The Moon is a mystery. For all its familiarity–the regularity of its phases, the fact that everywhere on Earth it looks the same–the Moon has always been an enigma, a luminous question mark rolling across the night sky.
In this new video from Cosmic Journeys, we learn about some of the latest scientific research into the structure and history of the Moon. In particular, we learn the latest ideas on what is perhaps the greatest of lunar mysteries: the question of how the Moon got there in the first place.
The leading candidate for an answer is the Giant Impact Hypothesis, which posits that sometime in the early stage of the Solar System–about four and a half billion years ago–a large proto-Earth collided with a Mars-sized body named “Theia,” causing a huge cloud of material from both bodies to fly out into space. Some of the material remained in the Earth’s orbit and coalesced into the Moon. It’s a fascinating hypothesis. To see more videos from the same series, visit the Cosmic Journeys channel on YouTube, or the SpaceRip blog.
As a carless cinephile, I’ve spent hours upon hours listening to film podcasts while riding my bike or the train.Battleship Pretension, hosted by knowledgeable but still knowledge-hungry young critics Tyler Smith and David Bax, has long held top priority on these rides — and even if the title’s referent doesn’t flood your mind with memories of artistic awe, you probably get the pun. But if you want to go deeper and talk about how film editing went from grunt work to art form, you have little choice but to talk about Battleship Potemkin(1925) and its director, Sergei Eisenstein. A Russian double-threat of filmmaker and film theorist in the 1920s through the late 1940s, Eisenstein pioneered many now-essential editing techniques, figuring out how images could be arranged to serve not just a film’s story but its rhythm, its tone, and even its themes.
Like cinema itself, Eisenstein came from the theater. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he made great strides in dragging cinema out of the theater behind him, casting off staid storytelling habits in favor of the vast possibilities of the then-new medium, most of which remain uncharted even today. Tasked by his government with producing what came down to revolutionary propaganda, Eisenstein couldn’t push the thematic envelope very far. Even so, today’s filmmakers looking for ways to advance their form, or today’s filmgoers eager to learn more about how movies work, would do well to look at what Eisenstein managed to do 85 years ago, and how aesthetically exhilarating it all remains.
This you can do from the comfort of your computer by browsing Open Culture’s collection of Free Movies Online, where you’ll find links to Eisenstein pictures viewable at the click of the mouse, including the sweepingAlexander Nevsky, the doomed¡Que viva México!, and of course, the iconicBattleship Potemkin(above). Watch a few, and you’ll see why Battleship Pretension’s listeners voted Eisenstein into the top hundred directors of all time. Smith and Bax called on yours truly to write his blurb on the list, but don’t take my word for the filmmaker’s importance; his movies, whether you catch them in a grand revival screening or on your web browser right now, show you everything you need to know.
The clip above is apparently the oldest collegiate football footage surviving today. And, in case you’re keeping score, Princeton won the game 11–6.
But if you’re counting the number of Free Courses provided by the two universities, we have the score at 38–1, with Yale coming out way on top.
In April of 1964, the British Broadcasting Corporation launched BBC Two as a highbrow alternative to its mainstream TV channel. One of the new channel’s first programs was Jazz 625, which spotlighted many of the greatest Jazz musicians of the day. Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans and others performed on the show, which featured straight-forward camera work and a minimalist set. The focus was on the music.
The title of the show referred to the channel’s 625-line UHF bandwidth, which offered higher resolution than the 405-line VHF transmission on BBC One. Among the surviving episodes is Thelonious Monk’s March 14, 1965 performance at the Marquee Club in London. You can watch a 35-minute excerpt above. The quartet features Monk on piano, Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Larry Gales on bass and Ben Riley on drums. They perform four numbers:
Straight No Chaser
Hackensack
Rhythm-A-Ning
Epistrophy
You can learn the story behind Jazz 625 by reading an article by Louis Barfe at Transdiffusion. And to see more from the shows, scroll down.
The Oscar Peterson Trio:
Above is a 25-minute excerpt from the Oscar Peterson Trio’s October 1, 1964 performance. The original show, like other episodes of Jazz 625, was over an hour long. The trio features Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums.
The Bill Evans Trio:
Above are two 35-minute episodes, shown back-to-back, featuring the Bill Evans Trio. The two sets were recorded on March 19, 1965 and feature Evans on piano, Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums.
The Modern Jazz Quartet:
The Modern Jazz Quartet performed for Jazz 625 on April 28, 1964. Above is a 27-minute except, featuring the Quartet’s musical director John Lewis on piano, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums. Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida makes a special appearance.
