Hunter S. Thompson Sets His Christmas Tree on Fire, Nearly Burning His House Down (1990)
It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, a writer for the then formidable TIME magazine, visited Thompson’s home and watched the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:
I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9‑mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.
Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.
The wooden mantel above the fireplace apparently still has burn marks on it today.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Read More...A Visual Timeline of World History: Watch the Rise & Fall of Civilizations Over 5,000 Years
In the video above, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker suggests that we not refer to the period spanning the fifth and the late fifteenth centuries as the “dark ages.” In justification, he doesn’t put forth the argument, now fairly common, that the time in question was actually full of subtle innovation occluded by modern prejudice. The real problem, as he sees it, is that the slowing, if not reversing, of the progress of human society that we’ve traditionally regarded as occurring in what are commonly known as the Middle Ages only occurred in Europe. What’s more, there have been multiple such eras in the world: take the earlier “Greek dark ages” associated with the Bronze Age civilizational collapse of 1177 BC.
All this and more comes across at a glance on Baker’s Timeline of World History, whose design is explained in the video. With characteristic UsefulCharts clarity (also demonstrated by the World Religions Family Tree and the Evolution of the Alphabet, previously featured here on Open Culture), it lays out all the periods of history we may know better by their names than by their relationship to actual events.
At the top, it begins with the end of prehistory and the start of history: that is, when writing developed around 5,300 years ago. At that point, multiple civilizations had already begun to establish themselves around the world, and it is their growth and decline represented by the thickness of the lines running down the timeline’s regular century-long divisions.
As the early Bronze Age gives way to the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age gives way to the Iron Age, and the Iron Age gives way to Classical Antiquity, these lines of civilization thicken into those of empire. None come thicker than that of ancient Rome, which occupies the visual center of the poster (itself, incidentally, available for purchase from UsefulCharts’ site), but the design’s strength lies less in underscoring the importance of any one empire than of revealing how much history was going on all over the world at any given time. Using its vertical lines to trace the rise and fall of the Olmecs, say, or the Aksumite Empire or the Mississippian Culture, one can hardly suppress a feeling of Ozymandian transience. Nor, for that matter, can one ignore that all of us live out our lives within the span of two of its horizontal ones.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913
A century ago, the great French composer Claude Debussy sat down at a contraption called a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano and recorded a series of performances for posterity. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s playing, including pedaling and dynamics, onto piano rolls for later reproduction.
Debussy recorded 14 pieces onto six rolls in Paris on or before November 1, 1913. According to Debussy enthusiast Steve Bryson’s web site, the composer was delighted with the reproduction quality, saying in a letter to Edwin Welte: “It is impossible to attain a greater perfection of reproduction than that of the Welte apparatus. I am happy to assure you in these lines of my astonishment and admiration of what I heard. I am, Dear Sir, Yours Faithfully, Claude Debussy.”
The selection above is “La soirée dans Grenade” (“Grenada in the evening”), from Debussy’s 1903 trio of compositions titled Estampes, or “Prints.” Debussy was inspired by the Symbolist poets and Impressionist painters who strove to go beyond the surface of a subject to evoke the feeling it gave off. “La soirée dans Grenade” is described by Christine Stevenson at Notes From a Pianist as a “sound picture” of Moorish Spain:
Debussy’s first-hand experience of Spain was negligible at that time, but he immediately conjures up the country by using the persuasive Habenera dance rhythm to open the piece–softly and subtly. It insinuates itself into our consciousness with its quiet insistence on a repeated C sharp in different registers; around it circles a languid, Moorish arabesque, with nasal augmented 2nds, and a nagging semitone pulling against the tonal centre, occasionally interrupted by muttering semiquavers [16th notes] and a whole-tone based passage. Debussy writes Commencer lentement dans un rythme nonchalamment gracieux [Begin slowly in a casually graceful rhythm] at the beginning, but later Tres rythmé [Very rhythmic] in a brightly lit A major as the dance comes out of the shadows, ff [Fortissimo–loudly], with the click of castanets and the stamping of feet.
Debussy was 52 years old and suffering from cancer when he made his piano roll recordings. He died less than five years later, on March 25, 1918. Since then, his beautiful and evocative music has secured a place for him as one of the most influential and popular composers of the 20th century. As Roger Hecht writes at Classical Net, “Debussy was a dreamer whose music dreamed with him.”
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!
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
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Read More...The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared the beginning of a “Thousand-Year Reich” that ultimately came up about 988 years short. Fascism in Italy managed to hold on to power for a couple of decades, which was presumably still much less time than Benito Mussolini imagined he’d get on the throne. History shows us that regimes of this kind suffered a fairly severe stability problem, which is perhaps why they needed to put forth such a solid, formidable image. The IMPERIAL video above explores “the evil genius of fascist design,” focusing on how Hitler and Mussolini rendered their ideologies in art and the built environment, but many of its observations can be generalized to any political movement that seeks total control of a society, especially if that society has a sufficiently glorious-seeming past.
