The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

The 80-sec­ond clip above cap­tures a rock­et launch, some­thing of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or anoth­er. What makes its view­ers call it “the great­est shot in tele­vi­sion” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one view­ing to notice. In it, sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke speaks about how “cer­tain gas­es ignite, and that the ther­mos flask per­mits you to store vast quan­ti­ties of those gas­es safe­ly, in their frozen liq­uid form, until you want to ignite them.” Use a suf­fi­cient­ly large flask filled with hydro­gen and oxy­gen, design it to mix the gas­es and set light to them, and “you get that” — that is, you get the rock­et that launch­es behind Burke just as soon as he points to it.

One can only admire Burke’s com­po­sure in dis­cussing such tech­ni­cal mat­ters in a shot that had to be per­fect­ly timed on the first and only take. What you would­n’t know unless you saw it in con­text is that it also comes as the final, cul­mi­nat­ing moment of a 50-minute explana­to­ry jour­ney that begins with cred­it cards, then makes its way through the inven­tion of every­thing from a knight’s armor to canned food to air con­di­tion­ing to the Sat­urn V rock­et, which put man on the moon.

For­mal­ly speak­ing, this was a typ­i­cal episode of Con­nec­tions, Burke’s 1978 tele­vi­sion series that traces the most impor­tant and sur­pris­ing moves in the evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy through­out human his­to­ry.

Though not as wide­ly remem­bered as Carl Sagan’s slight­ly lat­er Cos­mos, Con­nec­tions bears repeat view­ing here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not least for the intel­lec­tu­al and visu­al brava­do typ­i­fied by this “great­est shot in tele­vi­sion,” now viewed near­ly 18 mil­lion times on Youtube. Watch it enough times your­self, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by hav­ing Burke walk from a non-time-sen­si­tive shot into anoth­er with the already-framed rock­et ready for liftoff. But that hard­ly lessens the feel­ing of achieve­ment when the launch comes off. “Des­ti­na­tion: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the plan­ets, or Peking” — a clos­ing line that sound­ed con­sid­er­ably more dat­ed a few years ago than it does today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Endeavour’s Launch Viewed from Boost­er Cam­eras

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

125 Great Sci­ence Videos: From Astron­o­my to Physics & Psy­chol­o­gy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Bruce Springsteen Endorses Kamala Harris & Makes the Case Against Donald Trump

The Boss speaks the truth in a din­er. Find it on Insta­gram.

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When Kris Kristofferson (RIP) Stood by Sinéad O’Connor at the Height of Her Controversy

One would have imag­ined Sinéad O’Con­nor imper­vi­ous to any reac­tion from a hos­tile audi­ence, no mat­ter how vit­ri­olic. But even for a pub­lic fig­ure as out­spo­ken and unapolo­getic as her, it could all get to be a bit much at times. Take the 1992 con­cert Colum­bia Records put on for the 30th anniver­sary of Bob Dylan’s first album. “Avail­able on pay-per-view,” writes the New York Times’ Marc Tra­cy, it “fea­tured per­for­mances by Dylan along with some of the biggest stars of his era, among them Ste­vie Won­der, George Har­ri­son, John­ny Cash and Eric Clap­ton,” as well as the late out­law-coun­try icon Kris Kristof­fer­son.

The young O’Con­nor also per­formed, despite being “at the cen­ter of a firestorm. Just two weeks ear­li­er, the Irish singer was the musi­cal guest on Sat­ur­day Night Live when, at the con­clu­sion of her sec­ond and final per­for­mance of the evening, she ripped up a pic­ture of Pope John Paul II and exhort­ed, ‘Fight the real ene­my,’ a defi­ant act of protest against sex­u­al abuse in the Catholic Church.” It fell to Kristof­fer­son to intro­duce her, where­upon she “took the stage to a cas­cade of applause and boos, which did not let up as O’Connor stood silent­ly at the micro­phone with her hands behind her back.”

