Have you, while flipping through your morning news source of choice, found yourself muttering "2016 is a car crash?" And afterwards, have you chastised yourself for your lack of creativity—your inability to distill just how bad things are? You're in luck: the perfect metaphor has finally come along.
This past Sunday, a train carrying 120 shiny new BMWs went off the tracks in South Carolina, damaging itself and also crushing every single car. No humans were hurt, and the cause of the crash remains unclear, reports News West 9.
The derailment occurred near Kenkinsville, South Carolina, just after 3PM. As Autoevolution reports, the "horror train" was heading from a plant in Greer to the Port of Charleston, and the 120 cars riding it had been destined for lives abroad. No model aboard was spared, from the X3 all the way up through the X6 Sports Activity Coupe.
Footage from KWES shows cranes lifting dozens of banged-up Bimmers off the tracks, like a cleanup crew after a demolition derby. (To add insult to injury, it seems all the cranes are Volvo-brand.) If you're in the market for a more-than-gently used BMW, you know where to go.
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.
Update, 12/6: The original version of this article said that the train was carrying BMW models from the X1 through the X6—the South Carolina plant only produces from the X3 on up. Thanks to Brian for the correction, and we regret the error.
Lalibela, Ethiopia is a holy city, a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for its 12th century churches cut into the rock of the earth. On the opposite end of the architectural spectrum, just a short walk away, is Ben Abeba, a snail shell of a building that looks more like a spaceship landed on top of that rock.
Ben Abeba is a restaurant of wide-open spaces, located next to the historic architectural wonders of Lalibela. Perched high on a hill on the north side of town, it’s often described as looking like a bouquet of flowers or some sort of cooking pot.
The whole enterprise was the dream of owner Susan Aitchison, a retired home economics professor who came to Ethiopia from her native Scotland, initially to help a friend set up a school. Faced with leaving such a magnificent place and going home to Glasgow, she opted to stay. A chance ride with a local transportation company owner led to a business partnership, and to one of the best restaurants in Lalibela.
Aitchison’s and her partner, Habtamu Baye, hired local architects to put her ideas into motion, and the curved decks jutting out from the building’s central, spiraling staircase give patrons unobstructed views of the breathtaking river valley below. The award-winning restaurant serves a menu mixing traditional Ethiopian dishes and western fare, sometimes combing the two. Rising to the challenges of running a restaurant in a place with sometimes sketchy electricity and less than reliable refrigeration, they pride themselves on giving valuable training to their young local staff, and especially their sourcing of local ingredients.
British television personality Jeremy Clarkson is known for having a big head, and now it looks like some golem created of pure ego is traveling America’s highways and byways. As shared on Twitter by longtime co-host James May andothers, a giant statue of Clarkson’s head is being carted off to some unknown location on the back of a flatbed truck.
Clarkson is best known for hosting the long-running BBC automotive show, Top Gear, along with co-hosts May, and Richard Hammond. For decades, the show was a massive hit, trading on the often-politically-incorrect interplay between the outspoken hosts, and a cavalcade of the world’s coolest cars. Clarkson was removed from the show in 2015, taking his fellow hosts with him, and the three devised a startlingly similar new show for Amazon, called The Grand Tour.
How this giant Clarkson head relates to the trio’s new show is unclear. While pictures of it being loaded onto the back of a truck in Washington state have been released, there has been no word on the head’s final destination. According to The Grand Tour's official tweets shared by the Independent, giant heads for Hammond and May are also in the offing, so we have that to look forward to.
The head is undoubtedly a promotional stunt of some kind for The Grand Tour, it doesn’t make it any more unsettling to see a colossal blowhard staring down innocent motorists.
In New York City, in the winter of 1910-11, two days before the box office opened, people began standing in line to buy tickets to Chantecler, a French play about a rooster. By the time tickets went on sale, the line had grown a block long. In the first three hours of sales, the play sold 3,000 tickets.
There was a simple reason that this philosophical play, set in a barnyard, became the most talked-of theatrical event of the season. It starred Maude Adams, an actress whose reputation and fame in 1911 stretched so far that one critic called her “the most popular person in the United States.”
The American production of Chantecler was meant to be a blockbuster. The play's author, Edmond Rostand—most famous for his Cyrano de Bergerac—had spent 10 years writing it. The American version featured the country's most popular actress. The production was lavish: Adams and her co-stars were dressed in elaborate costumes that transformed them into barnyard fowl; the stage was set with oversized trees and giant haystacks. Adams, who was most famous for Peter Pan, later said that, of all her plays, she treasured this one the most.
Critics hated it. What were they missing?
Maude Adams, everyone agreed, was incredibly charming. She had been acting professionally since 16, and her breakout role in 1892, when she was 20, showed how funny she could be. (In the scene that stole the show, her character in The Masked Ball pretended to be tipsy in order to get even with her husband, with Adams coming across as hilarious and graceful all at once.) In 1897, she starred in her first play by J.M. Barrie.
That collaboration would last for the rest of her career, but it was one play, the stage adaption of Peter Pan, that made Adams a superstar. As Peter, she was funny, mischievous, charming, naïve, and moving. She added her own touches to the play, too: the style of collar she designed for her costume would become the popular “Peter Pan collar."
Peter Pan wasn't the only show in which Adams played a male character. In 1900, she had starred in another Rostand play, L'Aiglon, as the title character, Napoleon II, the eaglet, son of Napoleon Bonaparte. Rostand had written that role for a woman: in France, it starred Sarah Bernhardt, Adams' only real rival among the actresses of her day.
Chantecler, though, was meant to star a man. The title character, a barnyard rooster, is a strutting specimen, full of pride. At the beginning of the play, he is convinced that his thrilling song causes the dawn to break each day, and the story follows his philosophical and emotional journey to the realization that the sun will rise without him. Rostand wrote the role for a very “masculine” actor; Chantecler himself was described a “Cyrano in feathers," a man after the heart of Rostand's most famous character, the brash and big-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac. But when Adams' longtime producer saw the play in France, he decided immediately that he should buy the American rights to the show and that Adams should be its star.
When Chantecler finally opened in New York, after months of rehearsals, including special instruction for the actors on making proper fowl-like noises, Adams first appeared on stage in evening dress, to deliver the prologue. After she disappeared backstage, the curtain rose on an oversized barnyard, with a haystack towering over the stage. The sets had been created by a star-studded team of designers, who'd worked on some of the city's great monuments—the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the vaulted ceiling at Grand Central Station. When Adams reappeared, fully feathered, as the Rooster, she would have been dwarfed by the sets, made to seem smaller than human, akin to actual barnyard creatures.
