what anyone would reasonably call a mistake in the middle of one of Davis’ solos—hitting a noticeably wrong chord—Hancock reacted as most of us would, with dismay. “Miles paused for a second,” he says, “and then he played some notes that made my chord right… Miles was able to turn something that was wrong into something that was right.” Still, Hancock was so upset, he couldn’t play for about a minute, paralyzed by his own ideas about “right” and “wrong” notes.
What I realize now is that Miles didn’t hear it as a mistake. He heard it as something that happened. As an event. And so that was part of the reality of what was happening at that moment. And he dealt with it…. Since he didn’t hear it as a mistake, he thought it was his responsibility to find something that fit.
Hancock drew a musical lesson from the moment, yes, and he also drew a larger life lesson about growth, which requires, he says, “a mind that’s open enough… to be able to experience situations as they are and turn them into medicine… take whatever situation you have and make something constructive happen with it.”
This bit of wisdom reminds me not only of my favorite Radiohead lyric (“Be constructive with your blues”), but also of a story about a Japanese monk who visited a monastery in the U.S. and promised to give a demonstration in the fine art of Zen archery. After much solemn preparation and breathless anticipation, the monk led his hosts on a hike up the mountain, where he then blindly fired an arrow off a cliff and walked away, leaving the stunned spectators to conclude the target must be wherever the arrow happened to land.
What matters, Davis is quoted as saying, is how we respond to what’s happening around us: “When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” Or, as he put it more simply and non-dualistically, “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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Herbie Hancock’s Joyous Soundtrack for the Original Fat Albert TV Special (1969)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...An Introduction to Outsider Artist Henry Darger and His Bizarre 15,000-Page Illustrated Masterwork
The expression “Don’t quit your day job” is often used as an insult, implying that the recipient’s creative skills aren’t up to attracting a career-supporting audience. But it can also be practical advice in certain cases, especially those of artists possessed of a sensibility too particular and strange to bear direct exposure to the marketplace. So it was with Henry Darger, who deliberately passed his 81 years in near-absolute obscurity, working increasingly menial janitorial jobs by day and, when not attending one of his five daily masses, obsessing over his art the rest of the time. That art took various forms, most notably The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco–Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which has been described as the longest work of fiction ever written — and the strangest.
As described in the video above from Fredrik Knudsen (and in the 2004 feature-length documentary In the Realms of the Unreal), its 15,145 pages relate the adventures of a set of immaculately virtuous little girls against the backdrop of an apocalyptic, ultra-violent religious war. When Darger’s landlords discovered the work after his death, they also turned up a variety of drawings, paintings, and collages, many of them at least obliquely related to the story.
Against backdrops alternately idyllic and harrowing, the Vivian girls often appear naked, sometimes bewilderingly outfitted with male genitalia. Though clearly composed without formal training of any kind, Darger’s visual compositions demonstrate an askew kind of proficiency, or at least a kind of staggering evolution over the course of decades. Whatever the appeal of his work, there’s never been an artist like him. Nor could there be, given the highly specific stretch of history occupied by his long yet rigidly bounded life.
Not long after Darger’s birth in the Chicago of 1892, the death of his mother followed by the incapacitation of his father plunged him into a childhood of Dickensian-sounding hardship, spent in institutions with names like the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. An aggrieved loner seemingly afflicted by what we would now call mental health difficulties from the start, he took a kind of refuge in the fantasy cohering in his head, one shaped equally by mass print media phenomena like Winnie Winkle and Little Annie Rooney, Civil War photographs, and ultra-devout Catholicism. Since his posthumous discovery and elevation to the status of the ultimate “outsider artist,” there’s been no end of speculation about his personal habits, sexual proclivities, and state of mind. But with all such questions beyond resolution, we can, for the moment, leave the last word to the artist himself: “It’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Howard Zinn’s “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire”: An Illustrated Video Narrated by Viggo Mortensen
“Throughout U.S. history, our military has been used not for moral purposes but to expand economic, political, and military power,” says a cartoon Howard Zinn in Mike Konopacki’s 273-page comic book A People’s History of American Empire. Written with Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, the book adapts Zinn’s pathbreaking history from below, A People’s History of the United States, and his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train in a direct examination of the U.S. Imperium. Konopacki calls the book his “answer” to the textbooks of “the power structure.”
Above, you can see a short video adaptation of some key text from A People’s History of American Empire. Narrated by Viggo Mortensen, the video gives us a nutshell version of Zinn’s cultural, political, and moral education—what the Germans used to call bildung—as he grows from a somewhat naive WWII bomber pilot, to a college student on the G.I. Bill, to a graduate student, then professor, of history.