As you can see in the video at the top of the post, Kristof­fer­son did­n’t stay off­stage. After a minute he “re-emerged from stage left, put his arm around O’Connor and whis­pered some­thing in her ear.” The show then went on, albeit not as planned: instead of doing Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” she did Bob Mar­ley’s “War,” the very same song she’d sung on SNL before the noto­ri­ous Pope-rip­ping. Rather than leav­ing his mes­sage as a Lost in Trans­la­tion moment, Kristof­fer­son lat­er revealed the words he’d sum­moned to encour­age her: “ ‘Don’t let the bas­tards get you down.’ To which, he said, she respond­ed: ‘I’m not down.’ ”

That response was char­ac­ter­is­tic of O’Con­nor, as was her 2021 auto­bi­og­ra­phy’s note that she was think­ing, “I don’t need a man to res­cue me, thanks.” What­ev­er her feel­ings in the moment, her friend­ship with Kristof­fer­son seems to have last­ed until her death last year. “Kristof­fer­son appeared with her in the 1997 music video for the song ‘This Is to Moth­er You,’ ” writes Tra­cy. “In 2010, the two per­formed a duet of Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ on an Irish talk show. It was a year after Kristof­fer­son had released a song about the 1992 inci­dent, ‘Sis­ter Sinead.’ ” Out­ward­ly, the two could hard­ly have had less in com­mon, but inward­ly, they must have rec­og­nized each oth­er as kin­dred spir­its — the likes of which we’ll sure­ly not see again.

via New York Times

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear a Rare First Record­ing of Janis Joplin’s Hit “Me and Bob­by McGee,” Writ­ten by Kris Kristof­fer­son

Shane Mac­Gowan & Sinéad O’Connor Duet Togeth­er, Per­form­ing a Mov­ing Ren­di­tion of “Haunt­ed” (RIP)

Sinéad O’Connor’s Raw Iso­lat­ed Vocals for “Noth­ing Com­pares 2 U”

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Trib­ute to Sinéad O’Connor & Per­forms “Noth­ing Com­pares 2 U”

5 Musi­cal Guests Banned From Sat­ur­day Night Live: From Elvis Costel­lo to Frank Zap­pa

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Is Now a Retro Video Game

The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show–it start­ed first as a musi­cal stage pro­duc­tion in 1973, then became a cult clas­sic film in 1975. Now, a half-cen­tu­ry lat­er, it gets reborn as a retro video game. Sched­uled to be released by Hal­loween, the game fea­tures “8‑bit chip­tune ren­di­tions of Rocky Hor­ror’s leg­endary songs,” includ­ing the “Time Warp” of course. Accord­ing to The Wrap, it also boasts “8‑bit-styled graph­ics bring­ing the show’s sets and char­ac­ters to life, com­bin­ing ’80s nos­tal­gia with the show’s ’70s retro vibes.” The game will be avail­able for Sony Playsta­tion, Xbox, Nin­ten­do Switch and Steam. Enjoy.

via The Wrap

Relat­ed Con­tent

How Rocky Hor­ror Became a Cult Phe­nom­e­non

1978 News Report on the Rocky Hor­ror Craze Cap­tures a Teenage Michael Stipe in Drag

Rare Inter­view: Tim Cur­ry Dis­cuss­es The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show, Dur­ing the Week of Its Release (1975)

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Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New Nazca Lines in Peru

If you vis­it one tourist site in Peru, it will almost cer­tain­ly be the ruined Incan city of Machu Pic­chu. If you vis­it anoth­er, it’ll prob­a­bly be the Naz­ca Desert, home to many large-scale geo­glyphs made by pre-Inca peo­ples between 500 BC and 500 AD. Many of these “Naz­ca lines” are lit­er­al­ly that, run­ning across the desert floor in an abstract fash­ion, but oth­ers are fig­u­ra­tive, depict­ing human beings, flo­ra, fau­na, and var­i­ous less eas­i­ly cat­e­go­riz­able chimeras. The preser­v­a­tive effects of the cli­mate kept many of these designs iden­ti­fi­able by the time mod­erns dis­cov­ered them in 1927, and thanks to arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy, researchers are find­ing new ones still today.