In New York, the show sold out. Adams would eventually perform the show 320 times in 89 cities. Financially, it was a success. But the reviewers who saw the show uniformly hated Adams' performance, because she was a woman.
“Chantecler is essentially a masculine role…and Miss Adams is essentially a feminine actress," one wrote. "Nothing could be more incongruous than a woman’s essaying to play a character whose strength and value depend on upon masculine virility," wrote another. "The actress was charming and delightful as Maude Adams, but never for a single moment was she Chantecler. She did not even give the remotest suggestion of the character—no woman could."
A third: "Chantecler is brutally masculine or he is nothing. He is aggressive, arrogant, masterful, with a powerful, virile voice and a lustiness that betrays itself both in his strut and his crow. How much of all this does Miss Adams suggest? Nothing. Her frail, womanly physique did not permit her to even hint at the possibilities of the part."
It's hard to imagine what she could have done to impress them, though: they had imagined the part should be played in a way that she never could have fulfilled. One critic summed up the general critical sentiment: “Miss Adams’s desire to appear in the title role is, of course, impossible to understand.”
Adams' own judgment of the play was the inverse of the critics'. “Of all the plays that were trusted to my care, I loved Chantecler best, and then came Peter Pan," she told a friend later in life.
Adams' loyalty to Chantecler may have had to do with her rivalry with Bernhardt, who had wanted to play the role in the French original—one account has it that she “literally fell on her knees before [Rostand] begging the privilege of presenting her as Chantecler." If Bernhardt had owned L'Aiglon, Adams could own Chantecler.
But more than 100 years after Chantecler first premiered, it's not so hard to see what might have attracted Adams to the role. Chantecler lives to perform: to him, it is everything that matters. In the course of the play, he had to confront the realization that his voice is not the most beautiful, and he has to decide whether to trade his dedication to performance for the possibility of love. In the end, he chooses to continue his performance—even if the sun doesn't rise because of his song, he realizes, he has a duty to signal the importance of the dawn to the other animals.
Like Chantecler, Adams dedicated her whole life to performance, never marrying. To her, Chantecler was "the story of an idealist going forth into the world and getting the edges rubbed off his ideals by the stern realities of life," one contemporary reporter wrote. "But she believes that the cock’s steadfastness to these ideas, even when he learns that his part in the scheme of things is not as important as he thought it was is the most lasting lesson in the play."
Perhaps as a woman, limited in her art by her gender, she identified with that.
The scientists at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory have one big job: to use their resources, expertise, training and crime-fighting ingenuity in the service of wildlife law enforcement.
Based in Ashland, Oregon, the USFWS’s facility was established in 1988 to provide scientific analysis of investigative evidence. It helps track down poachers, illegal fishing and hunting operations, logging of protected trees, theft of rare plants, and sources of products made from endangered species.
Take a walk around the lab’s evidence rooms and you’re likely to see musical instruments made from the scarcest rosewood, colorful feathers, bundles of animal hides, taxidermy and mounted trophy heads. There are shiny purses and shoes made from exotic skins, stacks of bones, teeth, tusks and skulls. It’s all evidence, and with the right sets of eyes doing the examining, the lab is able to use it to link a victim to a crime scene, and ultimately to a suspect.
The USFWS Lab is the go-to facility for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and its staff of scientific super heroes use their skills in genetics, chemistry, pathology, morphology, and criminalistics to support the mission of animal and plant protection around the world. By examining and identifying victims and causes of death, as well as tracking contamination from chemicals and performing high-tech DNA analysis, if the Lab isn’t careful they might just end up with their own TV show.
When Ian Fleming decided upon a favorite bar in Paris for James Bond, there was only one option for the discerning secret agent: the legendary Harry’s New York Bar.
As laid out in the 1960 short story A View To A Kill, when in Paris, 007 “invariably stuck to the same addresses... if he wanted a solid drink he had it at Harry’s Bar.” By then, Harry’s was already nearly 50 years old, and an institution for some of the most hard-drinking American expats in the City of Light.
Located near the Opera in Paris’ prestigious 2nd arrondissement, Harry’s started as a bistro which was purchased and converted into a bar by American jockey, Tod Sloan, opening on Thanksgiving Day, 1911. Called simply "The New York Bar," the actual wooden bar itself was imported in from Manhattan, and a Scottish barman named Harry MacElhone was hired to run the joint. In 1923, Harry bought the bar outright, added his name, and began to turn Harry’s into one of Paris’ most legendary watering holes.
As American writers, artists and sportsmen began to flock to Paris during the Jazz Age, Harry’s New York Bar became a staple on the hard drinking circuit. Its address, 5 Rue Daunou, was the bar’s calling card, with advertisements in the international press running a tagline telling visitors to simply ask taxi drivers to head to “Sank Roo Doe Noo.”
Those who followed the ad’s directions included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Dempsey, Thornton Wilder, and most famously, Ernest Hemingway. It was in the dark mahogany piano bar decorated with faded American College pennants that George Gershwin is said to have composed An American In Paris. Along with journalist O.O. McEntyre, Harry created a society for his illustrious guests, the International Bar Flies, whose aim was the serious business of drinking. Members had their own secret handshake and decorated their narrow silk ties with a tie clip featuring a two friendly looking, well dressed flies.
As well as being the adopted home of legendary ex-pat drinkers, Harry’s also claims to be the home of legendary drinks. Fernand Petiot is said to have invented the Bloody Mary there in 1921 (although other accounts place the restorative cocktail's birthplace at Manhattan’s 21 Club by George Jessel). Harry MacElhone himself invented the French 75, a potent mix of champagne, gin, lemon juice and sugar that Harry likened to being hit by a French 75mm artillery shell. His 1919 book, "Harry's ABC of Mixing Cocktails" also included the equally strong Side Car and White Lady.
Today, Harry’s remains a quaint, welcoming neighborhood bar, still run by the MacElhone family; the current owner is Harry’s grandson’s widow, Isabelle MacElhone. With no televisions and the only music coming from George Gershwin's piano room downstairs, couples nestle together in what claims to be Europe's first cocktail bar, virtually unchanged, and still serving up the same well-made drinks that made it a second home to Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
And the International Bar Flies are still going strong, just as they were the night James Bond said to his taxi driver "Sank Roo Doe Noo," beginning a memorable evening in Paris “culminating in the loss, almost simultaneous, of his virginity and his note case.”
