I live in Seoul, and whenever I’m back in the West, I hear the same question over and over: what’s Gangnam like? Presumably Westerners wouldn’t have had anything to ask me before the virality of “Gangnam Style,” and specifically of the music video satirizing the image of that part of the Korean capital. In Korean, “Gangnam” literally means “south of the river,” the waterway in question being the Han River, which runs through modern Seoul much as the Thames and the Seine run through London and Paris. Developed in the main only since the 1970s, after Korea’s unprecedentedly rapid industrialization had begun, Gangnam looks and feels quite different from the old city north of the Han. In the financial center of Gangnam, everything’s bigger, taller, and more expensive — all of it meant to impress.
With Psy’s novelty song a thing of the distant past — in internet years, at least — the world now thrills again to another glimpse of Gangnam style: a digital screen that looks like a giant water tank, full of waves perpetually crashing against its walls. When video of this high-tech optical illusion went viral, it looked even more uncanny to me than it did to most viewers, since I recognized it from real life.
Though I happen to live in Gangbuk (“north of the river”), whenever I go to Gangnam, I usually come out of the Samsung subway station, right across the street from COEX. A convention-center complex embedded in a set of difficult-to-navigate malls, COEX also includes SM Town COEX Artium, a flashy temple of K‑pop run by music company SM Entertainment. Announcing SM Town’s presence, this colossal wraparound display, the largest of its kind in the country, usually offers up either fresh-faced pop stars or ads for Korean-made cars.
Occasionally the SM Town screen’s programming gets more creative, and “#1_WAVE with Anamorphic illusion” has made the most striking use of its shape and dimensions yet. Designed by Gangnam’s own d’strict, this piece of public video art “serves as a sweet escape and brings comfort and relaxation to people” — or so says d’strict’s Sean Lee in an interview with Bored Panda’s Robertas Lisickis. It’s even impressed Seoulites, accustomed though they’ve grown to large-scale video screens clamoring for their attention. Even up in Gangbuk, the LED-covered facade of the building right across from Seoul Station has turned into a “Digital Canvas” every night for nearly a decade. Though that artistic installation never displays advertising, most of the increasingly large screens of Seoul are used for more overtly commercial purposes. There may be something dystopian about this scale of digital advertisement technology in public space — but as every Blade Runner fan knows, there’s something sublime about it as well.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
At my home now, we constantly tell stories: to distract, soothe, entertain—telling and retelling, collaboratively authoring over meals, listening to a ton of story podcasts. These activities took up a good part of the day before all hell broke loose and schools shut down. Now they guide us from morning to night as we try to imagine other worlds, better worlds, than the one we’re living in at present. We are painting on the walls of our cave, so to speak, with brave and fearful images, while outside, confusion sets in.
Lest anyone think this is kid stuff, it most assuredly is not. Narrative coherence seems particularly important for healthy human functioning. We may grow to appreciate greater levels of complexity and moral ambiguity, it’s true. But the desire to experience reality as something with arcs, rather than erratic and disturbing non-sequiturs, remains strong. Experimental fiction proves so unsettling because it defies acceptable notions of cause and consequence.
From the tales told by plague-displaced aristocrats in Boccaccio’s Decameron to the radio dramas that entertained families sheltering in place during the Blitz to our own podcast-saturated coronavirus media landscape…. Stories told well and often have a healing effect on the distressed psyches of those trapped in world-historical dramas. “While stories might not protect you from a virus,” writes Andre Spicer at New Statesman, “they can protect you from the ill feelings which epidemics generate.”
In addition to advice offered throughout history—by many of Boccaccio’s contemporaries, for example, who urged story and song to lift plague-weary spirits—“dozens of studies” by psychologists have shown “the impact storytelling has on our health.” Telling and hearing stories gives us language we may lack to describe experience. We can communicate and analyze painful emotions through metaphors and characterization, rather than too-personal confession. We can experience a sense of kinship with those who have felt similarly.
Perhaps this last function is most important in the midst of catastrophes that isolate people from each other. As reality refuses to conform to a sense of appropriate scope, as cartoonish villains destroy all proportion and probability, empathy fatigue can start to set in. Through the art of storytelling, we might learn we don’t have to share other people’s backgrounds, beliefs, and interests to understand their motivations and care about what happens to them.
