David Bowie Predicts the Good & Bad of the Internet in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Something Exhilarating and Terrifying”

“We’re on the cusp of some­thing exhil­a­rat­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing.”

The year is 1999 and David Bowie, in shag­gy hair and groovy glass­es, has seen the future and it is the Inter­net.

In this short but fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with BBC’s stal­wart and with­er­ing inter­roga­tor cum inter­view­er Jere­my Pax­man, Bowie offers a fore­cast of the decades to come, and gets most of it right, if not all. Pax­man dole­ful­ly plays devil’s advo­cate, although I sus­pect he did real­ly see the Net as a “tool”– sim­ply a repack­ag­ing of an exist­ing medi­um.

“It’s an alien life form that just land­ed,” Bowie coun­ters.

Bowie, who had set up his own bowie.net as a pri­vate ISP the pre­vi­ous year, begins by say­ing that if he had start­ed his career in 1999, he would not have been a musi­cian, but a “fan col­lect­ing records.”

It sound­ed provoca­tive at the time, but Bowie makes a point here that has tak­en on more cre­dence in recent years–that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sta­tus of rock in the ‘60s and ‘70s was tied to its rar­i­ty, that the inabil­i­ty to read­i­ly hear music gave it pow­er and cur­ren­cy. Rock is now “a career oppor­tu­ni­ty,” he says, and the Inter­net now has the allure that rock once did.

What Bowie might not have seen is how quick­ly that allure would wear off. The Inter­net no longer has a mys­tery to it. It’s clos­er to a pub­lic util­i­ty, odd­ly a point that Bowie makes lat­er when talk­ing about the inven­tion of the tele­phone.

Bowie also approved of the demys­ti­fi­ca­tion between the artist and audi­ence that the Inter­net was pro­vid­ing. In his final decade, how­ev­er, he would seek out anonymi­ty and pri­va­cy, drop­ping his final two albums sud­den­ly with­out fan­fare and refus­ing all inter­views. He also didn’t fore­see the kind of trolling that sends celebri­ties and artists off of social media.

Pax­man sees the frag­men­ta­tion of the Inter­net as a prob­lem; Bowie sees it as a plus.

“The poten­tial of what the Inter­net is going to do to soci­ety, both good and bad, is unimag­in­able.”

There’s a lot more to unpack in this seg­ment, and let your dif­fer­ing view­points be known in the com­ments. It’s what Bowie would have want­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspir­ing Artists: “Go a Lit­tle Out of Your Depth,” “Nev­er Ful­fill Oth­er People’s Expec­ta­tions”

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Any­way (1998)

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness

What do you imag­ine when you hear the phrase “cat piano”? Some kind of whim­si­cal fur­ry beast with black and white keys for teeth, maybe? A rel­a­tive of My Neigh­bor Totoro’s cat bus? Or maybe you pic­ture a piano that con­tains sev­er­al caged cats who shriek along an entire scale when keys are pressed that slam sharp­ened nails into their tails. If this is your answer, you might find peo­ple slow­ly back­ing away from you at times, or gen­tly sug­gest­ing you get some psy­chi­atric help.

But then, imag­ine that such a per­verse odd­i­ty was in use by psy­chi­a­trists, like the 18th-cen­tu­ry Ger­man physi­cian Johann Chris­t­ian Reil, who—reports David McNamee at The Guardian—“wrote that the device was intend­ed to shake men­tal patients who had lost the abil­i­ty to focus out of a ‘fixed state’ and into ‘con­scious aware­ness.’”

So long, meds. See you, med­i­ta­tion and man­dala col­or­ing books.… I joke, but appar­ent­ly Dr. Reil was in earnest when he wrote in an 1803 man­u­al for the treat­ment of men­tal ill­ness that patients could “be placed so that they are sit­ting in direct view of the cat’s expres­sions when the psy­chi­a­trist plays a fugue.”

