50 years ago today, the Beatles played their final official concert and put an end to their touring career. It all happened at the now defunct Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
As Josh Jones told us in 2014, “knowing it would be their final show, the band brought a camera onstage to take photos of the crowd and themselves.” And “Paul McCartney asked the band’s press officer Tony Barrow to record the concert on a hand-held tape recorder.” Barrows eventually talked more about how this recording came to see the light of day. He said:
Back in London I kept the concert cassette under lock and key in a drawer of my office desk, making a single copy for my personal collection and passing the original to Paul for him to keep. Years later my Candlestick Park recording re-appeared in public as a bootleg album. If you hear a bootleg version of the final concert that finishes during Long Tall Sally it must have come either from Paul’s copy or mine, but we never did identify the music thief!
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In episode one, for instance, indie rock icon and activist for artist rights David Lowery deconstructed the lyrics for his story songs “All Her Favorite Fruit” (Camper Van Beethoven, 1989) and “I Sold the Arabs the Moon” (from his 2011 solo album), contrasting these with the nonsense song that launched his career, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.”
The songs discussed are played in full, and the idea is to get a sense of the artist’s approach in very specific terms, and how this has changed over time. In episode 15, Craig Wedren shows us his development from writing heavy (“post-hardcore”), dissonant music in the 90s with Shudder to Think, to creating disco synthscapes with his early 00’s band Baby, to now composing music for soundtracks like Netflix’s “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.”
The emphasis in a given interview depends on the artist: Guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart, Jeff Buckley) eschews music theory, so the focus is more on the ideology of creation, whereas tap-guitar wizard Trey Gunn (King Crimson, David Sylvian) instructs us in combining time signatures and soloing in modes. The interviews both teach us how to listen to and appreciate music by showing us what to focus on, and also serve to instruct songwriters real and vicarious about decisions that go into a choice of chord or lyric or instrumentation.
What kind of music can you expect to hear? Officially, anything that has thought behind it, but I’m starting with my experience as musician (see www.marklint.com) and music lover growing up in the 80s and 90s listening to popular, indie, folk, punk, and progressive rock. There hare been some movement into soul (Episode 16 features the great Narada Michael Walden, who produced Whitney Houston among many others), electronica (Gareth Mitchell), country (Beth Kille), and future episodes will venture into classical, hip-hop, and world music. More typical, however (i.e. more akin to my own writing), are figures like 90s sweetheart and political activist Jill Sobule, cow-punk pioneer Jon Langford (Mekons), grunge-peddler turned symphonist Jonathan Donahue (Mercury Rev), NPR darling Chad Clark (Beauty Pill), and 80s Cutting Crew front-man Nick Eede. One of the episodes next to be released will feature Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks).
In one of the most interesting interviews (episode 3), major league music video director–and member of 70s supergroup 10cc and 80s duo Godley & Creme–Kevin Godley takes us from 70s prog excess (and getting to record jazz legend Sarah Vaughan) into the New Wave and out of music altogether, only to rediscover it post-retirement.
This is not about getting behind the scenes with your favorite stars or any other hype of that sort, but about talking with smart people to figure out the language of music, the motivations behind creation, and the techniques available for self-expression. In the course of these discussions, we get into changing trends in making a living in music (or not!), new music technologies, and, of course, philosophical issues.
Mark Linsenmayer is a writer and musician in Madison, WI. His Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast has been downloaded more than 15 million times. Learn more about Nakedly Examined Music at www.nakedlyexaminedmusic.com, subscribe via iTunes, or follow on Facebook.
On my last trip to New York, some friends took me to a favorite new-wave Chinese place of theirs. When I asked where to find the bathroom, they said to go downstairs. The staircase deposited me into one of the most surreal bathroom approaches I’ve ever experienced: a long, narrow, fully mirrored hallway with a hauntingly familiar composition piped in from speakers installed along its length. Not until I resurfaced and asked what the deal was could I identify the music: the “Love Theme” from David Lynch’s early-1990s television series Twin Peaks.
