When Japan’s Top Animators Made a Thrilling Cyberpunk Commercial for Irish Beer: Watch Last Orders (1997)

When it came out in 1995, Mamoru Oshi­i’s Ghost in the Shell showed the world what the art of Japan­ese ani­ma­tion could do with the kind of grit­ty, tech-sat­u­rat­ed, glob­al­ized cyber­punk visions pop­u­lar­ized in the pre­vi­ous decade by William Gib­son and oth­er writ­ers. The film’s par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful release in the Unit­ed King­dom got some cul­tur­al­ly savvy mar­keters in Ire­land think­ing: why not use this sort of thing to sell beer?

But rather than rip­ping it off and water­ing it down — all too par for the course in adver­tis­ing — they hired ani­ma­tors straight from Pro­duc­tion I.G., Ghost in the Shell’s stu­dio, to cre­ate a whole new ani­mat­ed cyber­punk real­i­ty, the one in which Last Ordersthe minute-long spot above, takes place. The 1997 com­mer­cial tells the sto­ry of six samu­rai rush­ing through a cityscape that has every­thing we’ve now come to expect from this genre: forests of high-ris­es, bustling streets, mys­te­ri­ous women, arti­fi­cial humanoids, the tech­no­log­i­cal every­where merged with the organ­ic, and neon signs aplen­ty.

The samu­rai con­verge on their des­ti­na­tion, a tav­ern, just in time to silent­ly but firm­ly sig­nal their demand for their drink of choice: Mur­phy’s Irish Stout, a Heineken-dis­trib­uted brew offered as a lighter, less bit­ter alter­na­tive to the mar­ket-dom­i­nat­ing Guin­ness. But no mat­ter of the steely deter­mi­na­tion of the samu­rai in Last Orders, the first ani­me-style com­mer­cial ever to air in the UK and Ire­land, it seems that one chal­lenges such an icon­ic brand at one’s per­il: Mur­phy’s cur­rent­ly has only a five-per­cent share of the Irish stout mar­ket, and that most­ly thanks to a 28-per­cent share in its native Cork.

The Japan­ese ani­ma­tors who worked on the com­mer­cial have fared rather bet­ter, going on to, among many oth­er respect­ed projects, Blood: The Last Vam­pire and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. Though I’ve nev­er encoun­tered Mur­phy’s on any tap, I’d glad­ly watch a movie or even an entire series set in its world. The stout mar­ket, the mighty Guin­ness includ­ed, may have been on the decline in recent years, but cyber­punk, in our own ever more glob­al­ized and tech-sat­u­rat­ed real­i­ty, seems about due for a come­back.

via Kotaku

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

Watch the New Ani­me Pre­quel to Blade Run­ner 2049, by Famed Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Shinichi­ro Watan­abe

Watch a New Star Wars Ani­ma­tion, Drawn in a Clas­sic 80s Japan­ese Ani­me Style

The Art of Hand-Drawn Japan­ese Ani­me: A Deep Study of How Kat­suhi­ro Otomo’s Aki­ra Uses Light

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

Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Space Rock Opera Rigel 9: A Rare Recording from 1985

In her remem­brance of recent­ly depart­ed sci-fi great Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Mar­garet Atwood describes “an absurd vision” she drew from Le Guin’s fan­ta­sy nov­el A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea: “There was Ursu­la, mov­ing calm­ly down a hill of whis­per­ing sand under the unchang­ing stars; and there was me, dis­traught and run­ning after her and call­ing ‘No! Come Back! We need you here and now!’” Atwood longs for Le Guin’s respons­es to the crises of the present, the old hier­ar­chies of pow­er and priv­i­lege reassert­ing their cru­el dom­i­nance over men, women, chil­dren, and an already over­bur­dened envi­ron­ment.

