On social media channels, Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a message (with love) to the Russian people, telling them what’s really happening with Putin’s war in Ukraine, and exposing a truth that the Russian government has tried to censor at home. You can find his video on Telegram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. And as he says: “Please watch and share,” especially with any friends in Russia.
The video above shows us Jack Kerouac giving a reading, accompanied by the jazz piano stylings of evening television variety-show host Steve Allen. In other words, if you’ve been looking for the most late-nineteen-fifties clip in existence, your journey may have come to an end. Earlier in that decade, Allen says (sprinkling his monologue with a few notes here and there), “the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called the Beat Generation. A novel titled On the Road became a bestseller, and its author, Jack Kerouac, became a celebrity: partly because he’d written a powerful and successful book, but partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation.”
As the novelists and poets of the Beat Generation were gradually gaining renown, Allen was fast becoming a national celebrity. In 1954, his co-creation The Tonight Show made him the first late-night television talk show host, and consequently applied pressure to stay atop the cultural currents of the day. Not only did he know of the Beats, he joined them, at least for one collaboration: “Jack and I made an album together a few months back in which I played background piano for his poetry reading.” That was Poetry for the Beat Generation, the first of Kerouac’s trilogy of spoken-word albums that we previously featured here on Open Culture back in 2015.
“At that time I made a note to book him on this show,” Allen says, “because I thought you would enjoy meeting him.” After answering a few “square questions” by way of introduction — it took him three weeks to write On the Road, he spent seven years on the road itself, he did indeed type on a continuous “scroll’ of paper, and he would define “Beat” as “sympathetic” — Kerouac reads from the novel that made his name, accompanied by Allen’s piano. “A lot of people have asked me, why did I write that book, or any book,” he begins. “All the stories I wrote were true, because I believed in what I saw.” This is, of course, not poetry but prose, and practically essayistic prose at that, but here it sounds like a literary form all its own.
If you’d like to hear the music of Kerouac’s prose without actual musical accompaniment, have a listen to his acetate recording of a half-hour selection from On the Road that we posted last weekend. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of his birth, which elsewhere brought forth all manner of tributes and re-evaluations of his work and legacy. 65 years after On the Road’s publication, how much resemblance does today’s America bear to the one crisscrossed by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty? It’s worth considering why the country no longer inspires writers quite like Jack Kerouac — or for that matter, given the passage of his own little-noted centenary last December, television hosts like Steve Allen.
Related content:
Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitchhiking Trip Narrated in On the Road
Jack Kerouac Reads American Haikus, Backed by Jazz Saxophonists Al Cohn & Zoot Sims (1958)
Free: Hours of Jack Kerouac Reading Beat Poems & Verse
Young Frank Zappa Plays the Bicycle on The Steven Allen Show (1963)
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.
If you’ve read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in English, it’s likely that your translation referred to the transformed Gregor Samsa as a “cockroach,” “beetle,” or, more generally, a “gigantic insect.” These renderings of the author’s original German don’t necessarily miss the mark—Gregor scuttles, waves multiple legs about, and has some kind of an exoskeleton. His charwoman calls him a “dung beetle”… the evidence abounds. But the German words used in the first sentence of the story to describe Gregor’s new incarnation are much more mysterious, and perhaps strangely laden with metaphysical significance.
Translator Susan Bernofsky writes, “both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning “monstrous” or “huge”) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations—virtual nonentities—prefixed by un.” Ungeziefer, a term from Middle High German, describes something like “an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice,” belonging to “the class of nasty creepy-crawly things.” It suggests many types of vermin—insects, yes, but also rodents. “Kafka,” writes Bernofsky, “wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them.”
It’s likely for that very reason that Kafka prohibited images of Gregor. In a 1915 letter to his publisher, he stipulated, “the insect is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance.” The slim book’s original cover, above, instead features a perfectly normal-looking man, distraught as though he might be imagining a terrible transformation, but not actually physically experiencing one.
