Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

Fleeting Wonders: A Vlogging Gorilla

0
0

article-image

The Ugandan mountain gorilla, imploring you to go easy in the comments section. (Image: YouTube video screenshot)

Somewhere in the mountain forests of Uganda is a three-year-old ape with a flair for online multimedia production.

As Fox 6 reports, a filmmaking duo from Amsterdam was shooting video of wildlife in Uganda earlier this year in order to create a virtual reality safari experience when they encountered an inquisitive young gorilla. Said gorilla took charge of the pair's camera for a few minutes, examining it carefully, poking at its various knobs, dials, and buttons, and even licking the lens.

Fortunately for the YouTube-viewing world, the camera was on the whole time, and the filmmakers have uploaded the footage. Below is the three-minute video, in which the gorilla is endearingly curious—and refreshingly unconcerned about upping his subscriber count. (Though the intense concentration and muffled scratching could qualify as ASMR, one of YouTubes hottest trends.)

Not since Snapshot Serengeti has there been such an intimate, so-close-you're-up-their-nose look at wildlife. Inspired by the gorilla-cam footage they inadvertently ended up with, the Amsterdam duo has named their virtual reality company "VR Gorilla."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.


Why Does the Australian Flag Still Have a Union Jack?

0
0

article-image

Canada's flag, pre maple leaf. (Photo: Josh Graciano/Creative Commons)

When the British Empire established dominion over half the world, the Union Jack became a ubiquitous presence. Whether flown as a national symbol or slapped on the upper left corner of a colony’s flag, the Union Jack was a clear indicator of the extent of Britain’s influence, politically and culturally.

Over the centuries, as the Empire crumbled and colonies gained their independence, these fresh new nations jettisoned the Union Jack from their flags as part of asserting their individual identities. In some cases, this happened swiftly—the United States ditched the Union Jack from its flag within a year of signing the Declaration of Independence. Or it can take almost a century, as happened with Canada, which gained independence in 1867 but didn’t switch the Union Jack for a maple leaf until 1965.

article-image

Canada's flag from 1957 to 1965. (Image: Public domain/Wikipedia)

The flags of British Overseas Territories like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands still carry the Union Jack in their corner. But the vast majority of former British colonies have either removed it from their flag or, in the case of New Zealand and Fiji, are currently in the process of doing so. Fiji aims to hoist a new flag design in October, timed to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain. In March 2016, New Zealanders will vote in a referendum in which they will choose to either adopt a new flag—culled from a long list of submitted designs—or keep the current one.

Both New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama regard their countries’ current flags as outdated colonial symbols that do not reflect their national identities. If New Zealand and Fiji adopt new designs, that will leave just three independent countries whose flags still sport Union Jacks. One is the island nation of Tuvalu, which has a population of about 10,000 and is best known for its .tv internet domain. Another is the tiny South Pacific island of Niue—technically self-governing, but in free association with New Zealand, which handles most of its diplomatic relations. The last is Australia.

The Australian flag, as commentators like John Oliver have gleefully noted, looks almost identical to the colonial relic that is the New Zealand flag. Both designs are based on what vexillologists—those who study the science and symbology of flags—call the “defaced blue ensign”: a Union Jack on a blue background with a few extras on top. The Australian and New Zealand flags are “defaced” with the stars of the Southern Cross, a constellation visible from their positions in the southern hemisphere. (“Defaced” in this context does not connote vandalism, though it certainly does in the eyes of those who advocate a redesign.)

article-image

The current New Zealand flag. (Image: Public domain/Wikipedia)

article-image

The current Australian flag. (Vector image: Ian Fieggan/Wikipedia)

Each nation's flag is often mistaken for the other—earlier this month, for instance, it became apparent that the official jersey of the Wallabies, Australia’s national rugby team, had been inadvertently embroidered with New Zealand’s flag. Similar mix-ups occur regularly in international political gatherings—in November, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key spoke on radio of the indignity of being seated beneath the Australian flag at high-level meetings helmed by oblivious organizers.

The Australia-New Zealand relationship is characterized by mostly good-natured rivalry and antagonism, but each country is clear about one thing: the need to be known as separate entities, not lumped together into some amorphous bottom-of-the-world archipelago. (That said, the countries’ interchangeability in the eyes of the world can also be used as an advantage. Australians, for instance, regard Russell Crowe—born in New Zealand; raised in Australia—as a true-blue Aussie whenever he wins an Oscar, but as soon as he makes headlines for assaulting a hotel clerk with a phone, he is suddenly referred to as “that actor guy from New Zealand.”)

In Australia, which became an independent nation in 1901, changing the flag is not an issue of importance—for the government or most of the populace. But there are pockets of passionate campaigners loudly vocalizing their desire to ditch the Union Jack. One long-time activist is Harold Scruby, who in 1981 established Ausflag, an apolitical, non-profit organization that aims to secure popular support for a new national flag.

article-image

An Ausflag campaign launched prior to the 2000 Sydney Olympics shows some of the flags that resemble Australia's. (Photo: Ausflag)

“I think it’s about as absurd to have a Union Jack on our flag as it would be for Microsoft to shove an Apple logo on the top left-hand corner of theirs,” says Scruby. In his opinion, instead of making a statement to the world about what Australia stands for, “all we’re doing is promoting their identity, their image.”

Queen Elizabeth II remains Australia’s official head of state, but is regarded as a mere figurehead and performs no governmental duties. This arrangement isn’t unique to Australia, however—it’s also the case for other Commonwealth monarchies like Canada. And Canada ditched its red British ensign decades ago to put forth the maple leaf.

“Canada is passionately in love with its flag and yet passionately remains a monarchy,” says Scruby. So Australia’s reluctance to let go of the Union Jack is not related to its status as a Will-and-Kate-loving monarchy. Why, then, is the flag revamp conversation not happening?

article-image

One of Ausflag's proposed designs for a new Australian flag, featuring the Southern Cross beside green and gold, the country's official sporting colors. (Image: Ausflag)

Part of the explanation, according to Scruby, is found in Australia’s fractured national identity. Though there is a sense of patriotism in the country—go to any cricket match between Australia and England and you’ll find it—there is also the residual insecurity that comes with being the geographically isolated former colony of a mighty empire.

Eager to show off on the world stage, but too sparsely populated and far away to be an ever-present part of the global conversation, Australia has long been reckoning with a self-image that is alternately boastful and insecure. Physically colonized by Britain and pop-culturally colonized by the United States, the land Down Under doesn’t quite have a cohesive national identity of its own. What flag could sum that up?

Another consideration for Australia is the need to recognize the country’s indigenous population in its official imagery; this has also been a factor in the Fijian and New Zealand flag debates. When the British settled Australia in the 1780s, they declared the nation terra nullius: “nobody’s land.” In doing so, they negated the history and sovereignty of the indigenous population that had been living there for tens of thousands of years.

Centuries later, indigenous Australians, says Scruby, “don’t have a microdot of representation on our flag.” The Australian aboriginal flag, designed in 1971 for the land rights movement, became one of the official "Flags of Australia" in 1995. It is flown alongside the national flag at many buildings in the country. 

article-image

The Australian Aboriginal flag beside the country's national flag. (Photo: NH53/Creative Commons)

With  Ausflag, Scruby's dream is "to have a flag which screams out to the world, ‘Australia!’" he says. "Not ‘Colony of Britain.’"

One of the best assessments he has heard of the current flag, he says, came from Jerry Seinfeld. Visiting the country a few years back, the comedian cracked: “I love the Australian flag: Britain at night!”


 

FOUND: A GoPro That Went to the Edge of Space And Got Lost for Two Years

0
0

article-image

What the GoPro saw (Photo: chanmnb/Imgur)

In June 2013, after months of planning, five friends launched a GoPro to the edge of space. They attached the camera to a weather balloon, along with a phone that logged the contraption's location and was programmed to send back a message once it returned to cell phone range. 

They sent the phone off from a spot about 20 miles from the Grand Canyon. It went up, up, up…and then disappeared. They never heard back from the phone about its location and figured they'd miscalculated at some point

But two years later, the phone and the camera reappeared. This is what the camera had seen:

It turned out that the team had calculated its trajectory more or less accurately. The problem was that the area where it landed, which had looked, on the cell coverage map, like it would have been fine, did not in fact have good coverage. So the phone never knew it was back on Earth.

But recently a hiker—who happened to work for AT&T—came across it. She took it to an AT&T store, where they traced the phone to its owner using the SIM card. And, two years after the launch, the five friends finally got to see the results of their handiwork. 

Bonus finds: 10,000-year-old stone toolsa pig with blue fat.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Kim Davis, William Franklin, And Others Who Picked The Wrong Revolution

0
0

article-image

Men gather outside the National Anti-Suffrage Association headquarters in 1911. (Image: Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress Public Domain)

This morning—having spent the past week hopping between a jail cell, newspaper headlines, and the right-hand sides of various Republican presidential hopefuls—Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who was arrested last week for refusing to sign and process marriage licenses for same-sex couples, has returned to work.

An elected official, Davis cannot be fired, so instead spent five days in jail as a consequence of defying orders. Though Davis's supporters have compared her to various civil rights heroes, better parallels might be drawn to those who doggedly threw in their lot with an outdated side. As the country, and Davis' constituents, wait to see whether she will do her job today, let us look back at some of those for whom an earlier America changed too fast. 

Benjamin Franklin's Loyalist Son

article-image

Benjamin and William fly the famous lightning kite. (Image: Le Roy C. Cooley/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Benjamin Franklin is widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of this country. It's less well-known that he was an actual father, to William Franklin. Born out of wedlock but raised by the Franklins, William built himself an impressive military and legal career of his own, taking the occasional break to fly kites with his dad, or to write "scathing pamphlets against [Benjamin's] political foes," under the pseudonym Humphrey Scourge.

By his early 30s, William's hard work and connections had landed him the governorship of the colony of New Jersey. Soon after, his career was interrupted by a little thing called the Revolutionary War. William had studied law abroad in London, and was a staunch Britain-loving Loyalist. A talented governor, he nonetheless earned the ire of many of his constituents by enforcing the dreaded Stamp Act, informing on local patriots and "working tirelessly against the cause for independence." 

article-image

William Franklin, circa 1790. (Image: Mather Brown/WikiCommons Public Domain)

All of this was eventually too much for his father, who cut ties with William in 1775. A year later, William was arrested by the newly independent Provincial Congress of New Jersey, whose legitimacy he refused to recognize. He spent the next few years in and out of prison, organizing Loyalist groups and rebellions and, possibly, revenge killings. In 1782, he was exiled to Britain, where he continued to agitate for the Loyalist cause until the Treaty of Paris ended things the next year. 

Officially caught on the wrong side of history, William tried to reconcile with his father, who agreed to do his best to let bygones be bygones. But in his last will and testament, Benjamin gave his only son very little, writing that "the part he acted against me in the late war... will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of." William died in England in 1813. His grave is lost

Pro-Slavery Union Soldiers 

article-image

Union General Oliver Otis Howard was particularly tough on officers who tried to resign in protest of emancipation. (Image: Library of Congress/Public Domain)

Throughout the Civil War, the majority of the Union Army was made up of volunteers—people who were willing to donate their time, effort and lives to the various causes that inspired the conflict. But in the days after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, a number of soldiers began second-guessing their dedication.

"Some Union officers were so distraught by the changing war policies that they resigned their commissions shortly after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation," writes Jonathan W. White in Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln. Men who were enlisted also deserted.

"Many of the officers who resigned," White writes, "were arrested, court-martialed, and punished." F.G. Stidger, a record-keeper during the war, writes of a series of resignation notices from a particular Kentucky regiment that came through his office after the Proclamation. After the requests repeatedly failed to be approved, "the matter was dropped by all the Officers except Major [Henry F.] Kalfus," who sent his along a third time, explaining that "since the consummation of the Proclamation of President Lincoln for the freeing of the slaves of the South he declined to further participate." This request was returned with an order for Kalfus's arrest, and he was paraded before the rest of his regiment, dishonorably discharged, and marched out of camp at bayonet-point. 

The Anti-Suffragist Who Changed His Mind

article-image

Don't you know you're driving your mommas and poppas insane? (Image: Levy Sheet Music Collection/Public Domain)

The women's suffrage movement built slowly. The 19th amendment that granted the right to vote was a hard-won victory, ratified by Congress 42 years after its original introduction. It made its way through the state legislatures until finally, in August 1920, it reached Tennessee, where it needed the support of 50 out of 99 representatives in order to be appended to the Constitution. Suffragettes and anti-suffragettes, swarmed Nashville, handing out different-colored roses that symbolized their positions—yellow for suffrage supporters, and red for those opposed. Citizens and representatives wore the roses to make their stances clear.

On August 18th, the day of the vote, the reds in the voting room outnumbered the yellows, and suffragettes feared the cause was lost. One of these roses was pinned to the lapel of Harry T. Burn, a 24-year-old representative from rural McMinn County. Burn had planned to vote "no" until he received a letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn. After six pages of regular chit-chat, Mrs. Burns wrote to her son, "Hurrah, and vote for suffrage!... Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. [Carrie Chapman] Catt put the 'rat' in ratification."