A baf­fling­ly cru­el and non­sen­si­cal exper­i­ment, and we might rejoice to know it prob­a­bly nev­er took place. But the bizarre idea of the cat piano, or Katzen­klavier, did not spring from the weird delu­sions of one sadis­tic psy­chi­a­trist. It was sup­pos­ed­ly invent­ed by Ger­man poly­math and Jesuit schol­ar Athana­sius Kircher (1602–1680), who has been called “the last Renais­sance man” and who made pio­neer­ing dis­cov­er­ies in the fields of micro­bi­ol­o­gy, geol­o­gy, and com­par­a­tive reli­gion. He was a seri­ous schol­ar and a man of sci­ence. Maybe the Katzen­klavier was intend­ed as a sick joke that oth­ers took seriously—and for a very long time at that. The illus­tra­tion of a Katzen­klavier above dates from 1667, the one below from 1883.

Kircher’s biog­ra­ph­er John Glassie admits that, for all his undoubt­ed bril­liance, sev­er­al of his “actu­al ideas today seem wild­ly off-base; if not sim­ply bizarre” as well as “inad­ver­tent­ly amus­ing, right, wrong, half-right, half-baked, ridicu­lous….” You get the idea. He was an eccen­tric, not a psy­chopath. McNamee points to oth­er, like­ly apoc­ryphal, sto­ries in which cats were sup­pos­ed­ly used as instru­ments. Per­haps, cru­el as it seems to us, the cat piano seemed no cru­el­er in pre­vi­ous cen­turies than the way we taunt our cats today to make them per­form for ani­mat­ed GIFs.

But to the cats these dis­tinc­tions are mean­ing­less. From their point of view, there is no oth­er way to describe the Katzen­klavier than as a sin­is­ter, ter­ri­fy­ing tor­ture device, and those who might use it as mon­strous vil­lains. Per­son­al­ly I’d like to give cats the last word on the sub­ject of the Katzen­klavier—or at least a few fic­tion­al ani­mat­ed, walk­ing, talk­ing, singing cats. Watch the short ani­ma­tion at the top, in which Nick Cave reads a poem by Eddie White about tal­ent­ed cat singers who mys­te­ri­ous­ly go miss­ing, scooped up by a human for a “harp­si­chord of harm, the cru­elest instru­ment to spawn from man’s gray cere­bral soup.” The sto­ry has all the dread and intrigue of Edgar Allan Poe’s best work, and it is in such a milieu of goth­ic hor­ror that the Katzen­klavier belongs.

The Cat Piano nar­rat­ed by Nick Cave will be added to our list of Free Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Peo­ple Named Their Cats in the Mid­dle Ages: Gyb, Mite, Méone, Pan­gur Bán & More

Cats in Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Ani­mals Came to Star in Its Pop­u­lar Art

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The First Animation That Hayao Miyazaki Directed on His Own: Watch Footage from the Pilot of Yuki’s Sun (1972)

Hayao Miyaza­ki began his career as an ani­ma­tor in 1963, get­ting in the door at Toei Ani­ma­tion not long before the com­pa­ny ceased to hire reg­u­lar­ly. Miyaza­k­i’s equal­ly retire­ment-resis­tant con­tem­po­rary Tet­suya Chi­ba, already well on his way to fame as a man­ga­ka, or com­ic artist, pub­lished the series Yuki no Taiy­ou, or Yuk­i’s Sun, that same year. But the paths of their work would­n’t cross until 1972, when Yuki no Taiy­ou was adapt­ed into a pilot for a prospec­tive ani­mat­ed series, the very first project Miyaza­ki — who had by that point amassed a good deal of expe­ri­ence as not just a key ani­ma­tor and col­lab­o­ra­tor with Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder-to-be Isao Taka­ha­ta, but also as a man­ga­ka him­self — direct­ed solo.

Despite hav­ing been orphaned as an infant, the tit­u­lar Yuki grows into a high-spir­it­ed tomboy so cheer­ful as to have devel­oped the odd habit of phys­i­cal­ly strik­ing oth­er peo­ple when she gets too hap­py.

And as with so many par­ent­less pro­tag­o­nists in chil­dren’s fic­tion, she has not just a dis­tinc­tive per­son­al­i­ty but also a sto­ry-dri­ving desire to dis­cov­er the truth about her ori­gins — which, it’s inti­mat­ed, may not be ordi­nary, and may indeed be spe­cial. Her search for her moth­er sends her on a quest through moun­tain, val­ley, wood, and, giv­en the set­ting of Japan’s north­ern­most island of Hokkai­do, a great deal of snow (the Japan­ese word for which is a homo­phone of Yuk­i’s name).