We started the week expecting to publish one David Foster Wallace post. Then, because of the 50th birthday celebration, it turned into two. And now three. We spent some time tracking down free DFW stories and essays available on the web, and they’re all now listed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. But we didn’t want them to escape your attention. So here they are — 23 pieces published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
An Ingmar Bergman retrospective begins next month here in Los Angeles, and as I mark my calendar, I reflect on what turned me on to his films in the first place. Who can approach Bergman now without first running a cultural gauntlet of knowing references, gushing appreciations, and contrarian broadsides? What young cinephile could resist the temptation to inflate an opinion about The Seventh Seal, or Wild Strawberries, or Persona after seeing them for the first time — or indeed, before? We could all benefit from someone to show us the way into the “Swedish master’s” loaded, time-consuming filmography, and as this BBC interview by film critic Mark Kermode reveals (watch Part 1 above, and Part 2 here), Woody Allen could well be it.
Allen holds a surprisingly plausible claim to the title of Bergman’s number-one fan, or at least his most prominent one. How to square his dedication to these solemn Swedish meditations on mortality, emotional isolation, and the impossibility of faith with his creation of beloved light comedies like Bananas, Sleeper, and Annie Hall? But watch Allen’s filmography in full, especially pictures like Love and Death, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Shadows and Fog, and the answer comes into view. Mortality, emotional isolation, the impossibility of faith — Bergman’s preoccupations are Allen’s, but Allen grapples with the unanswerable questions by making jokes about them. What Allen describes as a “thematic connection” to Bergman ultimately becomes a much more complicated entanglement: his hiring of Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist to shoot Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Celebrity, for instance, suggests something beyond simple influence.
In conversation with Kermode, Allen remembers joining the vanguard of New York Bergman enthusiasm after seeing Summer with Monika and The Naked Night, films that, to his mind, displayed an obviously higher level of craft than anything else playing in town. The days when discovering Bergman really meant discovering Bergman have long passed, but it will never be too late to feel the same excitement Allen did about Bergman’s ability to express internal conflicts — “inner states of anxiety,” Allen calls them — so richly and dramatically on film. The Woody Allen-approved points of entry for the Bergman novice: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Cries and Whispers “for sure.” And maybe The Magician. H/T @opedr
In early 1964, Bob Dylan was at the apex of his journey as a socially conscious folk singer. The fleeting moment is preserved in this rare half-hour TV program, recorded on February 1 of that year. Within a week the Beatles would land in America. In a little over a month, Dylan would rent an electric guitar.
The television performance is from Quest, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series that ran between 1961 and 1964 and showcased a wide range of literary and performing arts. It was produced in Toronto by Daryl Duke, who went on to direct American television programs and feature films.
Dylan appears in his classic Woody Guthrie mode on a set made to look like a western bunkhouse. He plays six songs–half from The Times They Are a‑Changin’, his third album released just a few weeks before, and half from his previous album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. In order of appearance:
The Times They Are A Changin’
Talkin’ World War III Blues
Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Girl From the North Country
A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall
Restless Farewell
“The Times They Are a‑Changin’,” as the program is titled, offers a unique glimpse of the early Bob Dylan, just before his music turned from social issues to personal ones, just before he put away the blue jeans and work shirts and began wearing Beatle boots and sunglasses. “Dylan’s appearance on Quest,” says writer and filmmaker Erek Barsczewski, “provides the closest approximation available of what his early performances in Greenwich Village would have looked and sounded like.”
Cinema went into its death throes on September 31, 1983. The instrument of its demise? The video remote control. When the “zapper” endowed the viewer with the ability to play, pause, stop, fast-forward, and rewind at will, the medium’s artists lost their absolute control over the rhythm, duration, and other chronological subtleties of the cinematic experience. Or so filmmaker Peter Greenaway claims in this lecture at UC Berkeley. Anyone fan enough to read all the interviews the director has granted — and I count myself in the group — will by now be familiar with, even weary of, Greenaway’s ideas about cinema’s technical and economic straitjacketing, its arbitrary aesthetic boundaries, and its squandered potential as a freestanding art form. Nowhere else, though, does he explain and elaborate upon these ideas in such detail, or in such an entertainingly oratorical manner.
“The death of cinema,” though? Really? Knowing how dramatic that sounds, Greenaway frames what’s happened in another way: perhaps cinema has yet to be born. What if the last century or so has offered only the prologue to cinema, and modern filmmakers must take it upon themselves to bring the real thing into the world? These may strike you as the thoughts of a crackpot, and maybe they are, but watch and listen as Greenaway recounts the stunted development of the art form in which he works. We’ve grown so accustomed to the limitations of cinema, so his argument goes, that we don’t even feel the pressure of the “four tyrannies” that have lorded over it since the beginning: the frame, the text, the actor, and the camera. Even if you loathe Greenaway’s films, can you help asking yourself whether the rarely questioned dominance of an elite class of essentially theatrical performers, following textually conceived instructions, viewed from one perspective at a time through a simple rectangle, holds the movies back?