Burns brought the letter with him to the session. When voting time came, he went against his rose color and voted for suffrage. Legend holds that he then had to hide in the attic from an overexcited mob. He explained to the assembly: "I believe in a moral and legal right to ratify," but also "I know that a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow." In this case, his mother saved him from being the one man whose "no" vote kept half the population from voting at all. 

article-image

George Wallace attempts to block integration at the University of Alabama on June 11th, 1963. (Image: Warren K. Leffler/WikiCommons Public Domain)

There are many more examples of Americans who failed to swap their roses, and stuck to guns doomed to backfire—George Wallace, the governor who tried to bodily prevent black University of Alabama students from entering a school building, comes to mind, as does Keith Bardwell, the Justice of the Peace who resigned in 2009 after refusing to grant marriage licenses to interracial couples. All were considered brave by those who agreed with them, and backwards-facing by those who did not. 

But perhaps the best place to look is the first great work on this tactic: Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, in which Thoreau speaks to the local tax-gatherer, who he considers to be an agent of injustice. "If you really wish to do anything," he says, "resign your office." 

Fleeting Wonders: A Meeting of the Secret International Tortoise Assembly?

0
0

article-image

A member of the Pattenburg Volunteer Fire Company posing with Sulley, finally found a mile from home. (Photo: the Pattenburg Volunteer Fire Company)

It was a busy weekend in the tortoise world, with not one, but two elderly tortoises absconding from home and leaving their owners in distress. Sulley, a tortoise from northern New Jersey, and Tortoise, a Californian creature (and possibly Sulley's partner-in-crime), both escaped their homes for no identifiable reason.

The suspicious timing of these two tortoises’ attempted getaways implies possible plans to attend a Secret Tortoise Creep (creep is the actual scientific term for a group or gathering of tortoises).

Tortoises are underrated escape artists. Though they can't swim, they can hold their breath for a very long time, as they have to empty their lungs before retreating into their shells. They're also a lot faster and stealthier than they may appear, can forage for plant sustenance almost anywhere, and have the benefit of carrying their homes on their backs. 

article-imageA member of the Pattenburg Volunteer Fire Company and their search-and-rescue dog head out in search of Sulley, while a local cameraman captures the action. (Photo: the Pattenburg Volunteer Fire Company)

Sulley, a 100-pound tortoise from Union Township, New Jersey, went missing over Labor Day weekend. The Pattenburg Volunteer Fire Company enlisted their search-and-rescue dog Timmy, a German Shepherd, to hunt down the wily reptile in nearby woods. The search was set to continue into the next day, when on Friday morning, a motorcyclist spotted the miscreant a mile from home.

Upon the return of Sulley, his owner, Laura Roerig, began crying in relief, while her friend Phil explained to nj.com that the tortoise walks as fast as a human, probably covering six inches with each step—a veritable speedster. Roerig later joked that Sulley is currently in time-out. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, California’s San Jacinto Valley Animal Campus reported a 200-pound tortoise found lurking on the streets in Hemet. It turned out this was not just any old tortoise (though he is quite old–over 100 years old), but Tortoise the tortoise, belonging to Vince Tarantino.

Before he was able to reclaim his pet, Tarantino had to provide proof of ownership–a few other locals were claiming Tortoise was theirs, including a woman who lost a tortoise named Carlos more than two years ago.

Tortoise made a beeline to his burrow after arriving back home, with Tarantino reporting that the animal was very tired after his “vacation.”

article-image

Sneaky Sulley, found at last. He wont be making it to the Secret Creep. (The Pattenburg Volunteer Fire Company)

This past weekend is confirmation that losing one’s tortoise is a source of widespread concern. Luckily, there are resources out there to address the issue. The Tortoise Protection Group works to reunite missing tortoises with their owners, alongside the Tortoise Trust and Tortoise Group

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

What Miracles Have You Seen?

0
0
We know some weird things have happened to you, dear reader. Please tell us some stories! Description below. 

In 500 Years, the Sierras' Stores of Snow Have Never Been This Low

0
0

article-image

The Sierra Nevadas (Photo: François B. Lanoë/Nature Climate Change)

As if there needed to be one more sign that man-made climate change is making the world a very different place to live, a new study has found that the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas is the lowest it's been in the past 500 years.

By using data from weather stations, tree rings, and temperature reconstructions, a group of scientists were able to reconstruct snowpack conditions on April 1 of every year going back to the early 1500s. And this year's low, they write in Nature Climate Change is "unprecedented" in the last five centuries.

For context, five hundred years ago, Europeans didn't really know California existed. Spanish explorers didn't even see the San Francisco Bay until 1769, less than 250 years ago. California didn't become an American territory until the 1850s.

California depends on this snowpack for water during its dry summers. (Snowpack is made not just of one season's snow, but of the accumulation of snow that gathers on a mountain, melts partially over the spring and summer, and grows again over the winter.) But it's harder to reconstruct its historical levels than those of precipitation or drought. Studies like this one often depend on tree rings to reveal how weather played out in the years before people starting keeping track. But since trees grow in the summer and snow falls in the winter, the connection between the two variables can be a little shaky.

Most weather stations didn't start tracking snowpack data until later in the 20th century, either. But in California, weather stations starting measuring snowpack early on, in the 1930s, around the same time the federal government decided to provide irrigation to the state's Central Valley, now the heart of its agriculture industry.

"That alone is an indication of how important this snowpack is to California," says Valerie Trouet, an associate professor at University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and an author of the study.

To create a record going further back, Trouet and her colleagues looked at the rings of blue oak trees. "They're some of the most climate-influenced trees I know of," she says. "In years of very wet winters, they'll grow a lot, resulting in very wide tree rings. In dry winter, they'll grow very little, resulting in thin tree rings."

article-image

A blue oak (Photo: K.J. Anchukaitis/Nature Climate Change)

These trees were also conveniently located. They don't live in the mountains, but in California's Central Valley, right in the path of the storms that drop snow on the Sierra Nevadas. The storms come down from the North Pacific, over the valley and into the mountains, and the same storms that soak the trees and speed their growth drop heavy loads of snow further west.

Precipitation isn't the only factor that governs snowpack, though. Temperature matters too. In 2015, the precipitation in the mountains was very low—California is in the middle of a historic drought—but within the realm of natural variability, Trouet says. The scientists' reconstruction accounted for both variables, and it's the two factors together, low precipitation and record-high temperatures, that make this year's snowpack so exceptionally low.

The role of temperature also means that there will likely be more years of such low snowpack coming, too. "We haven't modeled the future in this study," says Trouet. "But we know that temperature are on the rise because of anthropogenic climate change. If the temperatures are going to keep rising, the chances of co-occurrence will rise going forward, too. And the 2015 snowpack low will likely occur more frequently in the future."

article-image

What it looks like from space when snowpack is low (Image: NASA/MODIS)

The Duke, the Landscape Architect and the World's Most Ambitious Attempt to Bring the Cosmos to Earth

0
0

article-image

 

Last fall, a hand-picked group of the world's top theoretical physicists received an invitation to a conference about the multiverse, a subject to which many of them had devoted the majority of their careers. Invitations like these were nothing unusual in their line of work. What was unusual was this conference was not being hosted by a university or research institute, but rather by a Scottish Duke.

And its organizer was not a physicist, but a landscape architect by the name of Charles Jencks.

The physicists were surprised to learn that Jencks had spent the past three years bringing their cosmological theories to life in the form of a massive land installation carved into the hills and pastures of the Nith Valley in southwest Scotland. It was titled "Crawick Multiverse" after the village where it was built, and its features, according to the brochure accompanying the invitation, included a Supercluster of Galaxies, twin Milky Way and Andromeda spiral mounds, the Sun Amphitheater (which seats 5,000), a Comet Walk, Black Holes ("in two different phases"), an Omphalos (a boulder-limned grotto symbolizing Earth's "mythic navel") and of course, the multiverse itself. And now Jencks, together with the project's patron, Duke Richard Buccleuch, was asking the physicists to converge on Drumlangrig Castle, to spend the summer solstice weekend discussing the mysteries of the cosmos among Rembrandts and Dutch Masters, and to wander the first earthly representation of the multiverse with a handy, one-page map in their hands.

My father, the cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, was among the physicists who received this invitation. One could say I'd grown up with the multiverse; my father's first paper on the subject was published in 1983. He has given lectures around the world, appeared on the covers of magazines, published books and held forth on television about the tumultuous, explosive, eternally expanding state of the cosmos. Multiverse theories suggest a sci-fi scenario: outer space is one giant Etcetera, and ours is but one lonely universe in an endless chorus of universes. In its staggering intricacies and metaphysical implications, it is an idea that seems to test the very limits of human perception. And not all physicists agree it is even true. The notion of fashioning a simulacrum of something so mind-blowingly abstract using nothing more than dirt, rocks and water, sounded, well, frankly insane.

Then I clicked open some photographs Jencks had sent my father. Gazing at a surreal landscape of spiraling mounds and stark plateaus exploding with boulders, it felt as though I were falling through multiple levels of a futuristic video game that hadn't yet been invented. It was hard to believe these photos had been taken on planet Earth.

When my father asked whether I wanted to come explore the Multiverse with him, there could only be one answer.


article-imagetop: A view into the world's first multiverse. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks). above: The North-South view from Amphitheatre of the Crawick Multiverse. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

At 76, Jencks is energetic, quick to laugh, and surprisingly stylish. He is tall and thin, and looks all the part of a regal Scotsman, with a scarf tied at the neck, a homburg atop his head, and a carved wooden shillelagh in his right hand. But when he speaks, his American origins (Jencks was born in Baltimore and raised in New England) are betrayed by a flat East Coast accent. Although he does nothing to disguise his old world intellectualism—he is likely to quote Latin or French, or to launch into an explanation of why the anthropic principle is a misnomer, or describe how the epigenetic revolution has doomed neo-Darwinism—his speech is peppered with enabling crutches. "As you know…", a typical sentence might begin, or "you've probably studied…", prods often accompanied by a light touch on the shoulder. Before you can protest that you've been miscast as a scholar (or decide he is probably a blowhard) you find yourself giddily swept along, an unwitting co-conspirator in his latest hypothesis—whether you understand that hypothesis or not. The persistent gentility can also make a cipher of the man behind the theories. "I don't want to go into the thousand and one humiliations because that's not my nature," he demurred when asked about dealing with clients who don't share his scientifically-inspired vision. "I'm happy to struggle. Life is a joyful science." Given all this, it comes as something of a shock to learn that within the world of architectural criticism where he first made his name, Jencks is known as a firebrand—the flamethrower who burned down the house of modernism.

In 1973, after finishing his Ph.D in Architectural History at University College London, Jencks' dissertation, Movements in Modern Architecture, was published by Penguin. The modernists, he argued, "had tortured [themselves] into a corner of both criticism, and inability to face what it was discovering about itself," namely its connection to fascism, both metaphoric — fanatical pursuit of coherence and aesthetic purity—and literal; his research had turned up ingratiating correspondence between Le Corbusier and Mussolini, Walter Gropius and Goebbels, and other modernists jockeying to provide the "new architecture"for the new social order. In subsequent books and articles, Jencks argued that architects should stop trying to purge urban landscapes of manmade disorder one concrete cube at a time, and instead embrace ambiguity, improvisation—the entire chaotic spectrum of emotion that defines the human experience. "It can include ugliness, decay, banality, austerity, without becoming depressing," Jencks wrote in Movements. "It can confront harsh realities of climate, or politics without suppression. It can articulate a bleak metaphysical view of man…without either evasion or bleakness." He would later give this bold new inclusive architecture a name: postmodern. It was a term Jencks probably did more to popularize than any other 20th century critic.

My favorite Jencksian metaphor differentiating the old paradigm from the new is cheese-based:

"If the pure Camembert cheese is modern, then the mixed Cambozola is post-modern and the recent crossbreed Camelbert (like Brie but from camel milk) is very pm."

But not everyone, he soon discovered, was ready for Camelbert. Jencks remembers being escorted out of a Royal Academy Evening to celebrate the Bauhaus to the metronome of "a slow clap"; from architects and critics, and recalls a mysterious incident at Syracuse University where he was "chased off a stage by two dogs." He claims to have received death threats for touting postmodernism. And while it's unlikely that Le Corbusier-loving assassins were shadowing his footsteps, it's true that Jencks had harsh critics. Roger Kimball, the current editor of famed journal The New Criterion, accused him of misrepresenting Modernist master Mies van der Rohe's connections to the Nazi party and dismissed his post-modernist vision as trendy, arguing he was essentially giving architects carte-blanche to indulge in camp. Such criticism, however, did little to slow Jencks'rising star. He went on to write more books—more than 30 in all—becoming, as Mark Wigley, former dean and current professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, put it, "Mr. Postmodernism himself."

article-imageA panorama painting of Crawick. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

Jencks' own career as a landscape architect didn't begin, as one might expect, as a cerebral experiment, a terra-based test of paper-bound theories. The first garden he designed was born of more primeval causes: love and death. In 1990, Maggie Keswick Jencks, Jencks' wife, began work on a garden at Portrack House, their 18th century manor home in Dumfries, Scotland. Keswick was one of the world's leading experts on Chinese gardens (her book on the subject is still considered a classic). She was experimenting with Feng Shui, and the Taoist idea of harnessing the geological energies hidden in soil and stone, drawing out the "bones of the Earth." She asked her husband for help—an idea he discouraged at first. "I won't do it, because I'll take it over if I do," Jencks recalled telling her.