Many TV themes have lodged themselves into our collective memory, mostly through sheer repetition, but few have retained as much evocative power as the one Lynch’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, recorded for his short-lived postmodern detective show.
It had that power from the moment Badalamenti put his fingers to the keyboard, a story told in the clip above. “What do you see, David?” he remembers asking the director as he sits down before the very same Fender Rhodes on which he composed Twin Peaks’ major themes all those years ago. “Just talk to me.”
“We’re in a dark woods,” Badalamenti recalls Lynch first saying. “There’s a soft wind blowing through sycamore trees. There’s a moon out, some animal sounds in the background. You can hear the hoot of an owl. Just get me into that beautiful darkness.” Badalamenti plays as he played then, which drew an immediate response from Lynch: “Angelo, that’s great. I love that. That’s a good mood. But can you play it slower?” With the feedback loop between the scene in Lynch’s mind and the mood of Badalamenti’s music engaged, Lynch added a detail: “From behind a tree, in the back of the woods, is this very lonely girl. Her name is Laura Palmer.”
Badalamenti lightens his improvisation in a way that makes it somehow eerier. “That’s it!” The composer and the director play off one another’s ideas, almost like two long-collaborating musicians in a jam session. “She’s walking toward the camera, she’s coming closer… just keep building it! Just keep building it!” Eventually, they’ve created an entire rising and falling dramatic arc in this single piece of music (arguably more dramatic than the one created by the series itself, which Lynch left after two seasons). “David got up, gave me a big hug, and said, ‘Angelo, that’s Twin Peaks’ ” — and to this day, a part of the culture.
For almost two hundred years, English gentlemen could not consider their education complete until they had taken the “Grand Tour” of Europe, usually culminating in Naples, “ragamuffin capital of the Italian south,” writes Ian Thomson at The Spectator. Italy was usually the primary focus, such that Samuel Johnson remarked in 1776, perhaps with some irony, “a man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.” The Romantic poets famously wrote of their European sojourns: Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth… each has his own “Grand Tour” story.
Shelley, who traveled with his wife Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, did not go to Italy, however. And Byron sailed the Mediterranean on his Grand Tour, forced away from most of Europe by the Napoleonic wars. But in 1817, he journeyed to Rome, where he wrote the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! And control In their shut breasts their petty misery.
For the traveling artist and philosopher, “Italy,” Thomson writes, “presented a civilization in ruins,” and we can see in all Romantic writing the tremendous influence visions of Rome and Pompeii had on gentlemen poets like Byron. The Grand Tour, and journeys like it, persisted until the 1840s, when railroads “spelled the end of solitary aristocratic travel.” But even decades afterward, we can see Rome (and Venice) the way Byron might have seen it—and almost, even, in full color. As we step into the vistas of these postcards from 1890, we are far closer to Byron than we are to the Rome of our day, before Mussolini’s monuments, notorious snarls of Roman traffic, and throngs of tourists.
“These postcards of the ancient landmarks of Rome,” writes Mashable, “were produced… using the Photochrom process, which adds precise gradations of artificial color to black and white photos.” Invented by Swiss printer Orell Gessner Fussli, the process involved creating lithographic stone from the negatives—“Up to 15 different tinted stones could be involved in the production of a single picture, but the result was remarkably lifelike color at a time when true color photography was still in its infancy.”
Aside from a rare street scene, with an urban milieu looking very much from the 1890s, the photographs are void of crowds. In the foreground of the Triumphal Arch further up we see a solitary woman with a basket of produce on her head. In the image of San Lorenzo, above, a tiny figure walks away from the camera.
In most of these images—with their dreamlike coloration—we can imagine Rome the way it looked not only in 1890, but also how it might have looked to bored aristocrats in the 17th and 18th centuries—and to passionate Romantic poets in the early 19th, a place of raw natural grandeur and sublime man-made decay. See the Library of Congress online catalog to view and download all forty-two of these postcards. Also find a gallery at Mashable.