The prob­lem of pow­er and its abus­es is one Le Guin returned to over and over in her work. “As an anar­chist,” writes Atwood,” she would have want­ed a self-gov­ern­ing soci­ety, with gen­der and racial equal­i­ty.” As a keen anthro­po­log­i­cal observ­er of human behav­ior, she saw how and why tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-advanced, yet psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly reac­tionary soci­eties stray from these ideals, desta­bi­liz­ing the eco­log­i­cal bal­ance they depend on to sur­vive and thrive. Le Guin fought back in her way. She was a pro­lif­ic builder of poet­ic new worlds. Through them, we will always have her wis­dom, and in a few rare instances, we have her music.

No, Le Guin didn’t com­pose, but she did write libret­tos for three dif­fer­ent col­lab­o­ra­tive projects. Above, we have her “most note­wor­thy melod­ic under­tak­ing,” accord­ing to Locus magazine’s Jeff Berk­wits, Rigel 9, a space opera with music by avant-garde com­pos­er David Bed­ford, record­ed and released in 1985. (It’s also stream­able on Spo­ti­fy. Lis­ten below or here.) Rigel 9 “tells a pret­ty clas­sic space sto­ry,” Cara Giaimo  writes at Atlas Obscu­ra. “Three astro­nauts, named Anders, Kap­per, and Lee, are sent to explore a strange world. After Anders goes off to col­lect plant sam­ples and is kid­napped by extrater­res­tri­als, Kap­per and Lee argue over whether to res­cue him or save them­selves.”

Amidst this dra­ma of tiny red aliens, a dou­ble sun, air that smells of cin­na­mon and yel­low and orange trees, we learn a few unset­tling facts about what has hap­pened back on Earth. “The Earth has no more forests,” sings Anders, “no wilder­ness, no still places.” Evok­ing a Sartre­an hor­ror on a plan­e­tary scale, he gives us an image of “only human faces, only human voic­es…. The Earth has no more silence.” The resources we need to replen­ish not only air and water, but also weary minds have dis­ap­peared. These rev­e­la­tions set up Anders’ seduc­tion by the lush­ness and qui­et of Rigel 9, and the gor­geous sopra­no voic­es of its inhab­i­tants.

Bedford’s music is trans­port­ing, with “Bowie-esque synth sweeps” and sax­o­phones, thrilling choral move­ments, and a pound­ing rhythm sec­tion that puts one in mind of Queen. Scot­tish New Wave duo Straw­ber­ry Switch­blade make an appear­ance, as the lead voic­es of an alien funer­al pro­ces­sion (top). The dia­logue and spo­ken per­for­mances can be a bit corny, but the space rock opera has nev­er been suit­ed for sub­tle­ty, and Le Guin and Bed­ford pur­pose­ful­ly cre­at­ed the dra­ma as a radio play of sorts. “We had talked about the com­po­si­tion as ‘opera for ear,” she explained, “That is, a ‘radio opera… We liked the idea of being able to imag­ine the scenery, and then putting that scenery into the words and the music.”

That same year, Le Guin released anoth­er musi­cal effort, team­ing with musi­cian Todd Bar­ton for a cas­sette-only pro­duc­tion called Music and Poet­ry of Kesh, released togeth­er with her nov­el Always Com­ing Home. And ten years lat­er, she worked with clas­si­cal com­pos­er Eli­nor Armer on Uses of Music in Utter­most Parts. This eight-move­ment work fea­tures Le Guin her­self, nar­rat­ing a text about “a fan­tas­ti­cal realm,” Berk­wits writes, “the Utter­most Arch­i­pel­ago in the fifth quar­ter of Island Earth—where sound lit­er­al­ly sus­tains life.” Just above, hear one move­ment, “The Sea­sons of Oling,” a fur­ther reminder that Le Guin, who nev­er shrank from the vio­lence of our world, could always imag­ine enthralling alter­na­tives.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

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

Robert Reich Makes His UC Berkeley Course on Wealth and Inequality in America Available on Facebook

Robert B. Reich served as Sec­re­tary of Labor under Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton and was lat­er named one of the 10 most effec­tive cab­i­net sec­re­taries of the 20th cen­tu­ry by TIME Mag­a­zine. Nowa­days, Reich teach­es cours­es on pub­lic pol­i­cy at UC Berke­ley, and uses his pop­u­lar Face­book page to dis­cuss pol­i­cy ques­tions with a much broad­er audi­ence. So here’s the next the log­i­cal step: This semes­ter, Reich is teach­ing a Berke­ley course on wealth and inequal­i­ty in Amer­i­ca, and he’s mak­ing the lec­tures them­selves avail­able on Face­book too. Watch the open­ing lec­ture above, and then check back in for new install­ments.

