Someone in the Office of Sheriff, in Monroe County, New York, has a good sense of humor. And if you’re from the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies generation, you will get a good laugh.
In other news, Warner Bros. just announced that it’s developing an animated Wile E. Coyote movie, some 70 years after he first appeared on the screen. Appropriately the film is called, Coyote vs. Acme. Somehow that pummeled coyote manages to endure.
Orson Welles died more than 30 years ago, and his last feature film F for Fake came out fifteen years before that. But we’ll now have to revise our notions of where his filmography ends, since his long-unfinished project The Other Side of the Wind just debuted at the Venice Film Festival in advance of its November 2nd release. Shot between 1970 and 1976, a process prolonged by numerous financial difficulties, the film was first thrust into limbo in its third year of editing by the Iranian Revolution, as some of its financing had come from the Shah’s brother-in-law. The light at the end of The Other Side of the Wind’s decades-long tunnel of ownership complications, when it finally appeared, took a form even Welles could never have imagined: Netflix.
The Other Side of the Wind stars acclaimed film director John Huston as an acclaimed film director named Jake Hannaford, recently returned to America after years of self-exile in Europe. An old-school relic in the 1970s’ “New Hollywood” era, a time when a younger generation of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Terrence Malick used the major studios to realize personal visions at a large cinematic scale, Hannaford tries to make a comeback with a counterculture picture of his own. Filled with long takes of vast landscapes, modern architecture, a lone motorcycle rider, and gratuitous nudity, this film-within-the-film, also called The Other Side of the Wind, takes its cues not just from the New Hollywood kids but from Michelangelo Antonioni and the other European filmmakers then in vogue as well.
The “real” The Other Side of the Wind, of which you can get a taste in the trailer above, takes a completely different tack, using documentary-style shooting, quick cutting, and oscillation between color and black and white. This layering of different styles comes with a layering of different eras, each commenting on the others: the 1930s and 1940s that shaped Welles as a filmmaker (and that Welles shaped as a period in cinema), the New-Hollywood 1970s, and the present day, when a company like Netflix has the clout to make projects happen for any director, living or dead. The collaboration to complete the film involved new participants as well as those who’d worked on it in the 1970s, like Welles associate Peter Bogdanovich, who played a filmmaker in The Other Side of the Wind not long after becoming a filmmaker himself.
Numerous other directors also appear in the film, from Golden-Age Hollywood journeyman Norman Foster to French New Wave figure Claude Chabrol to countercultural icon Dennis Hopper. As for Hannaford, a line in the trailer describes him as “the Hemingway of cinema,” the kind of macho artist who had long intrigued Welles, perhaps ever since he met and clashed with Hemingway himself. “He’s been rejected by all his old friends,” Welles once said of the Hannaford character in a previous version of the film. “He’s finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur… a fellow who lives off other people’s danger and death.” He put it more bluntly to Huston in a quote that appears in Josh Karp’s book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind: “It’s a film about a bastard director. It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”
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.
As the “King” of American pop culture in the mid-20th century, Elvis embodied so many of his country’s contradictions. Revivalist of the “love and theft” of black American music and performance; humble, small town mama’s boy and dutiful soldier who built a cult of modern celebrity and a garish temple to conspicuous excess; self-appointed crusader who railed against “the drug culture” while his “legal” addiction to opiates and amphetamines laid waste to his career and health.
Maybe in these conflicts between humility and fame-seeking, all-American wholesomeness and transgressive seduction, playacting lawlessness and moralizing law and order, his legions of fans saw their own split selves. His hip-shaking confidence seemed particularly suited to both inflaming and soothing anxieties and safely channeling pent-up passions. Certain inconsistencies in his persona did not seem to trouble him overmuch.
But he was not a well man in the last several years of his short life and his tenure in the glittering faux-palaces of Las Vegas dramatically hastened the decline. While the reality of Elvis in Vegas was tacky and sad, the mythos of Elvis in Vegas made it “cool for fading superstar performers to find a second (or even third) act of their career in Vegas,” writes Mike Sager at Billboard. “Elvis paved the way for the likes of Britney Spears,” whose big American rise and fall resembles his in many ways.
