89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love: A 50th Anniversary Playlist

in Music | August 3rd, 2017

Image by Bryan Costales, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The Sum­mer of Love was not just a sea­son of great music and the zenith of the flower child, but the cul­mi­na­tion of a move­ment that start­ed back on a chill­i­er Bay Area day, on Jan­u­ary 14, 1967. That was the month of the Human Be-In, and what must have looked like a full on inva­sion of the coun­ter­cul­ture into Gold­en Gate Park. The back­drop of this out­pour­ing of good vibra­tions was any­thing but lov­ing: Viet­nam, inner city riots, Civ­il Rights, and a huge gen­er­a­tion gap. The crowd size was esti­mat­ed at 100,000, and every­body there sud­den­ly real­ized they weren’t alone. They were a force.

Joel Selvin, inter­viewed by Michael Kras­ny for this KQED seg­ment on the Sum­mer of Love (lis­ten here), says that the real Sum­mer of Love for San Fran­cis­cans at least, hap­pened in 1966, when it was a local secret. One year lat­er, the hip­pie move­ment had become main­stream. And that’s when every band on both sides of the Atlantic had turned on to the zeit­geist, and the gates of psy­che­del­ic music opened up.

Today, we have a playlist of 89 songs to com­mem­o­rate the 50th anniver­sary of that his­toric sum­mer. (Down­load Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware here, if you need it.) If you are com­ing to this as a music fan, but not some­body who lived through that era, you might think you know all the songs from that peri­od, hav­ing had them ham­mered into your brain over the years from the ubiq­ui­tous hits of clas­sic rock radio, and nos­tal­gic movies.

There are of course the stone cold clas­sics from 1967, with not one but two Bea­t­les releas­es, includ­ing the icon­ic Sgt. Pep­per album; the best two songs from Jef­fer­son Air­plane; Pro­col Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”; the Who’s best psy­che­del­ic song “I Can See for Miles”; Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Expe­ri­enced?” and “Hey Joe”; the Rolling Stones’ move into cham­ber pop with “Ruby Tues­day” and their own trip­py “She’s a Rain­bow” and “We Love You”—the last time they ever felt lovey dovey about any­thing; and the first releas­es by the Doors.

Soul and R’n’B was also at the height of its mid-60s pow­er, with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” Mar­vin Gaye and Tam­mi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough”, and Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” infect­ing the charts.

“We were rid­ing the crest of a high and beau­ti­ful wave,” is how Hunter S. Thomp­son famous­ly put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and this playlist might just con­vince you of that con­sid­er­ing how music seemed to frac­ture so soon after—even the Bea­t­les would be deliv­er­ing that strange and some­times fright­en­ing trip of a White Album a year lat­er. Viet­nam would con­tin­ue to drag on, and the decade’s metaphor­i­cal end at Alta­mont was loom­ing on the hori­zon, not that many could see it. (By the way, Joel Selvin just wrote a very good book on that dark, decade-end­ing con­cert.)

Enjoy the playlist and argue over what’s miss­ing in the com­ments. (No “Water­loo Sun­set”? “I Sec­ond That Emo­tion”? “Glo­ria”? Hmmph!)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage of the “Human Be-In,” the Land­mark Counter-Cul­ture Event Held in Gold­en Gate Park, 1967

Jimi Hen­drix Opens for The Mon­kees on a 1967 Tour; Then After 8 Shows, Flips Off the Crowd and Quits

Paul McCart­ney Admits to Drop­ping Acid in a Scrap­py Inter­view with a Pry­ing Reporter (June, 1967)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the 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.

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Siri Can Sing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”

in Random | August 2nd, 2017

It’s true. And you can try it your­self, at home. Just sing “I see a lit­tle sil­hou­et­to of a man.” Then let Siri do the rest.

Have fun!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

65,000 Fans Break Into a Sin­ga­long of Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” at a Green Day Con­cert in London’s Hyde Park

1910 Fair­ground Organ Plays Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” and It Works Like a Charm

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty: String The­o­ry Explored With an A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion of Bohemi­an Rhap­sody

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Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975

in Music, Poetry | August 2nd, 2017

Note: The first poem and oth­ers con­tain some offen­sive lan­guage.

