Heat Mapping the Rise of Bruce Springsteen: How the Boss Went Viral in a Pre-Internet Era

in Google, Music, Technology | September 17th, 2012

A friend of mine and for­mer musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor was mar­ried this past week­end in Asbury Park, New Jer­sey, where Spring­steen got his start with his first album in 1973. This was deliberate—she’s  a die-hard Jer­sey girl and the biggest Spring­steen fan I’ve ever met. But while Spring­steen is firm­ly root­ed in his work­ing-class New Jer­sey, he is also a poet of Amer­i­cana writ large (Nebras­ka is my favorite record), and his songs are as much cel­e­bra­tions of his home state as they are eulo­gies of it, or rous­ing calls to hit the road and leave the Jerz behind. All that’s to say, Spring­steen is some­thing of a rock-and-roll geo­g­ra­ph­er, so he’s the per­fect sub­ject for the Map­brief project above which charts his career from folk trou­ba­dour to are­na-rock hit­mak­er and back again–from 1973 to the present–by show­ing the impact of each album’s tour on a map of the U.S. Here are some things to keep in mind as you watch the visu­al­iza­tion above:

    • each red dot is a per­for­mance (data cour­tesy of the Killing Floor data­base).
    • the inten­si­ty or “heat” gen­er­at­ed is a func­tion of the loca­tion of a show, the size of the venue, and inverse­ly cor­re­lat­ed with the over­all pop­u­la­tion with­in 40km of the con­cert loca­tion. So for instance, a sin­gle are­na show in New York City will gen­er­ate less heat than a sin­gle are­na show in Oma­ha, NE.
    • there is a taper­ing effect applied so return­ing to a par­tic­u­lar area with­in a few months will reflect a cumu­la­tive heat effect (**Click here for inter­ac­tive map ver­sion).

Using the geographer’s method­ol­o­gy of read­ing expan­sion dif­fu­sion and hier­ar­chi­cal dif­fu­sion, cre­ator Bri­an Tim­o­ny draws some inter­est­ing con­clu­sions about the nature of “going viral” in a pre-inter­net age, and about the con­tin­u­ing impor­tance of place, despite its osten­si­ble era­sure by the Inter­net. Tim­o­ny writes, “the Jer­sey Shore pro­vid­ed a unique, acces­si­ble sym­bol­ic res­o­nance to audi­ences that res­onates as a Place.  (In stark con­trast to the way a mil­lion bands from Brook­lyn today fail to con­vince the rest of us of the intrin­sic awe­some­ness of…Brooklyn.)”

It’s worth noth­ing that almost none of those “Brook­lyn” bands actu­al­ly come from Brook­lyn and can claim it in the way Spring­steen claims the Jer­sey Shore. That kind of anchor has always seemed to give him license to explore musi­cal forms and metaphors from the South and Mid­west in authen­tic and per­son­al ways. A coun­terex­am­ple, of course, is Bob Dylan, who seems to come from nowhere at all, but the wan­der­ing mys­tic min­strel also fig­ures into Timony’s scheme. He con­cludes by not­ing that the abil­i­ty of Spring­steen, Dylan, and Leonard Cohen to still com­mand the stage and defy the cult of youth in pop cul­ture exem­pli­fies “the wise-man/shaman/en­ter­tain­er who is best equipped to chan­nel both what the audi­ence wants to hear and what it needs to hear.” Not a strict­ly “geo­graph­i­cal” point, but it’s a hard one to argue with all the same.

via Metafil­ter

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen Sin­gin’ in the Rain in Italy, and How He Cre­ates Pow­er­ful Imag­i­nary Worlds

Bruce Springsteen’s Per­son­al Jour­ney Through Rock ‘n’ Roll (Slight­ly NSFW But Sim­ply Great)

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How Leo Tolstoy Learned to Ride a Bike at 67, and Other Tales of Lifelong Learning

in Life, Literature | September 15th, 2012

Some say you’re nev­er too old to learn some­thing new. Oth­ers say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Well, you know where we come down on this. And we’ve got some celebri­ty case stud­ies to back us up. In a blog post yes­ter­day, The New York Times fea­tured four cul­tur­al icons and one war hero who learned new skills lat­er in life. Miles Davis start­ed box­ing when most box­ers are hang­ing up their gloves. Ayn Rand, in her 60s, improb­a­bly took up the hob­by of stamp col­lect­ing. Marie Curie learned to swim in her 50s. And the great nov­el­ist Leo Tol­stoy took his first bike ride at the age of 67. The Times writes that he start­ed cycling:

only a month after the death of his 7‑year-old son, Vanich­ka. He was still griev­ing, and the Moscow Soci­ety of Veloci­pede-Lovers pro­vid­ed him a free bike and instruc­tion along the gar­den paths on his estate. He became a devo­tee, tak­ing rides after his morn­ing chores. “Count Leo Tol­stoy … now rides the wheel,” declared Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can in 1896, “much to the aston­ish­ment of the peas­ants on his estate.”