Elvis’ own attempt at a third (or fourth) act is predictably tragic. Exploitative manager Colonel Tom Parker pushed him out on tour in 1977, notes Andy Greene at Rolling Stone, “despite his horrid shape.” Parker “arranged a camera crew to film the June 19th show in Omaha” in order to “get more product in to the stores”—perhaps sensing that Presley did not have much further to go. The cameras kept rolling in stops throughout the Midwest.
He was an absolute mess. He was only 42, but years of prescription drug abuse and horrifying dietary habits had left him bloated, depressed and near death. He had an enlarged heart, an enlarged intestine, hypertension and incredibly painful bowel problems. He was barely sleeping and should have probably been in the hospital, but he was still a huge draw on the concert circuit and the money was too good to turn down.
It is ugly to dwell on this period, except that somehow those final concerts produced the extraordinarily poignant footage of “Unchained Melody” at the top in Rapid City, South Dakota. “Without a doubt,” writes Greene, “it’s the last great moment of his career.” He digs deep, his voice is clear and strong. The jarring contrast between how good he sounds and how terrible he looks underlines and bolds the lines—“time can do so much…”
At the last tour stop in Indianapolis, he barely pulled off a rendition of “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” above. The song starts off really strong but soon devolves into Elvis muttering gibberish, sweating, and giggling to himself. This is hard to watch and it’s no wonder the tour footage, aired once on CBS, “has yet to resurface in any official capacity. This isn’t the Elvis that his estate wants the fans to remember.” Surely those fans themselves prefer the kitschy fantasy. Less than two months later, he was gone.
There are only two kinds of story, holds a quote often attributed to Leo Tolstoy: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. When it set about producing A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet, a “community service video” geared to viewers unfamiliar with the World Wide Web, internet portal company Lycos went with the latter. That stranger, a history teacher and aspiring comedian named Sam Levin, comes to a town named Tick Neck, Pennsylvania, his car having broken down early in a cross-country drive to a gig in Las Vegas. In order to update his manager/sister on the situation, he stops into the rural hamlet’s only diner and orders “coffee, half regular and half decaf — and the telephone book.”
Sam doesn’t make a call; instead he unplugs the diner’s phone, connects the line to his computer, looks up his internet service provider’s local number, and (after the requisite modem sounds) gets on the information superhighway. Today we know few activities as mundane as going online at a coffee shop, but the townspeople, innocent even of e‑mail, are transfixed. Sam shows a couple of kids how to search for information on haunted houses and college scholarships, and soon the students become the teachers, demonstrating online games to friends, chat rooms to a cranky old-timer (“I don’t like this word network at all. Network of what? Spies, probably”) and even state government feedback forms to the mayor of Tick Neck (who describes herself as “not much with a keyboard”).
Though at times it feels like the 1950s, the year was 1999, perhaps the last moment before America’s complete internet saturation — before social media, before streaming video, before blogs, before almost everything popular online today. “The video for Internet ‘newbies’ starring John Turturro was made available for free rental on the community service shelf of over 4,000 Blockbuster Video stores, West Coast Video stores, public school libraries and classrooms across the United States,” says a contemporary article at Newenglandfilm.com. “The production was funded by Lycos who has instituted a campaign to better educate the public about the World Wide Web.”
Those of us on the Web in the 1990s will remember Lycos, which ran one of the popular search engines before the age of Google. Launched in 1994 as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which might explain A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet’s setting), Lycos was in 1999 the most visited online destination in the world, and the next year Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica acquired it for a cool $12.5 billion. Turturro, not to be outdone, had in 1998 ascended to a high level of the countercultural zeitgeist with his role in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, the purple-clad bowler Jesus Quintana — very much not a stranger anyone would want going online with their kids, but Turturro has always had a formidable range.
History hasn’t recorded how many newbies A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet helped to start surfing the Web, but the video remains a fascinating artifact of attitudes to the internet during its first period of enormous growth. “My family doesn’t own a computer,” the young boy tells Sam, “and my dad doesn’t like ’em. He says facts are facts.” (That last sentence, innocuous at the time, does take on a new resonance today.) The boy’s teenage sister excitedly describes the internet as “like going to the library, department store, and post office, all at the same time.” Entering his credit card number to buy an auto-repair manual for the skeptical mechanic, Sam says (with a strange defensiveness) that “it’s completely private. I’ve done it before and it’s not a problem.” As with any stranger of legend who comes to town, Sam leaves Tick Neck a changed place — though not nearly as much as the Tick Necks of the world have since been changed by the internet itself.