In the con­text of the rad­i­cal socio-polit­i­cal change of 1975, Pat­ti Smith announced her­self to the world with Hors­es, “the first real full-length hint of the artis­tic fer­ment tak­ing place in the mid-‘70s at the junc­ture of Bow­ery and Bleeck­er,” writes Mac Ran­dall. Though born in an insu­lar down­town milieu, Smith’s view was vast, con­duct­ing the poet­ry of the past—of Rim­baud, the Beats, and rock and roll—into an uncer­tain future, through the nascent medi­um of punk rock. The album is “close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the begin­ning of some­thing,” and yet is “so con­cerned with end­ings”: the loss of Jimi Hen­drix (at whose stu­dio Smith record­ed), and of “oth­er depart­ed coun­ter­cul­ture heroes like Jim Mor­ri­son, Janis Joplin and Bri­an Jones.”

In a way, Smith’s voice defines the piv­otal moment in which it arrived: antic­i­pat­ing an anx­ious age of aus­ter­i­ty and wom­en’s lib­er­a­tion; mourn­ing the loss of 60s ide­al­ism and the promise of racial equi­ty. She was a female artist ful­ly uncon­strained by patri­ar­chal expec­ta­tions, with com­plete author­i­ty over her vision. “My peo­ple were try­ing to forge a new bridge between the peo­ple we had lost and learned from and the future,” she recent­ly remarked.

In her “fab­u­lous­ly grand” way, she told The Guardian’s Simon Hat­ten­stone in 2013, “I felt in the cen­ter, not quite the old gen­er­a­tion, not quite the new gen­er­a­tion. I felt like the human bridge.” Smith was no naïf when she made Hors­es, but a con­fi­dent artist who, at 29, had worked in the­ater with her late­ly-depart­ed friend Sam Shep­ard, become her famous lover Robert Mapplethorpe’s favorite sub­ject, joined the St. Mark’s Poet­ry Project, and pub­lished two col­lec­tions of verse.

She thought of her­self as a poet who “got side­tracked” by music. “When I was young,” Smith says, “all I want­ed was to write books and be an artist.” But poet­ry was always cen­tral to her work; Hors­es, she says, “evolved organ­i­cal­ly” from her first poet­ry read­ing, four years ear­li­er, at St. Mark’s Church, along­side Allen Gins­berg, William Bur­roughs, and oth­er lumi­nar­ies. Above, you can hear her dis­cuss that atten­tion-grab­bing first read­ing, and at the top of the post, lis­ten to Smith at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty in 1975, read­ing the poems that devel­oped that year into the songs on Hors­es, includ­ing her 1971 “Oath,” which begins with a vari­a­tion on Hors­es’ open­ing sneer, “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

Be warned the first poem she reads con­tains offen­sive lan­guage, as do many oth­ers. No one should be shocked by this. But some who only know Smith as a singer may be sur­prised by her mas­ter­ful lit­er­ary voice and wicked sense of humor. She has always been an elegist, mourn­ing her cul­tur­al heroes, most of whom died young, as well as a trag­ic string of per­son­al loss­es. “When I start­ed work­ing with the mate­r­i­al that became Hors­es,” she remem­bers, “a lot of our great voic­es had died.” But her intent went beyond ele­gy, beyond a maudlin appro­pri­a­tion of fad­ing 60s heroes. Smith had a “mis­sion,” she says, of “form­ing a cul­tur­al voice through rock’n’roll that incor­po­rat­ed sex and art and poet­ry and per­for­mance and rev­o­lu­tion.” It sounds grandiose, but it’s a mis­sion she’s large­ly ful­filled. At the cen­ter of her project is poet­ry as per­for­mance, as a means of enter­tain­ing, shock­ing, and seduc­ing an audi­ence. The read­ing at the top is an espe­cial­ly faith­ful record of her fear­less onstage per­sona.

Find more poet­ry read­ings in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Pat­ti Smith Read 12 Poems From Sev­enth Heav­en, Her First Col­lec­tion (1972)

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Pat­ti Smith’s New Haunt­ing Trib­ute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover Langston Hughes’ Rent Party Ads & The Harlem Renaissance Tradition of Playing Gigs to Keep Roofs Over Heads

in History, Jazz, Music, Poetry | August 2nd, 2017

Both com­mu­ni­ties of col­or and com­mu­ni­ties of artists have had to take care of each oth­er in the U.S., cre­at­ing sys­tems of sup­port where the dom­i­nant cul­ture fos­ters neglect and depri­va­tion. In the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, at the nexus of these two often over­lap­ping com­mu­ni­ties, we meet Langston Hugh­es and the artists, poets, and musi­cians of the Harlem Renais­sance. Hugh­es’ bril­liant­ly com­pressed 1951 poem “Harlem” speaks of the sim­mer­ing frus­tra­tion among a weary peo­ple. But while its star­tling final line hints grim­ly at social unrest, it also looks back to the explo­sion of cre­ativ­i­ty in the sto­ried New York City neigh­bor­hood dur­ing the Great Depres­sion.