Yet it seems obvious that Kafka meant Gregor to have become some kind of insect. Kafka’s letter uses the German Insekt, and when casually referring to the story-in-progress, Kafka used the word Wanze, or “bug.” Making this too clear in the prose dilutes the grotesque body horror Gregor suffers, and the story is told from his point of view—one that “mutates as the story proceeds.” So writes Dutch reader Freddie Oomkins, who further observes, “at the physical level Gregor, at different points in the story, starts to talk with a squeaking, animal-like voice, loses control of his legs, hangs from the ceiling, starts to lose his eyesight, and wants to bite his sister—not really helpful in determining his taxonomy.”
Difficulties of translation and classification aside, Russian literary mastermind and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov decided that he knew exactly what Gregor Samsa had turned into. And, against the author’s wishes, Nabokov even drew a picture in his teaching copy of the novella. Nabokov also heavily edited his edition, as you can see in the many corrections and revisions above. In a lecture on The Metamorphosis, he concludes that Gregor is “merely a big beetle” (notice he strikes the word “gigantic” from the text above and writes at the top “just over 3 feet long”), and furthermore one who is capable of flight, which would explain how he ends up on the ceiling.
All of this may seem highly disrespectful of The Metamorphosis’ author. Certainly Nabokov has never been a respecter of literary persons, referring to Faulkner’s work, for example, as “corncobby chronicles,” and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a “petrified superpun.” Yet in his lecture Nabokov calls Kafka “the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plastic saints in comparison with him.” Though a saint he may be, Kafka is “first of all an artist,” and Nabokov does not believe that “any religious implications can be read into Kafka’s genius.” (“I am interested here in bugs, not humbugs,” he says dismissively.)
Rejecting Kafka’s tendencies toward mysticism runs against most interpretations of his fiction. One might suspect Nabokov of seeing too much of himself in the author when he compares Kafka to Flaubert and asserts, “Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author’s private sentiments.” Ungeheueres Ungeziefer, however, is not a scientific term, and its Middle German literary origins—which Kafka would have been familiar with from his studies—clearly connote religious ideas of impurity and sacrifice.
With due respect to Nabokov’s formidable erudition, it seems in this instance at least that Kafka fully intended imprecision, what Bernofsky calls “blurred perceptions of bewilderment,” in language “carefully chosen to avoid specificity.” Kafka’s art consists of this ability to exploit the ancient stratifications of language. His almost Kabbalistic treatment of signs and his aversion to graven images may consternate and bedevil translators and certain novelists, but it is also the great source of his uncanny genius.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Related Content:
Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907–1917
Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Having by now seen Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) more times than I can remember, it surprises me to meet someone who’s never seen it at all. When I do, my first impulse is always to suggest a screening right then and there. This would seem to put me in company with Oliver Stone, who in recent years has been documented engaging in at least one instance of high-profile Strangelove evangelism. As for the new inductee into the Strangelove viewership, he went more than 60 years without having seen the film, but for the last couple of decades had the credible excuse of busyness: it isn’t just a part-time gig, after all, being the president of Russia.
Stone seized the opportunity to watch Dr. Strangelove with Vladimir Putin in the course of filming The Putin Interviews, a four-part documentary series broadcast on Showtime in 2017. This wasn’t the first time Stone had made a subject of his own interactions with a head of state whom many Americans consider malevolent: in 2008’s South of the Border, for example, he attempted a humanizing cinematic portrait of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. At Showtime’s Youtube channel, you can watch a variety of clips from The Putin Interviews, including Putin giving Stone a tour of his offices, Putin’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump, and Putin checking in with Stone before skating out onto the ice for a game of hockey.
The viewing of Dr. Strangelove comes at the series’ very end, which is presumably an effort on Stone’s part to save the “best” for last — and as Cold War American cinema goes, one could hardly hope for a better selection. Based on Peter George’s Red Alert, a straightforward thriller novel about American and Soviet protocols of nuclear-defense management gone disastrously wrong, the film only took shape when Kubrick realized it had to be a comedy. As he later recalled, “I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.”