Alas, this is a quest tele­vi­sion audi­ences would nev­er see, since the plot for Yuki no Taiy­ou, footage from which you can see in the five-minute teas­er above, did­n’t draw a net­work order for a full series. In some respects, it seems con­cep­tu­al­ly sim­i­lar to Sasur­ai no Shou­jo Nell, or Wan­der­ing Girl Nell, a volu­mi­nous­ly loose adap­ta­tion of Charles Dick­ens’ The Old Curios­i­ty Shop that aired in Japan at the end of the sev­en­ties. By that time, Miyaza­ki had com­plet­ed work on his first ani­mat­ed fea­ture as direc­tor, The Cas­tle of Cagliostro. A few years there­after, he would adapt his own man­ga Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind into a motion pic­ture now wide­ly con­sid­ered the debut of the lav­ish, cap­ti­vat­ing Stu­dio Ghi­b­li style — and whose epony­mous pro­tag­o­nist has more than a lit­tle in com­mon with the adven­tur­ous, nature-lov­ing Yuki.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Hayao Miyaza­ki Ani­mate the Final Shot of His Final Fea­ture Film, The Wind Ris­es

The Phi­los­o­phy of Hayao Miyaza­ki: A Video Essay on How the Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Reli­gion Shin­to Suf­fus­es Miyazaki’s Films

Hayao Miyaza­ki, The Mind of a Mas­ter: A Thought­ful Video Essay Reveals the Dri­ving Forces Behind the Animator’s Incred­i­ble Body of Work

The Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Cel­e­brat­ed in a Glo­ri­ous Con­cert Arranged by Film Com­pos­er Joe Hisaishi

Hayao Miyazaki’s Uni­verse Recre­at­ed in a Won­der­ful CGI Trib­ute

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

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

Howl­in’ Wolf may well have been the great­est blues singer of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Cer­tain­ly many peo­ple have said so, but there are oth­er mea­sure­ments than mere opin­ion, though it’s one I hap­pen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Bur­nett also had a pro­found his­tor­i­cal effect on pop­u­lar cul­ture, and on the way the Chica­go blues car­ried “the sound of Jim Crow,” as Eric Lott writes, into Amer­i­can cities in the north, and into Europe and the UK. Record­ing for both Chess and Sun Records in the 50s (Sam Phillips said of his voice, “It’s where the soul of man nev­er dies”), Burnett’s raw sound “was at once urgent­ly urban and coun­try plain… south­ern and rur­al in instru­men­ta­tion and howl­ing­ly elec­tric in form.”

He was also phe­nom­e­nal on stage. His hulk­ing six-foot-six frame and intense glow­er­ing stare belied some very smooth moves, but his finesse only enhanced his edgi­ness. He seemed at any moment like he might actu­al­ly turn into a wolf, let­ting the impulse give out in plain­tive, ragged howls and prowls around the stage. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” he said, “so I turned to howl­in’. And it’s done me just fine.” He played a very mean har­mon­i­ca and did acro­bat­ic gui­tar tricks before Hen­drix, picked up from his men­tor Char­lie Pat­ton. And he played with the best musi­cians, in large part because he was known to pay well and on time. If you want­ed to play elec­tric blues, Howl­in’ Wolf was a man to watch.

This rep­u­ta­tion was Wolf’s entrée to the stage of ABC vari­ety show Shindig! in 1965, open­ing for the Rolling Stones. He had just returned from his 1964 tour of Europe and the UK with the Amer­i­can Folk Blues Fes­ti­val, play­ing to large, appre­cia­tive crossover crowds. He’d also just released “Killing Floor,” a record Ted Gioia notes “reached out to young lis­ten­ers with­out los­ing the deep blues feel­ing that stood as the cor­ner­stone of Wolf’s sound.” The fol­low­ing year, the Rolling Stones insist­ed that Shindig!’s pro­duc­ers “also fea­ture either Mud­dy Waters or Howl­in’ Wolf” before they would go on the show. Wolf won out over his rival Waters, toned down the the­atrics of his act for a more prud­ish white audi­ence, and “for the first time in his sto­ried career, the cel­e­brat­ed blues­man per­formed on a nation­al tele­vi­sion broad­cast.”