Note: Once you start play­ing the video, you might need to enable the audio in the low­er right hand cor­ner of the video play­er.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Reich Debunks Three Eco­nom­ic Myths by Draw­ing Car­toons

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es

Free: Lis­ten to John Rawls’ Course on “Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy” (Record­ed at Har­vard, 1984)

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Read the Shortest Academic Article Ever Written: “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ ”

We’ve fea­tured impres­sive­ly short aca­d­e­m­ic papers here on Open Cul­ture before, like John Nash’s 26-page PhD the­sis and this two-sen­tence “Coun­terex­am­ple to Euler’s Con­jec­ture on Sums and Like Pow­ers,” but if you’ve set your sights on writ­ing one short­er still, don’t get your hopes up. The almost cer­tain­ly unbeat­able exam­ple of a short aca­d­e­m­ic paper appeared more than forty years ago, in the fall 1974 issue of the Jour­nal of Applied Behav­ior Analy­ses, its main text com­ing in at exact­ly zero words. You can read it, if indeed “read” is the word, above or at the Nation­al Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­o­gy Infor­ma­tion.

Writ­ten, or at least thought up, by psy­chol­o­gist Den­nis Upper, “The Unsuc­cess­ful Self-Treat­ment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ ” has noth­ing but its title, one foot­note (indi­cat­ing that “por­tions of this paper were not pre­sent­ed at the 81st annu­al Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Con­ven­tion”), and the ful­some com­ments of a review­er: “I have stud­ied this man­u­script very care­ful­ly with lemon juice and X‑rays and have not detect­ed a sin­gle flaw in either design or writ­ing style. I sug­gest it be pub­lished with­out revi­sion. Clear­ly it is the most con­cise man­u­script I have ever seen — yet it con­tains suf­fi­cient detail to allow oth­er inves­ti­ga­tors to repli­cate Dr. Upper’s fail­ure. In com­par­i­son with the oth­er man­u­scripts I get from you con­tain­ing all that com­pli­cat­ed detail, this one was a plea­sure to exam­ine.”

Some describe writer’s block, whether in sci­ence or lit­er­a­ture or any oth­er field requir­ing the prop­er arrange­ment of words, as a fear of the blank page. If look­ing at Upper’s void-like paper fright­ens you, con­sid­er hav­ing a look at the Louisiana Chan­nel series we fea­tured in 2016 where­in writ­ers like Mar­garet Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Car­ol Oates, and David Mitchell talk about how they deal with the blank page them­selves. Atwood finds that it “beck­ons you in to write some­thing on it,” that “it must be filled,” but if you don’t hear the same call, you’ll have to come up with an approach of your own. Just don’t try titling, foot­not­ing, and turn­ing in the emp­ty sheet — it’s been done.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

8 Writ­ers on How to Face Writer’s Block and the Blank Page: Mar­garet Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

The Short­est-Known Paper Pub­lished in a Seri­ous Math Jour­nal: Two Suc­cinct Sen­tences 

Read John Nash’s Super Short PhD The­sis with 26 Pages & 2 Cita­tions: The Beau­ty of Invent­ing a Field

When a Cat Co-Authored a Paper in a Lead­ing Physics Jour­nal (1975)

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

Watch Animated Scores to Music by Radiohead, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Photek & Other Electronic/Post-Punk/Avant-Garde Musicians

A few weeks ago, we told you about Stephen Mali­nows­ki and the Music Ani­ma­tion Machine, a pop­u­lar and pret­ty expan­sive YouTube chan­nel that fea­tures scrolling, col­or-coor­di­nat­ed ani­mat­ed “scores” for clas­si­cal works from Debussy to Bach and Stravin­sky.

But what if there was a ver­sion of this, some­where some­how, for elec­tron­ic music?