Hugh­es had grown reflec­tive in the 50s, return­ing to the ori­gins of jazz and blues and the his­to­ry of Harlem in Mon­tage of a Dream Deferred. The strained hopes and hard­ships he had elo­quent­ly doc­u­ment­ed in the 20s and 30s remained large­ly the same post-World War II, and one of the key fea­tures of Depres­sion-era Harlem had returned; Rent par­ties, the wild shindigs held in pri­vate apart­ments to help their res­i­dents avoid evic­tion, were back in fash­ion, Hugh­es wrote in the Chica­go Defend­er in 1957.

“Maybe it is infla­tion today and the high cost of liv­ing that is caus­ing the return of the pay-at-the-door and buy-your-own-refresh­ments par­ties,” he said. He also not­ed that the new par­ties weren’t as much fun.

But how could they be? Depres­sion-era rent par­ties were leg­endary. They “impact­ed the growth of Swing and Blues danc­ing,” writes dance teacher Jered Morin, “like few oth­er peri­ods.” As Hugh­es com­ment­ed, “the Sat­ur­day night rent par­ties that I attend­ed were often more amus­ing than any night club, in small apart­ments where God-knows-who lived.” Famous artists met and rubbed elbows, musi­cians formed impromp­tu jams and invent­ed new styles, work­ing class peo­ple who couldn’t afford a night out got to put on their best clothes and cut loose to the lat­est music. Hugh­es was fas­ci­nat­ed, and as a writer, he was also quite tak­en by the quirky cards used to adver­tise the par­ties. “When I first came to Harlem,” he said, “as a poet I was intrigued by the lit­tle rhymes at the top of most House Rent Par­ty cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a col­lec­tion.”

The cards you see here come from Hugh­es’ per­son­al col­lec­tion, held with his papers at Yale’s Bei­necke Rare Book and Man­u­script Library. Many of these date from the 40s and 50s, but they all draw their inspi­ra­tion from the Harlem Renais­sance peri­od, when the phe­nom­e­non of jazz-infused rent par­ties explod­ed.  “San­dra L. West points out that black ten­ants in Harlem dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s faced dis­crim­i­na­to­ry rental rates,” notes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate. “That, along with the gen­er­al­ly low­er salaries for black work­ers, cre­at­ed a sit­u­a­tion in which many peo­ple were short of rent mon­ey. These par­ties were orig­i­nal­ly meant to bridge that gap.” A 1938 Fed­er­al Writ­ers Project account put it plain­ly: Harlem “was a typ­i­cal slum and ten­e­ment area lit­tle dif­fer­ent from many oth­ers in New York except for the fact that in Harlem rents were high­er; always have been, in fact, since the great war-time migra­to­ry influx of col­ored labor.”

Ten­ants took it in stride, draw­ing on two long­stand­ing com­mu­ni­ty tra­di­tions to make ends meet: the church fundrais­er and the Sat­ur­day night fish fry. But rent par­ties could be rau­cous affairs. Guests typ­i­cal­ly paid a few cents to enter, and extra for food cooked by the host. Apart­ments filled far beyond capac­i­ty, and alcohol—illegal from 1919 to 1933—flowed freely. Gam­bling and pros­ti­tu­tion fre­quent­ly made an appear­ance.  And the com­pe­ti­tion could be fierce. The Ency­clo­pe­dia of the Harlem Renais­sance writes that in their hey­day, “as many as twelve par­ties in a sin­gle block and five in an apart­ment build­ing, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, were not uncom­mon.” Rent par­ties “essen­tial­ly amount­ed to a kind of grass­roots social wel­fare,” though the atmos­phere could be “far more sor­did than the aver­age neigh­bor­hood block par­ty.” Many upright cit­i­zens who dis­ap­proved of jazz, gam­bling, and booze turned up their noses and tried to ignore the par­ties.