Corpsing—aka laughing inappropriately onstage—requires far less skill than soldiering on when the actor playing opposite loses control, an occurrence that almost always wins audience favor.
The recently released super cuts of Saturday NightLive cast members’ composure deserting them, above and below, suggest that the worst offenders are aware that viewers will lap up these lapses. Why strive to stay in character when blooper reel stardom awaits?
It’s a fact that these crack ups have the ability to loosen things up, recalling that freewheeling period before the show became the institution its cast members dreamed of auditioning for since childhood.
It’s unclear what—if any—meaning we should ascribe to the evidence that the most indulgent gigglers are all male.
Could it be that women are funny after all… enough to win the sort of punchlines that’ll make the boys lose it on camera?
If so, perhaps we can arrange for aliens to abduct the next commentator who suggests otherwise, probe him, then seat him opposite a bewigged Kate McKinnon. No offense to guest host Ryan Gosling, the embodiment of a good sport. His inability to stay in character was both understated and heartwarming, and he wasn’t pandering. SNL regulars Aidy Bryant and Bobby Moynihan struggled too. I still wager a lot of funny ladies watched that Close Encounters skit, and rooted for McKinnon to be given the opportunity to take down an old school chauvinist pig.
Tracy Morgan excoriated his fellow cast member (Jimmy Fallon) for “laughing and all that dumb shit he used to do,” explaining, “That’s taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I’m the cute one.’
The writers outdid themselves when they bestowed a signature gesture on another of Hader’s recurrent characters, New York City cultural commentator, Stefon. His newfound proclivity for hiding his face behind his hands could’ve helped the actor pull it together, but instead it turned into a bit. Wonder what Tracy Morgan thought when Hader attributed his inability to keep a straight face to his straight man / Weekend Update foil Seth Myers:
A person being patient with an insane person is my favorite thing in the world…. You were being so patient with this maniac who had the simplest job in the world.
It’s hard to imagine two figures more representative of two disparate directions experimental music took in the 20th century than John Cage and Sun Ra. Cage’s aleatory arrangements and instruments improvised from radios and TV sets left much to the discretion of the performer. And yet, oddly, he didn’t think much of improvisatory music, writing in his 1961 book Silence that he considered jazz “rather silly” and “unsuited,” notes Seth Colter Walls at Pitchfork, “for ‘serious’ contexts.”
Sun Ra, on the other hand, while a master improviser, left little to chance. He embraced the role of bandleader of his Arkestra with unique vigor, “completely obsessed with precision and discipline.” Cage preferred the plain-spoken, unspoken, and wordless. Ra delivered rococo treatises onstage, dressed in glittering capes and headdresses. How the two would, or could, come together may seem a mystery, but come together they did, for a one-time concert event at a Coney Island freak show.
The resulting album is “one of the most sought after records in either discography,” writes The Vinyl Factory in an announcement of the full performance’s recent release by label Modern Harmonic. Fans can finally purchase that double LP, or listen to the live recording for free below. (If you need Spotify’s software, download it here.) Though it may seem like a bit of a novelty, “the album gradually emerges as something greater than a footnote,” Walls writes, “despite the arms-length embrace, the overall concert has a surprisingly seamless quality.”
Cage’s contributions consist mainly of wordless vocalizations and poignant silences. Ra recites poetry and unleashes solo after solo on his Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, blending “sci-fi movie tones” with “sprightly figures” and “dense chords and drones.” The album’s trailer at the top of the post offers some rare black and white footage of the occasion, which briefly included a couple of additional artists–Arkestra saxophonist Marshall Allen and singer June Tyson. (Tyson’s intentionally strained performance “is beset by amplification problems,” Walls warns, “though the noise-damaged result works, in context.”
Throughout the one-off meeting, Ra and Cage trade solos, each respectfully yielding the stage to the other in turn. While this setup highlights the two giants’ profoundly different approaches to making–and conceiving of–music, Sun Ra’s “ability to meet Cage more than halfway… helps hold the entire gig together,” writes Walls. One of the few tracks on which the two collaborate directly, “Silent Duet,” is, well, exactly that. Since we cannot see the performance, we have to imagine the two of them, sitting side-by-side in silence, as the audience seems to all but hold its breath.
