Dramatic Footage of San Francisco Right Before & After the Massively Devastating Earthquake of 1906

in Film, History | May 1st, 2018

Dis­as­ters both nat­ur­al and man-made—or in the case of cli­mate change, some mea­sure of both—can reduce built envi­ron­ments to ash and rub­ble with lit­tle warn­ing. In cas­es like the Lis­bon earth­quake, the Great Fire of Lon­don, or the bomb­ing of Dres­den, cities have been com­plete­ly rebuilt. In oth­ers, like the utter­ly destroyed Pom­peii, they lay in ruins for­ev­er, or like Cher­nobyl, become irra­di­at­ed ghost towns. Such events stand as sin­gu­lar moments in his­to­ry, like rup­tures in time, shak­ing faith in reli­gion, sci­ence, and gov­ern­ment.

In the case of the Great 1906 San Fran­cis­co Earth­quake, which destroyed 80% of the city with its esti­mat­ed mag­ni­tude of 7.9, the dis­as­ter also serves as a dire his­tor­i­cal warn­ing for what might hap­pen again if seis­mol­o­gists’ cur­rent grim prog­nos­ti­ca­tions prove cor­rect. In the film above, “A Trip Down Mar­ket Street” by the Miles broth­ers, we see the bustling city just four days before the quake. Film his­to­ri­an David Kiehn has dat­ed this footage to April 14th, 1906. The very con­vinc­ing sound design has been added by Mike Upchurch.

The film shows Mar­ket Street in full swing, Mod­el T’s jostling with horse­drawn car­riages over street­car tracks, while pedes­tri­ans weave in and out of the traf­fic. The four Miles broth­ers, Har­ry, Her­bert, Ear­le, and Joe, left for New York short­ly after shoot­ing in San Fran­cis­co and just missed the quake. They had sent the neg­a­tives ahead, bare­ly sav­ing this valu­able footage. They returned to find their stu­dios, and their city, destroyed by the quake and the near­ly four days of fires that fol­lowed it. They did what any film­mak­er would—started film­ing.

Their footage of the dev­as­ta­tion was long thought lost until it was re-dis­cov­ered at a flea mar­ket. Kiehn dig­i­tized the film and it was recent­ly screened at the Bay Area Edi­son The­ater while on its way to the Library of Con­gress, just before the 112th anniver­sary of the quake. The Miles broth­ers, says Kiehn, “shot almost two hours of film after the earth­quake and very lit­tle of it sur­vives. I think this is one of the longest sur­viv­ing pieces.” It begins with a har­row­ing trip down Mar­ket Street, reduced from bustling city cen­ter to waste­land.

The quake, writes Bill Van Niek­erken at the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle, caused “unfath­omable dev­as­ta­tion… At least 700 are thought to have per­ished, with some esti­mates at more than 3,000…. 490 city blocks were lev­eled, with 28,188 build­ings destroyed. More than 200,000 peo­ple were left home­less.” From this hor­ror, Niek­erkan draws inspi­ra­tion. “San Fran­cis­co, how­ev­er, rose from the ash­es, rebuilt and became a greater city, a shin­ing sym­bol of the West.”

Per­haps the les­son, should sci­en­tists who fore­cast anoth­er major quake be right, is that the city can rebuild again. And in part because of the “wealth of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge” seis­mol­o­gists gained from the 1906 quake, it is much bet­ter pre­pared for such a calami­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Lon­don in Vivid Col­or 125 Years Ago: See Trafal­gar Square, the British Muse­um, Tow­er Bridge & Oth­er Famous Land­marks in Pho­tocrom Prints

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

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Charlie Chaplin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

in Comedy, Film | May 1st, 2018

Char­lie Chap­lin was an actor and film­mak­er com­mit­ted to his craft–a per­fec­tion­ist, in short. When direct­ing City Lights (1931), Chap­lin demand­ed as many as 342 takes of a fair­ly straight­for­ward three-minute scene. That’s what it took to get it right.

Above, we find an ear­li­er exam­ple of the film­mak­er’s atten­tion to detail … and his appetite for risk. In the 1928 film, The Cir­cus, Chap­lin took more than 200 takes to com­plete the Lion’s Cage scene shown above. Many of those takes, the offi­cial Char­lie Chap­lin web­site reminds us, took place inside the lion’s cage itself. As the scene unfolds, the ten­sion builds and Chap­lin puts in a per­for­mance that helped him secure his first Acad­e­my Award.