Appar­ent­ly that’s Tol­stoy and his bike above.

via @kirstinbutler

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Days of Leo Tol­stoy Cap­tured on Video

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

The Art of Leo Tol­stoy: See His Draw­ings in the War & Peace Man­u­script & Oth­er Lit­er­ary Texts

 

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The Making of Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant’s First Major Film (1989)

in Film | September 14th, 2012

Port­land, 1988. Film­mak­er Gus Van Sant shoots Drug­store Cow­boy, the project that will bring he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors a for­mi­da­ble burst of main­stream atten­tion. Star­ring Matt Dil­lon, Kel­ly Lynch, and Heather Gra­ham, the film fol­lows a rov­ing quar­tet of drug addicts — and, con­se­quent­ly, drug thieves, espe­cial­ly from the busi­ness­es of the title — who wash up in Port­land’s then-grit­ty Pearl Dis­trict. A death among their own spooks the leader of the pack into try­ing to clean up, and an encounter with a sepul­chral junkie priest does its part to con­vince him fur­ther. Or maybe we should call him a Junkie priest, por­trayed as he is by a con­tro­ver­sial cameo from writer William S. Bur­roughs. “I’m going back to the old days,” Bur­roughs says of his role ear­ly in the above doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of Drug­store Cow­boy. “The old days when they used to give peo­ple mor­phine in jail. The old days before the methadone pro­grams.”

This footage cap­tures Van Sant on the point of tran­si­tion between obscu­ri­ty and fame. His pre­vi­ous work — semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal shorts on Super 8 film, the unre­leased fall­en-actress sto­ry Alice in Hol­ly­wood, and the retroac­tive­ly acclaimed grim snap­shot of grim psy­cho­sex­u­al strife Mala Noche — demon­strat­ed that he could make uni­ver­sal­ly affect­ing movies about kids on the skids and their poten­tial redemp­tion. But thrown into this $2.5 mil­lion pro­duc­tion, he found him­self in anoth­er realm entire­ly: a full pro­fes­sion­al cast, a full pro­fes­sion­al crew, and a pho­tog­ra­phy depart­ment that could take up to twen­ty min­utes (he says, with exas­per­a­tion) to light. “I’m caught in the mid­dle of this trav­el­ing cir­cus,” he reflects, weari­ly. “This is exact­ly the kind of thing I did­n’t want to hap­pen: I did­n’t want peo­ple hang­ing around, jok­ing, drink­ing cof­fee,” he says, cof­fee in hand. But from this com­bi­na­tion of col­lec­tive lax­ness and direc­to­r­i­al anx­i­ety arose one of the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed Amer­i­can films of 1989. Van Sant describes it as an “anti-drug” film, but Bur­roughs sug­gests a broad­er mes­sage: “Say no to drug hys­te­ria. Or any oth­er kind of hys­te­ria, for that mat­ter.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Gus Van Sant Adapts William S. Bur­roughs: An Ear­ly 16mm Short

William S. Bur­roughs’ “The Thanks­giv­ing Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Yeah, Baby! Deep Purple Gets Shagadelic on Playboy After Dark

in Music, Television | September 14th, 2012

This is so bad it’s good. Or maybe, as the char­ac­ter played by Tho­ra Birch dead­pans in a mem­o­rable scene in Ter­ry Zwigof­f’s film Ghost World, “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.”

In any case once it gets going you may find it hard to resist watch­ing this clip from the Sep­tem­ber 23, 1968 episode of Hugh Hefn­er’s syn­di­cat­ed TV pro­gram Play­boy After Dark. It looks like it came straight out of an Austin Pow­ers movie. The show was chore­o­graphed to rep­re­sent the hippest, groovi­est cock­tail par­ty ever.

The musi­cal guests that night were the British rock group Deep Pur­ple, who had formed only nine months ear­li­er and were still in their orig­i­nal line­up, which fea­tured Rod Evans on vocals and Nick Sim­per on bass (both of whom left the band less than a year lat­er) along with Jon Lord on organ, Richie Black­more on gui­tar and Ian Paice on drums.

Look­ing debonair in his black tie and jack­et, Hefn­er fakes inter­est in a brief gui­tar les­son from Black­more before chat­ting awk­ward­ly with Lord (who died last month) and ask­ing the group to play their first hit, “Hush” (writ­ten and orig­i­nal­ly record­ed by Joe South, who also died recent­ly), which had just made it to the top five in the Amer­i­can pop charts around the time of the broad­cast. Says Hef: “I think it would real­ly groove the kids if you’d do that.”