“A team from the Japan­ese Uni­ver­si­ty of Yamagata’s Naz­ca Insti­tute, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with IBM Research, dis­cov­ered 303 pre­vi­ous­ly unknown geo­glyphs of humans and ani­mals, all small­er in size than the vast geo­met­ric pat­terns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Naz­ca plateau,” writes the Guardian’s Dan Col­lyns.

“The use of AI com­bined with low-fly­ing drones rev­o­lu­tion­ized the speed and rate at which the geo­glyphs were dis­cov­ered, accord­ing to a research paper pub­lished this week in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences,” and many more Naz­ca lines could remain to be iden­ti­fied with these meth­ods.

The new­ly iden­ti­fied geo­glyphs “include birds, plants, spi­ders, human­like fig­ures with head­dress­es, decap­i­tat­ed heads and an orca wield­ing a knife,” writes CNN’s Katie Hunt. She also cites hypothe­ses about why the orig­i­nal cre­ators of these fig­ures did the painstak­ing work of dis­plac­ing stone after stone to cre­ate images most­ly invis­i­ble to the human eye: it’s pos­si­ble that “they formed a sacred space that was per­haps a place of pil­grim­age. Oth­er the­o­ries pro­pose they played a part in cal­en­dars, astron­o­my, irri­ga­tion or for move­ment, such as run­ning or danc­ing, or com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” Some of them, sure­ly, were meant only for the eyes of the gods, and so it may stand to rea­son that only our mod­ern gods of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have been able to reveal them.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Machu Pic­chu, One of the New 7 Won­ders of the World

The Solar Sys­tem Drawn Amaz­ing­ly to Scale Across 7 Miles of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

Peru­vian Singer & Rap­per, Rena­ta Flo­res, Helps Pre­serve Quechua with Viral Hits on YouTube

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

A Mys­te­ri­ous Mono­lith Appears in the Utah Desert, Chan­nel­ing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Perform a Rollicking Cover of the Mary Tyler Moore Theme Song (1996)

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Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by Son­ny Cur­tis and released in 1970, “Love Is All Around”–otherwise known as the Mary Tyler Moore theme song–has been cov­ered by many acts: Sam­my Davis JrHüsker Dü, and Joan Jett & the Black­hearts, to name a few. After releas­ing a stu­dio ver­sion in 1996, Jett per­formed the song live on the Late Show with David Let­ter­man that same year. If you’re old enough, this per­for­mance will give you a dou­ble dose of nos­tal­gia. It lets you recall the spir­it of 1970s sec­ond-wave-fem­i­nist tele­vi­sion, and it recap­tures the sheer play­ful­ness of Let­ter­man’s free­wheel­ing 90s late night show. Enjoy!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Joan Jett Start­ed the Run­aways at 15 and Faced Down Every Bar­ri­er for Women in Rock and Roll

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

What Makes a Cov­er Song Great?: Our Favorites & Yours

Frank Zappa’s 1980s Appear­ances on The David Let­ter­man Show

How Henri Matisse Scandalized the Art Establishment with His Daring Use of Color

Even those of us not par­tic­u­lar­ly well-versed in art his­to­ry have heard of a paint­ing style called fau­vism — and prob­a­bly have nev­er con­sid­ered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have every­thing to do with one anoth­er, at least in the sense of how cer­tain crit­ics regard­ed cer­tain artists in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. One of the most notable of those artists was Hen­ri Matisse, who since the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry had been explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of his deci­sion to “lean into the dra­mat­ic pow­er of col­or,” as Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak puts it in the new video above.

It was Matis­se’s uncon­ven­tion­al use of col­or, emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful but not strict­ly real­is­tic, that even­tu­al­ly got him labeled a wild beast. Even before that, in his famous 1904 Luxe, Calme et Volup­té, which has its ori­gins in a stay in St. Tropez, you can “feel Matisse forg­ing his own path. His col­ors are rebelling against their sub­jects. The paint­ing is anar­chic, fan­tas­ti­cal. It’s puls­ing with wild ener­gy.” He con­tin­ued this work on a trip to the south­ern fish­ing vil­lage of Col­lioure, “and even after more than a cen­tu­ry, the paint­ings that result­ed “still retain their defi­ant pow­er; the col­ors still sing with the dar­ing, the cre­ative reck­less­ness of that sum­mer.”

In essence, what shocked about Matisse and the oth­er fau­vists’ art was its sub­sti­tu­tion of objec­tiv­i­ty with sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, most notice­ably in its col­ors, but in sub­tler ele­ments as well. As the years went on — with sup­port com­ing from not the estab­lish­ment but far-sight­ed col­lec­tors — Matisse “learned how to use col­or to define form itself,” cre­at­ing paint­ings that “expressed deep, pri­mal feel­ings and rhythms.”  This evo­lu­tion cul­mi­nat­ed in La Danse, whose “shock­ing scar­let” used to ren­der “naked, danc­ing, leap­ing, spin­ning fig­ures who are less like peo­ple than mytho­log­i­cal satyrs” drew harsh­er oppro­bri­um than any­thing he’d shown before.

But then, “you can’t expect the instan­ta­neous accep­tance of some­thing rad­i­cal­ly new. If it was accept­ed, it would­n’t be rad­i­cal.” Today, “know­ing the direc­tions that mod­ern art went in, we now can appre­ci­ate the full sig­nif­i­cance of Matis­se’s work. We can be shocked at it with­out being scan­dal­ized.” And we can rec­og­nize that he dis­cov­ered a uni­ver­sal­ly res­o­nant aes­thet­ic that most of his con­tem­po­raries did­n’t under­stand —  or at least it seems that way to me, more than a cen­tu­ry lat­er and on the oth­er side of the world, where his art now enjoys such a wide appeal that it adorns the iced-cof­fee bot­tles at con­ve­nience stores.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

Why Georges Seurat’s Pointil­list Paint­ing A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te Is a Mas­ter­piece

When Hen­ri Matisse Was 83 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swim­ming Pool, So He Cre­at­ed a Swim­ming Pool as a Work of Art

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation

MTV stands for Music Tele­vi­sion, and when the net­work launched in 1981, its almost entire­ly music video-based pro­gram­ming was true to its name. With­in a decade, how­ev­er, its man­date had widened to the point that it had become the nat­ur­al home for prac­ti­cal­ly any excit­ing devel­op­ment in Amer­i­can youth cul­ture. And for many MTV view­ers in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, youth­ful or oth­er­wise, noth­ing was quite so excit­ing as Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion, whose every broad­cast con­sti­tut­ed a ver­i­ta­ble fes­ti­val of ani­ma­tion that pushed the medi­um’s bound­aries of pos­si­bil­i­ty — as well, every so often, as its bound­aries of taste.

Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s orig­i­nal three-sea­son run began in the sum­mer of 1991 and end­ed in ear­ly 1995. All through­out, its for­mat remained con­sis­tent, round­ing up ten or so shorts, each cre­at­ed by dif­fer­ent artists. Their themes could vary wild­ly, and so could their aes­thet­ics: any giv­en broad­cast might con­tain more or less con­ven­tion­al-look­ing car­toons, but also stick­men, pup­pets, ear­ly com­put­er graph­ics, sub­vert­ed nine­teen-fifties imagery (that main­stay of the Gen‑X sen­si­bil­i­ty), Japan­ese ani­me, and even live action, as in the recur­ring drag-show sit­com “Art School Girls of Doom” or the mul­ti-part adap­ta­tion of Charles Burns’ Dog­boy.