Enjoy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Watch Char­lie Chap­lin Demand 342 Takes of One Scene from City Lights

When Char­lie Chap­lin Entered a Chap­lin Look-Alike Con­test and Came in 20th Place

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

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The Gig When Miles Davis Jammed with Carlos Santana & Robben Ford (Giants Stadium, 1986)

in Music | May 1st, 2018

The old joke about super­groups being less than the sum of their parts often holds true in rock and pop. Too many cooks, and all that. But what hap­pens when you bring togeth­er super­stars from dif­fer­ent gen­res? This was basi­cal­ly the idea of jazz fusion, and espe­cial­ly of Miles Davis, one of fusion’s prin­ci­ple pio­neers in the late six­ties and ear­ly sev­en­ties. It’s a genre of music peo­ple seem to either love or hate. Those who fall into the lat­ter camp often cite the ten­den­cy of jazz-rock ensem­bles to over­play, to the detri­ment of both jazz and rock.

Fol­low­ing Davis’ inno­va­tions, vir­tu­oso col­lab­o­ra­tors like John McLaugh­lin went on to form their own super­groups, while the star trum­peter checked out for a while. But “after five years of silence,” as Peo­ple mag­a­zine wrote in 1981, his trum­pet was “once again heard in the land.”

Davis assem­bled a few bands and charged ahead in an even more fusion‑y direc­tion, despite some severe crit­i­cism from music writ­ers, fans, and fel­low per­form­ers. He cov­ered Cyn­di Lau­per and Michael Jack­son and col­lab­o­rat­ed with new wave bands and pop stars like Toto. He seemed deter­mined to mix it up with as many major play­ers as he could.

The results were some­times less than the sum of their parts, though his exper­i­men­ta­tion crys­tal­ized in an excel­lent record in 1986, the Mar­cus Miller-pro­duced jazz/funk/pop/R&B album Tutu. That same year, Davis and a loose­ly-assem­bled band took the stage at Giants Sta­di­um for a short set at an Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al ben­e­fit con­cert, where they were joined by jazz and rock gui­tarist Robben Ford and, on the last song, by spe­cial guest star Car­los San­tana. Tutu, notes The Last Miles—web­site for George Cole’s book of the same name—“was still a few months away from its offi­cial release.”

The band jammed through two of the new album’s tunes, the title track and “Splatch.” Then, for the final song, “Burn”—“a rock-funk num­ber that Miles first heard in 1980”—Santana took the stage. You can see video of them play­ing that song at the top of the post and hear the full audio of the short per­for­mance, less than 30 min­utes, fur­ther up. The eight-piece band plays a typ­i­cal­ly busy fusion set, with solo after amaz­ing solo over a full-on wall of elec­tri­fied sound. I con­fess, I find this side of Miles a lit­tle assaultive next to the restraint of much ear­li­er work, but that’s a mat­ter of per­son­al taste. It’s impos­si­ble to say a bad word about the qual­i­ty of these per­for­mances.

How did these super­stars end up work­ing togeth­er, not only at this ben­e­fit but in oth­er con­certs and record­ings? Find out in the inter­views above from San­tana and Ford, both of whom describe their expe­ri­ences as major career high­lights. The respect in both cas­es, a rar­i­ty with Miles Davis, was mutu­al.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Dish­es Dirt on His Fel­low Jazz Musi­cians: “The Trom­bone Play­er Should be Shot”; That Ornette is “F‑ing Up the Trum­pet”

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

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

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What Is Blockchain? Three Videos Explain the New Technology That Promises to Change Our World

in Technology | May 1st, 2018

You’ve heard the word “blockchain” many times now, but prob­a­bly not quite as many as you’ve heard the word “bit­coin.” Yet you sure­ly have a sense that the ref­er­ents of those two words have a con­nec­tion, and even if you haven’t yet been inter­est­ed in either, you may well know that blockchain, a tech­nol­o­gy, makes Bit­coin, a cur­ren­cy, pos­si­ble in the first place. Their sheer nov­el­ty has already giv­en rise to a mini-indus­try of explain­er videos, more of them deal­ing direct­ly with bit­coin than blockchain, but in time the lat­ter could poten­tial­ly over­take the for­mer in impor­tance, to the degree that it becomes as vital to soci­ety as the pro­to­cols that under­gird the inter­net itself.

