Brendan Hughes

The Oldest Name We Know

The older I get, the clearer it becomes that everything… everything is economics. So it should probably have come as no surprise that the oldest known identity we have on record is that of a man who live 5,000 years ago, in 3200 BC Mesopotamia, whose name was Kushim, and whose profession was as an accountant.

He did well in math, had perhaps a healthy dose of skepticism, and so when the time came he hung out a shingle. His name appears on a receipt tablet for barley.

Ancient Roman gladiators had product endorsement deals. Ancient Greece had mortgages and college and restaurants. Temporally, we really are just specks.

It was All Ball

Last June, Koko the gorilla — who could communicate through sign language — died at 46. In her time, she told Mister Rogers she loved him, she jammed with Flea, she had a tickle session with Robin Williams (and grew morose for days upon learning of his death), and she kept a pet kitten she named All Ball.

According to Koko, this kitten was known to fly into fits of rage, and she once reluctantly implicated All Ball in the crime of having ripped a sink out of a wall.

Krishna’s Butterball

“Equipoise” is a balance of forces and interest. For dancers, outfielders and cats of prey, it is the state between stillness and motion. It’s when you’re ready to pounce, you’re sprung, you’ve stopped just for a second but your momentum may tip your body weight onward.

In the town of Mahabalipuram, there rests on an incline a 250 ton granite boulder named Krishna’s Butterball. For at least 1200 years, it has paused briefly (in geological terms), to collect itself before continuing its choreo-tone poem performance down the hill.

In 1908, the local British administrator was so unnerved by its equipoise, and so emboldened by a colonizer’s arrogance, that he hired seven elephants to yank it from its place. He failed. It’s still catching its breath today.

Spunows and Spap Oop

Trudging the vast hellscape of made up product words meant to sound like the solution to the problem created by the company selling you the solution— which are at best a portmanteau like Pinterest and ‘broccoli’ (a man-made hybrid of brussel sprouts and cauliflower), and at worst gadflies of meaning, like Abilify and Instagram — it can be hard to know exactly what this thing is you’re expected to insert into your head.

As corporations massage the lexicon into an oblivion of monetizable syllables, it’s sometimes hard not to just take nonsense sounds at face value.

Like Spap Oop or, my favorite, Spunow.

Powdered wigs were because of sex, you guys

The 1580s were a time great lovemaking throughout Europe. So much so that basically everyone had syphilis. And without modern medicine, this meant—for many—open soars, blindness, dementia and baldness. Of these, Europeans found baldness to be the least tolerable.

So when the kings of England and France had dueling syphilae microbes laying waste to their follicles, they commissioned local wig makers to fix the problem. But the dementia among the syphilitic wig makers led to massive, curly beasts for the head, powdered with fragrances to mask the various olfactory offenses flowing through court.

“Bigwigs” then galavanted throughout the continent until a tax was levied on wig powder in 1795, whereupon all sex stopped, and natural hair got its European reboot.

How the Dodge Brothers Ruined Everything

I once walked into a friend’s new apartment, which he had decked out with black leather couches from a yard sale. “This,” he confessed, “is my American Asshole furniture.”

The phenomenon of the American asshole may have begun in 1919, with the Dodge brothers. The day after attending Henry Ford’s son Edsel’s wedding, they sued Ford (in whom’s company they owned a 10% stake).

Ford had wanted to use his extra profits to raise employee wages and hire more people. The Dodges argued in their suit that a corporation’s only responsibility was to increase shareholder value. They won, of course.

The Dodge brothers: American assholes.

The Tenth Watch

The longest running lab experiment in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, began in 1927. Professor Thomas Parnell set out to prove that pitch, in this case natural asphalt, which shatters like glass when you hit it with a hammer, is in fact an extremely slow-moving liquid.

Since the experiment’s inception, there have been nine drops. Parnell survived to see two of them. The first seven drops were, on average, about 8 years apart. The last two were spread out by 13 years.

Until the last drop, the ninth. on April 24, 2014, no one had ever directly witnessed a drop. The next one is due in 14 years.

The Vickers Manuscript

After Trish Vickers lost her sight to diabetes, she strapped a bunch of rubber bands around a clipboard and used them as guides to write a 110,000 book in longhand. Every week, her son would come over and read to her what she wrote, but one time she gave him 27 blank pages. Her pen had run out of ink during a burst of inspiration.

The forensics lab of the local police spent 5 months extracting the information and saved her work.

On March 9, 2017, the first copy of her book, Grannifer’s Legacy, arrived at her door. She lost a battle with breast cancer the same day.

The Sassi

Human troglodytes lived uninterrupted in these half-caves in Italy from 7,000 B.C. to the 1950s. They shared ovens and harvested rainwater in complex networks of porcelain pipes. They hung curtains and swept everyday.

Roughly 411 generations of recipes, feuds, love stories, fist fights, palace intrigues, tribal justice, rain, gods, births, sorrows, dawns, wars, inventions and handshakes… before they were kicked out for being poor.

Unpaid Interns, a short film

The inestimable Matthew Humphreys at Pace University’s School of Performing Arts had the deranged notion to give me six of his acting seniors, a camera, a theatre building, a snowy weekend in February of 2017 and carte blanche.

The result—when combined with my hatred for plutocracy—was my second short film, Unpaid Interns.

This is the trailer (full film below the jump):

(more…)
Continue Reading

The Isthmus of Prowess and the OK Plateau

In 600 B.C., construction began on a paved trackway at the Isthmus of Corinth, which became known as the Diolkos. Wheel ruts of the exact gauge of then-modern wagon wheel axles were built in to the road, so that boats and other heavy industry could be carted from Ionian Sea to the Aegean Sea without having to sail around the Peloponnese peninsula, windy as its headlands were.

Continue Reading

The Grapevine and the Wedding Ring

Two friends of mine were driving on the Grapevine, which is a braided ribbon of highway climbing over the hills one hour north of Los Angeles. They were high school sweethearts, they had just gotten engaged, and they were in the middle of a knock-down-drag-out fight over something neither of them can now remember.

At one point, the bride-to-be had had it, she rolled down the window, and she chucked her engagement ring as far as she could.

As soon as she did, they stopped fighting. They forgot all about their squabble, and they yanked the car to the shoulder to find it.

Continue Reading

Let’s Murder the Moonlight

On the morning of October 15, 1908, Italian poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti was speeding down Via Dormodossola in Milan. Rounding a sharp corner, two cyclists on penny-farthings blocked his way and he had no option but to veer into a ditch. His Runabout flipped twice and he was briefly knocked unconscious. When he awoke and was pulled to safety by the cyclists, he announced to them that having been a step away from death, he now knew we had nothing to fear from speed, that speed was the greatest thing to happen to man, and he resolved right there that his next move would be to launch an artistic movement.

Continue Reading

The Appetizer of Truth

Prior to 46 BC, no one in Rome knew what day it was. The calendar was tightly controlled by the priest class. They based it on cycles of the moon, and some years would have fifteen months, others would have eleven. Sometimes different priests would tell you it was a different day depending on how it might serve them. The first of the month would roll around a little more often for landlord priests, and priests in the senate always seemed to meet their deadlines.

Continue Reading
%d bloggers like this: