238 - Runnin’ Down A Dream: Tom Petty’s Map of LA

Here’s a map reminiscent of the Bruceville map – another piece of musical cartography treated earlier on this blog (entry #134). This one charts the haunts of Tom Petty, an “undercelebrated rock and roll icon”, in the words of LA Weekly, which recently featured this map.

Petty’s been around in LA for over 3 decades, ever since he drove cross-country from Gainesville (FL) to get a record deal for his first band Mudcrutch. Petty’s musical entourage eventually morphed into the Heartbreakers, with whom he achieved success from 1976 onwards – a career that culminated, recently, in a 4,5 hour long Peter Bogdanovich rockumentary on the band, a coffee table book (both entitled Runnin’ Down A Dream)… and, more importantly for this blog, a musical map of Los Angeles.

The map not only shows some of the places relevant to Tom Petty’s life and career, but its tilted presentation and exaggeration of some geographical features paradoxically helps to get a better visual understanding of this sprawling city with the size and population of a not-even-so-small country.

I’m just listing the places on the map to give you an idea what’s where. For the full stories behind each number, go to the article in LA Weekly.

1. Sunset Boulevard; 2. Ben Frank’s Diner (now Mel’s Diner); 3. The Sunset Strip; 4. Shelter Records Office; 5. Hollywood Premiere Motel; 6. Canoga Park; 7. Travelodge Hotel; 8. The Winona; 9. The Alley; 10. Village Recorder; 11. London, U.K.; 12. Whisky A Go Go; 13. Sound City; 14. MCA Records; 15. Century City; 16. “FM radio” and “The freeway”; 17. Cello Studios; 18. The Smog; 19. The 101 Freeway; 20. Mulholland Drive; 21. Reseda; 22. Vampires on Ventura Boulevard; 23. Rose Bowl; 24. East L.A; 25. Viper Room; 26. LAX; 27. Dave Stewart’s house in Encino; 28. Sunset Sound; 29. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; 30. Universal Amphitheater (now the Gibson); 31. Petty’s home in Encino; 32. Charo’s house in Beverly Hills; 33. Le Seur; 34. Beverly Hills mansion designed by Wallace Neff; 35. Pacific Palisades “Chicken Shack”; 36. House of Blues; 37. McCabe’s Guitar Shop; 38. Malibu.

Click on map to magnify. Many thanks to Kyle Hunsberger, who alerted me to this map.

237 - Regionalism and Religiosity

 

Cuius Regio, Eius Religio - this Latin saying applies to Europe, and to the principle that ended religious warfare: “Whose region (it is), whose religion (shall predominate)”. But it sprang to mind when seeing this map of the US, showing the leading church bodies per county. The map demonstrates the important link between region and religion, or to put it more precisely: where you live is a predictive factor as to where you worship.

The map highlights 8 major Christian denominations, showing where they represent a plurality (and in counties marked with a + at least 50%) of the relevant counties’ population. This shows that there are quite a few remarkably contiguous religious blocks in the US

The most notable of those contiguous areas is that of the Baptists, a term that is quite rightly almost synonymous with Southern Baptist (a bit like how Orthodox in Europe equals Eastern Orthodox; as “western orthodoxy” is referred to as Catholicism). Baptists are the biggest congregations in nigh on all counties of nine states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee), and are a major presence in West Virginia (where Methodists dominate the northeast), Virginia (where the selfsame Methodists have a foothold in the border area with West Virginia) and Missouri (the area around St Louis being majoritarily Catholic). Florida, Louisiana and Texas are split between a Catholic South and a Baptist North – to a large part due to the large, traditionally Catholic communities of Latinos in southern Texas and Florida and of Cajuns (French-Americans) in Louisiana.

Another block, but not nearly as neatly contiguous, is the Lutheran one, present in the northern Midwest and West, best represented in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin. Lutheran here often is synonymous with German-American or more broadly speaking Northern European – again, Lutheran conjures up certain geographical, not to say climatological images; a form of worship designed to survive the grimmest of winters. It would be very hard to rhyme a Latin culture with the Lutheran religion.