Why is this sig­nif­i­cant? Over the decades, the Stones reg­u­lar­ly per­formed with their blues heroes. But this was new media ground. Bri­an Jones’ shy, starstruck intro­duc­tion to Wolf before his per­for­mance above con­veys what he saw as the impor­tance of the moment. Jones’ biog­ra­ph­er Paul Tryn­ka may over­state the case, but in some degree at least, Wolf’s appear­ance on Shindig! “built a bridge over a cul­tur­al abyss and con­nect­ed Amer­i­ca with its own black cul­ture.” The show con­sti­tut­ed “a life-chang­ing moment, both for the Amer­i­can teenagers clus­tered round the TV in their liv­ing rooms, and for a gen­er­a­tion of blues per­form­ers who had been stuck in a cul­tur­al ghet­to.” One of these teenagers described the event as “like Christ­mas morn­ing.”

Eric Lott points to the show’s for­ma­tive impor­tance to the Stones, who “sit scat­tered around the Shindig! set watch­ing Wolf in full-met­al idol­a­try” as he sings “How Many More Years,” a song Led Zep­pelin would lat­er turn into “How Many More Times.” (See the Stones do their Shindig! per­for­mance of jan­g­ly, sub­dued “The Last Time,” here.)  The per­for­mance rep­re­sents more, how­ev­er, than the “British Inva­sion embrace” of the blues. It shows Wolf’s main­stream break­out, and the Stones pay­ing trib­ute to a found­ing father of rock and roll, an act of humil­i­ty in a band not espe­cial­ly known or appre­ci­at­ed for that qual­i­ty.

“It was alto­geth­er appro­pri­ate,” says music writer Peter Gural­nick, “that they would be sit­ting at Wolf’s feet… that’s what it rep­re­sent­ed. His music was not sim­ply the foun­da­tion or the cor­ner­stone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imag­ine.” Gural­nick, notes John Bur­nett at NPR, calls it “one of the great­est cul­tur­al moments of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” At min­i­mum, Bur­nett writes, it’s “one of the most incon­gru­ous moments in Amer­i­can pop music”—up until the mid-six­ties, at least.

Whether or not the moment could live up to its leg­end, the peo­ple involved saw it as ground­break­ing. The ven­er­a­ble Son House sat in attendance—“the man who knew Robert John­son and Charley Pat­ton,” remarked Bri­an Jones in awe. And the Rolling Stone posi­tion­ing him­self in def­er­ence to “Chica­go blues,” Tryn­ka writes, “uncom­pro­mis­ing music aimed at a black audi­ence, was a rad­i­cal, epoch-chang­ing step, both for baby boomer Amer­i­cans and the musi­cians them­selves. Four­teen and fif­teen-year-old kids… hard­ly under­stood the growth of civ­il rights; but they could under­stand the impor­tance of a hand­some Eng­lish­man who described the moun­tain­ous, grav­el-voiced blues­man as a ‘hero’ and sat smil­ing at his feet.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Mud­dy Waters

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

Mud­dy Waters, Howl­in’ Wolf, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe & Oth­er Amer­i­can Blues Leg­ends Per­form in the UK (1963–66)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he won the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. More than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the book still fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuter­buch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavari­a’s per­son­al physi­cian Johannes Hartlieb adapts a sec­tion of the Buch der Natur with its own full com­ple­ment of 160 illus­tra­tions.

“Hartlieb’s sub­ject is plants, most­ly herbs, and their med­ical uses,” says the Library of Con­gress, on whose site you can view and down­load the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch spe­cial is the side-by-side pre­sen­ta­tion of text and images. The high cost of such a rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed book makes it unlike­ly that it was actu­al­ly used by doc­tors or phar­ma­cists of the time.”

But even if they lack a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic prac­ti­cal­i­ty, these botan­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions have a bright, sim­ple bold­ness that, in some respect, suits our visu­al aes­thet­ics here in the ear­ly twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry; you could call it a renais­sance equiv­a­lent of flat design.