Since his feature-length debut The Falls in 1980, Greenaway has struggled against what he sees as the barriers put up by cinema’s unhealthy entanglement with the narrative-driven forms of theater and literature. Trained originally as a painter, he wonders explicitly in public and implicitly through his work why films can’t enjoy the same freedom to explore the creative space at their disposal that paintings do. All his pictures, even the best-known like The Draughtsman’s Contract; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; and 8½ Women, use settings, actors, images, words, and sounds like colors on a palette, applying them with infinitude of strokes, creating a whole from which no one element can be easily separated. In this lecture, Greenaway marshals footage from his projects conducted even farther out at the medium’s edge: his transformation of an actual Italian palace into one big non-narrative film, his collaborations with avant-garde composer David Lang, and, of course, his VJ-ing sessions.
When we featured David Foster Wallace’s big, uncut interview yesterday, one important detail escaped us — the fact that the novelist would have turned 50 years old today. Kind of a stunning thought, especially if you vividly remember the wunderkind taking the literary world by storm with Infinite Jestin 1996. Seems like only yesterday.
To celebrate his 50th, we’re highlighting for you The David Foster Wallace Audio Project — a site that brings together most of the meaningful DFW audio available on the web. Built in 2009 by Jordyn Bonds and Ryan Walsh, a short while after the novelist committed suicide, the audio site is divided into four sections:
Last year, we featured a slick animation of Cross Road Blues by the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. This morning, one of our Twitter friends highlighted for us a 2007 animation of Johnson’sMe and the Devil Blues, created by Dutch artist Ineke Goes. Recorded in 1937 in only two takes, the song helped cement the legend of the bluesman. According to the old tale, Johnson made a Faustian bargain with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for boundless musical talent. And that he had. But, of course, the devil eventually demands his payback. Johnson died in 1938.
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In 2003, an interviewer from German public television station ZDF sat down with novelist David Foster Wallace in a hotel room. The ensuing conversation, whose raw, unedited 84 minutes (find links to the complete interview below) made it to the internet after Wallace’s suicide, remains the most direct, expansive, and disarmingly rough-hewn media treatment of his themes, his personality, and the fascinating (if at times chilling) feedback loop between them.
You can also experience this conversation in short, thematically organized clips; above, we have “David Foster Wallace on Political Thinking in America.” Wallace expresses his concerns about the strong influence of television ads on elections, which means, he says, “we get candidates who are beholden to large donors and become, in some ways, corrupt, which disgusts the voters, makes them even less interested in politics, less willing to read and do the work of citizenship.” This he sees coupled with an individualistic marketing culture which stokes “that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire” — “a strange kind of slavery.”
But as his pained, self-questioning expression reveals — especially when it retreats into strangely endearing post-answer cringes — Wallace did not believe he possessed the cure for, or even a precisely accurate diagnosis of, a sick society. Offering social criticism at a vast remove from the avuncular condemnation of a Noam Chomsky or the raised middle finger of a Bill Hicks, Wallace discusses his fears through a novelist’s consciousness that longs to, as he explains the desire elsewhere in the interview, “jump over the wall of self and inhabit someone else.” When the interviewer tells him about her peers’ frustration at feeling educated but “not being able to do anything with it,” Wallace puts himself in the mind of students who go from studying “the liberal arts: philosophy, classical stuff, languages, all very much about the nobility of the human spirit and broadening the mind” to “a specialized school to learn how to sue people or to figure out how to write copy that will make people buy a certain kind of SUV” to “jobs that are financially rewarding, but don’t have anything to do with what they got taught — and persuasively taught — was important and worthwhile.”
Underneath Wallace’s responses rushes a current of the questions his writing leads readers to think — and think hard — about: How far has entertainment evolved toward pure anesthetic? Can we still separate our needs from our wants, if we try? Has post-Gen X irony made us not just collectively ineffectual but that much easier to sell things to? Can we ever again use terms like “citizenship” without instinctively sneering at ourselves? To the David Foster Wallace novice, these clips make for a helpful thematic primer, but the full recording (see below) will thereafter become required viewing. The interview brims with the kind of asides that make it feel like a page from the notebook of one of Wallace’s own favorite literary craftsmen, Jorge Luis Borges. Wallace wonders aloud how much of what he says will get edited out, if he can discuss his all-consuming suspicion that “there’s something really good on another channel and I’m missing it” while he’s actually on television, and how to talk to the media about how difficult it is to talk to the media while pretending you don’t know you’re talking to the media. As he admits after unpacking one particularly difficult issue, “It’s all… complicated.”
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