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.
One of the wonderful things about David Lynch is that, despite interviews, several documentaries on his creative process, plenty of behind-the-scenes footage of him directing, and the release of a whole memoir/biography told both subjectively *and* objectively…despite all that, the man is still an enigma. Even when he returned 25 years later to familiar ground with the third season of Twin Peaks, there was no sign of self-parody, and he delivered some of the most brilliant work of his career. How the hell does he do it?
That being said, if you have read his book Catching the Big Fishor have heard him in interviews, this short film directed by his son Austin Lynch and Case Simmons, and presented by Stella McCartney, might not be anything new. If you are just now discovering Lynch, then this is a quick primer on his creative process and his devotion to Transcendental Meditation as a way to dive into that creativity and, eventually, bring peace to the world.
Austin Lynch is one of three Lynch children to work in entertainment. The eldest Jennifer Lynch directed Boxing Helena and wrote the Twin Peaks spin-off book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Riley Lynch is a musician and appeared in two episodes of the recent Twin Peaks.
Given the pedigree, Lynch and Simmons manage to honor David Lynch without copying his style. The short abstract profile also features very short cameos by Stella McCartney, Børns, Lola Kirk, and several others.
The director appears here and there during the nine minutes, backlit by subtle colored lights in a private screening room, watching a movie. What movie? It doesn’t matter.
“It’s so magical, I don’t know why, to go into a theater and have the lights go down,” Lynch says. “It’s very quiet and then the curtains start to open. And then you go into a world.”
The directors link this to a familiar Lynch tale of the beginning of his film career, when Lynch was painting at the beginning of his art school years and the canvas started to move and make sounds. No matter how many times Lynch tells this story, there’s something so odd about it. Is he talking in metaphor? Did he hallucinate? Did he get visited by a force beyond this reality? Are his greatest Lynchian moments his way of trying to make sense of that one episode?
He also talks about the circle that goes from the film to the audience and back, a feedback loop that musicians also talk about, and is the reason Lynch still loves the cinema as an event space. Performance spaces figure prominently in his works, whether it’s the Club Silencio in Mulholland Dr., the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, or the various lodges and performance areas in Twin Peaks. (It’s also why he despises watching films on iPhones, apart from the size.)
Lynch explains here how he became a filmmaker through studying meditation, how it saved him from anger and despair, and how these techniques led to landing bigger creative fish from “the ocean of solutions” and expanding artistic intuition.
Is Lynch enlightened? No, but he’s closer than most of us:
“Every day for me gets better and better,” he concludes. “And I believe that enlivening unity in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say peace to all of you.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Imagining a “brotherhood of man” sounds Pollyannaish and painfully naïve when even an “uneasy truce of man” seems hardly possible. But when John Lennon sings about it with conviction in “Imagine,” we sit up and listen. Such is the power of “Imagine”’s utopian vision, and Lennon later admitted it “should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song,” since “a lot of it—the lyric and the concept—came from Yoko,” specifically from Grapefruit, her little book of whimsical “instructions.” For decades the pair’s collaborations have received withering scorn from Beatles fans, but no greater testament to their combined humanist vision exists than “Imagine,” a product of Ono’s conceptual dream verse and Lennon’s earnest songcraft.
So much has been said and written about the song, so many great and not-so-great covers performed since its 1971 release, that we might think we know all there is to know about it. We even have behind the scenes footage in the documentary Gimme Some Truthof the sometimes tense recording sessions. Yet it turns out that the original demo version Lennon recorded at his own Ascot Sound studios went unnoticed in a box of tapes for 45 years. We can celebrate its 2016 rediscovery and now hear it for ourselves, that eight-track tape transferred to digital and enhanced by engineer Paul Hicks, above.