Fascism’s visual language has many inspirations, two of the most important cited in the video being Romanticism and Futurism. The former offered “a longing for the past, an obsession with nature, and a focus on the sublime”; the latter “worshiped speed, machines, and violence.” Despite their apparent contradiction, these dual currents allowed fascism “a peculiar ability to look both backward and forward, to summon the glory of past empires while promising a radical new future.”
In Italy, such an empire may have been distant in time, but it was nevertheless close at hand. “We dream of a Roman Italy that is wise and strong, disciplined and Imperial.” Even Hitler drew from the glories of ancient Rome and Greece to shape his own aspirational vision of an all-powerful German civilization.
Hence both of those dictators undertaking large-scale Neoclassical-style architectural projects “to bring the aesthetics of ancient Rome to their city streets,” including even muscular statues meant to embody the officially sanctioned human ideal. Of course, the builders of the United States of America had also looked to Roman forms, but they did so at a smaller, more humane scale. Fascist structures were designed not just to be eternal symbols but overwhelming presences, intended “not to elevate the soul, but to crush the individual into the crowd and promote conformity.” This, in theory, would make the citizen feel small and powerless, but with an accompanying quasi-religious longing to be part of a larger project: that of fascism, which subordinates everything to the state. For the likes of Mussolini and Hitler (an artist-turned-politician, as one can hardly fail to note), aesthetics was power — albeit not quite enough, in the event, to ensure their own survival.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Why Coffee Makes You Go #2
James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee and the creator of a coffee-centric YouTube channel, can tell you many things about coffee—from how to roast coffee, to the tools and techniques needed to make espresso, to the ultimate French Press technique. Then he can also get into more tangentially related questions, like why coffee makes you drop the proverbial deuce. Above, Mr. Hoffmann takes you on a short scientific journey through the human body, exploring the effects of coffee on digestion, gut bacteria, and our nervous system. We’ll provide no spoilers or gory details here.
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Read More...How Many Humans Have Ever Lived, and How Many Are Alive Right Now?
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How many people have ever walked the earth? Good question, even if you’ve never quite pondered it before. According to the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit research organization, if you travel back to 8000 B.C.E., the world population stood at about 5 million. By 1 C.E., the number climbs to 300 million, before gradually increasing to 500 million in 1650. Once we get beyond the plagues of the medieval period, our population explodes, reaching the 1 billion mark in 1800 and then 8 billion in 2022. Taken together, an estimated 117 billion people have collectively lived on our planet, and, of that total number, 7% are alive right now. A striking figure. Using similar data, video journalist Cleo Abram visualizes the historical trend in a short, succinct video above.
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Read More...Take a Tour of 18th-Century London, Recreated with AI
If you want to know what it was like to live in seventeenth-century London, read the diary of Samuel Pepys. While doing so, take note of his frequent references to the uncleanliness of the city’s streets: “very dirty and troublesome to walk through,” “mighty dirty after the rain,” and during the large-scale rebuilding in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666, “much built, yet very dirty and encumbered.” If you want to know what it was like to live in nineteenth-century London, read Charles Dickens. However much-lamented the difficulties it presents to young readers, the opening of Bleak House remains highly evocative, setting the scene with “as much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,” “dogs, undistinguishable in mire, and “horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.”
This “mud,” an unspeakably foul admixture of substances, only began to recede permanently from London’s streets in the eighteen-fifties, after the installation of sewer systems. So normal for so long, its presence would hardly have been downplayed by the city’s observers back then, whether they recorded their observations on the page or on the canvas.
Even the painter’s idealizing impulse could only do so much, as evidenced by some of the shots included in the new video tour of eighteenth-century London from Majestic Studios above. Turning contemporary paintings and engravings into cinematic animations with artificial intelligence-generated video, it offers the next best thing to actual footage of the city as it would have been seen by the likes of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gainsborough, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Seventeenth-century London was the cultural and commercial center of Georgian England, but also a city well on its way to becoming the center of the world. Some of its famous sights seen here in their eighteenth-century urban context include St. Paul’s Cathedral by Sir Christopher Wren, mastermind of the city’s post-Great Fire reconstruction; the old London Bridge, still lined with houses and shops; St. James’s Square after its transformation from a state once considered “muddy, neglected, and frankly, embarrassing for such prestigious addresses”; and the Tower of London on the bank of the River Thames. As for the river itself, it hardly goes ignored by the works of art that shape this video, or indeed un-glorified by them. But if you know anything about its condition before the turn of the twentieth century, you’ll be relieved that AI can’t yet restore its smell.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Tom Jones Performs Prince’s “Purple Rain” Accompanied by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (1992)
Over the decades, Tom Jones has performed with the best of them. In 1969, we can find him singing “Long Time Gone” with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and taking them delightfully by surprise. The same goes for his duet with Janis Joplin in that same year. Now fast forward to the 1990s. In this decade, Jones teamed up with the Swedish rock band The Cardigans and performed a rollicking version of the Talking Heads “Burning Down the House.” And, rather unexpectedly, he would get paired with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and croon Prince’s “Purple Rain.”