This large Catholic cemetery is the final resting place of movie stars including Sharon Tate, Rita Hayworth, Bing Crosby, Zasu Pitts, Rosalind Russell, and Dracula himself (aka Bela Lugosi).
In 1939, the newly created Diocese of Los Angeles-San Diego opened Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, on almost 200 acres of small rolling hills that had been part of the large land grant of Rancho La Ballona. The land was touted to have an "excellent drainage system ... and supplied with abundant water," and to have "been carried out in accordance with modern, approved trends in Memorial Park development." Monuments and vaults were not permitted, only flat grave markers. Burials began immediately.
In 1954, a Japanese-American artist named Ryozo F. Kado began work on the cemeteries impressive grotto. Dedicated to Saint Bernadette, grottos featuring artificial caves, waterfalls, statues of Mary, and often Bernadette herself, are important spots of veneration at many Catholic cemeteries.Once the elaborate grotto at Holy Cross was constructed, it became the most desirable real estate for departed SoCal Catholics. One of the first celebrities to be buried there was the original Dracula -- Hungarian born Bela Lugosi. Attended by only 60 mourners, including the director Ed Wood, Lugosi was buried in his famed Dracula cape while a Hungarian dirge was played on the violin. Since his burial, his unassuming grave has become a mecca for macabre fans.
A true horror story reached its conclusion in August, 1969, at the funeral and burial of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, victim of the Manson family. With the killers still unknown and on the loose, Tate's funeral was held in the chapel on the top of the hill at Holy Cross, while her family and husband, the director Roman Polanski, looked on. The highly emotional funeral, attended by the likes of Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner and Peter Sellers among others, concluded with Tate's mother bursting into tears as the officiate intoned, "Goodbye Sharon, and may the angels welcome you to heaven, and the martyrs guide your way."
Today, the sprawling cemetery is open to the public. There are many stories in these hills, diverse tales of people from many different continents, all united by a single religion and drawn to the city founded by their spiritual brethren many moons ago.
All across the western world, from the tip of Italy's boot to the coast of California, a conflict simmers. Some say the solution is worldliness—that we must expand the definitions of old standbys to reflect shifting realities. Others would boil themselves alive before letting the old traditions change. The focus of this discord inspires grand pronouncements. It tears families apart. Most grievously of all, it hijacks the dinner conversation.
I'm referring, of course, to spaghetti bolognese.
If you've ever eaten Italian food outside of Italy, chances are you've dug into a great big bowl of the 'bol—a savory glop of meat and tomato, served over a tangle of long, round noodles. It's on the menu everywhere from fancy restaurants to school cafeterias—in the U.K., "you'll rarely find a meat and tomato ragu served with any other shape of pasta," says food writer Felicity Cloake.
You may have even cooked it yourself: the internet offers recipes from such luminaries as Emeril Lagasse, Jamie Oliver, and Campbell's. While they may disagree on the particulars—Jamie flavors his with streaky bacon, while Emeril prefers pancetta—they're happy to share their takes on what they clearly consider a classic dish.
Spaghetti bolognese translates, roughly, to "spaghetti from Bologna." But if you try to take this particular flavor train back where it supposedly comes from, forget it—you'll be turned straight around. The British broadcaster and politician Michael Portillo found this out the hard way when he took a camera crew to the city seeking the dish. "Oh my gosh, no," says the first young woman he encounters in the footage. She makes an X with her arms, as though warding off a great evil. "Absolutamente no. No no no no."
And if you try to serve it up to an Italian, expect something close to a flipped table. "Bolognese is the most abused Italian dish," the chef Massimo Bottura, who has three Michelin stars for his restaurant, Osteria Francescana, told Corriere della Sera in 2010. Earlier this year, another chef, Antonio Carluccio, doubled down: "When I first tasted it [in Britain], in a little Italian restaurant, I was so horrified I sent it straight back to the kitchen," he told the Daily Mail. "It was inedible."
Like most good controversies, the spaghetti bolognese spat consists of a series of nested disagreements. The most basic concerns whether or not bolognese can be eaten with spaghetti at all. "They don't even eat spaghetti in Bologna," explains culinary historian Linda Pelaccio. "They eat a wider noodle." The number one choice, she says, is tagliatelle—a long, flat ribbon of pasta, about a centimeter wide, and cooked fresh instead of dried.
This pairing is historical, as Bologna is known for its fresh egg pasta—dried spaghetti, which is made of wheat, is generally from Naples, much further south. But it's also practical. "A bolognese is really just a bunch of crumbled meat," says Pelaccio. "And if you think about it, the noodle is really just the method of transport into your mouth." If tagliatelle is like Scotch tape, with plenty of sauce-sticking surface, spaghetti is more like a string: "You're going to have a hard time getting that in with a few strands," she says.
Other issues have to do with the sauce's ingredients, which, to outsiders, can be somewhat counterintuitive. "When you think Italy, you start to put oregano, basil, parsley, garlic, which is not at all [correct]," Carluccio told a British audience earlier this year. The classic preparation lacks all these things—it's just meat, stock veggies, wine, and tomatoes. (His remarks spurred a number of inflammatory headlines: "Antonio Carluccio BLASTS Brits for adding herbs to spaghetti bolognese," read the Express.)
It's unclear exactly who first bastardized the bolognese. Some postulate that during World War II, American and British soldiers passing through Bologna ate tagliatelle with meat sauce, liked it a lot, and began requesting it when they came back home, spurring Italian restauranteurs to do their best imitation. Even before the 1940s though, Northern Italians poured into Britain, escaping the wreckage of the Napoleonic wars and taking their recipes with them, perhaps occasionally making do with dried spaghetti.
Meanwhile, in America, the opposite amalgamation occurred: most immigrants came from the impoverished Italian south, and were so excited to find meat readily available that they began adding it to everything (begetting that other Italo-American classic, spaghetti and meatballs). This spirit of invention eventually permeated other dishes.
"The Italians came over, and they made do with what they found," says Pelaccio. "Now, Italo-American is a cuisine unto itself—a viable cuisine." By the 1950s, respected Italian cookbook authors were penning recipes for bolognese with "any kind of noodle." "I think it's basically, 'give 'em what they want,'" she says.