I don’t know is there’s a similar link thinkable in the Methodist case. The Methodist areas are also much smaller and much more disparate: in West Virginia (as mentioned) and adjacently in areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. There’s a sprinkling of Methodist-dominated counties in Maryland, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Strangely, most Methodist-dominated counties lie between two parallels of longitude determined by the northern border of Nebraska and Pennsylvania and the southern border of Kansas and Virginia.

The Mormons dominate every county in their state of Utah, and have proceeded from there to become numerically superior in some counties of adjacent states, such as Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada – they are the biggest congregation in the county that holds Las Vegas.

Most of the other counties have Catholics as the most numerous congregation, leading to a somewhat misleading map. Catholicism very often is the biggest denomination by default, owing to the fact that their institutional unity boosts ‘market share’ but at the same time masks differences between different wings of the Roman church that are as great as between denominations of Protestantism that have separated over theological differences.

On the other side of the bums on pews versus quality of purpose spectrum are the Mennonites (among whom the Amish are the strictest of the strict), dominating in very few counties, but where they do, often in two or three adjacent counties (as in northern Indiana, central Ohio and central Kansas).

Quite puzzling finally is the denomination labelling itself as Christian, dominating in central Illinois and Indiana. I thought they all were. Christian, that is…

This map was sent in many times, but most recently by Jack Alexander. 

236 - Victoria Victorious Over Rest Of Australia

“I used to work in a library and an old gentleman came in with it”, is about as much info as Jayson Emery can offer up about this map that he sent me.

What is obvious nonetheless is that the map is an advertisement of the self-aggrandizing pride taken by inhabitants from the state of Victoria in their constituent part of the Commonwealth of Australia. It is somewhat reminiscent of this map, projecting a similar boastfulness about Texas.

Victoria is Australia’s smallest, but also its most densely populated state. Just over 5 million people live in the state, out of a total of 21 million Australians. Clearly, these 5 million Victorians have some issues with their 16 million compatriots.

This parody map shows Victoria taking over the largest part of the country, pushing all other states to the periphery of the island-continent. Victorians, it appears, hold a lot of records, including ‘World’s most generous people’, ‘World’s best beer’, ‘World’s woolliest sheep’ and even ‘World’s highest taxes’. The other states are markedly less attractive.

Western Australia contains ‘Head hunters’ and is therefore ‘No good for white man’.
The Northern Territory (NT; or Not Teetotal, as it’s called here) holds the ‘World’s savagest crocodiles’ and the ‘World’s biggest mosquitoes’.
Queensland offers ‘Cannibals’, ‘Impenetrable jungle’ and the ‘World’s worst weather’.
South Australia is mainly marked as ‘Desert’ and ‘Unexplored’.
Particularly spiteful is the minuscule rendering of New South Wales, which is marked ‘Incomplete surveys’ and ‘Rabbits only’.

Antagonisms like these translate to other countries, with for example the aforementioned Texan example; other well-known animosities exist between the northern and southern Italians, the English and the Scottish (not to mention the Irish), the Catalans, the Basques and the rest of Spain, etc. All of which proves, quite ironically, that regional chauvinism is quite a universal trait.

235 - A Map to the Tombs of the Stars

I don’t know if the old man was having us on, but he said he was a funerary historian, researching the Père Lachaise cemetery in the same streaming rain that was washing away the lipstick traces off the Oscar Wilde monument and chilling us to the bone. “That little temple,” he said of a remarkably non-derelict house-sized funerary monument, “belongs to a descendant of Count Dracula.

“I’m quite sure you won’t find that relative of Vlad the Impaler on this list – unless under an assumed name; but this is an otherwise comprehensive overview of the most notable occupants of Paris’ biggest and most famous graveyard (although if you’re into that kind of thing and you are in the City of Lights, the cimetière at Montmartre is also worth a visit).