Which is exactly what happened, but for reasons both unexpected and tragic. A year after beginning work together on what would become the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Keswick's breast cancer, thought to be in remission, returned. As Keswick withdrew (her illness would prove fatal in 1995), Jencks threw himself into work on the garden, developing his singular visual vocabulary—crescent pools, lunar cones, sinuous paths and concentric circles—motifs that he continues to riff off to this day.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation now ranks among the most famous private gardens in Britain. Although Maggie's Asian influence remains, over time science has become the garden's driving metaphor, more specifically, Jencks' growing obsession with the origins of the universe. According to Tim Richardson, the first landscape critic to visit the Garden in 1996, it's a passion Jencks has always been eager to pass on to others. "I remember that they were doing jet training exercises," Richardson recalled of his visit. "I was standing on top of the fractal in the middle of the garden, this huge S-shaped landform, and these jets were flying over the top of us. Charles was in this black suit and an electric blue shirt and matching electric blue handkerchief, and he was talking to me nine-to-the-dozen about all of his cosmological theories. And the jets—I couldn't hear him—he yelled at me, ‘Can't you see? We are in a dialog with the universe!' There was very little I could say to that," Richardson laughs. "I felt like I was in the middle of the futurist manifesto or something."

article-imageCharles Jencks at his home in Portrack. (Photo: Alina Simone)

I had a similar feeling myself touring the garden with Jencks some 20 years later. By then the garden had metastasized into a Dali-esque profusion of scientific metaphors, with Banana Universes and Soliton Waves and Quark Walks and Symmetry Breaks and DNA sculptures so densely entwined that after a half an hour of trying to wreath it all in words, Jencks finally gave up and laughed, "Symbolism run amok!"


The mash-up of science and horticulture may seem like just another hyper-modern hybrid —the landscape equivalent of, well, Camelbert —but it is rooted in a centuries-old tradition. Many of the world's ancient earthworks are thought to have been astronomical calendars or tools, from the Nazca lines in Peru, to the concentric stone circles of the Rujm el-Hiri in Israel's Golan Heights. The same holds true for the famous gardens of antiquity, which often incorporated astrolabes and sundials. As Jencks has written, "The idea of the garden as a microcosm of the universe is quite a familiar one…What is a garden if not a celebration of our place in the universe?"

All this might make Jencks sound like a conceptual artist, yet his work has little in common with land artists like Robert Smithson or Andy Goldsworthy, content to let their earthworks decay on an uninhabited spit or anonymous forest floor. To be fully appreciated, Jencks' work demands both an audience and a skilled phalanx of gardeners. Which is why, in the midst of following Jencks through Portrack, dutifully trying to wring maximum symbolic value from every square inch of terra, a small voice inside my head kept chiming, Cant it just be beautiful? To which Jencks would probably respond: No.

This is probably the biggest challenge of being a Jencks fan. The problem isn't that he doesn't understand what he's talking about, but that he understands too much.

"I think he likes to be one step ahead all the time, to be really candid about it," Richardson said. "There's an element where, once you think you understand it, he will always kind of pull it away from you again and tell you another complicating factor."

Remarkably, Jencks' efforts to physically inhabit the cosmos actually began 10 years before he began work on the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, with the construction of his own home, a living shrine to theoretical physics which he calls "The Cosmic House," whose ceilings are covered in murals depicting the birth of the universe. Every room is cosmologically themed down to the "cosmic loo." Looking up from the toilet-seat vantage point, Jencks explains, one even finds "a white hole" (read: ceiling fan) designed to metaphorically suck away, you know, impurities. Like most things that interest Jencks, he has written a book on the subject (Symbolic Architecture, published by Rizzoli in 1985). In it, he explains that creating the Cosmic House was his way of dealing with "what happens to design and architecture when religion declines." Science in general, and the cosmos in particular, Jencks concluded, "was what was left after ‘the long withdrawing roar'of religion."

This conviction has served as the chief animating force behind the landscapes he has spent the last 20 years designing — his career's spectacular second act. In England, Jencks' gardens became quite influential, even trendy. For a while in the ‘00s, Richardson said, it became fashionable to have a Jencks' spiral mound in one's garden—a mini Andromeda or Milky Way.

article-imageCrawick Multiverse—Omphalos and distant galaxies. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

After the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Jencks created science-themed gardens throughout Europe and Asia, including for work featured in the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Olympic Forest Park in Beijing, and the National Botanic Garden in Dublin. Three years ago he completed The Lady of the North," the largest landform sculpture in the world" at 46 acres, in Northumberlandia. From the air, the landscape resembles a reclining woman, but her anatomy, one notices, is made up of the same swirly-hilled nebulas and gravel-pathed comet trails as those found at Crawick. Although there is no mention of science on the Northumberlandia website, when I asked Jencks whether The Lady was also inspired by theories of cosmology, he quickly replied: "Yes."

Beat. "Women are cosmic."


The original multiverse was born approximated 13.8 billion years ago from an amniotic stew of "repulsive matter" in an event known as the Big Bang. The multiverse at Crawick had a far humbler genesis.

Until three years ago, it was a wasteland.

Back in the mid-80's, Duke Richard Buccleuch leased the 55-acre plot to an open-cast mining operation. Soon afterwards, the coal seam ran out, and the owners, lacking the funds to restore the land, simply abandoned the site as it stood. According to John Syme, the councilmember who represents the local ward of Kirkconnel and Kelloholm, the once-bucolic pastureland looked as though "a bomb had been blown up in it." Decades went by, and the local community grew increasingly unhappy about the eyesore in their midst.

article-imageThe Garden of Cosmic Speculation: The white steps scissoring down from Portrack House represent the cascading universe. (Photo: Alina Simone)

But when Duke Richard first approached the Sanquhar Council about cleaning up the abandoned mine at Crawick, it wasn't to suggest creating a park. Instead, his proposal involved spreading a meter of human waste from a local sewage plant—60,000 tons of treated sludge—cross the whole 55 acre site as a means of regenerating the soil. "To say it wasn't received well," James Dempster, a Dumfries and Galloway councilmember deadpanned, "is really being quite modest."

There were obvious reasons to oppose the idea—the smell, as well as the threat of polluting the nearby Nithsdale River. But locals also suspected that the scheme would earn money for the Duke's estate at the expense of the community. The Scotts no longer reign by hereditary right, but they remain the largest private landholders in all of Scotland. Today Richard, who is the 10th Duke of Buccleuch, serves as the board chair of Buccleuch Ltd., a corporation that serves as "a platform for sustainable economic development"for 220,000 acres of land spread across all of Scotland. A campaign was quickly set up to oppose Scott's proposal for the Crawick site. Dempster was among those who fought the measure.

It was not long before the Duke abandoned the idea.

Then three years ago, Duke Richard brought Jencks, a friend of more than 40 years, to the top of a windblown hill of coal slag overlooking the mine to discuss restoring the site. It was to be a simple clean-up job: clear away the rubble, level the land, and sort out the wearisome logistics of suds-pond decontamination. But what Jencks envisioned as he looked out from this forlorn ridge surpassed both his expectations and Duke Richard's. Rising from the broken valley floor, he saw conical hills, undulating landforms and towering stone totems. The mine's sunken mouth was transformed into an elegant bowl with a jewel-box stage at its heart. Bald earth and blasted boulders were replaced by verdant carpets of pasture grass and serene pools. It was a vision he hoped would serve as an engine of regeneration for a long-impoverished county, and one day, a world-class mecca for art tourism as well.

The original design they presented to the Sanquhar community was austere compared to what Crawick ultimately became, but the suggestion of turning the land into a public attraction was greeted with outsized enthusiasm. "They were literally applauded out of the building," Dempster recalled. It wasn't just the low bar set by the prior, human waste-based proposal: Jencks was already well-known for his garden at Portrack; the Duke had committing a million pounds of his own money; and the project would provide a dozen permanent jobs for local townspeople. Still, I was surprised that the idea of a garden dedicated to cosmology didn't garner any head-scratching.

article-imageAndromeda view. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

Cosmology? Demster blinked when I put the question to him. "It was always to be known as 'Crawick Artland,' aye. Everybody locally signed up to that. Land art. Land form. Land shape. They liked that."

To me, it sounded like Jencks had pulled a classic bait-and-switch, promising something fun and easy and swapping in something theoretical and obtuse. But Dempster waved away that concern. People won't remember it as an "Artland" or a "Multiverse, he said. Locals wanted a place to take nice walks and hold pipe band competitions. "I'm not a scientist," Dempster added, "but I'm happy."


article-imageJencks pointing out one of his iconic spiral mounds, the Andromeda Galaxy, from atop the Northern Ridge. (Photo: Alina Simone)

So how does one go about building a multiverse? In Jencks'case, it required six men, eight JCB diggers and dump trucks, and three summers. As with all of his projects, this one began with surveys and drawings and Plasticine models, but Jencks soon found himself embracing a more impressionistic approach.

"You know Jackson Pollock? Action painting?," Jencks said, "Well, this is action sculpture. You have four diggers and four dumpers and they go out in the site and they move it around. You have to design and work as fast as you can think." Instead of drops of paint, Jencks explained, he used boulders. While the rigorous geometry of Jencks'landforms, and their effortless concert with one another, suggest serious engagement with CAD, or at least professional survey equipment, the opposite is in fact true. 

"I never used any measurements at all," confirmed Alistair Clark, the master gardener who has been working with Jencks for 56 years and who helped build the Multiverse. "You can measure everything out through the level, you know, spot on. But it might not look right. I just found it much easier to trust my eye."

In other words, Jencks created his massive paean to physics by…winging it.

Which in part explains how the project metastasized from an "artland"into a "multiverse." One that Jencks intends to devote the rest of his life to infinitely expanding, embellishing it with ever deeper and richer strata of detail. "It's the first multiverse in the universe," Jencks explained, "and I'd like to make it the one to surpass."


article-imageA map of the Crawick Multiverse. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

The driver who picked me up in Edinburgh to bring me to Crawick was a 34-year-old man named Stuart. His home was in Dumfries, 30 miles away from the Multiverse, but he had lived for some years in the neighboring town of Kirkconnel, which he described as a place where "not much happens."And as we drove beyond the exurbs of Edinburgh, indeed, the landscape underwent a noticeable transformation. Rolling hills, crosshatched by ancient stone fences, stretched unbroken to the horizon. There were few houses and fewer people—only black and white sheep scattered across the green hills like dice on a craps table. As we drew closer, the road narrowed, the sheep dwindled and the peaks surrounding us grew ever more stark and stony. "You know, there's gold in those hills," Stuart said, nodding to the bald escarpment to our right. I thought he was being facetious, quoting the old adage, but it was a statement of fact: 10 days prior, a Canadian tourist had turned up a record-breaking 20 carat nugget at the gold panning course up at the Wanlockhead Museum of Lead Mining.

But unlike Wanlockhead, whose mineral wealth earned it the nickname "God's Treasure House," Crawick Village, and its larger neighboring town of Sanquhar, haven't known a proper boom since the mid-1880s when they were the center of Scottish wool production. After the Industrial Revolution shuttered Crawick's carpet factory, came the discovery of black gold: coal. While long mined throughout the Upper Nithsdale Valley, coal didn't become the backbone of the local economy until well into the 20th century, but even that relative prosperity proved short-lived; many of the coal seams were shallow and soon exhausted, leaving the landscape pocked with "coal bings," eerie pyramids of carbon spoil. By 1971, the Glasgow Herald was calling the Sanquhar district one of Scotland's unemployment "black spots." The open cast mine at Crawick, now home to Jencks' Multiverse, was the last to close.

In attempting to dial back a decline that's been ongoing for more than 150 years, the Duke and Jencks have their challenge cut out for them. The very road to Crawick seems to mock tourism, winding as it does through serpentine valleys where fences do little to discourage curious livestock from staring down cars from the middle of the road. Coming from Glasgow the only route to Crawick narrows at the juncture of a 13th century tollbooth, to accommodate only one car at a time. It's not so much a question of, "if they built it, will they come?"—the Lady of the North in Northumberland attracts 115,000 visitors a year, and during the one day each year when Jencks' Garden of Cosmic Speculation is open to the public in nearby Dumfries, up to 4,000 cars jam the roads—but how, exactly, will they get there. Although the amphitheater Jencks built can accommodate 5,000, the Multiverse parking lot can only fit about 75 cars, which means you can't just show up at Crawick, you need to make an online reservation first. All of this pretty much banishes visions of EDM festivals and mobbed gift shops.

article-imageAndromeda detail. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

But take a flyover view of the Scottish lowlands and a different picture emerges, of a "cosmic route" as Jencks puts it, connecting the Multiverse and Drumlanrig Castle—with its formal gardens and world-class land art—to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, and further away, Little Sparta, perhaps Scotland's most celebrated garden, and Jupiter Artland, home to Jencks 'biology-themed "Cells of Life" landforms. Is it fantastical to think these gardens might form a processional route for art pilgrims? Only two hours drive from Scotland's capital city, Crawick certainly doesn't need as much help as, say Marfa, Texas—the minimalist art mecca located in the drought-plagued Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas. When Donald Judd screwed his first fluorescent light tube into a hangar wall in 1971, few would have anticipated that Marfa (whose population, like Sanquhar's, hovers near 2,000) would one day host a museum of contemporary art, a multifunctional art space, a fake Prada store and ironic dining options such as the Food Shark Museum of Electronic Wonders and Late Night Grilled Cheese Parlour, to become, as NPR put it, a land of "vegan food, straw bale houses, and funky bars filled with artsy kids clinking Shiner Bocks with famous painters and film directors." 