We can also learn to start small, with just a few people, instead of the whole world. Short fiction brings unthinkable abstractions—the death tolls in wars and plagues—to a manageable emotional scale. Rather than showing us how we might defeat, avoid, or escape invisible antagonists like viral pandemics, stories illustrate how people can behave well or badly in extreme, inhuman circumstances.
Below, find a series of audio dramas, both fiction and non, in podcast form—many featuring celebrity voices, including Rami Malek, Catherine Keener, Tim Robbins & more—to help you in your journey through our narratively exhausting times. Parents and caregivers likely already find themselves immersed in stories much of the day. Yet adults, whether they’re raising kids or not, need storytime too—maybe especially when the stories we believed about the world stop making sense.
Alice Isn’t Dead — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — A truck driver searches across America for the wife she had long assumed was dead. In the course of her search, she will encounter not-quite-human serial murderers, towns literally lost in time, and a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.
Blackout — Apple — Spotify — Google — Academy Award winner Rami Malek stars in this apocalyptic thriller as a small-town radio DJ fighting to protect his family and community after the power grid goes down nationwide, upending modern civilization.
LifeAfter/The Message — Apple — Spotify — Google — The Message and its sequel, LifeAfter, take listeners on journeys to the limits of technology. n The Message, an alien transmission from decades ago becomes an urgent puzzle with life or death consequences. In LifeAfter, Ross, a low level employee at the FBI, spends his days conversing online with his wife Charlie – who died eight months ago. But the technology behind this digital resurrection leads Ross down a dangerous path that threatens his job, his own life, and maybe even the world. Winner of the Cannes Gold Lion.
Homecoming — Apple — Spotify — Google — Homecoming centers on a caseworker at an experimental facility, her ambitious supervisor, and a soldier eager to rejoin civilian life — presented in an enigmatic collage of telephone calls, therapy sessions, and overheard conversations. Starring Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, David Schwimmer, David Cross, Amy Sedaris, Michael Cera, Mercedes Ruehl, Alia Shawkat, Chris Gethard, and Spike Jonze.
Limetown — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — The premise: Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again. In this podcast, American Public Radio reporter Lia Haddock asks the question once more, “What happened to the people of Limetown?”
Motherhacker — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — The plot: Bridget’s life is a series of dropped calls. With a gift for gab, an ex-husband in rehab, and down to her last dollar, Bridget’s life takes a desperate turn when she starts vishing over the phone for a shady identity theft ring in order to support her family.
Passenger List — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — Atlantic Flight 702 has disappeared mid-flight between London and New York with 256 passengers on board. Kaitlin Le (Kelly Marie Tran), a college student whose twin brother vanished with the flight, is determined to uncover the truth.
Sandra — Apple — Spotify — Web Site — Co-stars Kristen Wiig, Alia Shawkat, and Ethan Hawke. Here’s the plot: Helen’s always dreamed of ditching her hometown, so when she lands a job at the company that makes Sandra, everyone’s favorite A.I., she figures it’s the next-best thing. But working behind the curtain isn’t quite the escape from reality that Helen expected.
The Angel of Vine — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — A present day journalist uncovers the audio tapes of a 1950s private eye who cracked the greatest unsolved murder mystery Hollywood has ever known… and didn’t tell a soul. Starring Joe Manganiello, Alfred Molina, Constance Zimmer, Alan Tudyk, Camilla Luddington, and more.
The Bright Sessions — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — A science fiction podcast that follows a group of therapy patients. But these are not your typical patients — each has a unique supernatural ability. The show documents their struggles and discoveries as well as the motivations of their mysterious therapist, Dr. Bright.
The Orbiting Human Circus — Apple — Spotify — Google — Discover a wondrously surreal world of magic, music, and mystery. This immersive, cinematic audio spectacle follows the adventures of a lonely, stage-struck janitor who is drawn into the larger-than-life universe of the Orbiting Human Circus, a fantastical, wildly popular radio show broadcast from the top of the Eiffel Tower. WNYC Studios presents a special director’s cut of this joyous, moving break from reality. Starring John Cameron Mitchell, Julian Koster, Tim Robbins, Drew Callander, Susannah Flood, and featuring Mandy Patinkin and Charlie Day.