The map numbers the different subsections of Père Lachaise and highlights, in red, its most celebrated occupants – although the celebrity of many has not survived their death by much. Anyone ever heard of Monsieur ou Madame Ferko-Patikarus (65)? Or of Dr E. Reliquet (96)? Some names, however, do still resonate today. How about:
• Héloise and Abélard, the tragic mediaeval lovers, finally together in their very own tombe à deux? (7, near the Jewish section);
• Composers Rossini (4) and Bizet (68);
• The Egyptologist Champollion, the (somewhat disputed) decipherer of the Rosetta Stone (18);
• The illustrator Gustave Doré (22).

As far as I can tell, the map is undated; but it certainly looks like it’s pre-World War II, maybe even pre-World War I. Although Doors-frontman Jim Morrison is buried at Père Lachaise, it’s therefore unlikely he is the Morrison mentioned in section 68.

An intriguing label is that of the Victimes de l’Opéra-comique (96; possibly the last serious attempt at French comedy). Most of the other names are complete mysteries as well; please feel free, if you recognise anyone, to offer some biographical data, which, ultimately, might help in determining the map’s age.

Click on map to enlarge. This map was found here.

234 - “Slumless, Smokeless Cities”

Take that, Harry Beck. Try as you might, the lines on your Tube map could never be as straight as this.

Beck schematised a transportation system that was completely irregularly laid out to begin with. This map, however, shows how planning ahead would enable not just symmetry, but also better living conditions, or as the map itself states: “Slumless, Smokeless Cities”.

The map was drawn up by Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), the father of the garden city movement. Howard believed the living conditions of the poor, huddled masses cramped together in giant, insalubrious cities could be improved by combining the best aspects of town and country and carefully allocating space to housing, industry and agriculture.

He explained his urban planning ideas in ‘Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform’ (1898), republished as ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’ in 1902, the year before he would actually found the very first garden city in the world: Letchworth Garden City, in the south of England. In 1920, he would found a second one, Welwyn Garden City, where he single-handedly planted a tree in the garden of each house.

The British garden city movement was important influence on the later strategy of building new towns in the UK, and spawned parallel movements in the US, Canada, Argentina, Israel and Germany.

As with most instances of social engineering, the garden city movement didn’t quite achieve what it set out to do. Its laudable motives and egalitarian vision contrast with the often depressing artificiality of ‘garden cities’, and the fact that they merely function as dormitories to the larger cities they so often adjoin.

This map of a planned, but as yet unbuilt conurbation of ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ has a few notable aspects:

• Central City (pop. 58.000) is the hub for 6 surrounding garden cities (pop. 32.000 each), all given idyllic names such as Philadelphia (’brotherly love’), Rurisville (as in ‘rural’), Justitia, Gladstone (presumably after the Prime Minister), Garden City and Concord.
• Each of these 7 urban centres is surrounded by a canal, which also connects them to the neighbouring and the central cities, forming a wheel-shaped system of waterways, the Inter Municipal Canal.
• A slightly smaller circle is formed by the Inter Municipal Railway. Within this circle lie several curious institutions: ‘Homes for Waifs’ (one imagines a neighbourhood populated by petite, sulking catwalk beauties), ‘Epileptic Farms’ (must be annoying for the cows when they’re being milked), ‘Large Farms’, an ‘Insane Asylum’ and a ‘Home for Inebriates’.
• Outside the circular railway, indeed outside the circular canal, are ‘Convalescent Homes’, ‘Stone Quarries’, ‘Cemetery’, a ‘College for the Blind’ and ‘Industrial Homes’.
• Although all basically the same shape (a circle divided into four equal parts by the intersecting waterways), each of the satellite cities has a different lay-out, allowing for variation (so those inebriates aren’t unduly confused on their way home).

This map was provided to me by Arjan Daniels.