The odd thump of a foot against the mic stand aside, the recording documents almost total dead air. Then this gives way to Cage’s cryptic mumbling and Ra’s restrained keyboard taps in “Empty Words and Keyboard.” The effect is electric, the moment sacred, and the collaboration, though fleeting, reveals itself as genuinely inspired, not only for its careful play of contrasting avant-gardism’s against each other but for the extraordinary instances in which Afrofuturist free jazz and Fluxus minimalism find accord.
With Twin Peaks coming back to our TV screens next year, fans want to know who’s coming back from the original cast and crew. The same could be said for composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose theme music for the series still evokes shots of sawmills, high waterfalls, rustling pines, and a deep, dark sense of mystery combined with the pangs of doomed romance.
In this selection from an August 19, 2016 concert from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Anthony Weeden, Badalamenti’s score is given a chance to stand alone as a composition without the visuals. Bathed in red light, the orchestra looks appropriately Lynchian, and all that’s missing is a large red curtain and zigzag flooring. The arrangement hews close to Badalamenti’s, though his small combo from the original soundtrack gets expanded to a full orchestra, with kettledrums, glockenspiel, harp, and concert bells. However, when “Laura Palmer’s Theme” segues into the title theme, the two-note twang is still played on electric guitar. (You can’t mess with that!)
In this context, Badalamenti’s nods to Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score are even more apparent, especially in the delicate, swelling love melody that is always in danger of sad collapse. The concert also featured selections from other great television soundtracks, including Game of Thrones, Homeland, Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, and more. The whole concert can be watched here.
“We had a fabulous time performing it —a very special part of the evening,” Anthony Weeden is quoted as saying on the go-to Welcome to Twin Peaks site. And he added, “I can’t wait for the new series!”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
They’ve teamed up with the printed electronics company Novalia to turn cardboard pizza boxes into playable turntables. Specializing in technology that adds touch and connectivity to everyday surfaces, Novalia has created two scratchable decks, each with controls that let you fine-tune the volume, pitch, playback, and crossfading. And it’s all done with the magic of conductive ink.
According to Live for Music, “the battery-powered box can be hooked up to a computer or phone through Bluetooth, then connected to any DJ software like Serato or DJ Pro.” Right now, the playable pizza box is only available at a few Pizza Hut locations in the UK. Above, DJ Vectra offers a primer on using the new gadget.
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A museum which contains only works of art that nobody can find sounds like something Jorge Luis Borges would’ve dreamed up, but it has twice become a reality in the 21st century — or twice become a virtual reality, anyway. “The Concert by Johannes Vermeer. Poppy Flowers by Vincent van Gogh. Rembrandt’sThe Storm on the Sea of Galilee. These are some of the world’s most famous and expensive paintings ever stolen,” writes Fast Company’s Mark Wilson. And though their whereabouts remain unknown, you can see them at The Museum of Stolen Art, “a virtual reality exhibition created by Ziv Schneider, a graduate student at Tisch ITP, that puts stolen works back on display.”
At the moment, Schneider’s project exists on Google’s virtual reality platform Cardboard, and you can download it as a smartphone app for iOS or Android. Its current exhibits include “a collection of photographs listed as stolen in the FBI’s art crime database”; the private collection of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, former president and first lady of the Philippines, now “being searched for by the PCGG – a Philippine government office in charge of seizing the Marcos’ ill gotten wealth and bringing it back”; and “a large collection of paintings stolen in some of the world’s most famous art heists, including the Stewart and Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston.”