In order to entice par­ty-goers and dis­tin­guish them­selves, writes Onion, “the cards name the kind of musi­cal enter­tain­ment atten­dees could expect using lyrics from pop­u­lar songs or made-up rhyming verse as slo­gans.” They also “used euphemisms to name the par­ties’ pur­pose,” call­ing them “Social Whist Par­ty” or “Social Par­ty,” while also sly­ly hint­ing at row­di­er enter­tain­ments. The new rent par­ties may not have lived up to Hugh­es’ mem­o­ries of jazz-age shindigs, per­haps because, in some cas­es, live musi­cians had been replaced by record play­ers. But the new cards, he wrote “are just as amus­ing as the old ones.”

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

Langston Hugh­es Cre­ates a List of His 100 Favorite Jazz Record­ings: Hear 80+ of Them in a Big Playlist

Watch Langston Hugh­es Read Poet­ry from His First Col­lec­tion, The Weary Blues (1958)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Download & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

in Art, History, Technology | August 2nd, 2017

Last week we fea­tured the British Muse­um’s archive of down­load­able 3D mod­els of over 200 rich­ly his­tor­i­cal objects in their col­lec­tion, per­haps most notably the Roset­ta Stone. But back in 2015, before that mighty cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion put online in 3D the most impor­tant lin­guis­tic arti­fact of them all, a project called Scan the World cre­at­ed a mod­el of it dur­ing an unof­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ty “scanathon,” and it remains freely avail­able to all who would, for exam­ple, like to 3D print a Roset­ta Stone of their very own.

Or per­haps you’d pre­fer to run off your own copy of a world-famous sculp­ture like ancient Egypt­ian court sculp­tor Thut­mose’s bust of Nefer­ti­ti or Auguste Rod­in’s The Thinker, both of whose 3D mod­els you can find on Scan the World’s archive at My Mini Fac­to­ry.

There the orga­ni­za­tion, “com­prised of a vast com­mu­ni­ty of 3D scan­ning and 3D print­ing enthu­si­asts,” has amassed a col­lec­tion of 7,834 3D mod­els and count­ing, all toward their mis­sion ” to archive the world’s sculp­tures, stat­ues, art­works and any oth­er objects of cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance using 3D scan­ning tech­nolo­gies to pro­duce con­tent suit­able for 3D print­ing.”

Scan the World has­n’t lim­it­ed its man­date to just arti­facts and art­works kept in muse­ums: among its mod­els you’ll also find large scale pieces of pub­lic sculp­ture like the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty and even beloved build­ings like Big Ben. This con­jures up the tan­ta­liz­ing vision of each of us one day becom­ing empow­ered to 3D-print our very own Lon­don, com­plete with not just a British Muse­um but all the objects, each of which tells part of human­i­ty’s sto­ry, inside it.

As much of a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel as it may rep­re­sent, print­ing out a Venus de Milo or a David or a Lean­ing Tow­er of Pisa or a Moai head at home can’t, of course, com­pare to mak­ing the trip to see the gen­uine arti­cle, espe­cial­ly with the kind of 3D print­ers now avail­able to con­sumers. But as recent tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry has shown us, the most amaz­ing devel­op­ments tend to come out of the decen­tral­ized efforts of count­less enthu­si­asts — just the kind of com­mu­ni­ty pow­er­ing Scan the World. The great achieve­ments of the future have to start some­where, and they might as well start by pay­ing trib­ute to the great­est achieve­ments of the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

Artists Put Online 3D, High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of 3,000-Year-Old Nefer­ti­ti Bust (and Con­tro­ver­sy Ensues)

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inimitable Style

in Music | August 1st, 2017

A tongue-in-cheek essay in McSweeney’s, Michael Fowler’s “How to Play a John Bon­ham Drum Solo,” con­tains some of the finest descrip­tions I’ve read of Bonham’s thun­der­ous play­ing. It all begins with the triplet, the “thump-pe-da, thump-pe-da, thump-pe-da” rhythm the Led Zep­pelin drum­mer plays on every piece of the kit. Should you learn to play drums like Bon­ham, you’ll be able to start this “up like a motor,” on any drum, “with either hand or foot, and per­form all over the drums, with­out throw­ing a stick or becom­ing entan­gled in your own limbs, except to be fun­ny.” After Bon­ham “made the impor­tant dis­cov­ery that all drum­ming is just triplets, or should be,” he then pro­ceed­ed to play them while “fly­ing around the kit with blind­ing speed, hit­ting every drum and cym­bal in those neg­li­gi­ble spaces” between the triplets, “jam­ming like hell inside those brief spaces” then “plung­ing the whole kit into dead silence.”