You don't hear about a lot of meatball backlash. But many Italians clearly see the spaghettification of bolognese, specifically, as a dire wrong. Their attempts to right it have ranged from organized, high-level efforts to, more recently, a kind of Internet comment trench warfare. In 1982, Bologna's chamber of commerce officially notarized what they consider to be the authentic recipe, which contains beef skirt, pancetta, celery, carrot, onion, a little tomato, wine, and milk.
In 2010, the Virtual Association of Italian Chefs, an international trade group, organized a kind of Bolognese Appreciation Day, during which hundreds of chefs around the world made traditional versions of the dish. This past August, when the New York Times published a recipe for "Rigatoni with White Bolognese," purists came out of the woodwork.
"Call this recipe what you want not Bolognese," commented one dissatisfied customer. "The ragu you describe is terrible, so please stop inventing recipes," wrote another. "Our suggestion is that you organize a trip to Bologna so you can understand." When Ryanair tweeted out a food-themed flight suggestion, the airline suffered a similar takedown.
Such stringent responses seem a little over the top. But as globalization changes the landscapes and foodscapes of the planet, people look for a place to plant a flag. "It's never really about the ragu, it's about defending a way of life," says Cloakes. "I suspect, like almost everywhere around the world, the Bolognese are feeling somewhat sensitive about their local traditions being stolen and bastardized by foreigners."
But as new versions of the food become a staple for other communities, those converts begin feeling equally defensive. In Britain, for instance, the dish is so common they've given it a nickname: spag bol. "It's one of the first things everyone learns how to make," says Cloake. "Over the years we’ve developed our own recipe for it, and to hear that criticized as wrong, even by the people that apparently invented it, feels like a very personal attack."
The latest attempt to smooth things over comes from Piero Valdiserra, a marketing executive and lifelong Bologna resident. After absorbing decades of sauce-based resentment, Valdiserra recently took matters into his own hands. His new book, Spaghetti alla Bolognese: L'altra Faccia del Tipico (Spaghetti Bolognese: The Other Side of Tradition) tries to have it both ways—it argues that Bolognans have been too cruel to what very well could be a product of their city. Poorer residents have long cooked their bolognese sauce various ways and eaten it over spaghetti, he says. Fresh egg pasta has generally been the purview of the rich, and served in restaurants.
So far, the response has been mixed. "Traditionalists are skeptical or critical, if not openly hostile," Validserra told The Local. But he is optimistic: "Culinary tradition is simply the accumulation of many small innovations, which are never finished," he says. "Those who seek to ‘stop’ the evolution of food by fixing it in rigid recipes fail to understand the deeper spirit of food itself."
Plus, they could be missing out on something really tasty.
As far back as the 16th century, monks and peasants wandered the secluded Puster Valley fortressed by the icy mountains of the Tyrolean Alps in search of the glistening, silky homes of spiders and caterpillars. Gently plying away the gossamer material with fingertips or a small knife, they would take the cobwebs and transform them into a delicate canvas. The layers of silk became the bases for portraits of saints and sprawling landscapes.
Cobweb painting—a unique peasant craftsmanship native to the Tyrolean Alps in Western Austria and Northern Italy—has become a forgotten artform with fewer than 100 known paintings today.
While they only average about the size of a large postcard, cobweb paintings, also known as gossamer paintings, involved a painstakingly intricate creation process. Artists had to collect cobwebs, layer and stretch them over an oval windowed mat, and paint with a special fine-tipped woodcock feather brush. A range of media were applied to cobweb canvases, from watercolor, India ink, to even print engravings.
“When I first saw the gothic spider web design on the cover of [the paintings’] cases, I was expecting something rather dark and macabre inside,” says Jason Nargis, special collections librarian at Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections which contains four of the approximately 100 existing paintings. “Instead, the paintings were simple, light, and hopeful.”
The very first cobweb paintings hung in windows of churches and cloisters. Artists sought to express their spiritual devotion and unwavering patience by mastering the most difficult canvas imaginable, Ina Cassirer wrote in the 1956 issue of Natural History. “The more fragile [the paintings] were, the more they were cherished,” she explained.
Additionally, artists were drawn to the transparent effect of the cobweb. When holding up renderings of The Madonna and the Child and The Lamb of God and the Book of Seven Seals to the light, the images are outlined with an ethereal glow. “The charm of the paintings lies partly in the fact that the background areas are left unpainted, so that the figures seem to float in an opalescent haze,” Cassirer wrote.
Eventually, the art pieces became a common household item, and featured pastoral landscapes, duchesses, kings, and military scenes in the 19th and 20th century.
The optimal web for canvases was the more dense and fine gossamer spun by certain species of caterpillars and spiders. Artists in the Tyrolean Alps were said to prefer cobwebs from the caterpillar of the small silver-gray spotted moth Yponomeuta evonymella and funnel-weaver spiders of the family Agelenidae for their elasticity and tensile strength. However, webs produced by the common house spider Tegenaria domestica were also a good source. Some webs measured almost two feet long.
Cobwebs were collected in sheets in the grass, on branches of bird-cherry trees in the winter, and in the nooks of attics. Threads measured between a fraction of a micron to three microns, which seems minuscule compared to the 13 to 26 microns of a silkworm’s string. The fragility of the material made it difficult to stretch the canvas without breaking. Little pieces of debris also easily got trapped between fibers, interfering with the translucency.
To overcome these challenges, artists would first thoroughly clean the web, stretch it over cardboard, and coat it with diluted milk to add strength. Johann Burgman, one of the most prolific cobweb artists of the late 1700s and early 1800s, found that soaking nuts in the water he used for painting extracted oils which helped transfer the color onto the delicate medium.
Most of the paintings were created with opaque watercolors, which are watercolors based with white pigment. Hair, eyes, flowers, and ribbons were all drawn with the utmost precision. Paintings in India ink contain lines and details so fine that viewers often mistake the minuscule brush strokes as penwork. But using a pen would just be asking for a tear—a gentle poke of a finger can completely destroy a cobweb painting.
Artists often chose to leave sections of the background unpainted or sometimes added an inconspicuous spider or insect in the bottom or corner to call attention to the amount of skill required to work with such delicate fabric, Cassirer noted.
In addition to India ink and watercolor paintings, some craftsmen even printed on cobwebs with metal plates. The layered cobwebs were stretched flat over a blackened plate, and then pressed with a heavy weight, wrote Cassirer. There are only six such cobweb engravings known to exist.