The recording above comes from Jones’ show The Right Time, a six-episode television series that aired in 1992. Tracing the evolution of pop music, the show featured appearances by Bob Geldof, Cyndi Lauper, The Chieftains and Stevie Wonder. When it comes to his version of “Purple Rain,” don’t miss the Gilmour solo midway through. Enjoy!
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Read More...Göbekli Tepe: The 12,000-Year-Old Ruins That Rewrite the Story of Civilization
We didn’t have civilization until we had cities, and we didn’t have cities until we had agriculture. So, at least, goes a widely accepted narrative in “big history” — a narrative somewhat troubled by the discovery of ruins on Göbekli Tepe, or “Potbelly Hill,” in southeastern Turkey. Apparently inhabited from around 9500 to 8000 BC, the ancient settlement predates the Pyramids of Giza by nearly 8,000 years, and Stonehenge by about 6,000 years. Though it was once believed to be a site used for ritual purposes only, later research unearthed evidence that suggests it was host to a variety of activities we associate with urban civilization, rather than what we usually think of hunter-gatherer sites. Does it amount to reason enough to revise our very understanding of the history of humanity?
“Like Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe’s structure includes circles of T‑shaped limestone pillars, many of them featuring etchings of animals,” says YouTuber Joe Scott in the video above. These pillars are arranged into enclosures, which together constitute a site that “features archaeological complexity that probably would have been too advanced for hunter-gatherers.”
Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who led the excavations at Göbekli Tepe between 1996 and 2014, believed that it was “a sanctuary and maybe a regional pilgrimage center where people gathered to perform religious rites.” But since his death, evidence of houses, a cistern, and grain-processing tools has turned up, indicating “a fully fledged settlement with permanent occupation” well before the advent of farming. This finding indicates that social and technological innovations associated with ‘civilization’ may have emerged long before the advent of agriculture, cities, or domesticated animals — under conditions very different from what historians had previously assumed. But as to the reason it was all built in the first place, this new information has led to more questions than answers.
One less than generally accepted theory holds that Göbekli Tepe was an astronomical observatory, and perhaps also a memorial to a devastating comet strike that occurred 13,000 years ago. Maybe it was “a last-ditch effort by a hunter-gatherer society to hang on to their vanishing lifestyle as the world was transitioning to farming.” That could have been the first large-scale technological revolution in human history, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last, and as we here in the twenty-first century consider the ruins of Göbekli Tepe — most of which still have yet to be excavated — we naturally find ourselves thinking about the long-term survival prospects of our own civilization. But the more recent discovery elsewhere in Turkey of other, even older ruins with a distinctly urban structure may also make us feel that our way of life isn’t quite as modern as we’d imagined.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Download 1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli
You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and The Cat Returns. Even so, the question remains: have you really seen them all? Experiencing them in the theater or on home video is only the first stage of the process. Ideally, each element of a Ghibli movie should subsequently be appreciated in isolation and at length: by listening to the music, for example, hundreds of hours of which, available to stream, we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.
Still, no matter how captivating Joe Hisaishi’s scores may sound on their own, Ghibli’s work is ultimately made to be seen. Given that 24 frames of their movies go by each second, it can be difficult to pick up all the details their animators include in each and every one of them.
Hence the value of the free archive of stills that the studio first made available online a few years ago, and that has steadily expanded ever since. Though only available in Japanese, it doesn’t present a great challenge even to fans with no knowledge of the language to click on the poster of their Ghibli film of choice, then to browse the variety of downloadable images associated with it.
Many of these stills are drawn from highly memorable moments across the Ghibli filmography: the children’s party on the hero of Porco Rosso’s beloved airplane; the emergence of the kodama in Princess Mononoke; the defeat of the colossal Giant Warrior in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which predates the studio’s foundation, but in any case now seems to count honorarily among its productions); the sentient flame cooking a skillet of bacon and eggs in Howl’s Moving Castle. Some of them have even been turned into wallpaper for video calls, downloadable from a page of their own. There we have another way to add a touch of Studio Ghibli’s distinctive vision to our everyday lives — and another source of inspiration to watch through the movies themselves one more time.
Enter the archive of still images here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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