233 - The Dutch Moisturize Mars

The pessimist mourns the glass’s half-emptiness, the optimist rejoices that it’s semi-full and the engineer just thinks the glass is twice the size it should be. I wonder what a space engineer would think of this map of Mars, half underwater.

Although the latest scientific evidence seems to indicate there once was water on Mars - laying to rest a controversy that has raged ever since ‘canals’ were detected on its surface – The Red Planet nowadays is rather rocky and definitely dusty, and not even close to moist. To map Mars as if it’s covered with oceans, seas and bays is clearly too Terra-centric.

It might help to know that this map of of a semi-submerged Mars is of Dutch origin. As the Dutch have always struggled to keep their country above sea-level, they might find it impossible to imagine a world without encroaching seas. This map therefore may say less about the precarious environment of Mars than about that of the Netherlands itself, a country not coincidentally named for its disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the North Sea.

None of which explains, however, why this vision of Mars would be upside down, with the Zuidpool (South Pole) at the top and the Noordpool (North Pole) at the bottom of the map. Maybe Dutch engineering isn’t what it used to be.

The map shows several continents protruding from the Martian waves. In the southern (top) hemisphere, these are:
• Gillland (which has far too many l’s in its name for a continent on any planet; and seeing its coast is a dotted line, probably is an ice-island)
• Burchardtland
• Cassiniland
• Lockyerland
• Jacobland
• Keplerland
• Webbland
• Huygensland (ostensibly the biggest continent, extending way down north)

In the northern (bottom) hemisphere, the continents are:
• Fontanaland
• Herschelland
• Dawesland
• Mädlerland
• Rosseland (a protrusion from the polar ice in the north)

From the few names I recognise, the continents seem to be named after astronomers (Keppler, Huyghens, Cassini, Herschel). I’m unsure whether the same applies for the bodies of water, these ones on the western (or is that eastern, since it’s upside down; in any case, the left) hemisphere:
• Maraldi Sea
• Huggins Bay
• Hook Sea
• Zöllner Sea
• Beer Sea
• Lambert Sea
• Newton Strait
• Arago Strait
• Herschell Strait
• Dawes Ocean
• Kaiser Sea

On the other hemisphere, there are:
• De la Rue Ocean
• De la Rue Strait
• Dawes Sea
• Maunder Sea
• Ariy Sea
• Faye Sea
• Tycho Sea

Apart from Isaac Newton and Tycho Brahe (the Danish astronomer with the bronze nose) and names previously used for the continents, I don’t recognise anyone. The tropics are called tropic of Lion (Leeuwskeerkring) and tropic of Aquarius (Watermanskeerkring).

This map, unfortunately undated and unsourced, was taken from the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps.

232 - Willkommen in Neu-York (?)

One could call it cautionary cartography, this map of a thoroughly germanified New York – something that might have happened in an alternate universe, where the Nazis not only won the World War in Europe, but managed to cross the ocean and subdue the United States.

Neu-York is a project by artist Melissa Gould, who writes on the project’s website about its disorienting side-effects, beyond the obvious “horrifying counterfactual proposition”: “(this) is an exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory. This re-imagining of the city plays with comparison and misrecognition, exploring the coexistence of past and present, fiction and reality.”

Gould’s Neu-York is based on several pre-1940 maps of Manhattan, thus excluding post-war developments, and digitally manipulating the material – erasing the synagogues, for one. Street and location names were replaced by names taken from contemporary Berlin maps. Thus, this Manhattan isn’t so much a city conquered and renamed, but one transported across an ocean and transposed on another one – Berlin-am-Hudson, so to speak.

The artist chose methods and colours to give her work a ‘vintage’ feel, resulting in an uncanny, pseudo-historical piece of psycho-geography.