There are many, of course, who think Judd would be turning over in his grave if he could see Marfa now, and Jencks himself is horrified by the notion of Crawick transforming into some kind of "Mickey Mouse, American thing." No doubt the hoped-for renaissance here would take a different form, but the essential point remains: transformation is always possible.


On the morning of the summer solstice, after a breakfast of baked eggs, roasted tomatoes and ham at Drumlanrig Castle, the physicists boarded a blue shuttle bus for the Multiverse. The scientists who accepted Jencks'invitation were a less august group than had been originally been expected (there was some noticeable grumbling amongst the press corps on this point), yet still included enough stars to power a NOVA special. The bus carried them down a long, winding drive painted crimson, past stone cottages that might have been dropped straight from the Brothers Grimm, and beyond an endless row of SUVs queuing up for a different event hosted at Drumlanrig that weekend: Tough Mudder, a 10-mile obstacle course and endurance race promising to turn this "fairytale castle into your worst nightmare."

article-imageBlack Hole painting. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

While each of the scientists came for their own reasons, they shared a common curiosity. How would Crawick's multiverse compare to the one they had spent their lives envisioning? Despite the earthbound constraints, had Jencks managed to capture the grandeur of the cosmos? Did he get it, you know, right?

Earlier that week, the Duke had sent an email warning that the forecast promised wind and lashing rain. Although it was mid-June, the temperature in Sanquhar hovered in the mid-50s. So when the van pulled up at the foot of the Andromeda Galaxy, the physicists disembarked swathed in coats and scarves, hats and boots. A few carried oversized umbrellas. Only the Duke, in a checkered shirt and slouchy corduroys, seemed unbothered by the weather as he passed around walking maps. Though Jencks gave cosmology top billing at Crawick, the Multiverse was actually a mashup of disciplines (physics, astronomy, religion), as well as styles (Neolithic, Romantic, Postmodern) that managed to combine the austerity of a Japanese rock garden with the whimsy of an Alexander Calder mobile; an improbable marriage of Seussian shapes and GPS precision. It was also still a construction site. The muddy plateau abutting the Supercluster bore the telltale tracks of excavators and dump trucks, and the grotto where the Omphalos was housed remained locked, Duke Richard explained, "because it had failed health and safety."

article-imageGalaxies in the Crawick Multiverse. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

The party made its way up a steep dirt road along the naked ridge to the Northpoint Shelter. Two years from now, the sheer slope will teem with nettles, thistle, sticky willy, cow's grass and wildflowers, but today the ground was still mostly bald, the grass patchy. The group ooohed, training their cameras on the twin hills of Andromeda and the Milky Way to their right, rising like pistachio soft serve into a cloud of marshmallow fluff. Then they turned to the left, no less enthralled by the sheep and cows grazing in the adjoining pasture.

The physicists fractured into groups. Some wandered the perimeter of the downward spiraling Void Shelter, punctuated at the bottom by an apostrophe-shaped pool of murky water. Others sandwiched themselves between two flat-sided boulders where one could look straight down at a grande allée of boulders, a quarter-mile path that ran straight through the elegant bowl of the sun amphitheater, cleaving the pool beyond into twin halves. Meanwhile, above their heads, on conical spire called the "Belvedere Finger," Charles Jencks held forth to a film crew from BBC Arts, an enormous furry microphone hovering over his head like some Jurassic moth.

From the North Point, we made our way down the comet walk—journey of perhaps five city blocks slowed by the rough terrain—where I caught up with Lord Martin Rees, an astrophysicist and cosmologist currently serving as the 15th Royal Astronomer.

article-imageThe Multiverse is surrounded by grazing pastures, which makes for a stunning contrast from its highest point. (Photo: Alina Simone)

"It's a speculation which may be true," Rees mused about the multiverse. "I like to think of it as a new Copernican Revolution. We've learned that the Earth's not the center of the solar system. We learned that our solar system is one of zillions of planetary systems in our galaxy. We've learned that our galaxy is one of zillions of galaxies in the visible universe. But we've learned now that possibly, our visible universe, huge though it is, is just a tiny part of physical reality. And there may have been other big bangs leading to other cosmoses perhaps quite different from ours." We took a sharp right, approaching a spot marked "comet explosion" on our maps, which in non-cosmological terms resembled an impressive cluster of boulders.

Rees, who is 86, leaned on his cane and paused, taking it all in. "This wonderful earthworks here is a sort of metaphor for all of this," he smiled. Of course it wasn't a very precise representation, he added, and there were ways in which it could be improved, but as a "happening of instruction"and an artwork that sought to represent the complexity of the cosmos, it was still, Rees stopped, searching for the right words, "great fun."

The Multiverse itself turned out to be about the size of a swimming pool, an upward-spiraling mound lined with red sandstone and mudstone boulders. At its base, I found my father and his friend Bernard Carr, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University.

"I've spent so many years thinking about it but this is the first time I've actually entered it," said Carr, before quickly correcting himself, "Of course, we're all in the multiverse." 

article-imageThe North-South Line. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

We had just begun our ascent when he stopped to peer at a carving on one of the boulders. "It could be the burgeoning complexity of life. I don't know… I mean, it's interesting. It's like a giant fan, isn't it?"

"Symmetry breaking," my father added, leaning in.

"This is rather like in quantum cosmology where you have a superposition. All possible histories of the universe." Staring at the carving, Carr realized he actually has a lecture slide that looked quite similar to it, which led to the conjecture that the carved stones encircling the Multiverse functioned like a Neolithic PowerPoint presentation.

"Makes you wonder what a Neolithic seminar would have been like before PowerPoint," Carr laughed. "Bring your own stone!"

We wound our way up the path, stopping periodically to puzzle over Jencks' cosmological hieroglyphics, until we reached the top, where we crowded around the unfinished altarpiece, a red sandstone boulder with a design still outlined in graphite, mysteriously captioned "Hot Stretch."

 "Hot stretch. Alex, this is you." Carr turned to my father, who stepped forward for a better look. He peered at the stone for a long moment.

"The wave function of the universe?" he offered.

"Ah, that makes sense!"

Carr had spent so much time unpacking the Multiverse that he'd forgotten to take any pictures of it. Now he held up his cell phone and took a step back, only to teeter perilously on the edge of the summit's steep ridge.

"Oh the irony if I were to fall off this thing," Carr laughed. "Slain by the multiverse!"

It was, the physicists agreed, the ultimate doomsday scenario.


article-imageA local pipe band makes its way across a field that still bears the marks of construction prior to the opening ceremony. (Photo: Alina Simone)

The day before the Multiverse was to be officially unveiled—the day that also happened to be Jencks' birthday—Duke Richard hosted a soft opening for members of the community. It was cold and wet, but that didn't deter hundreds of locals from filling the muddy parking lot, crunching up the long, gravel walk, and making the place their own. There were school children and town officials and engineers in fluorescent orange jumpsuits. There were five locals dressed as space aliens carrying giant tinfoil stars and a spacecraft fashioned out of paper mache, whose only purpose was to lend an extra-terrestrial element to what was already a very otherworldly event. Atop the twin spires of the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies the eerie call-and-response of bagpipe players echoed across the valley. I watched four siblings race one another up to the top of the Multiverse's spire as their mother, standing at the base, tried to maneuver a cell phone around the fifth child strapped to her chest. Over by the East Comet Collision Shelter, a local group was practicing Tai Chi, cutting slow motion circles in the air.  

Speeches were made in the Sun Amphitheater. Duke Richard thanked Jencks and his engineers for creating "a landmark whose fame will extend far beyond Scotland." Councilmember John Syme declared the Multiverse had, quite improbably, turned him into an art lover. Charles Jencks called it the happiest day of his life. Then the schoolchildren sang, and a pipe band played, and two girls on raised platforms kicked out an enthusiastic Highland Fling. 

article-imageLocals dressed up as extraterrestrials for the Multiverse's opening ceremony. (Photo: Alina Simone)

Throughout all of these festivities, I noticed there had had been no talk of black holes or galactic superclusters. Jencks has insisted that he didn't want to turn Crawick into a lesson in physics, but that he hoped the experience might serve as a subtle form of cosmological consciousness-raising. To see whether this was true, I decided to talk to some locals. Mary Crichton and her daughter Pamela, the pair seated on the stone benches next to me, had both lived in Sanquhar their entire lives.  

"Oh I think it's gorgeous. Very, very nice." Mary said. "Picturesque." 

"Before it was all a mess,” Pamela seconded.

"Trees and rubble." 

"But does the place remind you of anything…?"I asked. 

"The Stone Age," Pamela laughed.  

Maybe it also made them think of something else, I nudged. Like…cosmology? 

Mary eyed me silently. "I'm just enjoying the moment," she said, which I took as my cue to leave. Seeing me looking disconsolately around, Duke Richard swooped in and ushered me over to Jamie Shankly, a costumed young man sitting atop a horse with an elaborately braided mane. In addition to being a psychology student at the local university, Jamie was Sanquhar's principal cornet, which meant he led the annual Riding of the Marshes, a Scottish tradition that dates back to at least the 1500s, when any man who owned a horse was called upon to inspect the borders of their burgh, ensuring no encroachments had been made.           

article-imageAndromeda view. (Photo: Courtesy Charles Jencks)

Craning my neck upwards, I ask Jamie what he thought of the Multiverse. "They did a good job cleaning it up,"he nodded enthusiastically. "It's certainly pleasing to the eye."           

"It's actually inspired by cosmology. The, uh, theories of abstract physics…"I trailed off, realizing the three days I'd spent in the Multiverse hadn't done much to improve my ability to describe it.            

"Oh?"Jamie's eye widened. From atop 500 years of Scottish history, he gazed out at the elegant forms blooming across the valley, iconic shapes whose simplicity cloaked 14 billion years of evolution, synthesis and synergy.            

"Yeah," he smiled, nodding slowly. "I can kind of see that."

This story was funded with support by Longreads Members. Join, or make a one-time contribution.


Lydia Locke, the Turn of the Century Opera Singer With a Soap Opera Life

0
0

article-image

Lydia Locke, Turn of the Century Scandal Factory (All newspaper clipping images courtesy of Jim Logan and the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery)

Getting married seven times is a little excessive—especially when your marriages are accompanied by lethal gunplay, fake pregnancy, blackmail, and general social mayhem. Such was the life of Lydia Locke, a forgotten opera star of yesteryear whose eccentric antics outshone her talent as a mezzo soprano.

Lydia Locke was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1886. There is little information about her early life, but by her early 20s she was a widely known opera singer, having performed around the world. It was at this point that Locke's life began to become, in the words of Jim Logan, Superintendent of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Locke is buried, “more soap opera than opera.”

Locke's first groom was 43-year-old Reginald W. Talbot, who she married in Reno, Nevada in 1908. It was her first marriage, and Talbot's fourth. One year later, things imploded. Known around town as “Lord Talbot” or “Prince Talbot,” Locke's new husband was said to have led a plenty exciting life as a gambler and a raconteur, and demanded peace and quiet in his home life. But Locke was no wilting lily, and apparently after a long line of arguments, Talbot severely beat her. The very next morning, Locke had a meeting with her lawyer to discuss a divorce. “His Lordship” was also in attendance, and as their discussion got heated, Talbot hit Locke again. So she shot him three times with a pistol hidden in her fur muff.

Talbot died in the office.

Locke was arrested and tried for Talbot’s murder. Logan says the prosecution tried to vilify the singer as a “drug user and prostitute,” but thanks to a solid defense, and corroborating testimony from the couple’s house staff that Talbot was a serial abuser, Locke was acquitted. The Milwaukee Journal even said that the jury considered Talbot to have committed suicide.

Newly liberated, Locke continued to pursue her opera career, travelling to Chicago and Paris. During her work in these cities, she became acquainted with the man who would become her second husband: Orville Harrold, a tenor with the Oscar Hammerstein company. When Locke came into his life, Harrold was still married to the woman he had met back in his pre-opera days, when he was still driving a hearse. But now that he was a globe-trotting talent, Harrold was drawn to the vivacious and exciting Locke, just as she was drawn to him. In 1913, four days after Harrold had finalized his divorce from his hometown girl, he and Locke wed.

article-image

Ruh-roh.

Unfortunately, Locke’s life during her second marriage was no more smooth than during her first. According to Logan, the drama began quickly when Locke fired a shot at Harrold during their Italian honeymoon. The shot missed, but it was the starter pistol signaling years of strife to come. During their marriage, Locke took part in a number of altercations including punching her chauffeur in the face when he couldn't give her 25 cents in change, taking part in a knock down tussle with a maid over rent, and suing a wealthy banker who she claimed hit her with his car, breaking her leg.

After years of marriage and minor court appearances, Harrold had had enough and sued Locke for divorce. Locke immediately countersued, also for divorce. Harrold, ready to wash his hands of his marriage to Locke, conceded the divorce to her. According to a 1925 article in the American Weekly, a San Antonio paper, Harrold said, “I don’t care who gets it, so long as it is gotten.”

During their divorce proceedings, a man named Arthur Marks, who Locke had met on a train, became involved as Locke’s “co-respondent.” Marks was a wealthy former executive of the B.F. Goodrich tire company, and, at the time of Locke’s second divorce, the president of an organ company. Shortly after Locke divorced Harrold, Marks became her third husband around 1918.