The Truth — Apple — Spotify — Google — Web Site — The Truth makes movies for your ears. They’re short stories that are sometimes dark, sometimes funny, and always intriguing. Every story is different, but they all take you to unexpected places using only sound. If you’re new, some good starting places are: Silvia’s Blood, That’s Democracy, Moon Graffiti, Tape Delay, or whatever’s most recent. Listening with headphones is encouraged!
The Walk — Apple — Spotify — “Dystopian thriller, The Walk, is a tale of mistaken identity, terrorism, and a life-or-death mission to walk across Scotland. But the format of this story is — unusual. The Walk is an immersive fiction podcast, and the creators want you to listen to it while walking. It begins with a terrorist attack at a train station; you are the protagonist, known only as Walker, and the police think you’re a member of a shadowy terror group called The Burn.” “Author Naomi Alderman, whose latest novel was a bestseller called The Power, is the creator of The Walk.”
We’re Alive — Apple — Spotify — Google — An award-wining audio drama, originally released in podcast form. Its story follows a large group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse in downtown Los Angeles, California.
Wolf 359 — Apple — Spotify — Google — A science fiction podcast created by Gabriel Urbina. Following in the tradition of Golden Age radio dramas, Wolf 359 tells the story of a dysfunctional space station crew orbiting the star Wolf 359 on a deep space survey mission.
Many friends have expressed a sense of relief that their elderly parents passed before the coronavirus pandemic hit, but I sure wish my stepfather were here to witness Iggy Pop crossing the rainbow bridge with the heartfelt valentine to the late Tromba, the pooch with whom he shared the happiest moments of his life.
Iggy’s paean to his adopted Mexican street dog, who never quite made the adjustment to the New York City canine lifestyle, would have made my stepfather’s grinchy, dog-soft heart grow three sizes, at least.
That level of engagement would have pleased conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, who launched Bedtime Stories under the digital auspices of New York City’s New Museum, asking friends, fellow artists, and favorite performers to contribute brief readings to foment a feeling of togetherness in these isolated times.
It was left to each contributor whether to go with a favorite literary passage or words of their own. As Cattelan told The New York Times:
It would have been quite depressing if all the invited artists and contributors had chosen fairy tales and children stories. We look to artists for their ability to show us the unexpected so I am thankful to all the participants for coming up with some genuinely weird stuff.
Thusfar, artist Raymond Pettibon’s smutty Batman reverie is as close as Bedtime Stories comes to fairytale.
Artist and musician David Byrne (pictured here at age five) reads from “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti” by Milton Rokeach. As part of its series of new digital initiatives, the New Museum presents “Bedtime Stories,” a project initiated by the artist Maurizio Cattelan. Inviting friends and other artists and performers he admires to keep us company, Cattelan imagined “Bedtime Stories” as a way of staying together during these days of isolation. Read more at newmuseum.org. #NewMuseumBedtimeStories @davidbyrneofficial
Musician David Byrne picked an excerpt from The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by social psychologist Milton Rokeach, who detailed the interactions between three paranoid schizophrenics, each of whom believed himself the Son of God.
Artist Tacita Dean’s cutting from Thomas Hardy’s poem “An August Midnight” speaks to an experience familiar to many who’ve been isolating solo—an acute willingness to elevate random bugs to the status of companion.
Listen to the New Museum’s Bedtime Stories here. A new story will be added every day through the end of June, with a lineup that includes musician Michael Stipe, architect Maya Lin, and artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.
Joni Mitchell doesn’t like to do interviews, but once she starts to open up, she really opens up, not only about her own struggles but about her feelings towards her fellow artists. These are often decidedly negative. Maybe she took a cue from her personal hero, Miles Davis (who, it turned out secretly owned all her albums). Mitchell matched his level of caustic commentary in 2010 when she told the L.A. Times that Bob Dylan “is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
Attempts to clarify fell flat with the most backhanded of compliments. “I like a lot of Bob’s songs, though musically he’s not very gifted.” If any musician has earned the right to criticize him… In any case, whatever she thought of Dylan during her mid-seventies period, when she recorded and released her densely experimental The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Court and Spark, she was happy to join the 1975 Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue.