• The project’s website shows 21 detailed maps of Neu-York
• Also, extensive bi-lingual listings of the renamed streets, sights and locations. Some of the renaming is problematic: why does Central Park become Tiergarten when it obviously isn’t a zoo? Others are plain unsettling: the Croton Reservoir in Central Park becomes Wannsee, a Berlin locale forever infamously linked with the conference held there to set up the Endlösung, the extermination of European Jewry.
• The avenues are all named after German kings and emperors.
• The streets are named, in clusters, for birds, wildflowers, plants, grains and herbs, flowers, trees, animals, German composers, operas, ancient German first names, foreign cities, German rivers and German cities. More info on the renaming on the website.

Thanks to Melissa Gould and Larry Sawh for alerting me to this project.

231 - Praise the Lord and Pass the Dictionary!

This delicious map is the Europa Polyglotta, published in 1730 by Gottfried Hensel (or Henselius, after the contemporary fasion of latinising surnames). I’ve managed to piece together only very little information on its origin and background because I found it on a Ukranian website, describing it in an alphabet (not to mention language) I don’t understand.

Which is ironic because the full Latin title of the map is: Europa Polyglotta, Linguarum Genealogiam exhibens, una cum Literis, Scribendique modis, Omnium Gentium. Which I can translate, sort of: ‘Multilingual Europe, showing the genealogy of the languages, together with the alphabets and modes of writing of all peoples’.

In the upper left corner, the map shows severfal alphabets (left to right):
• “the Scythians, born of the Hebrews”
• the Greeks
• the Marcomanni
• Runes
• Moeso-Gothic
• Picto-Hibernic

In the upper right corner are shown Characteri Rutenicae Linguae, i.e. the Russian alphabet.

The lower left corner shows following alphabets next to each other (left to right):
• Latin
• German
• Anglo-Saxon

At the bottom, there are several other alphabets of the
• Hunnish,
• Slavonic (Cyrillic),
• Glagolitic (Illyric) and
• Etruscan (Eugubina) languages.

The map itself attempts to show the concordances and differences between all the languages spoken in Europe by spelling out the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in each of them.

Some notable facts about this ethnolinguistic map of Europe.
• The language areas have remained remarkably stable, except where German has lost terrain in Eastern Europe (in itself a relatively recent occurrence, and solely due to the Second World War).
• Another area that has disappeared, though is the Arabic (or Berber) portion of Iberia – the Spanish completed their Reconquista in 1492, was ‘Mauritanian’ still spoken there almost 250 years later?
• Turkish is mentioned in what is now Bulgaria, still home to a sizable Turkish minority. But no Bulgarian at that time?
• Apparently, ‘Barbarian Greek’ was still spoken in Asia Minor in the mid-18th century.
• Tartaria is subscribed with the legend Vocibus Teutonicis et Sclavonicis mixta – ‘With mixed German and Slavic languages’. I don’t believe that could have corresponded with the reality of that time.

It would be interesting to hear from native speakers how much their version of the prayer has deviated from this mid-18th century form.

Click on the map to maximise; map found here.

230 - Papua New Guinea, the Linguistic Superpower

The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, and is illustrated with this map, of the world’s ‘linguistic superpowers’. The caption reads:

“Languages are very unevenly distributed among the countries of the world. The map tries to capture this fact by rendering each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it. (Because of the inherent problems in accomplishing this, sizes are rather approximate). The ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use.”

The Ethnologue, cited a bit further, only lists 9 countries with more than 200 languages, however. Here are the 12 top countries:

Papua New Guinea 823 languages
Indonesia 726
Nigeria 505
India 387
Mexico 288
Cameroon 279
Australia 235
DR Congo 218
China 201
Brazil 192
United States 176
Philippines 169

It’s curious how the linguistically most diverse country in the world is Papua New Guinea – because it’s also the place with the biggest biodiversity anywhere, one of the last places in the world where new species get discovered regularly. I wonder whether there’s a single explanation for both phenomena.

I was alerted to this map by Bjørn A. Bojesen; Mr Parkvall himself was kind enough to provide me with this map. Here’s a link to his book on Amazon, warmly recommended for anyone both language- and trivia-obsessed.