Along the way he notices that the map in every textbook labeled “Western Expansion” shows “the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon”:
That huge acquisition of land called the Louisiana Purchase gave no hint of anything but vacant land acquired, no sense that this territory was occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes that would have to be annihilated or forced out of their homes in what we now call ethnic cleansing.
Zinn goes on to chart the rise of U.S. Imperialism into the twentieth century as the increasingly militarized nation seizes Mexican territory and invades Cuba and the Philippines. Then we come to the ostensibly anti-communist “police actions” in Korea and Vietnam, and Zinn’s highly influential 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. When entrusted by Daniel Ellsberg with hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers, Zinn learns that the war in Vietnam is largely waged for the same reasons as our other imperialist moves abroad: the papers “spoke bluntly of the U.S. motives as a quest for tin, rubber, oil.”
But what of the war Zinn begins with, the war in which he fought? Near the end of the short film, he returns to his days as a WWII bomber, when he heard a fellow pilot argue that the U.S. was as “motivated by ambitions of control and conquest” as its enemies. He disagreed at the time, but in the intervening years came to see his fellow airman’s point. What we get with our idealism about any war, Zinn says, is a seeming “Imperialism lite,” whose motives are benign. Soft power, we’ve been told (until recently), wins the day. But peel back the curtain on our actions in the world, and we will see the same atrocities, the same cruelties, and the same basic motivations as every other act of imperialist aggression.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
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See Albert Camus’ Historic Lecture, “The Human Crisis,” Performed by Actor Viggo Mortensen
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...An Animated Introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism: The World’s First Analog Computer from Ancient Greece
From TED-Ed comes an animated introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek device that dates back to the 2nd century BCE. TED writes: “In 1900, Greek divers stumbled upon a 2,000-year-old shipwreck whose contents would shake our understanding of the ancient world. Among the remains were fragments of mangled wood and corroded metal, which archaeologists soon realized were parts of the oldest geared device ever discovered — and humankind’s first computer. So, how did it work?” Above, science journalist Max G. Levy explains the inner workings of the Antikythera Mechanism and how the Greeks put the device to use.
For those who want to take a deeper dive into this ancient analog computer (there’s a lot more to learn), we invite you to explore the titles in the Relateds section below. They’ll take you deeper into this marvel of ancient engineering.
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Read More...Ten Lost Roman Wonders: The World’s Longest Tunnel, Tallest Dam, Widest-Spanning Bridge & More
Apart from a few bridges that still work, the infrastructural achievements of the Roman Empire exist, for us, mostly as ruins. With a little imagination, those historic sites give us a clear enough sense of the empire’s sheer might, but if we want to go deeper, we should then look into the numerous Roman constructions that haven’t survived at all. In the video below from his channel Told in Stone, ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan gives his personal top seven “lost Roman wonders,” beginning with Trajan’s Bridge, whose length of more than a kilometer across the Danube made it the longest bridge ever built at that time: a project of ambitions befitting a man that history remembers as one of the “Five Good Emperors.”
No such status for Nero, though he did commission the Subiaco Dams. Necessary to create a series of artificial lakes beneath the infamous ruler’s villa, they were the highest dams in existence until the Middle Ages. Hadrian’s more public-minded white-marble temple at Cyzicus in modern-day Turkey was known as unusually splendid even by the standards of that genre of building; now only its foundations remain, with archaeological digs turning up the occasional fragment.
In the former Constantinople, the Church of the Holy Apostles is remembered as the second-most famous vanished early Christian church, after only the old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Hagia Sophia may still be around, but the Column of Justinian that once stood between it and the Great Palace was melted down for scrap long ago.
We only know of these lost structures because we have historical attestations of their existence, most vividly in paintings: take the Pyramid of Romulus, a striking tomb that appears near the Vatican in The Vision of the Cross, which Raphael’s assistants produced after his death. Others, like the Colossus of Nero from which the Colosseum takes its name, are represented on coins. In the video at the top, Ryan covers three more “forgotten Roman megaprojects”: Claudius’ tunnel of record-making length through the mountain between the River Liris and the Fucine Lake, Trajan’s military highway through the “Iron Gates” of the Danube, and Octavian’s secret harbor at Lake Avernus. In our time, of course, there are no more emperors, Roman or otherwise, and we’re surely better off for it. But we can still admire — to use a twenty-first century concept — the state capacity they commanded.