Martin Scorsese captured the tour, which played smaller, more intimate venues than Dylan had in years. The documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, was only released last year. Dylan may have been the headliner, but this is also a Joni Mitchell story, and a Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, and other artists’ story. In the clip above, Mitchell plays a new song, “Coyote,” at Gordon Lightfoot’s house, with Dylan and McGuinn joining in on guitar. Her performance is immaculate, full of confidence and nuance. McGuinn leans forward before she begins to introduce the song for Joni, mansplaining into the mic, “Joni wrote this song about this tour and on this tour and for this tour.”
Mitchell says nothing, but fans will know she wrote the song about Sam Shepard and first introduced it onstage during The Hissing of Summer Lawns tour. They’ll also recognize it as the first song on Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira. The studio version, above, is still driven by her acoustic guitar but incorporates percussion and Mitchell’s serpentine vocal line entwines with Jaco Pastorius’s bass. Lyrically, the song is full of dusty, forlorn images like the settings of Shepard’s plays. How McGuinn could have thought that it was about Dylan’s tour is beyond me. But Mitchell never needed anyone else to speak for her.
Have free time on your hands? Then let Bill Gates suggest five books to fill your days. Most take you deeper into thinking about our challenging times. At least one provides a mental escape. Bill writes:
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis, by Jared Diamond. I’m a big fan of everything Jared has written, and his latest is no exception. The book explores how societies react during moments of crisis. He uses a series of fascinating case studies to show how nations managed existential challenges like civil war, foreign threats, and general malaise. It sounds a bit depressing, but I finished the book even more optimistic about our ability to solve problems than I started. More here.
Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood. If you get grossed out by blood, this one probably isn’t for you. But if you’re like me and find it fascinating, you’ll enjoy this book by a British journalist with an especially personal connection to the subject. I’m a big fan of books that go deep on one specific topic, so Nine Pints (the title refers to the volume of blood in the average adult) was right up my alley. It’s filled with super-interesting facts that will leave you with a new appreciation for blood. More here.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. It seems like everyone I know has read this book. I finally joined the club after my brother-in-law sent me a copy, and I’m glad I did. Towles’s novel about a count sentenced to life under house arrest in a Moscow hotel is fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat. Even if you don’t enjoy reading about Russia as much as I do (I’ve read every book by Dostoyevsky), A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story that anyone can enjoy. More here.
Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times, by Michael Beschloss. My interest in all aspects of the Vietnam War is the main reason I decided to pick up this book. By the time I finished it, I learned a lot not only about Vietnam but about the eight other major conflicts the U.S. entered between the turn of the 19th century and the 1970s. Beschloss’s broad scope lets you draw important cross-cutting lessons about presidential leadership. More here.
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties, by Paul Collier. Collier’s latest book is a thought-provoking look at a topic that’s top of mind for a lot of people right now. Although I don’t agree with him about everything—I think his analysis of the problem is better than his proposed solutions—his background as a development economist gives him a smart perspective on where capitalism is headed.
Find another additional list of books Gates considers worth reading here.
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We think of movies as lasting forever. And since we can pull up videos of films from 50, 80, even 100 years ago, why shouldn’t we? But as everyone who dives deep into this history of cinema knows, the further back in time you go, the more movies are “lost,” wholly or partially. In the case of the latter, bits and pieces remain of film — actual, physical film — but often they’ve been poorly preserved and thus have badly degraded. Still, they have value, and not just to cinema scholars. The thirty-year-long career of filmmaker Bill Morrison, for instance, demonstrates just how evocatively film at the end of its life can be put to artistic use.
“Created using a decomposing 35mm print of the crime drama The Bells (1926), the experimental short Light Is Calling (2004) depicts a dreamy encounter between a soldier and a mysterious woman,” says Aeon. “With images that reveal themselves only to distort and disappear into the decaying amber-tinted nitrate,” Morrison “invites viewers to meditate on the fleeting nature of all things physical and emotional, while a minimalistic violin score suffuses the century-old images with a wistful, haunting beauty.” Light Is Calling would have one kind of poignancy if The Bells were a lost film, but since you can watch it in full just below — and with a decently kept-up image, by the standards of mid-1920s movies — it has quite another.