Ask the ques­tion of the Inter­net, dear read­er, and the gods will pro­vide. For just over a year motion graph­ics design­er Johannes Lam­pert has been work­ing in a sim­i­lar style to inter­pret the work of elec­tron­ic, post-punk, and mod­ern com­posers like Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt in which every sound is rep­re­sent­ed by a dif­fer­ent ani­mat­ed sym­bol.

In the above video, Lam­pert takes on Talk­ing Heads’ mul­ti­lay­ered, Fela Kuti-inspired “The Great Curve” from Remain in Light. The video gives us jagged lines for Tina Weymouth’s bass, a steady bor­der of dots for Chris Frantz’ propul­sive drum tracks, and sev­er­al gaps into which the three vocal lines of the song—David Byrne’s lead, and Nona Hendryx and the band’s mul­ti­tracked call-and-response back­ing vocals—drop and pulse. Add to that an unbro­ken jagged line that repli­cates Adri­an Belew’s sear­ing and soar­ing solo.

Cur­rent­ly there are 12 tracks avail­able on Anato­my of a Track’s Youtube chan­nel, with a post­ing record that sug­gests Johannes Lam­pert is work­ing on one every two months.

Lam­pert exper­i­ments with the lay­out and graph­ics of his ani­ma­tions, mak­ing their design com­ple­ment the music. Hence “The Great Curve” look­ing like African tex­tiles, Gil-Scott Heron’s “New York Is Killing Me” aping the New York Sub­way map, and Photek’s “The Rain” as a pud­dle filled with puls­ing rain­drops.

Maybe the most com­plex video so far is for Radiohead’s “Bloom,” which is just as chaot­ic as the band’s tum­bling drum machine. But it does uncov­er how steady the bass is in this track while all around the oth­er instru­ments are shim­mer­ing and ethe­re­al. And for just a good time, Justice’s “Phan­tom” is turned into a dynam­ic light show that looks like a night dri­ve down a Japan­ese express­way.

I would put it to you that mod­ern elec­tron­ic artists think about their music much like these ani­ma­tions. I mean, what are music edit­ing pro­grams like Pro­Tools or Log­ic Pro but hor­i­zon­tal scrolls of dots and sound waves?

No doubt Lam­pert has more tricks up his sleeve and more tracks to ani­mate. Stay tuned.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Get Per­fect­ly Visu­al­ized as an Emo­tion­al Roller Coast­er Ride

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Celebrate the Life & Writing of Ursula K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Classic Radio Dramatizations of Her Stories

Until yes­ter­day, had you asked me to name my favorite liv­ing writ­ers, Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s name would appear near the top of the list. As of yes­ter­day, I can no longer say this. Le Guin passed away at the age of 88, and left mil­lions of fans bereft—fans with whom she had shared some of the finest sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy writ­ten in the 20th cen­tu­ry, and with whom she hap­pi­ly shared her wis­dom and advice in the free online work­shops she held in her lat­er years, her way of con­nect­ing with read­ers when she retired from writ­ing.

Like many peo­ple, I first came to Le Guin’s work through her 1969 Neb­u­la and Hugo-win­ning nov­el The Left Hand of Dark­ness, a book that explod­ed ideas about what sci­ence fic­tion could be and do. That nov­el is part of a series of sto­ries called the “Hain­ish cycle,” which—like C.S. Lewis’ Space Tril­o­gy—are deeply philo­soph­i­cal and deeply sen­si­tive to the emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal res­o­nances of the ques­tions they grap­ple with.

But unlike Lewis, Le Guin sought not to res­ur­rect old mytholo­gies, but to show how the bound­aries and divi­sions we take for grant­ed might eas­i­ly become arbi­trary and unfa­mil­iar; how we might become some­thing entire­ly new and dif­fer­ent.