As Joseph Heller realized while writing Catch-22, certain ridiculous truths about war simply can’t be portrayed non-comedically. As realized through the painstakingly exact filmmaking of Kubrick and his collaborators, Dr. Strangelove is the blackest of black comedies. “There are certain things in this film that indeed make us think,” Putin says to Stone after the closing montage of mushroom clouds. He even credits Kubrick with technical foresight: “Modern weapon systems have become more sophisticated, more complex. But this idea of a retaliatory weapon and the inability to control such weapon systems still hold true today.” Not much has changed since the days of Dr. Strangelove, he admits, and now that he’s undergone his own bout of geopolitical brazenness, let’s hope that he remembers how the movie ends.
Related content:
Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Minutes
Two Scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Recreated in Lego
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.
We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin. It’s almost impossible to imagine these two groups of people agreeing on anything other than the ominous portent of their respective messages. But in the early days of the scientific revolution—the days of Shakespeare contemporary Francis Bacon, and later 17th century Descartes—it was not at all unusual to find both kinds of reasoning, or unreasoning, in the same person, along with beliefs in magic, divination, astrology, etc.
Yet even in this maelstrom of heterodox thought and practices, Sir Isaac Newton stood out as a particularly odd co-existence of esoteric biblical prophecy, occult beliefs, and a rigid, formal mathematics that not only adhered to the inductive scientific method, but also expanded its potential by applying general axioms to specific cases.
Yet many of Newton’s general principles would seem totally inimical to the naturalism of most physicists today. As he was formulating the principles of gravity and three laws of motion, for example, Newton also sought the legendary Philosopher’s Stone and attempted to turn metal to gold. Moreover, the devoutly religious Newton wrote theological treatises interpreting Biblical prophecies and predicting the end of the world. The date he arrived at? 2060.
Newton seems, writes science blog Another Pale Blue Dot, “as confident of his predictions in this realm as he was in the rational world of science.” In a 1704 letter exhibited at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, above, Newton describes his “recconing”:
So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.
Newton further demonstrates his confidence in the next sentence, writing that his intent, “though not to assert” an answer, should in any event “put a stop the rash conjectures of fancifull men who are frequently predicting the time of the end.” Indeed. So how did he arrive at this number? Newton applied a rigorous method, that is to be sure.
If you have the patience for exhaustive description of how he worked out his prediction using the Book of Daniel, you may read one here by historian of science Stephen Snobelen, who also points out how widespread the interest in Newton’s odd beliefs has become, reaching across every continent, though scholars have known about this side of the Enlightenment giant for a long time.
For a sense of the exacting, yet completely bizarre flavor of Newton’s prophetic calculations, see another Newton letter at the of the post, transcribed below.
Prop. 1. The 2300 prophetick days did not commence before the rise of the little horn of the He Goat.
2 Those day [sic] did not commence a[f]ter the destruction of Jerusalem & ye Temple by the Romans A.[D.] 70.
3 The time times & half a time did not commence before the year 800 in wch the Popes supremacy commenced
4 They did not commence after the re[ig]ne of Gregory the 7th. 1084
5 The 1290 days did not commence b[e]fore the year 842.
6 They did not commence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 1084
7 The diffence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the seven weeks.
Therefore the 2300 years do not end before ye year 2132 nor after 2370.
The time times & half time do n[o]t end before 2060 nor after [2344]
The 1290 days do not begin [this should read: end] before 2090 [Newton might mean: 2132] nor after 1374 [sic; Newton probably means 2374]
The editorial insertions are Professor Snobelen’s, who thinks the letter dates “from after 1705,” and that “the shaky handwriting suggests a date of composition late in Newton’s life.” Whatever the exact date, we see him much less certain here; Newton pushes around some other dates—2344, 2090 (or 2132), 2374. All of them seem arbitrary, but “given the nice roundness of the number,” writes Motherboard, “and the fact that it appears in more than one letter,” 2060 has become his most memorable dating for the apocalypse.