Like many pictures of the silent era, The Bells was adapted from a stage play, in this case Alexandre Chatrian and Emile Erckmann’s Le Juif Polonais. Originally written in 1867, the play was turned into an opera before it was turned into a film — which first happened in 1911 in Australia, then in 1913 and 1918 in America, then in 1928 in a British-Belgian co-production. This 1926 Hollywood version, which features such big names of the day as Boris Karloff and Lionel Barrymore, came as Le JuifPolonais’ fifth film adaptation, but not its last: two more, made in Britain and Australia, would follow in the 1930s. The material of the story, altered and altered again through generations of use, feels suitable indeed for Light Is Calling, whose thoroughly damaged images make us imagine the intentions of the original, each in our own way.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The story of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is more or less the story in miniature of the Beatles’ reinvention after they swore off touring in 1966 and disappeared into the studio to make their most innovative albums. It was not, as some Beatles fans might remember, an easy transition right away. Some of their fans, it turned out, were fickle, easily swayed by gossip as the latest TV trends. “While unsubstantiated break-up rumors swirled, some music fans became disenchanted with the group,” writes Ultimate Classic Rock. “You need only watch a 1967 clip from American Bandstand to see how many teenagers in the audience thought the Beatles were has-beens.”
Eager to get something out and fight the whims of fashion, Parlophone and Capitol both released John Lennon’s latest, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane” as the B‑side, in 1967. Since the band no longer toured, they were “directed to make film clips to accompany each song and promote the single.”
Here, they debuted their new psychedelic look, and in the singles they demonstrated the new direction their music would go. Thematically, both songs are nostalgic trips through childhood, with Lennon taking a mystical, psych-rock approach and McCartney diving headlong into his sentimental music hall ambitions.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” also firmly established the band as studio wizards, thanks to the wizardry, primarily, of George Martin. In the video at the top from You Can’t Unhear This, we learn just what a marvel—as a technical achievement—the band’s new single was at the time, containing “the craziest edit in Beatles history.” The song itself went through a very lengthy gestation period, as Colin Fleming details in Rolling Stone, from sketchy, ghostly early acoustic demoes called “It’s Not Too Bad” (below) to the wild cacophony of crashing rhythms and looping melodies it would become.
Recording take after take, the band spent 55 hours in the studio working on “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Nothing seemed to satisfy Lennon, though he was leaning toward a darker, heavier take, Fleming notes:
This was a version approaching proto-metal. Lennon couldn’t decide if he wanted to go the ethereal route, or the stomping one, and famously told George Martin to combine the two versions. This was less than practical.
“Well, there are two things against it,” Martin informed Lennon. “One is that they’re in different keys. The other is that they’re in different tempos.”
But for a man who had started his most personal, honest musical journey, within the parameters of a single song, back in Spain, this was merely part of the process.
“You can fix it, George,” Lennon concluded, and that was that, with Martin now tasked with finding a solution to a problem that seemingly violated the laws of musical physics.
Martin’s solution involved slowing one version down and speeding up the other until they were close enough in pitch that “only a musicologist, really, would know that there was that much of a difference,” Fleming writes. Speeding up and slowing down tracks was common practice in the studio, and is today, but given the incredible number of instruments and amount of overdubbing that went into making “Strawberry Fields,” the endeavor defied the logic of what was technologically possible at the time.
While the time spent on the song might seem extravagant, we should consider that these days bands can pluck the sounds they want, whatever they are, from pull-down menus, and splice anything together in a matter of minutes. In the mid-60s, Brian Jones, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and other studio pioneers dreamed up sounds no one had heard before, and brought together instrumentation that had never shared space in a mix. Producers and engineers like Martin had to invent the techniques to make those new sounds come together on tape. Learning the ins-and-outs of how Martin did it can give even the most die-hard Beatles fans renewed appreciation for songs as widely beloved as “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
This is something you can do at home. Everyone, please draw pictures —Toshio Suzuki
There’s no shortage of online tutorials for fans who want to draw Totoro, the enigmatic title character of Studio Ghibli’s 1988 animated feature, My Neighbor Totoro:
This is Totoro as Zen practice, offered as a gift to cooped-up Japanese children, whose schools, like so many worldwide, were abruptly shuttered in an effort to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The Beastie Boys are still the only group to have their music videos receive a Criterion Collection release, having delivered a steady stream of hilarious and fun promo spots since “She’s on It” in 1985. As the documentary Beastie Boys Story recently dropped on AppleTV, the remaining B‑Boys and their record label remastered 36 of their videos, now re-uploaded to YouTube in HD. And now’s as good a time as any to restock and rethink their impact on the art form of music video.