There are many oth­er writ­ers who come to mind when I think of Le Guin—Octavia But­ler, Frank Her­bert, Iain Banks, and, of course, Tolkien. Like many of the best writ­ers in her gen­res, Le Guin’s fic­tion is con­tem­pla­tive as well as spectacular—she could write space opera, sword and sor­cery, and adven­ture sto­ries just as well as any of her con­tem­po­raries, but her sus­tained focus on the nuanced inter­re­la­tions of char­ac­ter and theme—on the agony of choice, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of free­dom and con­nec­tion with­out coer­cion, the social and eco­log­i­cal con­se­quences of blind acqui­si­tion and thought­less action—gave her work a depth many of her con­tem­po­raries lacked.

Le Guin’s anar­chist envi­ron­men­tal­ism and “tough-mind­ed fem­i­nist sen­si­bil­i­ty” opened up paths for dozens of writ­ers who came after her and who also did not fit the typ­i­cal molds estab­lished by the pulpy mag­a­zine sto­ries of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. She was a schol­ar, earn­ing an M.A. in French and Ital­ian lit­er­a­ture and doing doc­tor­al work in France on a Ful­bright in the mid-fifties. But unlike cer­tain, more inse­cure, writ­ers, Le Guin did not wear her learn­ing on her sleeve. She wove it into the tex­ture of her nar­ra­tives and the allu­sive lyri­cism of her prose.

Le Guin’s high­ly dis­tinc­tive qualities—her poet­ry and inquiry, tough­ness and sensitivity—are evi­dent in even minor, less­er-known sto­ries. Today, to cel­e­brate her life, we bring you a few of those sto­ries, as adapt­ed into radio dra­mas by the 70s pro­gram Mind Webs and the late 80s NPR show­case Sci-Fi Radio. At the top of the post, hear “Diary of a Rose,” below, “Field of Vision,” and, above, “The End.”

And, just above, hear part one of a CBC drama­ti­za­tion of Le Guin’s nov­el The Dis­pos­sessed, the fifth nov­el in the Hain­ish cycle, though chrono­log­i­cal­ly the cycle’s begin­ning. (Hear all six parts of the dra­ma­tized nov­el here.) Sub­ti­tled “an Ambigu­ous Utopia,” the nov­el, writes DePauw University’s Judah Bier­man, is “a prize­wor­thy con­tri­bu­tion to the debate about the respon­si­bil­i­ty of knowl­edge, of the vision­ary and of the sci­en­tist, in a planned soci­ety.” But like all of Le Guin’s fic­tion, it is so much more than that, a work that bears repeat­ed read­ing, and lis­ten­ing, and that nev­er exhausts its pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Note: If you’re inter­est­ed in get­ting pro­fes­sion­al­ly read ver­sions of Le Guin’s nov­els, con­sid­er sign­ing up for a 30-day free tri­al to Audible.com. When you sign up for a free tri­al, they let you down­load two audio­books for free, and keep the books, regard­less of whether you become a long-term sub­scriber or not. Get details here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Hear Inven­tive Sto­ries from Ursu­la LeGuin & J.G. Bal­lard Turned Into CBC Radio Dra­mas

Sci-Fi Radio: Hear Radio Dra­mas of Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Philip K. Dick, Ursu­la K. LeGuin & More (1989)

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Lis­ten to 188 Dra­ma­tized Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries by Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Isaac Asi­mov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Bal­lard & More

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

Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot” Animated

Back in 1990, Voy­ager 1 snapped a pho­to of plan­et Earth from a record dis­tance – 3.7 bil­lion miles away. And there we saw it, our home, Plan­et Earth, a small blue dot almost swal­lowed by the vast­ness of space. This image inspired the title of Carl Sagan’s 1994 book, The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Spacewhich cap­ti­vat­ed mil­lions of read­ers then, and still many more now.