Or at least you could come away con­vinced of that after watch­ing the blockchain explain­er videos fea­tured here. The short­est of the three, the one by the Insti­tute for the Future at the top of the post, attempts to break down, in just two min­utes, the prin­ci­ples behind this tech­nol­o­gy, still in its infan­cy, in which so many see such rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial.

“Blockchains store infor­ma­tion across a net­work of per­son­al com­put­ers, mak­ing them not just decen­tral­ized but dis­trib­uted,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. “This means no cen­tral com­pa­ny or per­son owns the sys­tem, yet every­one can use it and help run it.” And accord­ing to blockchain’s boost­ers, that very decen­tral­iza­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion makes it that much more trustable and less hack­able.

In the Wired video just above, blockchain researcher Bet­ti­na War­burg explains her sub­ject in five dif­fer­ent ways to peo­ple at five dif­fer­ent stages of life, from a five-year-old girl to a ful­ly grown aca­d­e­m­ic. Actu­al­ly, that last inter­locu­tor, an NYU his­to­ri­an named Finn Brun­ton, does much of the explain­ing him­self, and right at the begin­ning of his seg­ment (at 9:48) rolls out one of the clear­er and more intrigu­ing run­down of the nature of blockchain cur­rent­ly float­ing around on the inter­net:

A tech­ni­cal def­i­n­i­tion of blockchain is that it is a per­sis­tent, trans­par­ent, pub­lic, append-only ledger. So it is a sys­tem that you can add data to, and not change pre­vi­ous data with­in. It does this through a mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing con­sen­sus between scat­tered, or dis­trib­uted, par­ties that do not need to trust each oth­er. They just need to trust the mech­a­nism by which their con­sen­sus is arrived at. In the case of blockchain, it relies on some form of chal­lenge such that no one actor on the net­work is able to solve this chal­lenge more con­sis­tent­ly than any­one else on the net­work. It ran­dom­izes the process, and in the­o­ry ensures that no one can force the blockchain to accept a par­tic­u­lar entry onto the ledger that oth­ers dis­agree with.

Brun­ton also empha­sizes that “almost every aspect of it that is con­nect­ed with the con­cept of mon­ey” — includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to Bit­coin — “is wild­ly over-hyped.” Those who can look past the Gold Rush-style bal­ly­hoo­ing of those ear­ly appli­ca­tions of blockchain can bet­ter grasp what role the tech­nol­o­gy, which essen­tial­ly enables the build­ing of sys­tems to secure­ly exchange infor­ma­tion over the inter­net that no one per­son or com­pa­ny owns, might one day play in many parts of our lives, from finance to ener­gy to health care. “Cred­it scores that aren’t con­trolled by a hand­ful of high-risk, data-breach-prone com­pa­nies,” promis­es Caris­sa Carter of Stan­ford’s d.school, “cred­i­ble news sys­tems that resist cen­sor­ship; effi­cient pow­er grids that could low­er your pow­er bills.”

Before it can bring those won­ders, Bit­coin must first over­come for­mi­da­ble tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions: as Com­put­er­world’s Lucas Mear­i­an writes, for instance,” the Bit­coin blockchain har­ness­es any­where between 10 and 100 times as much com­put­ing pow­er com­pared to all of Google’s serv­ing farms put togeth­er.”  But then, few of the first devel­op­ers of the tech­nolo­gies that dri­ve the inter­net could have imag­ined all we do with them across the world today, and those who did must have had a sol­id under­stand­ing of its most basic ele­ments. How do you know when you’ve attained that under­stand­ing? “If you can’t explain it sim­ply, you don’t under­stand it well enough,” as Albert Ein­stein once said, and as Citi Inno­va­tion Lab CTO Shai Rubin quotes him as say­ing at the begin­ning of his own blockchain explain­er, per­formed in less than fif­teen min­utes using no pieces of tech­nol­o­gy more rev­o­lu­tion­ary than a white­board and mark­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Actu­al­ly Is Bit­coin? Princeton’s Free Course “Bit­coin and Cur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies” Pro­vides Much-Need­ed Answers

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies: A Free Course from Prince­ton

The Prince­ton Bit­coin Text­book Is Now Free Online

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.

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