“When lightning flashes across the sky, you only get a chance to glimpse its fractal form for a split second. But when you send 15,000 volts coursing through plywood, you get a much better look at how it grows. Melanie Hoff, a student at the Pratt Institute in New York City did just that, and the result is a timelapse where you can see the patterns slowly grow out and smolder, like lightning made from molasses.”
That’s the description that introduces the 15,000 Volts video on YouTube. On her own Vimeo Channel, Hoff adds a few more details about what you’re seeing above, saying “Yes, the grain of the wood influences the pattern and the direction [it takes]. The layers of veneer and the glue that holds them together causes the growth to progress much slower than in non-plywood. This is sped up hundreds of thousands of times” in the timelapse film. The musical accompaniment is “Aire De Zamba,” by Augustin Barrios Mangore.
Mark your calendars, music lovers, March 22nd is Dynamic Range Day and March 12th is the day Dave Grohl’s new documentary Sound City Studios gets wide release. What does this mean, you ask, and how are these things related? I’m getting there, hear me out. The digital age has brought us many bountiful rewards, it’s true, but it has also brought us the so-called “Loudness Wars”—basically, for several annoyingly boring technical reasons, digital recordings can be very highly compressed so as to sound subjectively louder than anything analog recording can produce. Sounds like a real bonus, right? Louder is better? Not so, say the organizers of Dynamic Range Day. Not so, say the participants in Dave Grohl’s documentary about the legendary Sound City Studios (trailer above) and his album of recordings using Sound City’s vintage analog Neve console.
See, highly compressed digital recordings basically sound like crappy walls of distorted noise after a while, which is ugly and tiresome. Gone is the dynamic range–the nuance, or light-and-shade, as music people sometimes like to say. This phenomenon—combined with the proliferation of low-grade mp3s and the digital trickery that makes bad singers sound tolerable—is ruining recorded music, and musicians know it, which is why so many great ones were excited to work with Grohl on his film and recording project, celebrating the lost art of live, all-analog recording. Well, that’s not the only reason. Founded in Van Nuys, CA in 1969, the dive‑y Sound City Studios also happens to be where some of the most-loved rock and roll records of all time were made, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush. (Rick Rubin also recorded Metallica’s Death Magnetic there—according to the purists and fans alike, one of the worst casualties of the Loudness Wars—but that’s a story for another day).
Now, Sound City Studios is no more, but its history has been documented by Grohl in Sound City, the movie, and Grohl preserved the studio’s beautiful analog gear, now housed in his Studio 606, and recorded a suite of songs with special guests from the film like Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Trent Reznor, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, punk legends Lee Ving and Pat Smear, and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme. That record, Sound City: Real to Reel is streaming free now on NPR. Listen to its sweet analog goodness above for a limited time (through your digital machine—hey, it is what it is, right?). Then, if you’re so inclined, you can purchase the record (or individual tracks) from iTunes or Amazon. The film will be available shortly on Blu-ray and download too.
Here’s a great reading by E.E. Cummings of his famous and widely anthologized poem, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” The poem has a bittersweet quality, dealing with the loneliness of the individual amid the crushing conformity of society, but in a playful way, like a nursery rhyme with delightfully shuffled syntax. It is the story of “anyone,” who lived in “a pretty how town” and was loved by “noone.” With the author’s idiosyncratic omission of some spacing, capitalization and punctuation, the poem begins:
anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
Women and men(both little and small) cared for anyone not at all they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same sun moon stars rain
Anyone who’s seen Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary about underground comics legend, R. Crumb, may consider themselves fairly conversant in both the art and the offbeat existence of the vintage-record-revering sexual adventurer and self-proclaimed wimp.
But does a traveler pass up the opportunity to visit Paris simply because he’s been there once before?
Unless you’re a virgin to the subject, The Confessions of Robert Crumb, a BBC doc whose release predated that of Zwigoff’s definitive portrait by seven years, will contain no major revelations. It’s still a lot of fun though, perhaps more so for having been scripted by its main attraction.
Crumb and his wife, fellow cartoonist, Aline Kominsky Crumb, were uneasy with Zwigoff’s portrayal, a reaction they documented in Head for the Hills!, a jointly authored, two-page comic in the New Yorker. Their objections ultimately lay with the notoriety the film would confer on them. Fame for Crumb is a monster-making drain on creativity. (“And I guarantee we won’t earn an extra dollar as a result of this wonderful exposure,” Aline adds in a word bubble, an observation the Crumb blog gives the lie to, nearly twenty years out.)
But in terms of what he was willing to own up to on camera, Crumb the screenwriter is far from a shrinking violet. The talking heads are minimized and the extended family kept to the shadows, but he’s frank about the erotic preoccupations that figure prominently in his work and have raised more than a few feminist hackles over the years. One might even say he plays it up in goofy staged bits, such as the one where he dons a lab coat to examine the powerful rear and kidney bean-shaped pelvic tilt of an impassive model clad in 80s-style Jane Fonda Workout wear. As social maladroits go, he’s not afraid to wear a lampshade on his head.