“Each chap­ter of the Kräuter­buch fol­lows a tra­di­tion­al sys­tem of botan­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion derived from the Greek philoso­pher Theophras­tus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illus­tra­tions. “Ani­mals are por­trayed as phar­ma­co­log­i­cal­ly knowl­edge­able, such as in an account of deer rub­bing them­selves on pep­per­weed (Lep­id­i­um lat­i­foli­um) to remove hunters’ arrows”; anoth­er sec­tion holds that “dead­ly car­rots (Thap­sia) aid beg­gars in their decep­tions — rubbed on the face, they will pro­duce signs of lep­rosy, which can also be cured with vine­gar.” Dis­cussing the poi­so­nous man­drake (see image imme­di­ate­ly above), Hartlieb car­ries for­ward von Megen­berg’s sug­ges­tion “that its mag­i­cal prop­er­ties should be kept secret from com­mon­ers,” who, nat­u­ral­ly, would nev­er be in pos­ses­sion of such a lav­ish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuter­buch — and most of us know that we’d be bet­ter off not mess­ing around with man­drake at all.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book

Hor­tus Eystet­ten­sis: The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Book of Plants That Changed Botan­i­cal Art Overnight (1613)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Man­u­script Fea­tur­ing Med­i­c­i­nal Plants with Fan­tas­ti­cal Human Faces

The Sur­pris­ing Map of Plants: A New Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Plants Relate to Each Oth­er

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

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

It’s easy to dis­miss The Mon­kees. Crit­ics and lis­ten­ers have been doing it since the six­ties, although the band has also come in for its share of reap­praisals, par­tic­u­lar­ly for their psych-rock album Head. (That’s the sound­track from the 1968 Jack Nichol­son-direct­ed art film of the same name: “One of the weird­est and best rock movies ever made.”) But what­ev­er you think of The Mon­kees’ music, you have to admit: they had one of the most extra­or­di­nary careers of any band in rock and roll.

They began in 1965 as a troupe of actors in a sit­com that Mon­kee Micky Dolenz described as being about “an imag­i­nary band… that want­ed to be The Bea­t­les,” but “was nev­er suc­cess­ful.” In a very short time, the four members—Dolenz, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith—had mas­tered their instru­ments and learned to write their own orig­i­nal songs.

It seemed that almost overnight, they’d gone from lip-sync­ing boy band come­di­ans to gen­uine pop stars. (Dolenz describes it as “the equiv­a­lent of Leonard Nimoy real­ly becom­ing a Vul­can.”)

In the sum­mer of 1967, “at the height of Mon­kee­ma­nia,” The Mon­kees Almanac informs us, the band embarked on a 28-city tour through the Unit­ed States and Eng­land, open­ing at the Hol­ly­wood Bowl just five days after their TV show col­lect­ed two Prime­time Emmy Awards. The odd­est thing about the tour: for eight dates, Jimi Hen­drix opened for the band with his new­ly formed Expe­ri­ence, “one of the strangest pair­ings in rock and roll his­to­ry.” But at the time, writes Men­tal Floss, “the pair­ing actu­al­ly made a lit­tle bit of sense for both acts.” The Mon­kees want­ed cred­i­bil­i­ty, and Hen­drix need­ed a U.S. audi­ence.

He was already a huge star in Eng­land, but, despite blow­ing the crowd away at the Mon­terey Pop Fes­ti­val that spring, Hen­drix was most­ly an unknown quan­ti­ty to U.S. music buy­ers. But Dolenz had seen him play in New York and was suit­ably impressed. When he sug­gest­ed Hen­drix for the tour, the Expe­ri­ence’s man­ag­er Mike Jef­fery jumped at the chance, think­ing he could lever­age The Mon­kees’ huge crowds to break Hen­drix in the States. Hen­drix him­self expressed much less enthu­si­asm, hav­ing called The Mon­kees’ music “dish­wa­ter” in a Melody Mak­er inter­view.

So how did it go? Not well, as you might imagine—certainly not the “West Coast Suc­cess” the head­line at the top of the post trum­pets. Mon­kees fans—mostly young kids drag­ging along parental chaperons—had no idea what to make of Hen­drix. “Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps and break into ‘Pur­ple Haze,’ ” wrote Dolenz in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “and the kids in the audi­ence would instant­ly drown him out with, ‘We Want Davy!!’ God, it was embar­rass­ing.” Although Peter Tork espe­cial­ly among The Mon­kees’ mem­bers was over­joyed to have Hen­drix on the tour, he lat­er recalled the pair­ing as a sin­gu­lar­ly bad idea: “This is scream­ing, scar­ing-your-dad­dy music com­pared with The Mon­kees. It did­n’t cross any­body’s mind that it was­n’t gonna fly. And there’s poor Jimi, and the kids go, ‘We want The Mon­kees, we want The Mon­kees.’ ”