Burns’ is hard­ly the the only name asso­ci­at­ed with Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion that comics and ani­ma­tion fans will rec­og­nize. Oth­ers who gained expo­sure through it include Bill Plymp­ton, John R. Dil­worth, Richard Sala, and Mike Judge, whose series Beav­is and Butthead and fea­ture film Office Space both began as shorts seen on Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion.

But no dis­cus­sion of the show can exclude Peter Chung’s futur­is­tic, qua­si-mys­ti­cal, dia­logue-free Æon Flux, whose epony­mous acro­bat­ic assas­sin became a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto her­self. The Æon Flux episodes have been cut out of this 22-video Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion playlist, but you can also find a col­lec­tion of uncut broad­casts at the Inter­net Archive.

The Ton­gal video above cred­its the show’s influ­ence to the insight of the show’s cre­ator Japhet Ash­er, who saw that “the atten­tion span of your aver­age TV view­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly young peo­ple, was get­ting short­er and short­er.” Hence Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s mod­el: “If you did­n’t like the cur­rent short, anoth­er one, which would be total­ly dif­fer­ent, would be along in a few min­utes. Fur­ther­more, if a seg­ment was so inex­plic­a­bly bizarre and brain-tick­ling, per­haps an even more com­pelling one would come next.” At the time, this would have been tak­en by some observers — much like MTV itself — as a dis­turb­ing reflec­tion of an addled, over-stim­u­lat­ed younger gen­er­a­tion. But with Youtube still about a decade and a half away, it’s fair to say they had­n’t seen any­thing yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Post­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

When a Young Sofia Cop­po­la & Zoe Cas­savetes Made Their Own TV Show: Revis­it Hi-Octane (1994)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Free: Download Over 33,000 Sounds from the BBC Sound Effects Archive

There may be a few young peo­ple in Britain today who rec­og­nize the name Lud­wig Koch, but in the nine­teen-for­ties, he con­sti­tut­ed some­thing of a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto him­self. He “start­ed record­ing sounds and voic­es in the 1880s when he was still a child” in his native Ger­many, says the web­site of the BBC. After flee­ing from the Nazis, he set­tled in Eng­land, which cre­at­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the Beeb to acquire his col­lec­tion of field record­ings, using it to start build­ing its own library of nature sounds. Soon, Koch “became a house­hold name as a nature broad­cast­er,” and his “dis­tinct Ger­man accent and eccen­tric loca­tion record­ings became so well known that he was par­o­died by Peter Sell­ers.”

You can hear 168 of Koch’s field record­ings at the online archive of BBC Sound Effects, whose dig­i­tal hold­ings have in recent years grown to include over 33,000 dif­fer­ent sounds from var­i­ous sources, span­ning more than a cen­tu­ry.

“These include clips made by the BBC Radio­phon­ic work­shop, record­ings from the Blitz in Lon­don, spe­cial effects made for BBC TV and Radio pro­duc­tions, as well as 15,000 record­ings from the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Unit archive,” says its About page. “You can explore sounds from every con­ti­nent — from the col­lege bells ring­ing in Oxford to a Patag­on­ian water­fall — or lis­ten to a sub­ma­rine klax­on or the sound of a 1969 Ford Corti­na door slam­ming shut.”