The first videos are silly, cartoonish slapstick, with a fratboy sense of humor that played better then than now, especially with several references to faux-aphrodesiac Spanish Fly. But the sped up action and costume changes placed them in a lineage usually associated with British acts like The Beatles and Madness.
The Beasties always poked fun at themselves, which other American acts rarely did, especially in the very macho worlds of hip-hop and metal. Even in their final videos they were slapping on wigs and fake mustaches.
But if the Beastie Boys really had one main legacy it was the use of the fish-eye lens. Used first in the “Hold It Now Hit It” video (an afternoon’s filming intercut with shots from their Dionysian first world tour), it would return for 1989’s “Shake Your Rump”, where the group have learned exactly how to work its distorting powers (MCA’s fingers feel like they’re going to reach through the screen). This style reaches its apex in “So What’cha Want” where the distortion is matched with a slowed motion (the band miming to a sped up version, then the video slowed to the correct speed). The music’s THC-laced grind is matched with decayed visuals. Rap videos ever since have used the immediacy of the direct-to-camera performance, and directors like Hype Williams made a career of turning a fisheye lens onto performers like Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliot, with even more surreal results.
But the Beastie Boys really flourished when they teamed up with director Spike Jonze, who directed the Beastie Boys Story and would direct six of their videos. A rising photographer and director connected with the skateboarding scene, his first collaboration with the group was 1992’s “Time for Living,” a punk rock non-single from Check Your Head. But things really took off with “Sabotage,” one of the band’s best videos, a parody of 1970s cop shows. Watching the Beasties and their friends play dress-up, run rampant through the streets of Los Angeles, jump across rooftops, and toss a dummy off a bridge is like the platonic ideal of a home movie made with your best friends. Absolutely silly and hilarious, but life-affirming at the same time, a distillation of what made the band great.
You probably have your own favorites too, as there’s so many: the Godzilla tribute of “Intergalactic,” the parody of Diabolik for “Body Movin’ “, the psychedelic paint explosion of “Shadrach,” the homage to Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii with “Gratitude”, the celebrity lovefest of “Make Some Noise”, and the years-before-their-time ‘70s disco-and-polyester indulgence of “Hey Ladies” where Jean Cocteau and Dolemite share a cokespoon-ful of influences.
The playlist also features a number of non-album tracks done for the hell of it, some real rarities even for the fan. Good God y’all.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
David Lynch began his artistic career as a painter. Before long his paintings became animations, of a kind, as exemplified by 1967’s Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) and 1968’s The Alphabet. By 1977, when the years-in-the-making Eraserhead finally saw the light of day, Lynch’s transformation into a live-action filmmaker must have seemed complete. But his imagination has never accepted confinement to one medium: even while working on ever higher-profile projects — The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks — he continued to paint, to draw, to take photographs. Lynch’s completely static comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World was a compelling fixture in the LA Reader during the 1980s, but apart from the online series Dumbland and the Interpol collaboration I Touch a Red Button Man, little Lynchian in the way of animation has appeared over the past few decades.
This past Monday, however, Lynch announced the release of one such rarity free to watch on Youtube. Like I Touch a Red Button Man,Fire (Pozar) is a joint effort between filmmaker and musician, in this case composer Marek Zebrowski. “The whole point of our experiment was that I would say nothing about my intentions and Marek would interpret the visuals in his own way,” said Lynch in a USC School of Music interview.
As collaborators, Lynch and Zebrowski go back to Inland Empire, the 2006 feature Lynch shot partially in Poland. This necessitated a translator, and the Polish-American Zebrowski stepped up to the job. In 2007 the two continued down that cultural avenue, recording an album called Polish Night Music. Fire (Pozar)‘s bilingual title also honors Zebrowski’s ancestral homeland, though the film itself may lack any direct reference to Poland — or to any real place, for that matter.