The recording was discovered by Rob Stevens who found it, reports Jason Kottke, “while sifting through boxes upon boxes of the original tapes for Yoko Ono.” It seems that improper labeling damned the tape to decades of obscurity. “There’s a one-inch eight-track,” remembered Stevens, “that says nothing more on the ‘Ascot Sound’ label than John Lennon, the date, and the engineer (Phil McDonald), with DEMO on the spine. No indication of what material was on the tape.” The find was “true serendipity,” he remarks.
Hearing this moving, stripped-down solo version reminds me of David Bowie telling an audience in 1983—just before singing the song on his Serious Moonlight tour—of how Lennon approached his songwriting: “’It’s easy,’ he said, ‘you just say what you mean and put a backbeat to it.’” Even without the backbeat, “Imagine” says exactly what it means. Imagine all the people living for today.
A set of “Ultimate Mixes” of the Imagine album will be released in October (pre-order here) and will of course include the newly-unearthed demo along with many other demos and rarities. Till then, enjoy this amazing discovery, just above.
As the nameless assassin protagonist of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control makes his way through Spain, he meets several different, similarly mysterious figures, each time at a different café. Each time he orders two espressos — not a double espresso, but two espressos in separate cups. Each time his contact arrives and asks, in Spanish, whether he speaks Spanish, to which he responds that he doesn’t. Each conversation that follows ends with an exchange of matchboxes, and each one the assassin receives contains a slip of paper with a coded message, which he eats after reading, containing directions to his next destination.
All these elements remain the same while everything else changes, a structure that showcases Jarmusch’s interest in theme and variation as clearly as anything he’s ever made. “Some call it repetition,” he says in the page above from fashion and culture biannual Another Man, “but I like to think of the repetition of the same action or dialogue in a film as a variation. The accumulation of variations is important to me too.” But to enrich the repetition and variations, he also makes use of randomness, “the idea of finding things as you go along and finding links between things you weren’t even looking to link.”
Jarmusch credits this way of thinking to William S. Burroughs (author, incidentally, of an essay called “The Limits of Control”), and specifically the “cut-up” technique, which Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin came up with, literally cutting up texts in order to then “mix words and phrases and chapters together in a random way.” He’s also found a source of randomness in the Oblique Strategies, the deck of cards published in the 1970s by artist and music producer Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt. “You just pick one card and it might say something like, ‘Listen from another room.’ One of my favorite cards says, ‘Emphasize repetitions.’ ” That last comes as no surprise, and he surely also appreciates the one that says, “Repetition is a form of change.”
Those who know both the Oblique Strategies and Jarmusch’s filmography — from his breakout indie hit Stranger Than Paradise to recent work like Paterson, the story of a bus-driving poet in William Carlos Williams’ hometown — could think of many that apply to his signature cinematic style: “Disconnect from desire,” “Emphasize the flaws,” “Use ‘unqualified’ people,” “Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities” (or indeed “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). His next project, which will feature regular collaborators Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton as well as such newcomers to the Jarmusch fold as former teen pop idol Selena Gomez, should offer another satisfying set of variations on his usual themes. And given that it’s about zombies, it will no doubt come with a strong dose of randomness as well.
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.
In the 1940s and 50s, experimental composers like Halim El-Dabh, Pierre Schaeffer, and Pierre Henry began making experimental compositions that Schaeffer would call musique concrete. They used tape recorders, phonographs, microphones and other analog electro-acoustic devices to create music, as Henry put it, from “non-musical sounds.” These techniques became mainstays of more familiar audio art, such as the radio and television sound designs of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. With the advent of synthesizers, electronic music overtook these sound experiments, just as other new technologies replaced the playback and recording devices used to make them.
A Japanese group called Open Reel Ensemble recalls this legacy of musique concrete, deploying reel-to-reel tape machines, cathode ray tube TVs, overhead projectors, and other analog technology to make 21st century music with “non-musical sounds.” Headed by programmer-turned-composer Ei Wada, the group embraces a very different compositional philosophy than the experimental electro-acoustic composers of the past, who worked in reaction to European classical music, opposing “concrete” sounds to abstract musical ideas. Wada, on the other hand, was first inspired by hearing a gamelan ensemble at a performance in Indonesia as a very small child.