The BBC has made all these record­ings free for your own non-com­mer­cial use, as long as you cred­it where they came from. To put them into a com­mer­cial project, you can license them by click­ing “Show details,” and then the “Buy sound” but­ton that appears right below. The archive also offers a “mix­er mode,” which lets you “lay­er, edit and re-order clips from the archive to cre­ate your own sounds,” poten­tial­ly mash­ing up a wide vari­ety of times and places into a sin­gle sound­scape. A chac­ma baboon wield­ing a laser in a Bel­gian café, for instance, or a laugh­ing woman brew­ing a ket­tle of water at a bull­fight in Spain: hard­ly the sort of aur­al scenes that would be intro­duced by Lud­wig Koch, grant­ed, but here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, the only lim­it is your imag­i­na­tion. Enter the BBC Sound Effects Archive here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Down­load 1,000+ Dig­i­tized Tapes of Sounds from Clas­sic Hol­ly­wood Films & TV, Cour­tesy of the Inter­net Archive

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Michael Winslow, the “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects”, Imper­son­ates the Sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s and Led Zeppelin’s Elec­tric Gui­tars with His Voice

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

David Bowie’s Fashionable Mug Shot From His 1976 Marijuana Bust


David Bowie always man­aged to look cool, even when he was being booked for a felony.

In ear­ly 1976, Bowie was on his “Iso­lar” tour, per­form­ing as the Thin White Duke, a per­sona he would describe as “a very Aryan fas­cist type — a would-be roman­tic with no emo­tions at all.” Bowie invit­ed his friend and some­time cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tor Iggy Pop to trav­el with him.

In the ear­ly morn­ing hours of March 21, after a con­cert at the Com­mu­ni­ty War Memo­r­i­al are­na in Rochester, New York, four local vice squad detec­tives and a state police inves­ti­ga­tor searched Bowie’s three-room suite at the Amer­i­cana Rochester Hotel. Accord­ing to reports in the Rochester Demo­c­rat and Chron­i­cle, the cops found 182 grams (a lit­tle over 6.4 ounces) of mar­i­jua­na there. Bowie and three oth­ers — Pop, a body­guard named Dwain Voughns, and a young Rochester woman named Chi­wah Soo — were charged with fifth-degree crim­i­nal pos­ses­sion of mar­i­jua­na, a class C felony, pun­ish­able by up to 15 years in prison.

Bowie and Pop were booked under their real names, David Jones and James Oster­berg Jr. The group spent the rest of the night in the Mon­roe Coun­ty Jail and were released at about 7 a.m. on $2,000 bond each. They were sup­posed to be arraigned the next day, but Bowie left town to go to his next con­cert in Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts. His lawyer appeared and asked for the court’s indul­gence, explain­ing the heavy penal­ties for break­ing con­cert engage­ments. He promised the judge that Bowie would appear the fol­low­ing morn­ing, March 23.

Bowie showed up for his arraign­ment look­ing dap­per in his Thin White Duke cloth­ing. It was then that his mug shot was tak­en — so we’ll nev­er actu­al­ly know what Bowie looked like when he was unex­pect­ed­ly dragged into jail at 3 a.m. The police escort­ed the rock star in and out of the court­room most­ly through back cor­ri­dors, shield­ing him from a crowd of fans who showed up at the cour­t­house. Reporter John Stew­art describes the scene in the next day’s Demo­c­rat and Chron­i­cle:

Bowie and his group ignored reporters’ shout­ed ques­tions and fans’ yells as he walked in — except for one teenag­er who got his auto­graph as he stepped off the esca­la­tor.

His biggest greet­ing was the screams of about a half-dozen sus­pect­ed pros­ti­tutes await­ing arraign­ment in the rear of the cor­ri­dor out­side the court­room.

Asked for a plea by City Court Judge Alphonse Cas­set­ti to the charge of fifth-degree crim­i­nal pos­ses­sion of a con­trolled sub­stance, Bowie said, “not guilty, sir.” The court used his real name — David Jones.

He stood demure­ly in front of the bench with his attor­neys. He wore a gray three-piece leisure suit and a pale brown shirt. He was hold­ing a match­ing hat. His two com­pan­ions were arraigned on the same charge.