Can you learn to do this? Maybe you’ll want a less col­or­ful, more pro­gram­mat­ic guide. Bon­ham him­self learned the tech­nique from some of the most furi­ous drum­mers in jazz, Gene Kru­pa and Bud­dy Rich, as the nar­ra­tor explains in the video above, “What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer?”

We begin with those trade­mark triplets, then learn of anoth­er Bon­ham sig­na­ture. While more straight­for­ward drum­mers like The Stones’ Char­lie Watts played strict 4/4 beats with metro­nom­ic pre­ci­sion, Bon­ham was often so far behind the beat it was as if he played his drum parts in an echo cham­ber, with a syn­co­pat­ed swing he took from funk.

But the heart of Bonham’s dis­tinc­tive drum­ming has to do with the unusu­al dynam­ic he had with Jim­my Page. Nor­mal­ly, a drum­mer will lock in with the bass play­er, pro­vid­ing a sol­id foun­da­tion for the gui­tars and vocals to stand on. But “the essence… of the whole Zep­pelin thing,” says engi­neer Ron Nevi­son, “was John Bon­ham fol­low­ing the gui­tar. He would take the riff and he would make that his drum part.” We hear sev­er­al dri­ving exam­ples of this, most notably “Immi­grant Song,” above, where Page and Bon­ham fol­low each oth­er, while John Paul Jones thun­ders below them. The result, and one cru­cial rea­son Bonham’s hands almost nev­er stop fly­ing around the kit, is that, like Page, he’s play­ing both rhythm and lead parts, some­times both at once.


Bon­ham sets out the scaf­fold­ing for Page’s com­plex phras­ing, some­times cre­at­ing a push-pull effect that height­ens a song’s ten­sion at its core. We hear this in “Kash­mir,” where Bon­ham plays a stan­dard 4/4 beat while Page and the string sec­tion play in 3/4 time. These asyn­chro­nous pas­sages can prove daunt­ing for accom­plished drum­mers. Bon­ham fre­quent­ly pulled them off with the same kind of loose­ness and panache he brought to all of his play­ing, with no short­age of triplets and Gene Kru­pa-like fills thrown in for good mea­sure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Bonham’s Iso­lat­ed Drum Track For Led Zeppelin’s ‘Fool in the Rain’

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Kash­mir”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Graphic Shows the House Plants That Naturally Clean the Air in Your Home, According to a NASA Study

in Health, Science | August 1st, 2017

This is a quick pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment. If you believe in sci­ence and facts, read on.

Back in the 1980s, NASA pub­lished a research report called “Inte­ri­or Land­scape Plants for Indoor Air Pol­lu­tion Abate­ment” that grap­pled with a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem: Many mod­ern build­ings (par­tic­u­lar­ly office build­ings) have become so well insu­lat­ed and her­met­i­cal­ly sealed that they allow for lit­tle “free air exchange.” As a result, tox­ins build up in these build­ings (for exam­ple, from the off gassing of fur­ni­ture) and the inhab­i­tants even­tu­al­ly pay a price.

In response, NASA looked for nat­ur­al ways to clean up these sealed spaces (like the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion), par­tic­u­lar­ly by avail­ing them­selves of the nat­ur­al air fil­ter­ing prop­er­ties of every­day house plants:

In this study the leaves, roots, soil, and asso­ci­at­ed microor­gan­isms of plants have been eval­u­at­ed as a pos­si­ble means of reduc­ing indoor air pol­lu­tants. Addi­tion­al­ly, a nov­el approach of using plant sys­tems for remov­ing high con­cen­tra­tions of indoor air pol­lu­tants such as cig­a­rette smoke, organ­ic sol­vents, and pos­si­bly radon has been designed from this work. This air fil­ter design com­bines plants with an acti­vat­ed car­bon fil­ter as shown in Fig­ure 1. The ratio­nale for this design, which evolved from waste­water treat­ment stud­ies, is based on mov­ing large vol­umes of con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed air through an acti­vat­ed car­bon bed where smoke, organ­ic chem­i­cals, path­o­gen­ic microor­gan­isms (if present), and pos­si­bly radon are absorbed by the car­bon fil­ter. Plant roots and their asso­ci­at­ed microor­gan­isms then destroy the path­o­gen­ic virus­es, bac­te­ria, and the organ­ic chem­i­cals, even­tu­al­ly con­vert­ing all of these air pol­lu­tants into new plant tissue.(31“37) It is believed that the decayed radon prod­ucts would be tak­en up by the plant roots and retained in the plant tis­sue.