After artist Johann Burgman died in 1825, the production of cobweb paintings began to dwindle in the Puster Valley. There have only been small resurgences of cobweb painting ever since. An artist based in Tennessee began practicing cobweb painting in the late 1890s after reading about the craft, and a few of her pieces were donated after her death in 1956 to the national Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. In the 1870s, art dealers Franz Unterberger and C. Czichna brought back the art practice in North Tyrol in western Austria, selling cobweb pieces of Tyrolean scenes as tourist gifts. A traveler who visited Unterberger’s shop in 1930 reported that the seven on display were the last of its kind. The artist Unterberger had commissioned had recently died, taking his secret cobweb painting techniques with him, wrote Cassirer.
Given their extreme fragility, it's remarkable that the delicate fibers of cobweb paintings have been able to survive for hundreds of years. Nargis, who continues to look over the four precious cobweb paintings in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collection, says that analyzing these preserved artifacts “opens a new perspective on the history of the people who made and used them.”
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Remington is one in a series of geothermally heated springs that emerge along the 165-mile Kern River, with its headwaters in the High Sierra and its terminus through a boulder-pocked, winding canyon into California’s Central Valley.
Native Americans had built small villages near several of Kern’s springs, but it was white settlers who would eventually transform these mineral-soaking pools into commercial ventures. Once gold mining fervor petered, the men and women who remained in the Kern River Valley swapped their mining pans for cattle, alfalfa, and industrial pursuits like hydropower, lumber, and construction. The many hot springs along the river became a popular destination for health-seeking tourists, and put a pretty penny in the pocket of the landowners who charged admission.
Today, Remington is the only free, public, and undeveloped hot springs in the Kern River Valley. The water, which is sulfuric and tends to tarnish metals, flows from the ground at 3.5 gallons per minute. There are four tubs total, including one away from the river in a grassy, shaded location off the trail, and one cold plunge right next to the river. Bold displays of wildflowers bloom here in the spring.
Like hot springs elves, the "Friends of Remington" scrupulously clean and maintain the cement tubs out of their own good will. Wander about and you’ll notice that these voluntary stewards have adorned the springs over the years. There are messages like “Eternal Love” and “Children of the Earth” etched into the walls of the river-rock pools. Once you’ve soaked and you ascend to the dirt parking lot off the Old Canyon Road, shiny trinkets will catch your eye–tiny tiles, crystalline stones, and colored glass embedded in the cement-worked steps.
The hermit crab is a kind of nomad of the crustacean world. As they grow, the small, orange-speckled creatures shift from shell to shell. Some are kicked out of their homes by larger, stronger hermit crabs.
Japanese artist Aki Inomata was inspired by this natural exchange of shells between hermit crabs. She used their dwelling behaviors as an artistic metaphor for human movement patterns by digitally modeling crystalline shells adorned with cityscapes.
In her project Why Not Hand Over a ‘Shelter’ to Hermit Crabs?, Inomata recorded hermit crabs crawling into a miniature version of New York’s sparkling skyline, resting peacefully within tiny Bangkok temples, and carrying Dutch windmills. She started developing the art project after attending a 2009 exhibition called “No Man’s Land” at the former French Embassy in Japan, which was swapped between Japanese and French ownership over the years. Inomata was inspired by “how a piece of land is peacefully exchanged between two countries,” she writes on her website.
She documented the shell-making process in the video above, which shows the urban landscapes rise up in shiny, clear resin. Inomata first took CT scans of hermit crab shells to obtain data on the interior spiral, then 3-D printed the new temporary city shelters out of non-toxic clear resin. She plopped the digitally made shells into a hermit crab’s terrarium where it could choose which shell it wanted to move into on its own. The transparency of the shells allows viewers to see the hermit crab wiggle into a new home.
Inomata took pictures of the hermit crabs in each of her specially designed cityscape shells, which were showcased in a gallery in Tokyo, Japan.
Hermit crabs in Japanese are called “yakadori”—literally “one who lives in a temporary dwelling,” reports ArchDaily. Like hermit crabs, we too move from place to place as we outgrow cities and homes. “The hermit crabs in my piece, who exchange shelters representing cities of the world, seem to be crossing over national borders,” Inomata writes. “It also brings to mind migrants and refugees changing their nationalities and the places where they live.”
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Gotokuji, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo’s Setagaya district, has become famous due to a legend citing it as the birthplace of the maneki-neko (beckoning cat) good luck charm.
Legend has it that during the Edo period, the final era of traditional Japanese government, a cat under the care of a priest at Gotokuji Temple led a feudal lord to safety during a thunderstorm. The cat beckoned the lord and his servants inside with a waving gesture—hence all maneki-neko statues have one paw raised.
The lord enjoyed tea with the priest while the thunderstorm raged outside. To express his thanks afterward, he donated rice and land and selected Gotokuji Temple as the cemetery for his prestigious family. Today, visitors can see hundreds of lucky cat figures on display around a statue of the goddess of mercy, Kannon. The main building and grounds are dotted with cats, while cat-related art lines the streets surrounding the temple.
Every year, thousands of old, unloved pianos molder in basements, wheeze off to the dump, or search futilely for homes on Craiglist. But one, in Winters, California, sees a fitting end—it's hoisted by a crane, suspended in the air, and then dropped from 60 feet up, in front of an adoring crowd.
Such fun has become a tradition in Winters—the 2016 piano drop, which happened last Saturday, marked the city's third. Prior to its plunge, each year's instrument lives in City Park, available for all and sundry to tickle. "The piano gets rained on and dried up by the sun. Kids bang on it," says Bruce Guelden of the Winters City Council. By the end of the year, "it's pretty well toast."
But a certain level of respect is still due. Just before the piano plummets, it's given a sort of last hurrah—a half-hour concert that closes out with a heartfelt rendition of Patsy Cline's 'I Fall to Pieces.'
"After that, we tilt it off and it comes crashing down," says Guelden. "Breaks up into pieces pretty good. And then the children rush it and they take the 88 keys or anything else they can grab out of there."
This was the third year of the piano drop. This coming spring, 2017's victim will appear in the park, to be banged on for months until it, too, is dropped 60 feet from a crane.
About 350 people came out to watch this year. This is not too shabby for an outdoor classical performance, although another metric was more important to Mr. Guelden:"From my point of view, it was a success, because nobody died," said Guelden. The piano might beg to differ.
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.