You can see Tork describe the ill-fat­ed match-up in a hilar­i­ous­ly dat­ed MTV clip above. Despite his reser­va­tions, Hen­drix got on very well with The Mon­kees. Not so much with their obnox­ious fans. “The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence played just eight of the 29 sched­uled tour dates,” writes Men­tal Floss, “and then on July 16, 1967, Jimi flipped the For­est Hills, Queens, New York, audi­ence off, threw down his gui­tar and walked away from Mon­kee­ma­nia.” (History.com gives the date as July 17.) No great loss for either band. A cou­ple of months lat­er, Melody Mak­er pre­sent­ed Hen­drix with a “World’s Top Musi­cian” award, and his music hit the U.S. main­stream as well. And The Mon­kees fin­ished the tour and went on to make Head, the film and album, which, depend­ing on whom you ask, either ruined their rock cred or defined it for­ev­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Unplugged: Two Great Record­ings of Hen­drix Play­ing Acoustic Gui­tar

How the 1968 Psy­che­del­ic Film Head Destroyed the Mon­kees & Became a Cult Clas­sic

Watch Frank Zap­pa Play Michael Nesmith (RIP) on The Monkees–and Vice Ver­sa (1967)

How Sci­ence Fic­tion Formed Jimi Hen­drix

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Stephen Fry Explains Why Artificial Intelligence Has a “70% Risk of Killing Us All”

Apart from his comedic, dra­mat­ic, and lit­er­ary endeav­ors, Stephen Fry is wide­ly known for his avowed technophil­ia. He once wrote a col­umn on that theme, “Dork Talk,” for the Guardian, in whose inau­gur­al dis­patch he laid out his cre­den­tials by claim­ing to have been the own­er of only the sec­ond Mac­in­tosh com­put­er sold in Europe (“Dou­glas Adams bought the first”), and nev­er to have “met a smart­phone I haven’t bought.” But now, like many of us who were “dip­py about all things dig­i­tal” at the end of the last cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of this one, Fry seems to have his doubts about cer­tain big-tech projects in the works today: take the “$100 bil­lion plan with a 70 per­cent risk of killing us all” described in the video above.

This plan, of course, has to do with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in gen­er­al, and “the log­i­cal AI sub­goals to sur­vive, deceive, and gain pow­er” in par­tic­u­lar. Even in this rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly stage of devel­op­ment, we’ve wit­nessed AI sys­tems that seem to be alto­geth­er too good at their jobs, to the point of engag­ing in what would count as decep­tive and uneth­i­cal behav­ior were the sub­ject a human being. (Fry cites the exam­ple of a stock mar­ket-invest­ing AI that engaged in insid­er trad­ing, then lied about hav­ing done so.) What’s more, “as AI agents take on more com­plex tasks, they cre­ate strate­gies and sub­goals which we can’t see, because they’re hid­den among bil­lions of para­me­ters,” and qua­si-evo­lu­tion­ary “selec­tion pres­sures also cause AI to evade safe­ty mea­sures.”

In the video, MIT physi­cist, and machine learn­ing researcher Max Tegmark speaks por­ten­tous­ly of the fact that we are, “right now, build­ing creepy, super-capa­ble, amoral psy­chopaths that nev­er sleep, think much faster than us, can make copies of them­selves, and have noth­ing human about them what­so­ev­er.” Fry quotes com­put­er sci­en­tist Geof­frey Hin­ton warn­ing that, in inter-AI com­pe­ti­tion, “the ones with more sense of self-preser­va­tion will win, and the more aggres­sive ones will win, and you’ll get all the prob­lems that jumped-up chim­panzees like us have.” Hin­ton’s col­league Stu­art Rus­sell explains that “we need to wor­ry about machines not because they’re con­scious, but because they’re com­pe­tent. They may take pre­emp­tive action to ensure that they can achieve the objec­tive that we gave them,” and that action may be less than impec­ca­bly con­sid­er­ate of human life.