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The Genius Engineering of Roman Aqueducts
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Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds
Madman or visionary? A little of both? A genius? A brand? A mensch? David Lynch was all these things and more, and this fan-made video above serves as a quick reminder of the career and the consistency of the film director/artist/transcendental meditator who passed away last year.
Early in the video we see one of the director’s publicity stunts, when he sat in a chair on the corner of La Brea and Hollywood, next to a cow and a large poster of Laura Dern. No, the cow had nothing to do with the film he was promoting—2006’s Inland Empire—but it did stop traffic and draw attention. Lynch didn’t have an advertising budget to promote Laura Dern’s lead role in the film, so the cow had to do.
Laura Dern appeared in a majority of Lynch’s films beginning with 1986’s Blue Velvet, and the video honors their friendship (he called her “Tidbit”) as well as his collaborations with Kyle MacLachlan (who Lynch called “Kale”) and Naomi Watts. All three obviously adored him.
There’s also a compilation of Lynch swearing like a champ. Product placement in film is “bullshit,” problems on set are “fucking nuts,” and for those who sat through the “peanut sweeping” scene in Twin Peaks The Return, you’ll understand his outburst on set: “Who gives a fuc&ing $hit how long a scene is?”
We’ve linked previously to Lynch’s video where he makes quinoa, and this short edit sums up that video nicely. It’s also nice to see attention given to The Straight Story, which usually gets passed over in his filmography, despite (or maybe because of) being his sweetest movie.
There’s also a reminder that Lynch made videos from quarantine in his Los Angeles home. Not only did he deliver the daily weather reports like he used to, but he also announced “Today’s Number,” which caused quite a lot of anxiety in the YouTube comments. (Why no seven? WHY NO NUMBER 7?)
The video ends with Lynch’s theory about catching ideas like fish—we’ve also highlighted this before—and then a lovely montage of title cards, reminding us all that “Directed by David Lynch” remains a guaranteed sign of quality.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.
Read More...The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women: The Avant-Garde Artists Who Helped Shape Modernism
It doesn’t take too long a look at the almost surrealistically clean-lined buildings of Walter Gropius to get the impression that the man wanted to usher in a new world, especially when you consider that many of them went up before World War II. Take the Bauhaus Dessau building, which, though completed exactly a century ago, looks like a concrete transmission from the future that never arrived, or one that may indeed still be on the way. It once housed the German art school turned political and cultural engine he founded in 1919, whose principles included absolute equality between male and female participants — or they did at first, at any rate.
Soon deciding that the new institution wouldn’t be taken seriously with too high a proportion of women, Gropius limited their enrollment to one-third of the student body. That episode, among others that underscore the ways in which Gropius and the Bauhaus’ ostensible commitment to the advancement of women wasn’t all it could be, figures into Susanne Radelhof’s documentary The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women.
Yet whatever the shortcomings in that department one might identify from a twenty-first century vantage, the fact remains that the Bauhaus made possible — or at least encouraged — more enduring and influential work by female artists and designers than almost any art school in early twentieth-century Europe.
Among the almost 500 women who studied at the Bauhaus, the film profiles figures like Alma Buscher, “who created prototypes of avant-garde furniture and toys”; “visionary metalsmith and designer” Marianne Brandt; Gunta Stölzl, whose “weaving revolutionized modern textile design” (weaving eventually being the main program to which women were admitted); Friedl Dicker, a “multitalented artist” dedicated to the Bauhaus; and Lucia Moholy, whose “exceptional photographs still influence how we view Bauhaus design today.” The school itself may have shut down in 1933, owing to the conflict between its aesthetic and political ends and those of the rising Nazi Party, but the forward-looking nature and worldwide cultural influence of the Bauhaus have ensured that we still feel the influence of its alumni, male and female alike.
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The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...
How This Skyscraper Ruined Paris, and Why They’re Now Trying to Make It Invisible
The playwright Tristan Bernard is said to have eaten lunch at the Eiffel Tower every day, but not because he liked the menu in its café: rather, because it was the only place in Paris with no view of the Eiffel Tower. His view wasn’t wholly eccentric in the decades after its construction, in the late eighteen-eighties, when the structure had yet to become the most beloved in France, and perhaps in the world. Yet not far behind the Eiffel Tower as a must-visit tourist attraction in a town full of them is Paris’ least beloved building: the Tour Montparnasse, which since its completion in 1973 has stood in infamy as the only skyscraper in the center of the city.