In a lowly tavern in an English town in the 1580s, a group of men met to organize the assassination of their monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. The head of the operation, Anthony Babington, planned to rescue and re-crown Mary of Scotland, the dethroned heir who had been imprisoned in the castle dungeon for 20 years. He detailed the plan to Mary as a cipher—a secret note in code— and snuck it to her in a shipment of beer. But Mary had no idea that his note had been opened and then resealed by a double agent posed as a courier, who was waiting for her reply. When Mary wrote back, the agent exposed the plot, and both she and Babington were executed.
Long before NSA surveillance, Queen Elizabeth had her own “Watchers," a network of agents who intercepted letters, cracked codes, and captured possible dissenters to protect the crown in secret. The queen’s network of spies formed the original surveillance state in the U.K., and she started it for good reason.
Britain was divided by religion when Elizabeth I began her reign; she was Protestant, while Mary, whose throne was given to Elizabeth, was Catholic. Many British citizens were not happy about the change in government, and England was surrounded by Catholic nations. The plot to restore Mary was just one of many reasons Elizabeth I had to be wary of her safety, and she took no chances—rather than leave her security to fate, she began a national security effort that heralded a centuries-long tradition of British espionage.
The Watchers were not just Elizabeth’s eyes and ears; some were among her most trusted advisors. One of Elizabeth’s most famous spies, John Dee, carefully reported on the Spanish court during its war with England—after first serving as the queen’s personal window into the occult world. Richard Deacon, in his biography of John Dee, says that Dee used a wax pentacle to "accurately prescribe the nature of the storms which shortly afterwards were to scatter and destroy the Spanish Armada," allowing the English to hold off on attacking the Spanish, and instead wait for the storm to take care of the job.
Given Dee's experience as an alchemist, magician, and astrologer to the queen, this success sparked rumors that he didn’t just predict the storm—he created it through magic. When spying abroad, Dee signed each private letter to Elizabeth with the insignia “007”—a moniker that was later borrowed by Ian Fleming, writer of James Bond.
But to become an entry-level Watcher, you didn’t need to be a magician. According to Stephen Alford in The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, “There were few rules and no vetting of volunteers, and so if some spies and informants were brilliantly effective, others were derelict as well as dangerous, spying out of greed or spite or for private revenge.” Those accepted into the intelligence branch went on exciting adventures to surrounding countries, gathering information on the political and military status of her majesty's growing list of enemies.
Being a spy wasn't all adventure—Alford writes that for some, being a regular spy was “simply a job and not a very glamorous one.” Many were assigned to routine work: walking in the cities and towns, listening, reporting back to base. But one of the Watchers on the street beat was the one to discover Babington’s conspiracy to restore Mary of Scots, so there were moments to look forward to even as a regular street spy.
Some saw spying as a religious duty for those who felt the English were God’s chosen people. For these spies, the job was rewarding. When street-level Watchers weren’t finding rebels (or rival spies) from Ireland, many of them spent their time capturing Catholic priests; one Jesuit claimed that spies were “so many and diligent as every hour almost we heard of some taken, either on suspicion or detection against them” of plotting dissidence and openly defying the new Protestant faith.
The subjects of Elizabeth I were not exempt from surveillance; political ties and religion were often so impossible to separate that to remain loyal to one religion was considered tantamount to treason by the other.
Sir Francis Walsingham, the Spymaster, managed the complex system, which included stations in most European countries, and hired the spies and special agents for the Queen. Often described as loyal and ruthless, Walsingham instructed a portion of his staff to torture his captured, unwilling informants to reveal plots and fellow conspirators in the Tower of London’s cold chambers. Loyalists to Mary and the Catholic church were the common target of interrogation, which was carried out to prevent attempted assassinations or attacks.
Some agents placed prisoners in a dungeon called “Little Ease” in which there was no room to lie nor sit, or force them into a fetal crouch by an iron implement called “The Scavenger’s Daughter” until they bruised and hemorrhaged. The most popular method of torture at the Tower was the infamous rack, which stretched the victim’s body until it tore. Alford writes that because of a controlling lock that allowed breaks between stretches, “the prisoner could be questioned while experiencing a constant amount of pain.” Depending on the outcome of the interrogation, those who lived might later be disemboweled, drawn, and quartered for treason.
Walsingham also hired specialists whose sole job was to intercept, copy and decode messages, many of which used substitution ciphers. These spies were a highly educated sect of Walsingham’s inner secretarial team, and according to Alford, the job required a deep understanding of Latin and all major European languages. Using the methods of Abu Yusuf al-Kindi, the 9th century Arabian scholar who invented cryptography, Elizabethan spies cracked these ciphers by looking at letter frequency—the most commonly-appearing letter was likely an E, and so on.
Once a few letters were discovered, the rest became a hangman-like puzzle of filling in the blanks. The spies inserted false symbols into their own ciphers to fool anyone who might crack the codes, and Walsingham and his most trusted secretaries alone held the now-lost “Book of Secret Intelligences,” which Alford says would have held all codes, agents and alphabets they used.
The Watchers, it seems, did their work well. Queen Elizabeth I reigned over her empire until her (natural) death in 1603, all along ruling with secret teams of servants spread across the world, crouching in dark alleys, impersonating couriers, always listening. There’s one thing to learn from Queen Elizabeth’s secret service; if you’re plotting treason, be careful who you talk to. You never know: anyone could be a spy.
Magic shows, wax works exhibits, hypnotism displays, circuses and séances. For the Victorians, there was no shortage of options for an evening’s entertainment, which may explain the hyperbole of their advertisements. “THE WONDER OF THE AGE”, proclaims the poster for a performance of “Mesmeric Seances”. “The Most Startling Mystery Ever Presented to the Public”, declares another, for a show at Egyptian Hall.
These attention-grabbing posters are the subject of an exhibition currently at the British Library, Victorian Entertainments: There Will Be Fun. Drawing mainly from the Evanion Collection, an archive of around 6,000 items collected by conjuror and ventriloquist Henry Evans Evanion, it explores how popular entertainment was advertised to Victorian audiences.
In addition to being a well-known entertainer who performed for Queen Victoria, Evanion was an avid collector of Victorian ephemera. It is thanks to him that we can see the promotional material for “The greatest performing elephant in the world” or for Madame Tussaud’s 1889 Christmas holiday attractions, items that may have otherwise been thrown away, plastered over or destroyed with time.