Would we be bet­ter off just shut­ting the whole enter­prise down? Fry rais­es philoso­pher Nick Bostrom’s argu­ment that “stop­ping AI devel­op­ment could be a mis­take, because we could even­tu­al­ly be wiped out by anoth­er prob­lem that AI could’ve pre­vent­ed.” This would seem to dic­tate a delib­er­ate­ly cau­tious form of devel­op­ment, but “near­ly all AI research fund­ing, hun­dreds of bil­lions per year, is push­ing capa­bil­i­ties for prof­it; safe­ty efforts are tiny in com­par­i­son.” Though “we don’t know if it will be pos­si­ble to main­tain con­trol of super-intel­li­gence,” we can nev­er­the­less “point it in the right direc­tion, instead of rush­ing to cre­ate it with no moral com­pass and clear rea­sons to kill us off.” The mind, as they say, is a fine ser­vant but a ter­ri­ble mas­ter; the same holds true, as the case of AI makes us see afresh, for the mind’s cre­ations.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry Voic­es a New Dystopi­an Short Film About Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry: Watch Escape

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stir­ring Let­ter About Chat­G­PT and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty: “We Are Fight­ing for the Very Soul of the World”

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Stephen Fry on the Pow­er of Words in Nazi Ger­many: How Dehu­man­iz­ing Lan­guage Laid the Foun­da­tion for Geno­cide

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course Taught by Geof­frey Hin­ton

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

Watch the 1896 Film The Pistol Duel, a Startling Re-Creation of the Last Days of Pistol Dueling in Mexico

One some­times hears lament­ed the ten­den­cy of movies to depict Mex­i­co — and in par­tic­u­lar, its cap­i­tal Mex­i­co City — as a threat­en­ing, rough-and-tum­ble place where human life has no val­ue. Such con­cerns turn out to be near­ly as old as cin­e­ma itself, hav­ing first been raised in response to a rough­ly thir­ty-sec­ond-long film called Duel au pis­to­let from 1896. The French title owes to its hav­ing a French direc­tor: Gabriel Veyre, a con­tem­po­rary of the cin­e­ma-pio­neer­ing Lumière broth­ers who first left France for Latin Amer­i­ca in order to screen their ear­ly films there.

On his trav­els, Veyre both exhib­it­ed Lumière films and made his own. “Between 1896 and 1897, he direct­ed and pro­duced 35 films in Mex­i­co,” writes Jared Wheel­er at Moviego­ings. “Many of those films fea­ture the Mex­i­can pres­i­dent Por­firio Díaz in dai­ly activ­i­ties.” The action cap­tured in Duel au pis­to­let is “most prob­a­bly a recre­ation of a famous duel that had tak­en place in Sep­tem­ber 1894, between Colonel Fran­cis­co Romero and Jose Verástegui, the post­mas­ter gen­er­al.” It seems that Romero had over­heard Verástegui accus­ing him of not only sleep­ing with a mutu­al friend’s wife, but also of hav­ing pulled strings to get that same friend a post in the gov­ern­ment.

His hon­or insult­ed, Romero demand­ed that Verástegui set­tle the mat­ter with pis­tols in Cha­pul­te­pec Park. By that time, duel­ing was a tech­ni­cal­ly ille­gal but still-com­mon prac­tice, one “gov­erned by a com­plex sys­tem of social norms that were, for some, a source of nation­al pride as a sign of Mexico’s moder­ni­ty, and of its kin­ship with oth­er Euro­pean nations like France.” But if a duel were to be re-cre­at­ed and screened on film out of its cul­tur­al con­text, “would oth­er nations rec­og­nize it as an hon­or­able, dig­ni­fied rit­u­al, or sim­ply see it as a sign that every­day life in Mex­i­co was char­ac­ter­ized by vio­lence and bar­barism?”

What still impress­es about Duel au pis­to­let (a col­orized ver­sion of which appears above), near­ly 130 years after its debut, is less the impres­sion it gives of Mex­i­co than its star­tling real­ism, which has giv­en even some mod­ern-day view­ers rea­son to won­der whether it’s real­ly a re-enact­ment. Many “have com­ment­ed on the nat­u­ral­ism of the duelist’s death,” Wheel­er writes, “one of the first to be depict­ed on screen and very much in con­trast to the melo­dra­mat­ic style that was more typ­i­cal of this time.” In real life, it was Verástegui who lost, and Romero’s sub­se­quent tri­al and impris­on­ment meant that Mex­i­co’s days of duel­ing were well and tru­ly num­bered — but the his­to­ry of onscreen vio­lence had only just begun.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film

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

More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.