It’s important to note that Newton didn’t believe the world would “end” in the sense of cease to exist or burn up in holy flames. His end times philosophy resembles that of a surprising number of current day evangelicals: Christ would return and reign for a millennium, the Jewish diaspora would return to Israel and would, he wrote, set up “a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom.” We hear such statements often from televangelists, school boards, governors, and presidential candidates.
As many people have argued, despite Newton’s conception of his scientific work as a bulwark against other theologies, it ultimately became a foundation for Deism and Naturalism, and has allowed scientists to make accurate predictions for hundreds of years. 20th century physics may have shown us a much more radically unstable universe than Newton ever imagined, but his theories are, as Isaac Asimov would put it, “not so much wrong as incomplete,” and still essential to our understanding of certain fundamental phenomena. But as fascinating and curious as Newton’s other interests may be, there’s no more reason to credit his prophetic calculations than those of the Millerites, Harold Camping, or any other apocalyptic doomsday sect.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Related Content:
M.I.T. Computer Program Predicts in 1973 That Civilization Will End by 2040
Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662)
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Videos Recreate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alchemy Experiments: Watch Silver Get Turned Into Gold
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
You have seen The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (UOGB) pay tribute to The Clash, Nirvana and Bowie. Now, it’s time for The Ramones and their 1978 classic, “I Wanna Be Sedated.” The UOGB took shape in 1985, and they’ve been performing creative covers of popular songs and musical pieces ever since. Enjoy this one, and find a long playlist of their other covers here.
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Image via The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Last year, the fates handed the New York Times’ Maria Cramer an enviably striking lede: “Humanity is 100 seconds away from total annihilation. Again.” That we all know immediately what she was writing about speaks to the power of graphic design. Specifically, it speaks to the power of graphic design as practiced by Martyl Langsdorf, who happened to be married to ex-Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf. This connection got her the gig of creating a cover for the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She came up with a simple image: the upper-left corner of a clock, its hands at seven minutes to midnight.
Asked later why she set the clock to that time in particular, Langsdorf explained that “it looked good to my eye.” That quote appears in a post at the Bulletin addressing frequently asked questions about what’s now known as the Doomsday Clock, “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.” In the 75 years since its introduction, its minute hand has been moved backward eight times and forward sixteen times; currently it still stands where Cramer reported it as having remained last January, at 100 seconds to midnight.
To the public of 1947, “midnight” signified above all the prospect of humanity’s self-destruction through the use of nuclear weapons. But as technology itself has advanced and proliferated, the means of auto-annihilation have grown more diverse. This year’s Doomsday Clock statement cites not just nukes but carbon emissions, infectious diseases, and “internet-enabled misinformation and disinformation.” Earlier this month, the Bulletin reminded us that even as 2022 began, “we called out Ukraine as a potential flashpoint in an increasingly tense international security landscape. For many years, we and others have warned that the most likely way nuclear weapons might be used is through an unwanted or unintended escalation from a conventional conflict.”
Now that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought this nightmare scenario to life,” many have found themselves glancing nervously at the Doomsday Clock once again. This also happened after the election of Donald Trump, which prompted the Vox video above on the Clock’s history and purpose. Its iconic status, as celebrated in the new book The Doomsday Clock at 75, has long outlasted the Cold War, but the device itself isn’t without its critics. Bulletin co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch once articulated the latter as meant “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality,” a somewhat controversial intention. One could also raise objections to using an inherently linear and unidirectional concept like time to represent a probability resulting from human action. Yet somehow more technically suitable images — “100 centimeters from the edge,” say — don’t have quite the same ring.
Related content:
53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto
Protect and Survive: 1970s British Instructional Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack
How Clocks Changed Humanity Forever, Making Us Masters and Slaves of Time
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.