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With Or Without U: Promoting a Scrabble Book to the Tune of U2

in Books, Music | September 14th, 2012

David Buk­sz­pan’s new book for Scrab­ble afi­ciona­dos is out — Is That a Word? From AA to ZZZ, the Weird and Won­der­ful Lan­guage of SCRABBLE®. And, when it comes to pro­mot­ing the book, Buk­sz­pan and his pub­lish­ers aren’t cut­ting cor­ners. In the book trail­er above, we find the author chan­nel­ing the young Bono — the Bono who came into star­dom in 1987’s wide­ly-played video for “With or With Out You” (below). Watch­ing the two clips togeth­er, you’ll see that the aes­thet­ic remains entire­ly the same. But the “You” in “With or With­out You” takes on a new mean­ing. H/T Gal­l­ey­Cat

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William S. Burroughs Shows You How to Make “Shotgun Art”

in Art, Literature | September 14th, 2012

It’s no secret that William S. Bur­roughs liked guns. He’s shot both Shake­speare and him­self in effi­gy, and in a bizarre and trag­ic acci­dent, he shot and killed his wife. In addi­tion to shoot­ing at peo­ple, he also shot at spray paint cans to cre­ate abstract paint­ings, known as “shot­gun art.” His paint­ings have appeared in gal­leries and one of them, once owned by Tim­o­thy Leary, was auc­tioned off a few years ago on Ebay. In the film above (date unknown), watch Bur­roughs in action with a rifle. He described the process in an inter­view with Gre­go­ry Ego:

There is no exact process. If you want to do shot­gun art, you take a piece of ply­wood, put a can of spray paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shot­gun or high pow­ered rifle. The paint’s under high pres­sure so it explodes! Throws the can 300 feet. The paint sprays in explod­ing col­or across your sur­face. You can have as many col­ors as you want. Turn it around, do it side­ways, and have one col­or com­ing in from this side and this side. Of course, they hit. Mix in all kinds of unpre­dictable pat­terns. This is relat­ed to Pol­lack­’s drip can­vas­es, although this is a rather more basi­cal­ly ran­dom process, there’s no pos­si­bil­i­ty of pre­dict­ing what pat­terns you’re going to get.

This is, admit­ted­ly, a very lo-fi film. It appears to have been shot on super‑8, and about two thirds of the way through, the cam­era flips upside down, then seems to have been tossed into a car. The sound goes out, and the last minute cap­tures a cloud-strewn Kansans sky speed­ing by in silence. It’s a strange and cap­ti­vat­ing piece of found art that, like Bur­roughs’ work, con­tains casu­al vio­lence, odd per­spec­tives, herky-jerky edit­ing, sud­den con­fu­sion and upheaval, and rare moments of beau­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

William S. Bur­roughs Sends Anti-Fan Let­ter to In Cold Blood Author Tru­man Capote: “You Have Sold Out Your Tal­ent”

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Pi in the Sky: The World’s Largest Ephemeral Art Installation over Beautiful San Francisco

in Art, Technology | September 13th, 2012

Yes­ter­day, on my way to lunch, I looked up and saw it — the world’s largest ephemer­al art instal­la­tion called “Pi in the Sky.” The instal­la­tion fea­tured planes fly­ing through the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area skies, using dot matrix print­er tech­nol­o­gy to write out the first 1,000 dig­its of the num­ber Pi. Pre­sent­ed as part of the 2012 ZERO1 Bien­ni­al, a fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing art and tech­nol­o­gy in Sil­i­con Val­ley, the Pi project was the brain­child of ISHKY, an eclec­tic col­lab­o­ra­tion of artists, pro­gram­mers and sci­en­tists look­ing to explore “the bound­aries of scale, pub­lic space, imper­ma­nence, and the rela­tion­ship between Earth and the phys­i­cal uni­verse.” You can learn more about the ini­tia­tive by watch­ing a video (below) from ISHKY’s Kick­starter cam­paign:

And here you can watch the art instal­la­tion in real­time, as we saw it yes­ter­day:

via Giz­mo­do

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Empire State of Pen: Patrick Vale’s Epic Freehand Drawing of the Manhattan Skyline

in Art | September 13th, 2012

Give UK artist Patrick Vale 80 sec­onds, and he’ll show you his free­hand draw­ing of New York City unfold in rapid-fire motion. Vale plant­ed him­self on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Build­ing, looked out­side his win­dow, and began draw­ing, with his iPhone duct taped to a ros­trum and record­ing the action. From start to fin­ish, the draw­ing took, he says in a Huff­Po inter­view, four to five days. He calls the draw­ing of the Man­hat­tan sky­line “Empire State of Pen.” The great Charles Min­gus pro­vides the sound­track.

via Metafil­ter

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.