Marks and Locke’s marriage would become the longest of the opera singer’s eventful life so far, lasting for six years—officially. The details of their married life are scarce, although it is known that they adopted a son, but after six years of being wed, Marks is said to have begun showing signs of extreme fatigue, and was checked into a sanitarium. Locke immediately began calling the sanitarium to speak to Marks, but his doctor deflected her calls. According to that same 1925 article in the American Weekly, the doctor told Marks, “You’d better pack up. I can’t do anything for you. What you need is a divorce.” Marks seemed to agree.

article-image

Lydia Locke, Arthur Marks, and their officially adopted son. 

Around 1924, Marks granted Locke a divorce in which she was awarded $300,000 and numerous pieces of property. But that wasn't the end of their association. Post-divorce, Locke began harassing Marks with near constant phone calls day and night, until, finally, he offered her an additional $100,000 to not contact him for a year (some reports say the deal was for five years). Locke took the bribe. Sort of.

After a mere six months of silence, Locke came crashing back into Marks’ life—this time, holding a baby that she claimed was his. Marks began preparing to care for the child, at least financially, but, wary of the strange time frame for the baby’s birth, he set private detectives on the case. They discovered that Locke had in fact “borrowed” the infant boy from the Willow Maternity Hospital in Kansas City, under the assumed name Mrs. Ida Johnson.

The baby was returned to the hospital by authorities. Locke was not formally charged with any wrongdoing.

During her time away, in addition to setting up a fake paternity scam, Locke had married her fourth husband: her former personal assistant, Harry Dornblaser. Unsurprisingly, their marriage didn’t last long. Dornblaser bailed on their European honeymoon for reasons that are still unknown, fleeing back to the States and disappearing. As Logan tells it, he was found a few months later in an abandoned cabin near Cleveland, Ohio, dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. No foul play was suspected.

Meanwhile, Locke was just now nearing the end of her agreed upon year of silence with third husband, Marks, which had been jeopardized by the fake baby debacle, but was still on the table (although the amount of her bribe had been lowered from $100,000 to $50,000). Unfortunately, Locke, possibly a bit emotionally unsound after Dornblaser’s abandonment, heard that Marks had found himself a new wife: one of Locke’s former friends. Locke sent the newlyweds a letter, which a 1932 article in the Milwaukee Journal said the courts described as “so obscene as to prohibit the publication of a single line.” The letter made a series of explicit claims about Marks’ new wife and her supposedly sexually deviant behavior. It was all false.

article-image

Yikes.

Locke was indicted by a federal grand jury for sending a “poison pen” letter through the mail, although neither this charge, nor a defamation suit Marks’ new wife filed against Locke, ever saw trial.

Through all of this, Locke maintained her opera career. After the years of strife and shenanigans with Marks, and another blip of a husband, Locke finally married her fifth husband in 1927. This latest man was a former Balkan count named Carlo Marinovic. Locke’s marriage to the “Count” was no more easy than any of her others. After three years of marriage, Locke returned from a Parisian shopping trip to flaunt her new purchases. Marinovic apparently couldn’t take it, and began throwing her new furs out the window before storming out and heading back to the Balkans. The last straw would be when Locke found that he was cheating on her with yet another of her friends. Foregoing the fake babies and lawsuits, Locke simply divorced him in the early 1930s.

According to Logan, Locke’s sixth husband is something of a mystery. In fact, the only reason he is thought to have existed is because the local historical society in Yorktown, New York, where she spent the later years of her life, lists her as having seven husbands. Her seventh marriage certificate also lists the nuptials as her seventh. Huh.

Speaking of, Locke’s seventh and final marriage was to a man named Irwin Rose. Locke’s final husband was a successful businessman and real estate mogul, and after marrying in 1954, the two settled down in Yorktown. Decades previous, in 1916, Locke had purchased 1,000 acres of land there, including a tall promontory from which the New York City skyline could be seen. Known as Locke Ledge, the property included a 26-room mansion where the couple lived, and a bustling inn onsite, which they operated.

Even with a new life of relative domesticity, Locke never dropped her badass persona. Logan says that during her later years, Locke was known to be chauffeured around town wearing nothing but one of her expensive furs. She was also known to appear at town hall meetings in the same bold outfit.

Locke and Rose remained together until Lydia’s death in 1966 of natural causes. Their mansion burned down in 1966, and the Locke Ledge property has since been parceled up for different uses, erasing most any trace of Lydia Locke’s life there. Her tabloid life lives on in archives, old newspapers, and the tour that visits her grave, but other than that her legacy is almost completely forgotten. Celebrity is fleeting; scandal lasts a lot longer.

FOUND: Who Does This Dennis the Menace Statue Belong To?

0
0

article-image

Whose Dennis the Menace is this? (Photo: City of Monterey)

All the way back in 1956, Hank Ketcham, the creator of Dennis the Menace, helped establish a playground in Monterey, California, that riffed on the mischievous personality of his most famous creation. In the 1980s, Ketcham helped add another feature to the park: a 3.5-foot-tall, 200-pound statue of Dennis himself. Dennis, the statue, hung out in the park for many years, until, in 2006, somebody stole him.

This week, though, Dennis turned up. Somehow, he had made it all the way across the country, to a Florida scrap yard (which happened to be owned by a man named Dennis). Monterey rejoiced: the statue would return to its rightful home.

But this might not be an open and shut kidnapping case. It turns out that Monterey's Dennis statue was one of four cast across the country. And another Dennis owner, the Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital, also had their statute stolen.

The hospital has a strong case for this Dennis being its Dennis. Like the scrapyard, the hospital is located in Florida, and it's easier to believe a statue stolen in Florida would be found in Florida. But right now, Dennis is headed toward Monterey. "We are going on the assumption that it's our Dennis," Monterey spokesperson Anne McGrath told KSBW News

Bonus finds: Skeleton under a tree, a secret chain of volcanoes

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Fleeting Wonders: NASA Says Astropoop Turns Into Shooting Stars

0
0

article-image

Image via NASA

Until March 2016, when you wish upon a star, you may actually be wishing on Scott Kelly's feces.

NASA has released a new infographic with handy facts about astronaut Scott Kelly's experience during the ongoing Expedition 43, his year-long International Space Station mission. The image answers some of the most basic facts about how an astronaut’s life functions while they are holed up in a tiny space station for a whole year.

Among tidbits about Kelly's radiation exposure and exercise regimens is the little fact that the astronaut will produce around 180 pounds of feces during his trip. NASA says that the waste will burn up in the atmosphere, and to those of us on the ground, it will look like shooting stars. 

article-image

A toilet on the International Space Station. (Image: NASA/Public Domain)

The need to go to the bathroom in space presents a fascinating conundrum. Due to the lack of gravity, waste doesn’t flee from the body like it does here on Earth. Instead, it needs to be manually removed, or vacuumed away via special toilets. In fact, according to a great article on the subject of astronaut bathroom habits on Space.com, astronauts have to go through special training to make sure they properly sit on the million-dollar space toilets. In modern space travel, urine is recycled for drinking water, but solid waste is eventually jettisoned towards Earth, to burn up in the atmosphere.

By the end of Expedition 43, Kelly and his space buddy, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, will become the first men to spend a full year hanging out in the weightless void of space. Thanks to hundreds of tests being performed by and on the astronauts, we will get to see just what extended space travel does to the human body. But before that, down on Earth, a lucky few may get a glimpse of one of Kelly's very special comets streaking across the sky.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

See Avant-Garde Soviet Bus Shelters Before They Disappear

0
0

article-imageDisputed region of Abkhazia Pitsunda. (All photos: Christopher Herwig

When photographer Christopher Herwig challenged himself to shoot at least one “interesting” image per hour hour during a cycling trip from London to St Petersburg in 2002, he didn’t envision it leading to a 12-year project. But that’s exactly what happened. After realizing that many of the bus stops he had been photographing were uniquely designed, his photographic experiment turned into a marathon project.    

Herwig's ambitious bus stop series spanned 13 former Soviet states: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Estonia, and the disputed region of Abkhazia. Along the route he encountered bus stops that, although created under the same all-encompassing system of government, varied wildly in their style and aesthetic.

These distinctive shelters are brought together for the first time in Herwig’s new book, Soviet Bus Stops. We chatted with him about his trip across the former USSR, and finding beauty in unexpected places. 

Were you ever concerned about safety or access?

It was pretty safe for the most part, and everyone was helpful and nice. Many of the places I had to pretend to travel as a tourist to get the visa–I was often worried that this would get me into trouble. I did have an unfortunate incident in the area of Abkhazia where the taxi driver accused me of being a Georgian spy and demanded large sums of cash not to turn me over to the militia. He indicated I would face the firing squad. He got rather angry but in the end I managed to get back across the border after only losing a couple of hundred dollars to him. I hid my memory card in my underwear just in case I lost my camera.

article-imageKarakol, Kyrgyzstan.  

How did you go about planning this project, and traveling across such large distances?  

The first half of the project I just came across them while traveling, but later I tried to do homework beforehand, by searching online and asking around. I even came across competitor bus stop hunters who guarded their locations dearly and wouldn't share any details. When possible, I scanned over thousands of kilometers of road in the Baltic countries on Google Earth beforehand. Otherwise I would go to bus stations and taxi stands and ask around locally. In Belarus I had the privilege of meeting up with one of the major architects, and he helped direct me.

article-imageKootsi, Estonia. 

article-image

Disputed region of Abkhazia Pitsunda.

Was there one country that you felt had the most interesting bus stops?

Some of my favorites are designed by Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, in what is now the disputed region of Abkhazia. He describes the projects as having no restrictions in term of funding and design and it shows. Asked why some have no roof or little function as a bus stop, he just says he is an artist and all that is important is that it looks good and brings pleasure. The bus stops date to the late '60s and '70s. They are crazy Gaudi inspired creations and look like waves, alien space ships, octopuses and whales.  

article-imageMachuhi, Ukraine. 

Do you know whether any of these are going to be replaced?

It varies from region to region. Most bus stops are in pretty rough shape and are disappearing or long gone. Lithuania and Estonia are pretty good and maintaining them, but sometimes change the design to much and they lose their charm. In Armenia many of the bus stops survive but only because they were made to with heavy concrete.  Many specific bus stops I was looking for in Belarus were sadly already torn down and replaced with standard designs, while in places like Kazakhstan and Ukraine one could see that locals were repainting and maintaining the bus stops.

article-imageFalesti, Moldova. 

article-imageKaunas, Lithuania. 

What prompted you to start shooting Soviet bus stops?

I was riding my bike from London to St Petersburg in 2002, and had made a challenge for myself that I had to take an interesting photograph at least one every hour while I was on my bike. I did this so I would force myself to photograph things I normally may have overlooked as not exotic or exciting enough. I had photographed some bus stops through Western Europe but it wasn’t till I entered Lithuania that I really started to get amazed by the variety and creativity of the shelters. The photos from the trip were shown at Galleri Kontrast in Stockholm the following year, with one wall dedicated to bus stops. 

article-imageRokiskis, Lithuania. 

article-imageShymkent, Kazakhstan. 

The aesthetics of these bus stops are incredible, especially considering bus stops are generally regarded as so mundane. What do they say about Soviet-era design?

For me it’s intriguing to think this was going on during the Soviet Union, a time commonly known for conformity and restricting individual creative freedom.  These bus stops are less about the Soviet Union as a whole and more about the local regions and individual artists. The bus stops provided an outlet for creative design. For me this has been a unique glimpse into the imagination of many people who were often creatively oppressed. It gives us a chance to look at a place and time in history–not as a state as a whole, but at the people who lived during that time.  

article-imageCharyn, Kazakhstan. 

article-imageAralsk, Kazakhstan. 

Where did you base yourself while you were working on the project? 

We moved to Kazakhstan, where my wife and I lived for three years while I explored the five 'stans of Central Asia. The series continued to grow as I passed by more bus stops, and continued with different trips until April 2015, when I travelled to Belarus. It was the only former Soviet state I had not been to yet. There are 13 countries included in this book plus the disputed region of Abkhazia. 

article-imageNiitsiku, Estonia.

What are your three favorite bus stops, and can you tell us a little bit about each one? 

1) Below is an early favorite of mine and the cover of the book. It was taken the middle of empty fields on the road near Taraz, Kazakhstan. Whenever I see it I think its going to bite me and I remember the two-week-long fantastic road trip exploring the far corners of Kazakhstan. 

article-imageTaraz, Kazakhstan. 

2) Near the town of Saratak in northwest Armenia, this 10 kilometer section of road surrounded by farmland had some of my favorite concrete creations every couple kilometers with no real reason for bus stops in sight. 

article-imageSaratak, Armenia. 

3) Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli created this wave overlooking the Black Sea in the disputed region of Abkhazia. It's located near the town of Gagra on the road towards Sochi. 

article-imageBus stop in Gagra, part of the disputed region of Abkhazia.

article-imageSlabodka, Belarus.

article-imageAstrašycki Haradok, Belarus. 

article-imageSaratak, Armenia. 

article-imageEchmidazin, Armenia. 

article-imageYerevan, Armenia. 

article-imageShkloŭ, Belarus. 

article-imageChristopher Herwig's book Soviet Bus Stops

A Short History of Area 51's Shady Expansion

0
0

article-image

Area 51 keeps growing... (Image: Google Maps)

Area 51, everyone’s favorite military test site turned alien conspiracy theorist hub, is growing—whether its neighbors like it or not.

The Associated Press reports that the huge and ostensibly top-secret base in Nevada plans to take over a 400-acre patch of former mining land that the base has come to encircle following a number of expansions over the decades. The owners of the land have been offered $5.4 million to give it up. But they say that’s not enough.