The original rock supergroup, Cream, lasted two years, changed the course of rock music, barely held together because of rancor between members and said goodbye in 1968. Their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London was one for the ages. Maybe not their best performance, but one of their most energetic. And inside the cavernous Hall, the three men laid down a wall of undeniable sound.
Too bad that it wasn’t properly documented, despite a series of cameras there that evening. A Youtube denizen called Mike Lefton has tried to rectify the history by assembling a cut of the 70-minute concert that plays in real time. It’s the kind of fan project for which YouTube is designed—something not professional enough for official release, but vitally important for the fans.
Go on to the BezosBorg site (you know, it rhymes with Glamazon), and you can find a concert film offered on Blu-Ray. What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Cream fans will tell you. Instead of letting the band play, the official Farewell Concert leaves off several songs, and includes a “totally square voiceover by Patrick Allen (who refers to the band as “The Cream” throughout),” according to the moviesteve.com website, while another reviewer notes this could be the genesis of Spinal Tap’s intentionally bad interviews. (But let’s be fair, the 1960s in general were filled with non-rock journalists interviewing musicians as if they were alien life forms. D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back is a compendium of such cringey moments.)
On top of that, director Allen really overdid the zoom lens, which was everywhere those days. It’s funny to see how it was used to “spice up” rock band footage, where really you could just hold the camera on Ginger Baker playing drums.
This edit cuts Allen’s footage together with black and white footage from the BBC, and generally does a fair job filling in the gaps, letting the concert stand on its own merits. It had plenty—the aforementioned Ginger Baker’s drum solo on “The Toad.” The repetition of footage is easy to spot—Jack Bruce tunes his guitar quite a lot, Eric Clapton looks offstage, and Baker smokes the final half-inch of a rollie over the hour—but Mike Lefton made this one for the fans, which is more than you can say for Allen, who made it for frightened BBC viewers still unsure about what all this “rock and roll” music was about. Enjoy.
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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.
Last week we featured the recent discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which has spent more than a century at the bottom of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. It sank there in 1915, after having been entrapped and slowly crushed by pack ice for the most of a year. That marked the end of what had started as the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the story. When it had become clear that there was no hope for Endurance, writes Rain Noe at Core77, “Shackleton and five of the crew then sailed 800 miles in a lifeboat to Stromness, an inhabited island and whaling station in the South Atlantic, where they were able to organize a rescue party. Shackleton located and rescued his crew four months later.”
Today we can watch the Endurance’s demise on film, as shot by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. “How is it possible that the film footage survived this ordeal?” Noe writes. “After the crew abandoned ship, food was the main thing to be carried away by the men, and Hurley had to decide which photo negatives and film reels to salvage.” Hurley himself later described this agonizing process, at the end of which “about 400 plates were jettisoned and 120 retained. Later I had to preserve them almost with my life; for a time came when we had to choose between heaving them overboard or throwing away our surplus food — and the food went over!”
Even relatively early in the era of cinema, Hurley must have understood the power of the image — as, it seems, did his captain. The footage Hurley could salvage retained a striking clarity, and it went into 1919’s South, which is now considered to be the very first documentary feature. “South was first exhibited by Ernest Shackleton in 1919 to accompany his lectures,” writes Ann Ogidi at the BFI’s Screenonline, “and it has some of the quality of a lecture. Excerpts of the journey are interspersed with scientific and biological observations.” And “just when the dramatic tension reaches its height, there are almost 20 inexplicable minutes of nature footage, showing sea lions gamboling, penguins and other birds.”
Crisply restored in the 1990s, South “is best thought of as that multi-media documentary lecture that Shackleton would have presented with stills, paintings, film and music woven together to spin the yarn, and for Hurley’s exquisite photography that keeps alive the story of that group of extraordinary men.” So writes BFI curator Bryony Dixon in a recent piece on the miraculous survival of not just Shackleton and his men, but of Hurley’s handiwork. And it was Hurley who then went right back out to the island of South Georgia to “take wildlife footage that the newspaper editor Ernest Perris, who sponsored the film, was convinced was needed to make the film interesting to the public.” Perris was daring enough to fund the first documentary feature, but also prescient in his conception of the form — a conception proven definitively right, more than eighty years later, by the box-office performance of March of the Penguins.
via Core77
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See the Well-Preserved Wreckage of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarctica
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The Titanic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Disaster Strikes (1911–1912)
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.