A quar­ter cen­tu­ry lat­er, The Pale Blue Dot con­tin­ues to give cre­ative inspi­ra­tion to many, includ­ing film­mak­ers who have pro­duced ani­ma­tions that sync with Sagan’s nar­ra­tion of a famous pas­sage from his book. The lat­est ani­ma­tion comes from a class of stu­dents at the Rin­gling Col­lege of Art and Design, locat­ed in Sara­so­ta, Flori­da. Give it a watch. It will help you put every­thing in per­spec­tive.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Won­der, Thrill & Mean­ing of See­ing Earth from Space. Astro­nauts Reflect on The Big Blue Mar­ble

Carl Sagan Presents a Mini-Course on Earth, Mars & What’s Beyond Our Solar Sys­tem: For Kids and Adults (1977)

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Experimental Film with Early Electronic Music Featuring Anaïs Nin (1952)

For decades, out­side of fem­i­nist schol­ar­ship and read­er­ships, French-Cuban-Amer­i­can diarist, nov­el­ist, and essay­ist Anaïs Nin was pri­mar­i­ly known through her famous friends—most notably the exper­i­men­tal nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller, but also psy­cho­an­a­lyst Otto Rank. She had affairs with both men, and inspired some of their work, but Nin has always deserved much wider appre­ci­a­tion as an artist in her own right, whose sur­re­al­ist explo­rations of sex­u­al­i­ty, and sex­u­al abuse, and posthu­mous col­lec­tions of erot­i­ca rival Miller’s body of work—and for many read­ers far sur­pass his tal­ents.

Now Nin’s expres­sive face and orac­u­lar quo­ta­tions have tak­en over the Tum­blr-sphere, such that she has been called the “patron saint of social media” and com­pared to Lena Dun­ham. Whether one finds these terms flat­ter­ing or not comes down to mat­ters of taste and, prob­a­bly even more so, of age. But those who wish for a short intro­duc­tion to Nin out­side of the world of memes and macros will sure­ly take an inter­est in the 1952 film above, “Bells of Atlantis,” shot and edit­ed by her then-hus­band Ian Hugo (also known as banker High Guil­er), with Nin in the star­ring role as the queen of Atlantis. Coil­house offers this suc­cinct descrip­tion:

Over cas­cad­ing exper­i­men­tal footage, Nin reads aloud from her novel­la House of Incest. We catch glimpses of her nude form swing­ing in a ham­mock, and we see her shad­ow undu­lat­ing over sheer fab­ric blow­ing in the wind, but for the most part, the imagery, cap­tured by Nin’s hus­band Ian Hugo, remains very abstract.

But it is not only the rare, hazy glimpses of Nin and the snip­pets of her read­ing that should draw our atten­tion, but also the bur­bling, whistling, hyp­not­ic elec­tron­ic score, com­posed and cre­at­ed by the hus­band-and-wife-hob­by­ist team of Louis and Bebe Bar­ron. Over a decade before Delia Der­byshire wowed audi­ences with her Dr. Who theme, the Bar­rons were mak­ing unheard-of exper­i­men­tal sounds using the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able at the time—tape machines, oscil­la­tors, micro­phones, and oth­er such low-tech ana­log devices.

“The Bar­rons were true pio­neers of elec­tron­ic music,” writes Messy Nessy, “and one of the crown jew­els of their audi­to­ry col­lec­tion is the sound­track for the 1956 thriller sci-fi film, For­bid­den Plan­et,” the first major motion pic­ture with an all-elec­tron­ic score. “Bells of Atlantis” breaks ground as an even ear­li­er exam­ple of the form, and its hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry visu­al jour­ney recalls the sur­re­al­ist film­mak­ing of decades past and looks for­ward to the psy­che­del­ic 60s.

Both the sounds the Bar­rons pro­duced and the visions of Hugo turn out to be, in my hum­ble opin­ion, the per­fect set­ting for a brief intro­duc­tion to Nin’s voice. After watch­ing “Bells of Atlantis,” put on some more ear­ly elec­tron­i­ca, and read Nin’s 1947 House of Incest for your­self, a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry prose-poem about, in Nin’s descrip­tion, the “escape from a woman’s sea­son in hell.”

via Messy Nessy/Coil­house

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Anaïs Nin Read From Her Cel­e­brat­ed Diary: A 60-Minute Vin­tage Record­ing (1966)

Hen­ry Miller Makes a List of “The 100 Books That Influ­enced Me Most”

Meet Delia Der­byshire, the Dr. Who Com­pos­er Who Almost Turned The Bea­t­les’ “Yes­ter­day” Into Ear­ly Elec­tron­i­ca

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

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