The defense lawyer told the judge that Bowie and the oth­ers had nev­er been arrest­ed before. The judge allowed them to remain free on bond until a grand jury con­vened. Bowie and his entourage went on with their tour, and the grand jury even­tu­al­ly decid­ed not to indict any­one. The inci­dent was large­ly for­got­ten until an auc­tion house employ­ee named Gary Hess stum­bled on Bowie’s mug shot while sort­ing through the estate of a retired Rochester police offi­cer. Hess res­cued the pho­to from the trash bin, accord­ing to an arti­cle in Rochester Sub­way, and in late 2007 his broth­er sold it on eBay for $2,700.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Thin White Duke: A Close Study of David Bowie’s Dark­est Char­ac­ter

John Coltrane’s Naval Reserve Enlist­ment Mugshot (1945)

David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good & Bad of the Inter­net in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Some­thing Exhil­a­rat­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing”

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

How Kodak Invented the Snapshot in the 1800s, Making It Possible for Everyone to Be a Photographer

We still occa­sion­al­ly speak of “Kodak moments,” mak­ing con­scious or uncon­scious ref­er­ence to the slo­gan of the East­man Kodak Com­pa­ny in the nine­teen-eight­ies. Even by that time, Kodak had already been a going con­cern for near­ly a cen­tu­ry, fur­nish­ing pho­tog­ra­phers around the world with the film they need­ed to cap­ture images. Its very first slo­gan, unveiled in 1888, was “You Press the But­ton, We Do the Rest,” and it her­ald­ed the arrival of a new era: one in which, thanks to the com­pa­ny’s No. 1 box cam­era (loaded with the new medi­um of roll film), pho­tographs could be “tak­en by peo­ple with lit­tle or no pre­vi­ous knowl­edge of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

So says Vox’s Cole­man Lown­des in the new video above, which explains how this inven­tion changed the nature of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. Peo­ple began using Kodak cam­eras “to doc­u­ment their trav­els and their dai­ly lives at home”; they “took por­traits of each oth­er, but also can­did street scenes.” Such was the nov­el­ty of tak­ing a pic­ture so quick­ly and eas­i­ly — and well out­side a stu­dio — that it demand­ed a new word, or rather, the adop­tion of a word from anoth­er domain: snap­shot, which up until then had referred to “a quick shot with a gun, with­out aim, at a fast-mov­ing tar­get.” Before Kodak, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er sim­ply had no way to cap­ture the moment.

But it was only with the intro­duc­tion of the inex­pen­sive Brown­ie, “a sim­ple box cam­era made of card­board encased in faux leather,” that every­one — even a child — could become a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. “Take a Kodak with You,” sug­gest­ed anoth­er of the com­pa­ny’s slo­gans in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, and mil­lions took heed. Its posi­tion as both a cor­po­rate and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion was­n’t seri­ous­ly threat­ened until the end of that cen­tu­ry, when Japan’s Fuji­film “had begun to eat away at the Amer­i­can pho­to giant’s mar­ket share,” and then dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy destroyed wide swaths of the film busi­ness at a stroke.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the first dig­i­tal cam­era was invent­ed in 1975 by a Kodak engi­neer, “but the com­pa­ny, which from the begin­ning had built itself on sell­ing and pro­cess­ing film rather than man­u­fac­tur­ing cam­eras, did­n’t make the change soon enough.” After final­ly enter­ing bank­rupt­cy in 2012, Kodak reor­ga­nized to “focus on dig­i­tal print­ing ser­vices rather than film devel­op­ment,” which has by now become “a some­what niche mar­ket of ded­i­cat­ed hob­by­ists.” Also doing its part to keep the com­pa­ny afloat is its line of logo-embla­zoned appar­el, which holds out a retro appeal all across the world — even to young­sters quick enough on the draw with their cam­era phones that every moment might as well be a Kodak moment.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

How Film Was Made in 1958: A Kodak Nos­tal­gia Moment

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

The Very Con­cise Sui­cide Note by Kodak Founder George East­man: “My Work is Done. Why Wait?” (1932)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice for Aspir­ing Pho­tog­ra­phers: Skip the Fan­cy Equip­ment & Just Shoot

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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