Given a collection of 70s reel-to-reel recorders by a family friend, he attempted to re-create the polyphony of those traditional Javanese gong ensembles. He has, writes Motherboard, “been on a quest to reproduce otherworldly sounds with tech that nobody wants.” But he freely combines these outdated machines with contemporary mixers, amplifiers, light shows, beats, and tempos. Formed with friends Haruka Yoshida and Masaru Yoshida, Wada’s Open Reel Ensemble might be compared to both the avant-garde experiments of composers like John Cage and the popular experiments of hip hop turntablists, both of whom used analog technology in innovative, unconventional ways.
Some of the group’s work is a kind of experimental dance music, as you can see in the live performance further up; some is more ambient sound art, as in Wada’s solo ventilation fan performance above, with implicit commentary on Japan’s economy and the disposable nature of consumer technology. “All these tech objects are a symbol of Japan’s economic growth,” says Wada. “but they also get thrown away in great numbers. It’s good to not just say bye to things that are thrown away but to instill old things with new meaning, and celebrate their unique points.”
The detourning of technology that would otherwise end up as landfill requires some ingenuity, given the increasing rarity of such instruments. In the performance above, we see Wada play with invented devices his group calls in English the “Exhaust Fancillator” and in Japanese a kankisenthizer, a neologism formed from the word for ventilation fan. “We used laser cutters and 3D printers to design the ventilation fans,” he says. This willingness to improvise, invent, and repurpose whatever works makes for some fascinating experiments that are as much performance art as sound composition.
In the Wada performance above from 2010, he uses old tube TVs as drums, hitting the screens to trigger both sound and light effects and bringing to mind not only the sound art of the early 20th century, but also the 1980s video installations of Nam June Paik, fully immersive experiences that foreground their technological artifice even as they produce an inexplicable kind of magic.
What turns people into science-fiction fans? Many enter through the gateway of Star Trek, an early 1960s television series “set on the worlds visited by a giant Spaceship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, and on the ship itself. Its crew is on a mission to explore new worlds and ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before.’ ” Though “not particularly successful in the ratings,” Star Trek nevertheless “attracted a hard core of devoted fans, ‘Trekkies,’ who made up in passionate enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers.” Perhaps creator Gene Roddenberry’s signature “blend of the mildly fantastic with the reassuringly familiar, and his use of an on the whole very likeable cast, attracted viewers precisely because its exoticism was manageable and unthreatening.”
Those quotes come from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, a free online resource featuring more than 17,500 entries explaining all things sci-fi, whether new or old, mainstream or obscure. Some of its pages deal with works of doubted status as science fiction at all: Star Wars, for example, “an entertaining pastiche that draws upon comic strips, old movie serials, Westerns, James Bond stories, The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, Errol Flynn swashbucklers and movies about World War Two” whose “gratifyingly spectacular – at the time – special effects and martial music hypnotized the audience into uncritical acceptance of the basically absurd, deliberately Pulp-magazine-style conflict between Good and Evil.”
That sort of thing is a long way indeed from the work of, say, a science-fiction grandmaster like Isaac Asimov, who wrote prolifically in “the clear unerring voice of a man speaking reason, uttering tales about how to solve the true world.” Some readers of Open Culture might well have found their way into science fiction through Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which despite its “many narrative flaws” remains “one of the most important sf movies made,” having showed “almost for the first time – though fans had spent years hoping – how visually sophisticated sf in film form can be.”
Blade Runner’s entry includes, of course, a reference to the script’s basis on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, “a figure who helps define by contrast those identified in this Encyclopedia as Mainstream Writers of SF: writers, that is, whose comprehension of the significant literatures of the last century has sometimes seemed less than full. An author like ThomasPynchon, who is not described in this encyclopedia as mainstream, will understand what he owes Dick; a mainstream author like MargaretAtwood has worked to make it clear that she does not.”
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the most ambitious sf film of the 1960s and perhaps ever,” has also done its part to propagate a sci-fi way of looking at the world, exploring as it does “the idea of human deficiency in the twenty-first century.” Kubrick developed it in collaboration with novelist Arthur C. Clarke, another of the genre’s titans, indeed “the very personification of sf. Never a ‘literary’ author, he nonetheless always wrote with lucidity and candour, often with grace, sometimes with a cold, sharp evocativeness that produced some of the most memorable images in sf.”