Using this material, the exhibition focuses on five well-known 19th-century performers that reflect the types of popular entertainment in the Victorian age: hypnotist Annie de Montford, music hall actor and comedian Dan Leno, circus owner Lord George Sanger, magician John Nevil Maskelyne, and Evanion.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through to March 12, 2017.
While working on a new housing development in wealthy Westchester County, New York, just a short distance from New York City, construction crews uncovered a massive, mysterious stone, reports Fox5. Hollow on top, the rectangular pillar was carved with ornamentations and, on one side, a clear inscription in Latin.
It is, according to a Roman art expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tombstone from 54 A.D. It came from Rome and belonged to “a tax collector named Tiberius Claudius Saturninus.”
What is a 2,000-year-old Roman tombstone doing in Westchester? This discovery makes a little bit more sense when you know that the new development is being built on a spot that was once the home of some of America’s wealthiest families. This part of New York was once called Millionaires Row because of the lavish mansions built here by the Rockefellers, Astors, and other Gilded Age tycoons.
The new development is called “Greystone on Hudson,” after Greystone Castle, the home of Josiah Macy, a partner in Standard Oil. The Macy mansion burned down in the 1970s and, says the property’s developer, the debris was buried in the old house’s foundation.
That’s where the crew was digging when they found the tombstone. According to Fox5, it originally came from Villa Borghese in Rome, where Macy’s wife obtained it and brought it back to New York. It’s unclear whether she knew she had bought a tax collector’s grave, but there is something beautifully grim about a very rich woman putting a taxman’s grave in her home.
Hidden in the outskirts of Pahrump, Nevada in a sun-scorched, sparsely-populated part of town lies an expansive cemetery of coffins and gravestones with a sign of black letters spelling out “Coffinwood.” Although it seems out of place for such a remote area, you have reached Coffin It Up, one of the world’s most bizarre coffin-making studios.
While coffins in the United States have been largely replaced by caskets and cremation urns, Coffin It Up looks to bring back the art of traditional Obsidian coffin making to southwestern Nevada. Featuring both actual coffins and multi-purpose coffin-shaped accessories such as spiderweb coffins, CD case coffins, coffin-shaped end tables, and the coffin armoire, Coffin It Up can replace any piece of standard furniture with a coffin-like shape.
If you're feeling like sitting at the computer will be the death of you, the Cyber Coffin computer desk will do the trick. If the blackness of your coffee reminds you of death, the Coffin Coffee Table is the table for you. And if you’re feeling unsure about your marriage, consider purchasing a Coffin Wedding Centerpiece.
In addition to these varieties, Coffin It Up also sells coffin purses, coffin-shaped headstones, Obsidian coffin jewelry, open-coffin cat beds, coffin suitcases, and even painted blades. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Coffinwood Cemetery surrounding Coffin It Up is packed with headstones, ghosts, skeletons, an active pet burial ground, and even what is likely the only coffin-shaped greenhouse in the entire world.
Every year, Coffin It Up’s creator, Bryan Schoening, buries a coffin under the dirt in the Coffinwood Cemetery to mark the “passing of the previous year.”. And to spice it up, Schoening has even designed a “Coffin Kitchen” in a nearby Las Vegas home, complete with coffin-shaped kitchen cabinets, a coffin-shaped breakfast bar, and a giant, coffin-shaped bathroom mirror.
Harsh winds and cold ocean spray doesn't ruffle the feathers of thethousands of birds who come to summer on Krýsuvíkurbjarg.
Reaching the cliffs requires a bumpy drive or a long walk across the lava fields, dotted with bubbling geothermal pools steaming from the volcano below. The cliffs appear from suddenly, a dramatic drop from the grassy lawn straight down to the sea crashing against the rock face. The wind blows fiercely. These conditions might seem inhospitable, but that's far from the case for the birds that migrate here in the summers.
Every year around 60,000 seabirds come to the cliffs to mate. Depending on the season, visitors can see guillemots and other auks, puffins, seagulls, European shags, sandpipers, and peewits. The birds tuck themselves into the tiniest crevices in the cliff face, making themselves at home despite the odds. What's more, thanks to Iceland's "midnight sun," you can enjoy the view practically any time of day.
Turn into a dark corner in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and you might be shocked to find two massive baroque globes dangling from the ceiling.
The 20-foot spheres were commissioned by King Louis XIV, France's Sun King, in 1681. During his 72-year reign (the longest in European history, dubbed the "Grand Century") the monarch presided over a golden age of art and literature in France, and established the country as a leading power in Europe.
Louis XIV commissioned the spheres after seeing the globes that belonged to his friend, the Duke of Parma. They instantly became a sensation, perceived as a symbol of the the French monarchy's ownership of the world. Italian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli delicately crafted his globes from thin strips of wood, fine fabric, and plaster, which incredibly have survived up till today. The spheres lived at Versailles—a former hunting lodge which Louis XIV transformed into a lavish palace—until the French Revolution, after which they were moved from place to place before finally settling at the historic library, where they are among the most popular attractions on display.
One globe depicts the cosmos with astrological constellations. The stars are arranged as they would have appeared at the date of Louis XIV's birth in September of 1638. It places the Earth at the center of the solar system, a widely accepted theory at the time. The second globe depicts the continents of the Earth with exotic illustrations of the people who live across the world. These were intended to provide encyclopedic information about whalers in the Pacific, tribesmen in Africa, cannibals in Brazil (from the accounts of Amerigo Vespucci), among others. It serves as a literal manifestation of Louis XIV's worldview, and provides an image of how we believed the world looked in the 1680s.
Coronelli drew the maps using various ships' logs. As such, for all its impressiveness, there are some inaccuracies on the globe: California is an island, and the mouth of the Mississippi River is in completely the wrong location. "Terra Australis" was uncharted territory, and Europeans had no idea what was there. Although Coronelli could draw the world, it wasn't yet possible to grasp it in its entirety. Nevertheless, the globes remain just as impressive as they were the day they were finished 400 years ago.
In the 1940s, Argentina was tango and tango was Argentina. Born in the marginalized outskirts and upscale brothels of Buenos Aires, the musical genre slowly but surely seeped into the very roots of the country’s culture and took a strong hold. Fathers would spend years teaching their sons how to dance, singers like Carlos Gardel were national figures, and social gatherings were always accompanied by the sound of the tango concertina, the bandoneon.
Then, two disparate but hugely impactful things arrived: a series of military dictatorships and rock 'n' roll. While in opposition in every other respect, the dictatorships and the new music genre inadvertently collaborated in dethroning tango and driving it to near oblivion.