Lynch is credited with having “written, drawn, and directed” the short (its animator, Noriko Miyakawa, was an editor on 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return), and on the visual level it plays out like a journey through what will feel, to many of us, like the familiar realm of the Lynchian imagination. The titular fire — or rather, pozar — starts early on. Then we’re transported to a silhouette landscape that brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s description of one of Lynch’s painting’s, “the sort of diagnostic House-Tree-Person drawing that gets a patient institutionalized in a hurry.” But there are no people here, or at least no whole people: the first even faintly humanoid figure to emerge brings to mind the menacing baby in Eraserhead, and by the end the scene will have been overtaken by creatures neither properly animal nor man. Zebrowski’s score gets thoroughly enough into this stark but frenetic spirit to make Lynch fans believe that further collaborations must surely be on the way.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Imagine Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter in his robot voice, saying, as he once said to his friend Boris Venzen, “Our music is good if blacks and whites can dance to it at the same time.” This statement is the essence of Kraftwerk. Despite their early 70s avant-garde phase and their famously satiric Teutonic look, the robotic German techno pioneers settled early on their “practice of fusing European electronic music with black American rhythms, forging an aesthetic that reached critical mass with the release of Trans Europe Express.”
So writes John Morrison at The Wire, in an essay that explores this fusion in some depth. Morrison also quotes former Kraftwerk percussionist Karl Bartos on the band’s debt to black music: “We were all fans of American music: soul, the Tamla/Motown thing, and of course, James Brown. We always tried to make an American rhythm feel, with a European approach to harmony and melody.” The experimental method emerges even in their earliest work, in which they begin working with the “’Bo Diddley’ beat… that dominated rock ‘n’ roll in the 50s and early 60s,” Morrison notes.
Black DJs in the states picked up on what the Germans were doing, and started playing Kraftwerk—along with Gary Numan, Yello Magic Orchestra, and New Order—in the discos. Meanwhile, Kraftwerk started incorporating early American house music with their 1981 album Computer World. The response to Kraftwerk in black clubs was huge, and they became even more famous after Afrika Bambaataa sampled “Trans Europe Express” in his 1981 track, “Planet Rock,” a song that had a seismic impact on electronic dance music around the world.
Kraftwerk’s most singular impact in the U.S. happened in the city of Detroit. As Morrison writes:
[Kraftwerk]’s influence took a particularly strong hold in Detroit with Urban radio DJs Like Electrifying Mojo introducing the European electronic sound to the generation of black youth that went on to create techno. In recent years, several clips have been uploaded of The Scene (and its spin-off The New Dance Show), a Soul Train-style dance show that aired from 1975–87 on Detroit’s WGPR TV 62. In these videos, black youth from Detroit can be seen dancing to Kraftwerk and a variety of progressive electronic dance music, giving us a glimpse into Detroit’s scene at the time.
If you ever needed to know how to dance to Kraftwerk, writes Dangerous Minds of the exuberant Soul Train-like dance line above, “this is how it’s done”—or at least, how it was done in Detroit in the late 80s on The New Dance Show. From the early 80s on, Morrison writes, “Kraftwerk became increasingly aware of the black music scene,” and legendary Detroit techno DJs like Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson became increasingly aware of Kraftwerk, a situation cultural scholar Paul Gilroy might fold into his concept of “the Black Atlantic,” but which could also be called something like The Trans Düsseldorf-Detroit Afrofuturist Techno Express.
[T]he first time I heard ‘Robots’ I just froze. My jaw dropped. It just sounded so new and fresh. I mean, I had already been doing electronic music at the time, but the results weren’t so pristine—the sound of computers talking to each other. This sounded like the future, and it was fascinating, because I had just started learning about sequencers and drum programs. In my mind, Kraftwerk were, like, consultants to Roland and Korg and stuff because they had these sounds before any of the machines even appeared on the market.
I mean, there were other funky electronic bands around—Tangerine Dream and Gary Numan and all that—but none were as funky as Kraftwerk. I mean, you could actually play the stuff on black radio, and that wasn’t a small feat. You could go to an all black club in Detroit and when they put on ‘Pocket Calculator’, everybody just went totally crazy.
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