You can read the rest of the study here. And, above, find a graph­ic (cre­at­ed by Lovethe­Gar­den) that visu­al­izes the results of the NASA study, show­ing which par­tic­u­lar plants will reduce air pol­lu­tion in your office and home.

For good mea­sure, we’ve also added below a short video where researcher Kamal Meat­tle “shows how an arrange­ment of three com­mon house­plants, used in spe­cif­ic spots in a home or office build­ing, can result in mea­sur­ably clean­er indoor air.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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Métal hurlant: The Hugely Influential French Comic Magazine That Put Moebius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi Forever

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Sci Fi | August 1st, 2017

Would you believe that one par­tic­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion inspired a range of vision­ary cre­ators includ­ing Rid­ley Scott, George Lucas, Luc Besson, William Gib­son, and Hayao Miyaza­ki? More­over, would you believe that it was French, from the 1970s, and a com­ic book? Not that that term “com­ic book” does jus­tice to Métal hurlant, which dur­ing its ini­tial run from 1974 to 1987 not only rede­fined the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the medi­um and great­ly widened the imag­i­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties of sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry­telling, but brought to promi­nence a num­ber of whol­ly uncon­ven­tion­al and high­ly influ­en­tial artists, chief among them Jean Giraud, best known as Moe­bius.

Métal hurlant, accord­ing to Tom Lennon in his his­to­ry of the mag­a­zine, launched “as the flag­ship title of Les Humanoïdes Asso­ciés, a French pub­lish­ing ven­ture set up by Euro com­ic vet­er­ans Moe­bius, Druil­let and Jean-Pierre Dion­net, togeth­er with their finance direc­tor Bernard Farkas. Influ­enced by both the Amer­i­can under­ground comix scene of the 1960s and the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al upheavals of that decade, their goal was bold and grandiose: they were going to kick ass, take names, and make peo­ple take comics seri­ous­ly.”

This demand­ed “artis­tic inno­va­tion at every lev­el,” from high-qual­i­ty, large-for­mat paper stock to risk-tak­ing sto­ry­telling “shot through with a rich vein of humour and deliv­ered with a nar­ra­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion pre­vi­ous­ly unseen in the medi­um.”

Giraud took to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the new pub­li­ca­tion with a spe­cial avid­ness. Under the pen name “Gir,” writes Lennon, he “was best known as the co-cre­ator of the pop­u­lar West­ern series, Blue­ber­ry. By the mid-1970s, Giraud was feel­ing increas­ing­ly con­strained by the con­ven­tions of the west­ern genre, so decid­ed to revive a long-dor­mant pseu­do­nym to embark on more exper­i­men­tal work. As ‘Moe­bius’, Giraud not only worked in a dif­fer­ent genre to ‘Gir’ – a deeply per­son­al, high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic form of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy – but his art looked like it was drawn by a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent per­son,” and “unlike any­thing that had been seen in comics — or, for that mat­ter, in any oth­er medi­um.”

Métal hurlant saw the debuts of two of Moe­bius’ best-known char­ac­ters: the pith-hel­met­ed and mus­ta­chioed pro­tec­tor of minia­ture uni­vers­es Major Gru­bert and the silent, ptero­dactyl-rid­ing explor­er Arzach, who bears a cer­tain resem­blance to the pro­tag­o­nist of Miyaza­k­i’s 1984 film Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind. Read through the back issues of the mag­a­zine — or its 40-years-run­ning Amer­i­can ver­sion, Heavy Met­al — and you’ll also glimpse, in the work of Moe­bius and oth­ers, ele­ments that would lat­er find their way into the worlds of Neu­ro­mancer, Mad Max, Alien, Blade Run­ner, Star Wars, and much more besides.

“A while ago, SF was filled with mon­strous rock­et ships and plan­ets,” said Moe­bius in 1980. “It was a naive and mate­ri­al­is­tic vision, which con­fused exter­nal space with inter­nal space, which saw the future as an extrap­o­la­tion of the present. It was a vic­tim of an illu­sion of a tech­no­log­i­cal sort, of a pro­gres­sion with­out stop­ping towards a con­sum­ma­tion of ener­gy.” He and Métal hurlant did more than their part to trans­form and enrich that vision, but plen­ty of old per­cep­tions still remain for their count­less artis­tic descen­dants to warp beyond recog­ni­tion.

via Tom Lennon/Dazed Dig­i­tal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

The Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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