The 20th century in Argentina was marked by political, social, and economic unrest. Between 1930 and 1983 there were six coup d’etats led by the military. Woven in between these were the authoritarian presidencies of Juan Domingo Peron, a former military general who participated in the coup of 1943 and ruled as a populist president from 1946 to 1955. Peron was seen as the protector of the working classes and national identity, two things that tango represented as well. Under him, the genre enjoyed a prosperous golden age.
But his censorship of the opposition and authoritarian rule gave rise to the self-named Liberating Revolution in 1955, which overthrew him and placed in power a military regime. Another coup would follow in 1962 and yet another in 1966. The latter, called the Argentine Revolution, would also be a dictatorship.
Peron ruled once again as president from 1973 until his death in 1974. His Vice President, Isabel Martinez de Peron, was also his wife, and her presidency after his death—which was considered nepotism by many— was overthrown by what would be the most brutal of the country’s dictatorial regimes, the National Reorganization Process.
The Argentine Revolution and the National Reorganization Process sought to squash the devotees of Peron's legacy—so-called peronismos—which had both strong right-wing and left-wing factions. As a result, many peronistas, including some of tango’s most prominent figures, were exiled, threatened, or simply disappeared.
There was also the question of censorship. When tango first emerged, the church banned it because it was the music of the "immoral" factions of society. It was no longer banned when the coup of 1930 occurred, but there was censorship of lyrics that supported populist ideas and used lunfardo, the slang of the working classes in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Even Peron banned songs like Cambalache for being too pessimistic.
After the coup of 1955, the military regimes continued this censorship even more harshly. They banned and censored songs that supported anything they deemed too close to peronismo, that criticized the state of affairs, or that sympathized with the working class and used lunfardo. With its lyrics heavily controlled, and with many of its figures exiled or in hiding, tango began to wane.
At the same time, a shift in social mentality began to occur. While there had previously been time to allot to social gatherings, the new economic models promoted by the regimes relied heavily on the idea of production. Marcelo Solis, an Argentine tango professor at the Escuela de Tango de Buenos Aires, who lived through the last two regimes, explained that in the mind of the military, if Argentina was a mess, it was because its culture was a mess. If the country wanted to be more prosperous, it should look at foreign countries and seek to imitate them. The xenophobic attitude of peronismo was replaced by the obsession of achieving a version of the American Dream. There was no time or money for something as frivolous as culture.
And then there was the horror of living under the regimes. When asked what she remembers of the regime of ‘76, Adriana Vera, an Argentine immigrant in New York, looked into space and recalled: “What do I remember? Persecution, mandatory curfew, a lot of caution, a lot of trembling, a lot of fear.” Gatherings of three or more in the street were prohibited, thousands of people were kidnapped and disappeared, thousands more were arrested and tortured.
In this era of constant fear, dancing and social gatherings were often renounced. The dictatorships, then, created the perfect situation for tango to be forgotten.
By an ironic and almost cruel twist of fate, so did rock 'n' roll.
Hailed as the genre of rebellion, rock united youth all over the world during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. In Argentina, things were no different. Stifled by the oppressive regimes and inspired by the sexual and political revolutions that were shaping a new world, young people rejected everything that seemed old and antiquated. Tango definitely fell into this category.
Gustavo Varela, Director of the History of Tango Graduate Program at FLACSO Argentina, says that there was an “enormous cultural difference [between young people and their parents] that was marked very clearly.” Rejecting the macho culture of tango as passé, the general mentality was that it was old people’s music.
Vera echoed this sentiment: “[I thought] it was something pretty that my parents and grandparents, old people, danced. Me? Tango? Never! I wouldn’t have been caught dead. That was old people’s dance and music.” Today, she is an active member of the New York tango community.
Besides, tango is by definition a social dance, while rock, as Varela says, “is a rhythm of tall buildings. Of locking yourself up in your bedroom.” In the midst of the dictatorships, in which “the social fabric was ruptured,” rock was the perfect music for youth who could listen to it on their own while wearing jeans and letting their hair grow long.
Not that people didn’t gather socially to listen to rock. Rock 'n' roll was so popular in Argentina that venues filled up as consistently as tango ones didn’t. Because of the curfew, there were instances of arrests after rock concerts. Varela recalls coming out of one when he was 16 or 17 and seeing the military load all the attendees into a truck. They let him go because he was white and blond, but most others did not share his fate.
However, it seems like the military often turned a blind eye to minors being out after curfew during rock concerts while keeping the rule in observance for milongas (tango dance parties). According to Solis, this, like most things, had to do with money. Rock venues made more profit than tango venues, and could thus afford to bribe government officials. He remembers that some of his friends worked in these venues and that the bribe was often included in the event budget. Milongas could rarely do the same.
But the relationship between the regimes, tango, and rock was not so clear cut. There were instances, for example, in which tango actually collaborated with the dictatorships. Varelo recounts how Astor Piazzolla, one of tango’s most prominent figures, traveled to Europe with his orchestra and was paid by the regime of ‘76 to tell the world that circumstances in Argentina were splendid. Given the violence of the regime, it seems unlikely that they even had a choice.
Many tangueros also supported the regimes and wrote songs for them. Several of them, including Piazzolla, sang in honor of Alfredo Astiz, a military “hero” who was involved in the kidnapping, torture, and disappearance of members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an activist group formed by mothers who demanded information on their disappeared children.
Because there are never too many comical twists in history, the military regimes and rock also helped set the stage for tango’s comeback. As Solis explains, in exile, Argentines started to come to the genre as a way to connect with their lost nation and bring it to Europe and North America. Hector Orezzoli, co-producer of the 1985 Broadway sensation Tango Argentino explained to the New York Times that Argentinians wanted to be European, so they thought of tango as tacky. Actual Europeans, however, couldn’t get enough of it. Ironically, this made tango once again favorable in the eyes of Argentinians.
National rock, once seen as the replacement of tango, began mentioning it in a positive light. Charly Garcia and Pedro Aznar, two of the icons of Argentinian rock, named their first collaborative album, coincidentally released in 1985, Tango.
When democracy was again re-instituted in 1983, tango was ready to follow suit. It took time, of course, but fueled by its popularity outside of Argentina, and the mysticism that shrouded it for being connected to the time before the dictatorships, tango once again rose to the top.
Today, it is the fastest growing dance in the world, and has been declared by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