"Why don't they ask themselves what it cost my family over the years in blood, sweat, tears and money?" landowner Joseph Sheahan said, according to the AP. Sheahan and his relatives have owned the land for almost 130 years.

The Air Force set a September 10 deadline for the acceptance of the $5.4 million offer, but the landowners refused to back down. Now, the matter is being handled in federal court. Sheahan and the others say they will continue to fight to receive what they consider to be a fair amount for their land: around $29 million.

article-image

The U-2 spy plane. Probably not alien in origin. (Photo: Nyenyec/Wikipedia)

This is not the first time that Area 51 has experienced growing pains. When the CIA established the Groom Lake facility back in 1955, the secret testing grounds measured just six miles by 10 miles. Today, the AP story notes, the borders of the base are now almost twice the size of Delaware, incorporating over 4,500 square miles of land.

Originally established to facilitate the creation and testing of the top-secret U-2 spy plane, the base was built on a former Army airfield that had been used in World War II for bombing tests. The base was significantly expanded to 600-some square miles in the 1960s, when a new airstrip and a cluster of fresh buildings were installed.

In 1984, the government, citing national security concerns, seized another 89,000 acres of public land to use as a restricted buffer zone for Area 51. In his book Dreamland, Phil Patton explains how this move gave rise to conspiracy theories:

Once you could walk almost up to the base. But after too many curious citizens, including Greenpeace demonstrators protesting at the adjoining nuclear test site, had disturbed their privacy, the Air Force in 1984 went to the Bureau of Land Management, then to Congress, and had large tracts of public land around the base declared part of the Nellis Air Force Base Bomb and Gunnery Range. But two high points, which allowed a glimpse of the base to intrepid hikers, had remained accessible. By the late eighties, the spot began to draw crowds and television crews. That's when the legend began.

article-image

This sign probably gets moved out a few inches every year. Tricky. (Photo: Tim1337/Wikipedia)

By the early ‘90s, during which the base grabbed up another 4,000 acres of land in the Groom Mountains, the site had become shorthand for shenanigans between extraterrestrials and the U.S. government. Area 51 appeared in shows like The X-Files and attracted a devoted culture of UFO hunters, who turned the nearby town of Rachel into a kitschy hub of alien fandom. With this new attention fueled speculation about what in the hell was really going on in there.

The facilities on the base have continued to improve and expand through the years, observed via satellite images and paranoid investigators. Major new facilities were built around 2007, causing a bit of a stir, but as was reported in a Wired article that year, the development was likely the result of post-9/11 military growth, not a spike in alien research.

It remains to be seen whether the current federal court filing will result in Sheahan and the other landowners’ property being seized at a less-than-ideal price. Regardless, it’s a pretty safe bet that Area 51, and all the mystery surrounding it, will be sticking around for decades yet.

Fleeting Wonders: Emu On The Lam In New Hampshire

0
0

article-image

Some emus in Australia, where they are supposed to live. (Photo: djpmapleferryman/Flickr)

Police in Bow, New Hampshire are tracking down a feathery fugitive.

For several days, the station has fielded reports of an emu wandering around town.

The large bird has explored at least 3 different neighborhoods, and recently approached an officer without fear, Sgt. Art Merrigan told the Associated Press. No emu farms in the area have laid claim to it, so the department has brought in a wildlife rehabilitator to assist in its capture.

 

Here is a video of the elusive emu.

Posted by Bow, NH Police Department on Sunday, September 13, 2015

A video from the police department shows the emu stepping out of the forest leisurely and looking around like he (or she) owns the place.

Over the past few years emus have escaped in MichiganMaryland, Vermont, New Jersey, and Florida. They often spend weeks orienting to their new freedom, commuting on the highways, strolling through town squares, and touring elementary schools. The UK, where the closely related rhea is the giant introduced flightless bird of choice, is often set a-flutter by similar escapes.

An escaped emu named Taco crosses a highway in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2012.

This emu's name and purpose are unclear, but will surely reveal themselves soon. 

Emus can run 30 miles per hour, flapping their claw-tipped vestigial wings for balance. They sleep only 90 minutes at a time, can go weeks without eating and days without drinking, "easily climb over high fences if necessary," and will swim if they must. If you have seen this emu, call the dispatch center at 603-228-0511. Best of luck, New Hampshire. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Perpetually Dying Art Of The Small-Town Obituary

0
0

article-image

(All illustrations by Matt Lubchansky)

After graduating from journalism school, I took a job at a tiny local paper in Northern California. I didn’t know this until I got there, but this paper was one of the few, and one of the last, perhaps, to publish long, reported obituaries for the common man, woman, and, even, child. Writing them became one of my primary tasks. The work was rewarding but difficult—I will never forget doing a two-page spread about the 9-year-old girl who drowned in a creek while having a picnic with her mom, for instance. I read reams of letters, diaries, and yellowed news clippings so old they crumbled in my hands, visited the homes of bereaved families, tracked down old photo albums—all to tell the stories of humans I would never know. I loved it.
 
Even before that job, though, the obituary form captivated me. You might even say it was an obsession; upon entering parties or business meetings, my mind would flash to what the obituary would be like for the person in front of me. (In my defense, the interest was also literary. They are kind of the ultimate in storytelling.) My mom traces these thoughts back to a serious car accident, about ten years ago. “You are very aware that the end could happen at any time,” she says. 
 
But even though my days as an obituary writer were not that long ago, the culture of obituaries has changed greatly in the last few years. For one thing, newspaper numbers are dwindling: from 1990 to 2006, Pew Research Center calculated a 14 percent drop in daily papers in circulation. Social media has transformed how we communicate, as well, creating constantly pruned self-told stories. The obituary as we know it might be over. How will we remember the dead in the future? And what did we do in the past? 
 

 
article-image
 
In 1990 there were 1,611 daily papers in circulation. By 2009 there were 1,387, a decrease that only continues, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 State of the Media. Fewer papers equal fewer obituaries, which mean a shift in who is awarded space for a reported life story. (Mainly famous people, really.)
 
I asked Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University and interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society (yes, a real thing), about the shrinking number of newspapers, and its effect on obituary coverage. First she laughed off her own obituary obsession: “I really am a happy person,” she said. (I could relate.) And then: “Hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.”
 
This shift in death coverage, however, is more importantly due to the rise of the digital age. With Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, we are not only able to consume more media, but are able to create more media, media that narrates our lives the way we want it to be narrated—in effect, we have more control over our own life story now than ever. 
 
And this translates to our death story. Today, instead of objective, reported obituaries or even paid, family-written eulogies printed in newspapers, there are sites like legacy.com—which publishes family- or even self-written obituaries online, complete with a guest book for comments—and myebit.com, which allows you to “create a free custom memorial at the world’s largest memorial site.” In February of this year, Facebook changed its policies, allowing you to designate a friend or family member to execute your Facebook “estate,” managing your account after you’ve died. Also in February, the famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, diagnosed with terminal cancer, wrote what was is, in effect, a living obituary in the New York Times, describing his life, and his death, on his own terms.  “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts,” he wrote. (Sacks died in late August and got an official obituary.)
 
“Obits have changed a lot over the history of the U.S. and now they’re undergoing another sea change with the rise of digital technologies,” said Janice Hume, journalism professor at Grady College and author of the book Obituaries in American Culture. “For those of us who were traditional newspaper people, the idea of some of the content that comes into these digital obits, particularly message boards or guest books, it’s content that we would never have dreamed of putting in. In guest books, people talk to the dead: ‘Go tell my aunt Marjorie I say hello.’”
 
“It's all very soft and loving,” said Dr. Nigel Starck, author of Life After Death: The Art of the Obituary. “But it's untrustworthy and full of lies. It's just untrue. It's rubbish. But people want to express their grief. You cannot trust them as a historical source.”
 
But then, obituaries were never totally objective. 
 

The word “obituary” comes from the Latin “obit,” or death. The word was first used to refer to death notices printed in British papers in the early 18th century, and the tradition followed to America. In the earliest days, American newspapers didn’t have reporters; families would supply death notices. The tone and style changed significantly over the years. 
 
The “news obituary” started in the early 19th century in America, when voracious readers of local news demanded a significant number of local papers. “When we move into eras with more reporters, obituaries become much more standardized,” said Hume—reporters, that is, and the rise of the funeral industry, she added, where families filled out forms at the funeral homes. Standardization, however, didn’t necessarily result in objective obituaries. Nineteenth century obituaries were filled with syrupy language. “Some people died and they listed the real cause of death, but you also got very sentimental language about death; the deceased would be ‘removed by the omnipotent author,’” she said, “And that was written in newspapers!”
 
article-imageTeddy Roosevelt's obituary in 1919 was a very detailed account. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)
 
The industrial revolution changed obituaries again, No longer were the deceased remembered as gallant (men) or gentle (women), but suddenly they were remembered for how much money they had, and how many years they worked. (Even young boys weren’t spared this treatment, said Hume: “Instead of ‘he died,’ it would read ‘his career was cut short.’”)
 
This changed again with the Civil War. Suddenly, death was everywhere. More than 600,000 men were killed. Obituaries were a way of securing their names in historical record. In the years after, the obituaries became very serious, as “death had become far too familiar,” Hume wrote in her book.
 
An odd shift came in the late 19th century and early 20th: poetry. When Guy Swain died in 1917 the Delaware Gazette published verse. “A precious one is gone, / A voice we loved is still, / “A place is vacant in our home / Which never can be filled…”
 
Later, obituaries became almost violent in nature, focusing on the exact cause of death. When Teddy Roosevelt died, in 1919, the first five paragraphs of his obituary in the New York Times explain exactly how he died. “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” When Louisa May Alcott died, in 1888, the first paragraph of her obituary in the Times included these meticulous details: 
 
For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis. She died at the Highlands early this morning. Miss Alcott was born on her father's birthday, and it is singular that she should have followed him so soon to the grave.
 
And we thought Michael Jackson’s death coverage was bad.
 

 
For a while, the obit beat assignment signaled that you were on the lowest rung of the newsroom hierarchy, a stigma that lasted up through WWII. But that began to change, in no small part due to an editor named Alden Whitman, who wrote obituaries in the New York Times from 1965 to 1976. He viewed them as feature writing, as biographies, and was famously profiled in 1966 by Gay Talese in an Esquire story called “Mr. Bad News.” 
 
“For an obituary writer there is nothing worse than to have a world figure die before his obituary is up-to-date,” Talese wrote. “It can be a harrowing experience, Whitman knows, requiring that the writer become an instant historian, assessing in a few hours the dead man’s life with lucidity, accuracy, and objectivity."
 
And, for some papers—especially larger papers like the New York Times, the Economist, the Guardian—this remains true today. Obituaries are objective features, written by journalists.
 
“Obit writers are invisible, writing about people who have ceased to exist. If they’ve written advance obituaries for some publication’s files, and they die before their subjects, the become people who no longer exist writing about people who no longer exist. This is ghostly work,” wrote Marilyn Johnson in her book, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries.
 
article-image
 
Margalit Fox, senior writer at the New York Times, has written more than 1,200 obituaries in her 11 years at the job. And, her job? Her job, she says, is to maintain objectivity. I asked her if families, especially today in the digital age, ever try to influence the story. Sometimes, but certainly not always, she said. “What happens, too, is that you do get a sense of which people are trying to control the narrative, families trying to stage manage a story,” she noted, “And very occasionally you get a sixth sense of families trying to do it.” When that happens, she “gently but firmly” puts the families on notice—no eulogies, none of the “flowery encomiums in small town papers, where everyone was a saint and everyone died surrounded by people they loved.” 
 
Not every grieving widower or granddaughter takes kindly to that line of thought.
 
“I’ve been called a bitch, a bad journalist, every name in the book. But when you calm down and listen to the message again, you realize the family is not actually identifying any issue of fact that you got wrong, it’s simply that what they wanted was a flowery eulogy and what they got was a news story,” she said.
 
Fox often writes of quirky contenders in history, stories of men and women who changed the world, perhaps only in tiny ways, written as a story, a biography, a fully formed narrative. I still think about the obituary she wrote in 2012 of the man who invented the bar code, a mechanical engineer in training, who sat on the beach and ran his fingers in the sand and had an idea. “The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding.”
 
The style of legacy.com is very different. A 71-year-old, gloomy-looking man from Oklahoma who “liked to travel, enjoyed people, friends and family and enjoyed running cattle.” A 95-year-old grandmother from Rhode Island, whose “faith in God, her incredibly wonderful soul, her humor, her generosity and charm, and her ‘recipes’ are unforgettable,” wrote a family member in the guest book. Then there are the Facebook pages of people who have died, both famous and not. David Carr’s last post, an article about Brian Williams, is filled with comments lamenting his death. An acquaintance of mine from high school died, a brain hemorrhage in his sleep, almost six years ago. His Facebook page, now labeled a “remembering” page, is filled with comments from friends and family, telling him, in comments as recent as October 2014, how much they miss him and think of him, still.  
 
“When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Gilbert told me. “Now, if it’s on legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.” 
 
That isn’t always the case though. Earlier this year, a Maine woman’s obituary went viral because of its grittiness. Written by her ex-husband, it aimed to capture the pain of her drug addiction. In doing so, her obituary became more of a political screed than a eulogy or news story.

 

article-image(Photo: Nagib/shutterstock.com

Thankfully, though, obituaries aren’t the only record of someone’s life. 
 