Unlike the Eiffel Tower, which was commissioned in part to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution, the Tour Montparnasse projects no political symbolism; unlike Notre-Dame de Paris, or Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, it has no religious significance. Its purpose is wholly commercial, befitting a large office building with a shopping mall — or now, the remains of a shopping mall — at the bottom. But when it was first conceived in 1958, it embodied the very image of modernity in a built environment that was dilapidated where it wasn’t war-torn. A modern skyscraper would show the world, unmistakably, that Paris had stepped fully into the twentieth century of indoor plumbing, electricity, fast trains, and telecommunication.
This mission gained the full backing of none other than Andre Malraux, then France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs. Unfortunately, nineteen-fifties Europe lacked the technology, expertise, and money required for a 60-story skyscraper, let alone one serving as the centerpiece of a sweeping redevelopment project that included gleaming new residential blocks and a completely rebuilt Montparnasse Station. The tower couldn’t even break ground until 1969, by which time the building’s once-cutting-edge mid-century design — hardly a universal hit even in maquette form — had already begun to look passé. (Part of the problem was surely its color, which architect Philippe Trétiack described as having “a touch of the nicotine stain about it.”)
When the Tour Montparnasse turned 50 a few years ago, I happened to be in Paris on my honeymoon. Nothing was happening to mark the occasion, apart from the long-ongoing discussions about whether to renovate the thing or just knock it down. The former option having won the day, you can see the details of the planned extreme makeover in the B1M video above. Rather than destroying the existing building, the idea is to do the next best thing and make it invisible. This ambitious project will install a new façade of clear glass and bands of sky gardens, among other changes, in order to lighten its burdensome visual mass. But however radical its transformation, one suspects that it will remain most appreciated as the only place in Paris without a view of the Tour Montparnasse.
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Watch the Building of the Eiffel Tower in Timelapse Animation
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons reigns as one of the world’s most recognizable early 18th-century pieces, thanks to its frequent appearances in films and television commercials.
Upon its debut in 1725, The Four Seasons stunned listeners by telling a story without the help of a human voice. Vivaldi drew on four existing sonnets (possibly of his own provenance), using strings to paint a narrative filled with spring thunderstorms, summer’s swelter, autumnal hunts and harvests, and the icy winds of winter.
The composer studded his score with precisely placed lines from the sonnets, to convey his expectations that the musicians would use their instruments to sonically embody the experiences being described.
For two hundred years, musicians cleaved closely to Vivaldi’s original orchestration.
The last hundred years, however, have seen a wide range of instruments and interpretations. Drums, synths, an electric guitar, a Chinese pipa, an Indian sarangi, a pair of Inuit throat singers, a Japanese a cappella women’s chorus, a Theremin and a musical saw are among those to have taken a stab at The Four Seasons’ drowsing goatherd, barking dog, and twittering birdies.
Remembering that Vivaldi himself was a great innovator, we suggest that there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from all that to revisit the original flavor.
The San Francisco-based early music ensemble, Voices of Music does so beautifully, above, with a video playlist of live performances given between 2015 and 2018, with the four concertos edited to be presented in their traditional order.
Voices of Music co-directors David Tayler and Hanneke van Proosdij were adamant that these high quality audio recordings would leave listeners feeling as if they are in the same room with the musicians and their baroque instruments. As Tayler told Early Music America:
We did tests where we sat in the audience listening to the mix. We stopped when we got to the point that it sounded like sitting in the audience. We didn’t want something that looked like a concert, with a CD playing in the background.
Multiple stationery cameras ensured that the mostly standing performers’ spontaneous physical responses to the music and each other would not pass unremarked. As tempting as it is to savor these joyful sounds with ears alone, we recommend taking it in with your eyes, too. The pleasure these virtuosos take in Vivaldi and each other is a delight.
You also won’t want to miss the English translations of the sonnet, broken into subtitles and timed to appear at the exact place where they appear in Vivaldi’s 300 year-old score.
Spring:
Allegro — 0:00
Largo — 3:32
Allegro — 6:13
Summer:
Allegro non molto — 10:09
Adagio — 15:31
Presto — 17:46
Autumn:
Allegro — 20:42
Adagio molto — 26:14
Allegro — 28:25
Winter:
Allegro non molto — 31:56
Largo — 35:29
Allegro — 37:25
While the audience reactions were edited from the presentation above, we’d be remiss if we didn’t direct you to a playlist wherein these virtuoso players are seen graciously accepting the applause of the crowds who were lucky enough to catch these performances in person.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Why We Love Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”: An Animated Music Lesson
Ayun Halliday is an author, theatermaker, and the Chief Primatologist in NYC.
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