But even before Schneider’s institution opened its virtual-reality doors, writes The Creators Project’s Becky Chung, “halfway across the world another institution — also called the Museum of Stolen Art — was debuting its gallery exhibition of works currently reported stolen or missing.” This Museum of Stolen Art, in the Netherlands, presents the Poppy Flowers and Waterloo Bridges of the art world in not virtual but augmented reality: its visitors raise their phones or tablets up to its meaningfully empty walls, and on their screens see the purloined works restored to their rightful frames. William Gibson, in some sense the Borgesian visionary of our tech-saturated time, has described augmented reality as the natural evolution of virtual reality. It’s made virtual art recovery possible; can virtual art theft be far behind?
Reminder: You can download The Museum of Stolen Art smartphone app on iOS and Android. The app is ideally designed for those with a Google cardboard viewer.
When prompted to think of the cinematic peaks of the 20th century, or of specific decades like the 1930s, the 1970s, or the 1990s, we can usually thread up specific examples in the projector of our mind right away. Grand Illusion and Gone with the Wind! Taxi Driver and The Godfather! Pulp Fiction and Fargo! But in this century it gets trickier. This probably doesn’t have to do with a precipitous drop in the quality of cinema itself, nor with a lack of films to consider — indeed, the 2000s and 2010s so far have burdened cinephiles with more critically-acclaimed pictures than they can get around to seeing.
The relative recency of the movies of the 21st century presents something of a challenge, since the zeitgeist hasn’t had quite enough time to digest most of them. And what now constitutes the “zeitgeist,” anyway? We live in a postmodern time, we often read, and that usually seems to mean that a greater variety of aesthetic sensibilities, historical periods, and world cultures now coexist for us on an essentially level playing field than ever before. The experience of the modern moviegoer reflects this condition, as does the BBC’s list of the 21st century’s 100 greatest films (so far), the top ten of which follow:
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
To produce the list, the BBC surveyed 177 critics “from every continent except Antarctica. Some are newspaper or magazine reviewers, others write primarily for websites; academics and cinema curators are well-represented too.” They note that they include the year 2000, though not technically part of the century, since “not only did we all celebrate the turn of the millennium on 31 December 1999, but the year 2000 was a landmark in global cinema, and, in particular, saw the emergence of new classics from Asia like nothing we had ever seen before,” not just Yi Yi and In the Mood for Love butAng Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a bit down the list.
France, though a country closely associated with mid-20th-century cinema, makes an admirable showing here with the likes of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners & I, Michael Haneke’s Caché, Claire Denis’ White Material, and Jean-Luc Godard’s voyage into 3D, Goodbye to Language. Some films shamefully overlooked at their initial release, like Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward RobertFord, appear here as perhaps a prelude to their rightful rediscovery. We can tell which auteurs have defined the cinematic century so far by the presence of more than one of their works: the late Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten and Certified Copy both appear, as do three films by Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and six by those still-ambitious once-wunderkinds of American cinema, the Andersons Wes and Paul Thomas.
Most of these movies exploit, to a deeper extent than the critically acclaimed pictures of decades previous, the creation of dreamlike experiences possible in film. None do it more vividly, perhaps, than the occupier of the top spot, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The selection will surprise some readers, and others not at all. What makes that particular movie so good? Conveniently, the BBC provides on the sidebar a link to an article by Luke Buckmaster explaining just that.
Buckmaster compares Mulholland Drive to Citizen Kane, “writer/director Orson Welles’ esteemed 1941 feature film debut – BBC Culture’s critics poll of the 100 greatest American films last year put Kane at number one. If Kane can be viewed as an essay on the nuts and bolts of film-making – a masterclass in technical processes, from montage to deep focus, dissolves and the manipulation of mise en scène – Mulholland Drive’s appeal is more thematic and conceptual. It is less a demonstration of how great cinema is achieved than what great cinema can achieve, its capacity for ideas seemingly endless.” May the remaining 84 years of the 21st century find that capacity more endless still.
The original Star Trek TV series took to the airwaves nearly 5o years ago–on September 8, 1966. Poor ratings meant that the show didn’t last very long (only three years). But everything changed once the show went into syndication. It achieved cult status. And a franchise was born. The original Star Trek has now spawned five additional tv series, 13 feature films, and a number of fan-made sequels.
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