My grandmother is now 96 years old. She lives in a nursing home near me in Boston. Fifteen years ago, she suffered a stroke. It paralyzed the majority of her left side, and left her wheelchair bound, though relatively mentally intact. The last few years, however, she has descended into a curious form of dementia—a sort of rational dementia. She tells stories. Long stories. Stories about her life. And, none of them are true. 
 
In reality, my grandmother grew up in the “borscht belt” of upstate New York, daughter of Polish immigrants who opened a hotel. She didn’t go to college, or ever hold a job, like many women in her generation. She married young, and had three kids – including my father, her youngest. Her marriage to my grandfather was glamorous. He made a lot of money. They lived in a beautiful, large house in the nice part of Middletown, NY, and threw parties people talked about for weeks afterward. But it wasn’t a happy marriage. I grew up hearing rumors of cheating, of fighting, of anger. 
 
The stories my grandmother tells about her life now, eight years after the death of my grandfather, are not disjointed or confusing. There are concrete details, albeit completely fabricated details, which repeat themselves from story to story. Timelines seem clear. Narratives have logical flow. She tells stories about working in the dress department at Macy’s, and starting a charity to send young students to medical school. For a while she talked about her work for the rights of the elderly, traveling all over the country, she said, to give speeches in their honor—including a talk to the members of the Supreme Court. Last year, at Passover, she told me she would be starting at Harvard Law School in the fall. 
 
I find these stories fascinating and sad, like I am listening to my grandmother rewrite her own life in her final years —a lucid dream world where she, perhaps, did what she wanted, not what she felt she should. 
 
When I see her, I think of the obituary a journalist would write of her life. And then I think of the one I would give her myself.

The Victorian Traderess Who Battled Colonialism and Crocodiles in Africa

0
0

article-image

Mary Kingsley, perhaps the most fashion forward early explorer. (Photo: Courtesy of The Victorian Web)

Explorer, trader, and anthropologist Mary Henrietta Kingsley was once saved from a grisly death by her proper and sturdy Victorian skirt. Kingsley, then 31, had been attempting a shortcut through the forest near the West African village of Efoua, when she suddenly found herself at the bottom of a game pit lined with spikes. “It is at these times you realize the blessing of a good thick skirt,” Kingsley states in Travels in West Africa (1897). 

“Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England... and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone and done for. Whereas, save for a good many bruises here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out.”

Mary Kingsley treated such travel mishaps with self-deprecation and nonchalance, whether she had fallen into a spiked pit or through a villager's roof. Kingsley lived from 1862 to 1900, though she was not liberated from her domestic duties until the last seven years of her life. Only two of these years, 1893 to 1895, were dedicated to adventure. Yet, within this short span, Kingsley became the first European to explore parts of Gabon, the first woman to summit Mount Cameroon, and the namesake for three species of fish.

On top of that, she wrote two books, one of which a bestseller that has yet to go out of print, gave lectures drawing crowds in the thousands, criticized colonialism, and condemned missionary work. During her travels, she also found the opportunity to launch a pot at a leopard, smack a crocodile with a paddle, and prod a hippo with her umbrella. 

Mary Kingsley grew up in Highgate, England, an armchair explorer in her father’s library of science and travel literature. Though her brother was sent off to university at Cambridge, Kingsley never attended school. In fact, she did not leave England until the age of 26, and then only for a short trip to Paris. It was not until both her parents passed away, in short succession, that she embraced a new independence and endeavored to complete her father’s unfinished anthropological work.

Her father, George Kingsley, had studied peoples in the Americas, China, and India. But Africa posed a gap that his daughter sought to fill, a place that she–and nearly everyone she spoke to–knew nothing about.

article-image

Equatorial West Africa, described to Kingsley by British doctors as "the deadliest spot on earth." The map is from Kingsley's second book, West African Studies (1897). (Image: Courtesy of The Victorian Web)

After arriving at the port in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, Kingsley integrated herself into the fabric of West African society in an unusual way for a Englishwoman of the day. To begin with, she arrived as an accredited mercantile trader with the firm Hattson and Cookson, carrying with her to Africa the standard cloth, tobacco, and fish-hooks to exchange for ivory and rubber. (The few other European women venturing to West Africa at the time came as the wives of missionaries and administrators.)

Although she certainly took advantage of her position as a white woman during her 15 months on the continent, by using local guides and porters, Kingsley arrived with respect for the native cultures and a desire to understand them. Few of her contemporaries showed either of these qualities, and Kingsley was quick to point that out. She recognized, despite her sheltered upbringing, that the Africans she met were better suited to being friends than enemies. “We belonged to that same section of the human race with whom it is better to drink than to fight,” she wrote.

She noticed, too, that though the regions she visited were governed by fetishism–a practice in which spiritual powers communicate through material objects–rather than Christianity, “there are neither asylums, prisons, nor workhouses; yet the same classes—the sick, criminal, and idle—exist, and under Fetish law none of them starve.”

Kingsley quickly realized that African legal, religious, and social structures were being damaged by her fellow countrymen, who were disrupting traditional practices to implement foreign ones. Though she had a poor impression of traders before arriving in Africa, she found that their relationship with locals was often healthier, she felt, than that of missionaries or administrators.

Over the course of two extended trips to the continent, she traveled through parts of modern-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Gabon, all the while collecting fish and insect samples for a zoologist at the British Museum. She was a self-taught anthropologist, entering the field with translators and notebooks, an intense sense of curiosity, and an open mind. Reflecting upon her first few months on African soil, Kingsley wrote:

“One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me, and found them either worthless or wanting.”

article-image

Sirimba Players in Congo, from Kingsley's West African Studies. (Photo: Courtesy of The Victorian Web)

Kingsley viewed the British colonial governments as extremely ignorant; she did not believe that Africa needed to be reformed according to outsiders’ beliefs. That said, she didn’t argue against colonialism itself, but rather against the way it was handled. Kingsley still considered Europeans the more advanced of the two peoples, but thought they were planting themselves in Africa for all the wrong reasons. 

Raised agnostic, Kingsley upset the Church of England with her unrestrained disparagement of missionaries. She had been skeptical of missionaries even before her travels, noting that missionary literature did not actually describe the country, but instead discussed“how it was getting on towards being what it ought to be.” She saw missionary work in Africa—the killing of a man’s soul to save his life—as an insupportable practice, and in her writing and lectures, she made that very clear. 

Kingsley also made it clear that she was not an “explorer in petticoats” (though technically she was—she never compromised her feminine attire), nor was she a “New Woman.” She argued that women’s suffrage could stay on the back burner while attention turned to still-disenfranchised men. Many see Kingsley’s rejection of feminism as a self-preservation tactic: the label of “feminist” would almost certainly have detracted from and discredited her work in academic circles and geographical societies. 

article-image

Fish species discovered by and named after Kingsley, with Ctenopoma Kingsleyae front and center. (Image: Courtesy of The Victorian Web)

Kingsley died of enteric fever at the age of 37, while volunteering as a nurse during the Boer War in South Africa. She was buried at sea with full military honors. 

Today, Kingsley is largely remembered for her strong views and (among ichthyologists) for the fish bearing her name. At the end of her life, Kingsley claimed pride in two things: her hard-earned ability to paddle a canoe like the natives, and scientists' acceptance of her fish specimens—though most would agree that she has a few other things to be proud of.

“It is merely that I have the power of bringing out in my fellow-creatures, white or black, their virtues, in a way honorable to them and fortunate for me,” she wrote in 1899, a year before she died.


This is part of a series about early female explorers. Previous installments can be found here.

When Treasure Hunting is the Family Business

0
0

article-image

Shipwreck haul. (Photo: Courtesy of Booty Salvage.)

Not everyone wants to go into the family business. The world is littered with the children of tailors or lawyers or insurance agents who want to break free. But what if your father is a treasure hunter?

This is not a hypothetical for Eric Schmitt, who grew up diving for treasure with his dad off the coast of Florida.

“He was in the right place at the right time,” says Schmitt. 

The right place was Florida’s Treasure Coast, a region off the state’s Atlantic shore where a fleet of Spanish ships met their fate during a massive hurricane in 1715. Schmitt’s father, Rick, got his start during the 1960s, when the fleet was first uncovered. During those early days, divers were “bringing up a lot of treasure—tons of it”.

Eleven ships sank, dragging with them caches of gold, silver, jewelry and other artifacts to the ocean floor. Modern-day treasure hunters weren’t the first to get the idea that they should plumb the sunken vessels for riches—pirates once made their way to the crash site in search of goods. Of the eleven ships, six have been uncovered. This past July marked the 300th anniversary of the initial sinking, and it was commemorated with art shows, book signings, a historical symposium and even a Pirate Festival.

article-image

Dale with more treasure. (Photo: Courtesy of Booty Salvage.)

Schmitt found his first treasure at the age of 14.

“I was working as a diver for [my father] during the summer and I found a really unique, ornate silver platter that was made in Mexico in the late 1600s,” he says. “It had very beautiful, ornate designs on it; bumblebees and ropes and all kinds of crazy stuff.”

That platter is now on display in a museum. 

Schmitt and his father started working together formally in 1999, and that version of the business lasted until 2004. By then, the dramatic Florida weather had taken  its toll on the Schmitts. One of the worst hurricanes in years arrived, and their boat was wrecked in the storm. Schmitt went to college and graduated but never escaped the pull of treasure hunting. They reconvened the business in 2011 and have been doing it ever since.

And this isn’t just a father and son operation; Schmitt’s wife, mother and sister are all crew members. While Schmitt is underwater, his wife Lindsay is the “first mate,” keeping detailed GPS coordinates and other records. His younger sister spends her summer breaks from teaching fourth grade diving for treasure. A glance at the company’s Facebook page reveals what looks like an idyllic anti-office: Astonishingly blue water, puffy clouds, and grinning members of the Schmitt clan emerging from the water with everything from coins to shoe soles.

article-image

In front of the family vessel, the Arr Booty. (Photo: Courtesy Salvage Booty.)

The Schmitt’s have embraced the pirate image. Their business is called Booty Salvage and their salvage vessel is Aarr Booty. “Booty Salvage,” declares their company swag. “Leaving no bottom untouched.” The motto is accompanied by a grinning skull, tongue wagging. But that is pretty much where the pirate comparison ends. Treasure hunting is not a lark for anyone with a metal detector; Florida regulates such practices and the Schmitts have permits that allow them to excavate shipwrecks. The Schmitts are required to cooperate with archaeologists and compensate the state with up to 20 percent of their hauls, typically in objects considered historically significant.

For the Schmitts, treasure hunting high season stretches from June to August. May and September are transition months, and the sea is usually too rough the rest of the year. During high season, the Schmitt’s are on the water almost every day, working mostly a 30-mile expanse where the 1715 wrecks reside, and still offer up long sunken treasure. 

“Thirty miles of ocean is pretty big, it can hide a lot of stuff,” says Schmitt. 

Here is what a day might look like for a treasure hunter: Up and out by 6:30 a.m. Consult your records and set a course for the day’s chosen salvage area. Once there, drop three anchors to keep the boat stable. Then lower large aluminum tubes over the propellers. Get into your scuba gear and plunge into the water. (The wreck sites don’t look like something out of Titanic— the actual ships have long since dissolved and the ornate pottery, gold, cannon balls and other water-resistant relics have burrowed under the sand.) Use currents supplied by the boat’s propeller and forced down the aluminum tubes to “dust” the ocean floor. Once you’ve uncovered the bedrock—a grey rocky surface that Schmitt likens to the face of the moon—whip out your metal detector and pass it over the area. Strike gold (if you’re lucky). Repeat over and over and over again until the ocean grows moody and you have to take a break until next season. 

article-image

At sea on the Arr Booty, the treasure hunting boat. (Photo: Courtesy of Salvage Booty)

The Schmitt’s have found remarkable things over the years, such as a delicate gold filigree box and strands of gold necklaces, but treasure hunting is slow and steady work; not every day brings an impressive haul.

But in 2015, the Schmitt’s made a truly historic discovery that earned them international media attention. They unearthed a cache of gold coins worth more than $1 million. Three hundred years ago, Schmitt explains, it was common to melt coins down and reconfigure them to stay current with the changing face of money, eliminating the old currency from circulation. Every coin found is one of the rarest in the world, he says. 

“It’s all day long, you’re out in the sun, you’re rocking on boat, you’re diving all day long with a weighted belt,” he says. “We worked hard and it’s kind of like winning the Super Bowl—you put in the same amount of work every year and it finally happens.”

The Schmitts made their discovery while working under contract of Brisben-Queens Jewels LLC, the company that owns the rights to excavate the shipwrecks. The company’s owner, Brent Brisben, told Reuters shortly after the discovery that after the state took its cut, he would split the remainder of the haul with the Schmitts.

article-image

Eric studying charts and maps of the wreck site. (Photo: Courtesy of Salvage Booty.)

Schmitt says the Super Bowl of treasure finds hasn’t changed the family’s day to day work. He is still out on the water as often as weather permits. Though tiring, his dives are relatively calm. There are sharks, but the Booty Salvage team has never had trouble with one. Schmitt’s main fear is getting stung by jellyfish, a wound that causes a very annoying burning sensation. Recently, he did encounter a manatee—an animal many people love for its seemingly serene composure and teddy bear black eyes.

“Seeing a ten foot object coming at you underwater, it doesn’t matter if it’s friendly or not,” says Schmitt. “It will kind of freak you out.”

There is a small community of treasure hunters scouring the Florida waters along with the Schmitt family. It is a friendly competition; they’re more likely to hang out and talk treasure than argue over a claim like cartoon prospectors.