He also reveals himself as a lifelong learner, avidly researching his non-flesh-related passions. His interests are infectious. One hour with Crumb and you may find yourself spending the next two or three on esoteric topics ranging from James Gillray to Harry Roy and his Bat Club Boys.
In 2007, Kurt Cobain’s 1991 anti-anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was long etched into the consciousness of every music fan, but the musical landscape had changed considerably since its release. The inevitable mass appropriation of Nirvana’s thunderous dynamics and shaggy rebellion had turned out so much bland, overproduced grunge that the sound sank into unlistenable decadence. With indie artists doing Gang of Four-like dance punk, eighties electro, and anything at all that sounded nothing like Nirvana, some—like Iron and Wine and the Decembrists—picked up banjos and fiddles and reached back even further to moody Appalachian folk.
So when punk foremother Patti Smith re-interpreted Nirvana’s era-defining classic for her ’07 covers album Twelve, she choose the latter sound, a spare country arrangement with bass, acoustic guitar, violin, banjo, and Smith’s timeless voice. No need for drums, it’s been done; what we hear instead is the essence of the song’s lyrical and melodic power.
As most songwriters will tell you, a good song should strip down to voice and guitar without losing its heart. Smith’s version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” proves that Kurt Cobain’s songwriting stands up to the test, and the black and white video recalls Smith’s own photography. It’s a particularly Patti Smith memorial.
Loss defines so much of Smith’s late period work—of Cobain, her brother, late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, and close friend Robert Mapplethorpe—but her commemoration of those losses has also renewed her creatively. In a way, her career revival began with a memorial to Cobain, with the song “About a Boy” from her 1996 “comeback” record Gone Again, a partial collaboration with her husband not long before his death. Watch Smith below deliver a spellbinding live performance of “About a Boy” from a June 23, 2000 concert in Seattle.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Sure, creators of television’s disposable sitcoms and game shows have to sell their wares, and strenuously, to network executives. But The Twilight Zone? How could such an innovative, influential televisual institution have ever needed to push its way past gatekeepers? Yet watch the series’ 1959 pilot above, and, before that even starts, you’ll see creator Rod Serling himself make his pitch: “You gentlemen, of course, know how to push a product. My presence here is for much the same purpose: simply to push a product. To acquaint you with an entertainment product which we hope, and which we rather expect, would make your product-pushing that much easier. What you’re about to see, gentlemen, is a series called The Twilight Zone. We think it’s a rather special kind of series.” And how.
As the quintessential late-night, black-and-white plunge into the speculative, the bizarre, the moralistic, and the simply eerie, The Twilight Zone continues to captivate viewers—nowadays often, no doubt, YouTube viewers—born generations after the end of its run. The pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?” sets the tone by following a lone, bewildered man through a mysteriously empty town, seemingly abandoned moments ago. But before that rolls, Serling tantalizes the bosses with descriptions of other tales then in production: a man stuck on an asteroid with a robot, an immortal sentenced to life imprisonment, and a milquetoast mistaken for the fastest gun in the old west. Not for nothing did Serling build a reputation as an auteur of human loneliness. But that would come later. “Mr. Serling should not have much trouble in making his mark,” wrote the New York Times’ critic when the show first aired. “At least his series promises to be different.”
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Here’s a quick video that serves as an addendum to last week’s post, “Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Concise Philosophy of Art and Life. As you’ll recall, Bukowski’s headstone is engraved with the simple saying, “Don’t Try,” and, if you look back at his letters, the cryptic expression could be interpreted in any number of ways. (See our summary.) But, thanks to Andrew Sullivan, we can take another good whack at making sense of Bukowski’s immortal words. Released in a posthumously published collection in 2003, the Bukowski poem “So You Want to be a Writer?” (above) warns the reader:
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
Later, the poem continues:
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die
or it dies in you.
So here’s another way to interpret, “Don’t try.” Either you’ve got it, or you don’t. And you’ll know it if you do.
The video above comes from the Spoken Verses YouTube collection. Tom O’Bedlam always does a nice job with the readings. In this case, I’m not so sure about the visual selections in the clip. But it’s not a perfect world.
From 18bis, a Brazilian design & motion graphics studio, comes this: a free interpretation of “The Me Bird,” a poem by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda. Writes 18bis, “The inspiration in the strata stencil technique helps conceptualize the repetition of layers as the past of our movements and actions. The frames depicted as jail and the past as a burden serve as the background for the story of a ballerina on a journey towards freedom. A diversified artistic experimentation recreates the tempest that connects bird and dancer.” It’s all pretty wonderful.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