There was a period in the late 20th-century when having hair long enough to sit on was considered something of an accomplishment.
Judging by the long hair pins unearthed from Austria’s Hallstatt burial site, extreme length was an early Iron Age hair goal, too, possibly because a coronet of thick braids made it easier to balance a basket on your head or keep your veil securely fastened.
Morgan Donner, whose YouTube channel documents her attempts to recreate historical garments and hairstyles, committed to trying various Hallstatt looks after reading archeologogist Karina Grömer’s 2005 article Experimente zur Haar- und Schleiertracht in der Hallstattzeit (Experiments on hairstyles and veils in the Hallstatt period.)
Gromer, the vice-head of the Vienna Natural History Museum’s Department of Prehistory, published precise diagrams showing the position of the hair ornaments in relation to the occupants of various graves.
For example, the skeleton in grave 45, below, was discovered with “10 bronze needles to the left of and below the skull, (and) parts of a bronze spiral roll in the neck area.”
Although no hair fibers survive, researchers cross-referencing the pins’ position against figural representations from period artifacts, have made a pretty educated guess as to the sort of hair do this individual may have sported in life, or more accurately, given the context, death.
As to the “bronze spiral roll” — which Donner persists in referring to as a spiral “doobly doo” — it functioned much like a modern day elastic band, preventing the braid from unravelling.
Donner twists hers from wire, after arranging to have replica hairpins custom made to historically accurate dimensions. (The manufacturer, perhaps misunderstanding her interest in history, coated them with an antiquing agent that had to be removed with “brass cleaner and a bit of rubbing.”
Most of the styles are variants on a bun. All withstand the “shake test” and would look right at home in a bridal magazine.
Star Wars fans will be gratified to find not one, but two iconic Princess Leia looks.
Our favorites were the braided loops and double buns meant to be sported beneath a veil.
“The braids do kind of act nicely as an anchor point for the veil to sit on,” Donner reports, “Not a lot of modern application per se for this particular style but it’s cute. It’s fun.”
Either would give you some serious Medieval Festival street cred, even if you have to resort to extensions.
Donner’s video gets a lot of love in the comments from a number of archaeology professionals, including a funerary archaeologist who praises the way she deals with the “inherent issues of preservation bias.”
The final nine minutes contain a DIY tutorial for those who’d like to make their own hairpins, as well as the spiral “doobly doo”.
If you’re of a less crafty bent, a jewelry designer in Finland is selling replicas based on the grave finds of Hallstatt culture on Etsy.
Watch a playlist of Donner’s historical hair experiments and tutorials, though a peek at her Instagram reveals that she got a buzzcut last fall, currently grown out to pixie-ish length.
Download Grömer’s illustrated article on Hallstatt period hairstyles and veils for free (in German) here.
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Violinist Kerenza Peacock writes: “I befriended some young violinists in Ukraine via Instagram and discovered some were in basement shelters but had their violins. So I asked colleagues across the world to accompany them in harmony. And I got sent videos from 94 violinists in 29 countries in 48 hours!! An astonishing collaboration forming an international violin choir of support for Ukraine. Illia Bondarenko had to film this between explosions, because he could not hear himself play.
We play an old Ukrainian folk song called Verbovaya Doschechka. Nine other young violinists sheltering in Ukraine join in unison, and are accompanied in harmony by players from London Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony, Oslo Philharmonic, the Hollywood Studios, and top violinists from all over the world including Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Belgium, Georgia, Poland, South Korea, South Africa, Moldova, Denmark, India, and the entire violin section of the Munich Chamber Orchestra!”
Learn more about the collaboration here, and donate to support Ukrainians in distress here.
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