One occupational risk of being a professional treasure hunter is the extended conversation that follows when you reveal your job. People are pretty much always fascinated, and the question “So what do you do?” can lead to a 15 minute line of inquiry.

So what would Schmitt be doing if he weren’t a treasure hunter? It is the only question that he can’t quickly answer.

“It’s hard to think about that,” he says.

Take a Grand Tour of the World's Great Tattoos

0
0

article-image

A Hindu deity (Photo: Tang Ping/World Atlas of Tattoo)

A Grand Tour of Tattooing, hitting all the highlights, might start in New York and end in Montreal. But in between, it would circle the world.

You'd travel to San Francisco, Japan, Beijing, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, before doubling back through Johannesburg, Jerusalem, India, and Bangkok. You'd have to swing down to New Zealand on your way back across the Pacific, and from there to Buenos Aires, up through Mexico City, and finally to Canada, just a little bit north of where you started.

On that trip, you’d see dozens of traditional local tattoo styles—but probably not in the places you expect. You might meet Jill "Horiyuki" Bonny, who specializes in classic Japanese tattoos, in San Francisco, and Dmitry Babakhin, who focuses on Polynesian blackwork designs, in St. Petersburg. In India, you could visit Obi, who grew up in Kolkata and still works there, if only part-time; he can also be found in Mumbai, Germany, and Norway, and his style mixes "traditional Bengali folk art with dotwork and other contemporary blackwork influences." In New Zealand, Steve Ma Ching, who was born there but lived in Western Samoa until he was a teenager, updates traditional Samoan designs with modern techniques. In Montreal, Safwan, a Cairo-born artist, does work influenced by traditions of both Western and Japanese tattooing.

This is just a taste of the current geography of tattooing, as documented in The World Atlas of Tattoo, a new book by tattoo historian and body art scholar Anna Felicity Friedman. "It is a dense, dense book," she says. The chapter introductions alone "synthesize thousands of years of history across the entire globe."

article-image

A neo-Kalinga chest piece by Elle Festin, based in California (Photo: Elle Festin/World Atlas of Tattoo)

Not so long ago, distinct tattoo traditions were flourishing all over the world. Then, as it did with so many traditions, European colonization eradicated many of them, often with great zeal. In today's world, there are two geographical stories to tell about state of tattooing. One is the revival of indigenous tattoo traditions, in or near the places where they once thrived. The other is the explosion of a contemporary style, in which artists from all over the world influence each other not just through the internet but also by traveling themselves to other studios and to conventions, itinerant students of the art.

Some tattoo styles are still strongly associated with their place of origin. Black and gray tattooing that began in barrios in the U.S. southwest, from California to Texas, still thrives there. The elaborate designs of dragons, flowers, fish, lion-dogs, and demons that became popular in 18th and 19th century Japan are still considered quintessentially Japanese designs, and you can still get San Francisco-style blackwork in San Francisco.

And not all tattoo traditions are easily accessible in every place where tattoos can be had. "Chicago is one of my great examples," says Friedman. "You don't see a lot of people wearing blackwork here, and and there aren't a lot of artists working in that style in Chicago. And there's only one really good artist working in Japanese style." 

article-image

A Marquesan bodysuit, by Taku Oshima, based in Tokyo (Photo: Taku Oshima/World Atlas of Tattoo)

But there are also artists inspired by ideas from halfway around the world, while putting their own region's influences into their work. Popular culture and the internet drove much of this cross-pollination. "There are a few traditions that are specifically tied to place, in terms of origins. But they get dispersed so quickly that it becomes difficult to track," says Friedman. "We get this incredible explosion of practices in all these different genres in most major cities of the world."

Jordanian artist Huzz, for instance, first saw tattoos on the TV show Kung Fu: the Legend Continues. Once he started tattooing, he quickly developed a reputation as the first real tattoo artist in Amman. His designs sometimes feature Arabic script, a practice that grew from local religious and cultural ideas about what sort of marks are appropriate on the body. But, as Friedman writes in the book, his practice reached, in his words, "a different level" after he traveled to his first tattoo convention—in China.

article-image

The murder of Thomas Becket (Photo: Mikael De Poissy/World Atlas of Tattoo)

Even in this hyper-globalized art world, though, there are practitioners whose art is deeply rooted in a particular place. In Darwin, Australia, for instance, Julia Mage’au Gray uses hand-poking and hand-tapping methods to give women traditional tattoos, updated for her modern clients. "I rework their family tattoos on to their bodies," she told Friedman. "The designs are about identifying women, ultimately to show their worth." 

It's counterintuitive, but some artists working to revitalize old traditions are actually working off documents left behind by the explorers, colonialists, and missionaries who helped destroy these traditions to begin with. More benign travelers also helped spread and continue different tattoo traditions. The World Atlas of Tattoo includes stories of medieval and Renaissance pilgrims to the Holy Land who returned with tattoos commemorating their journeys, and 19th-century American tourists who came back from Japan with large full-body tattoos.

article-image

A modern pilgrimage tattoo, a Jerusalem cross (Photo: Razzouk Family/World Atlas of Tattoo)

"We keep recycling these myths and tired tropes about tattooing that are based upon this particular anachronistic view of the history that's just not true," says Friedman. "Tattoos are not just for sailors; Captain Cook did not bring tattooing back to the west." Her next project is a new Center for Tattoo History and Culture that will aim to support tattoo scholarship and better inform the public about the true history of tattooing: that almost everywhere humans have been, they've tried marking their bodies in this way.

"There's no indigenous tattooing in Antarctica," Friedman notes. But, even though the continent's not in the new book, there has been tattooing done there: just last year, the tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle became the first person to tattoo on all seven continents.

article-image

A German diplomat's 18th century pilgrimage tattoos (Photo: akg-images/World Atlas of Tattoo)

 

Why Can’t We Get Rid of the 7-Day Week?

0
0

article-image

The almighty calendar. (Photo: Joe Lanman/Flickr)

In general, units of time can be divided into two categories. One category contains the units that measure something objective and observable, typically the movements of astrological objects. A day, for example, is the length of time it takes our planet to complete one rotation with respect to the sun. The second category is much more fun: totally random, basically meaningless divisions of time that were created out of a combination of superstition, incorrect science, and the need for greater precision in timing.

The seven-day week is in the latter category. There's no good reason for it, and yet, it's constant to almost every single culture.

Jews, who use a lunar calendar made up of either 12 or 13 months beginning with the New Moon, use a seven-day week. The Bengali calendar, which splits the year up into six seasons of two months each, uses a seven-day week. Even the Bahá'í, with their 19-month (and change) year, use a seven-day week.

Seven-day weeks very rarely divide evenly into any month or lunar division. They don’t fit into the overarching sexagesimal system; they don’t divide evenly into any conception of a year. Even our hours, minutes and seconds make more sense than the week. The sexagesimal system, meaning a numeral system with 60 at its base, happens to be fantastically flexible and information-dense

The week's slender hold on linear time accounting hasn't gone unnoticed. Throughout history, into the 20th century, thinkers have tried to oust the seven-day week for various philosophical, mathematical, and political reasons.

And yet, the damn thing persists.

article-image

What is time, really? Photo: Sean MacEntee/Flickr)

We don’t really know where the 7-day week originated, but there are some existing theories about why a period of around that length would make sense. “Only by establishing a weekly cycle of an unvarying, standard length could society guarantee that the continuity of its life would never be interrupted by natural phenomena such as the lunar cycle,” writes Eviatar Zerubavel in his book, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. In other words, this is all the moon’s fault for being so unreliable.

Zerubavel especially links the need for an interval of this length to the rise of market culture: there needed to be an agreed-upon time in which vendors and buyers could meet, and about four times every lunar cycle seemed a pretty good frequency.

article-imageMonths are associated with the meanderings of the moon. (Photo: Dave Young/Flickr)

Alternate-number weeks used to be common. The Egyptians, for example, used 10-day weeks. But our best guess for the creation of the seven-day week is that the idea originated in ancient Babylonia. The Babylonians, living in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), held the number seven as a holy number, that being the number of objects in our Solar System they could observe at the time: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The Babylonians already had months, just like anyone else, and if you want to split up a period of around 29 days into a smaller period, why not divide it basically into four parts, especially when that number is damnably close to your holy number of seven? So the Babylonians used a seven-day week, with the seventh day having certain religious responsibilities (relaxation, cessation of work, worship, that kind of thing). Writes Zerubavel:

The length of the astrological week was largely a result of the fact that the ancient Babylonian astronomers happened to identify seven planets. (Had they been able, with the help of some sophisticated telescopes, to observe Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, the week might have evolved as a ten-day cycle. On the other hand, had they accepted our heliocentric model of the planetary system, where the sun is considered a stationary star rather than a planet, this cycle might have been only six days long.)

Around the 6th century BC, the Babylonians were a dominant culture in the Near East, and their ideas spread far and wide, including the concept of the seven-day week. The Jews happened to be captives in Babylonia around that time, and adopted the week concept. So did the nearby Persians and the (not yet dominant) Greeks. The Jews already agreed with the Babylonians that "7" is a very cool number indeed; creation in the Jewish tradition (and Jewish-derived traditions, like Christianity) took place in seven days. (Though it’s worth noting two things: first, nobody’s totally sure that the Jewish creation myth actually predates the Babylonian captivity, and second, that “days” in that case probably translates better to something like “periods” or “intervals.”) Anyway, the Jews got on board.

The Greeks did, too, and when they began traveling and conquering around the time of Alexander the Great, from 356 to 323 BC, they brought the seven-day week with them as far east as India and, either directly or, more likely, through Indian contacts, to China. The last major society to fall to the tyranny of the seven-day week was the Romans; they had observed a strict 8-day week up until 45 BC, when the Romans adopted the new Julian calendar, which is extremely similar to the Gregorian calendar we use today. The Julian calendar used seven-day weeks, but the Romans observed, weirdly, both seven-day Julian weeks and (to a smaller degree) the older eight-day cycles until Constantine officially banned the eight-day cycle in 321 AD. By that time the eight-day cycle was barely used.

article-imageWhere did the seven-day week even come from? (Photo: Dafne Cholet/Flickr)

Every once in awhile, somebody comes along and tries to change the seven-day week. Some scientists and sci-fi fans like to amuse themselves with metric time, in which the base unit of time (to replace the second, and thus the minute, hour, etc.) is something like a hundred-thousandth of a day. Thus a “metric minute” (which would be called something sci-fi and weird) would be a thousandth of a day, and a “metric hour” (also something weird) would be a tenth of a day, or something like that. Usually a week in these schemes would be 10 days long, because 10 is a nice number.

The most recent real attempt to throw out the seven-day week was in 1929, when the USSR changed the calendar to have 72 weeks of 5 days each (the difference was made up with some national holidays, which did not fall on normal days of the week—it’d be like having Saturday, Sunday, Labor Day, Monday, Tuesday). Each worker was given one of these days as a rest day, in which they didn’t work. The system was designed to make for a continuous work week; at any given moment, 24 hours a day, every day, 80 percent of the work force was working, compared with in garbage capitalist systems that gave universal weekends.

article-image

But what does it mean? And how do we measure it? (Photo: Hartwig HKD/Flickr)

The system proved very frustrating; most people did not have the same rest day as their spouses, or friends, or family. And machines broke down for the same reason that New York City subways are always breaking down. When a system works 24 hours a day, every day, there’s no real time to repair or maintain them. In 1931, the USSR changed their schedule to...a six-day week, in which every sixth day was a rest day. This proved not much better, and in 1940 the USSR gave up and went back to a seven-day week.

The weekend, too, is a fairly recent creation. One day of rest per 7-day week is still, in many parts of the world, the standard, but in the US, that changed in the early decades of the 20th century. Factories with large populations of Jewish workers began, starting in 1908 with a mill in New England, to just give both Saturday and Sunday off. Henry Ford also implemented a two-day weekend. Soon labor unions began demanding it, and in 1938, FDR’s signing of the Fair Labor Standards Act established a five-day, 40-hour workweek for most American workers.

There’s nothing in particular about a 7-day week that makes it a requirement for anybody to observe; it seems that the idea took off simply because there was a need for a unit of time somewhere between five and 10 days long, and seven was a cool number. What’s surprising is that humans haven’t come up with anything better, except maybe, New Age app gurus.

Fleeting Wonders: A Thrilling Killer Whale Chase Caught on Camera

0
0

When you think of action-packed cinematic chase scenes, they don't usually involve a pod of killer whales and a motorboat helmed by two frightened fishermen.

Well, here's a new spin on the genre. As the Independent reports, two men in a 20-foot boat were fishing off the coast of San Diego when orcas came swimming toward them at an alarmingly swift speed. Amid shouts of "Dude!" and passionately voiced concerns about arms being bitten off, one of the fishermen filmed the killer whales' approach. The whales swam toward the rapidly retreating boat for several minutes, at times coming within a few feet of the vessel.

Though freaked out, the pair of fishermen escaped their orca encounter unscathed. (Despite their "killer whale" moniker, orcas aren't generally inclined to savage humans. They are, however, powerful enough to flip a 20-foot fishing boat as part of their playtime.) 

It's been a big week for filmed aquatic animal encounters in San Diego—on September 12, kayakers shot a video of a hammerhead shark circling them a mile off the coast of La Jolla. Kayaker Ryan Donigan told Fox 5 that he "didn’t feel in danger," but was "very enthralled by this awesome shark."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live


Latest Images