Other entries tell of writers not so closely associated with traditional science fiction but highly regarded and enduringly influential in the wider world of speculative literature: Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, with his “ ‘sense of ecstatic enclosedness in the Word Incarnate’ that may be uniquely intense in world literature,” or J.G. Ballard, “revered (and detested) for the corrosively inescapable vision of the late twentieth-century world, which his stories seemed not so much to reflect in a distorting mirror as (alarmingly) to reflect, for the first time, without defensive evasions.”
“Originally published in physical form in 1979,” writes Lithub’s MH Rowe, “the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction won a Hugo award for best nonfiction book in 1980. A second edition followed in 1993, with a CD-ROM supplement a few years later. The encyclopedia won another Hugo in 1994, and a decade later began its migration online, where it launched in 2011 as a precursor to its current digital form” — albeit a far cry from a crowdsourced, objectivity-oriented resource like Wikipedia. “Making no effort to avoid the partisanship that’s a hallmark of being a fan, the SFE possesses the kind of purity you can only get from corrupt endeavors. It’s by turns cranky, self-doubting, and ultra-confident, but it couldn’t be more deeply engaged with the genre of science fiction.” And if anything characterizes science-fiction fandom more than deep engagement, even the genre’s most powerful imaginations haven’t dreamed of it.
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.
The unmistakable zip and whirr of a rotary phone, the ungodly squeal of dial-up modems, the satisfying thunk of a cartridge in a classic Nintendo console, a VCR rewinding, the click-clack sound of a Walkman’s buttons…. I date myself in saying that these sounds immediately send me back to various moments in my childhood with Proustian immersion. The sense of smell is most closely linked to memory, but hearing cannot be far behind given how sound embeds itself in time, and most especially the sounds of technologies, which are by nature fated for obsolescence. A museum-quality aura surrounds the Walkman and the first iPods. These are triumphs of consumer design, but only one of them makes distinctive mechanical noises.
As analog recedes, it can seem that noisy tech in general becomes more and more dated. It is hard to hear the rubbing of thumbs and fingers across screens and touchpads. Voice commands make buttons and switches redundant. How much tech from now will one day feature in Conserve the Sound, the “online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds”?
Its collection gives the impression of a bygone age, quaint in its dozens of examples of mechanical ingenuity. The visual juxtaposition of handheld film cameras, typewriters, car window handles, electric shavers, boom boxes, stopwatches, and so on has the effect of making these things seem all of a piece, assorted artifacts in a great hall of wonders called “the Sound the 20th Century.”
At the top of the site’s “Sound” page, timeline navigation allows users to visit every decade from the 1910s to the 2000s, a category that contains only two objects. Other displays are more plentiful, and colorful. The 1960s, for example showcases the incredibly sexy red Schreibmaschine Olivetti Dora further up. It sounds as sleek and sophisticated as it looks. The virtual display case of the 30s holds the sounds of a twin-engine propeller plane and a handful of beautiful moving and still cameras, like the Fotokamera Purma Special above. It also features the humble and enduring library stamp, a sound I pine for as I slide books under the self-checkout laser scanner at my local branch.
Given just the few images here, you can already see that Conserve the Sound is as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears, each object lovingly photographed against an austere white background. In order for the full nostalgic effect to work, however, you need to visit these pages and hit “play.” It even magically works with objects from before our times, given how prominently their sounds feature in film and audio recordings that define the periods. You’ve likely also noticed how many of these products are of European origin, and many of them, like the robotic head of the Kassettenrekorder Weltron Model 2004, are perhaps unfamiliar to many consumers from elsewhere in the world.
Conserve the Sound is a European project, funded by the Film & Medienstiftung NRW in Germany, thus its selection skews toward European-made products. But the sound of a fan or an adding machine in Germany is the sound of a fan or adding machine in Chile, China, Kenya, or Nebraska. See a trailer for the project at the top of the post, and below, one of the many interviews in which German public figures, scholars, librarians, technicians, and students answer questions about their mnemonic associations with technological sound. In this interview, radio presenter Bianca Hauda describes one of her favorite old sounds from a favorite old machine, a 1970s portable cassette recorder.
“The world is on fire. Or so it appears in this image from NASA’s Worldview. The red points overlaid on the image designate those areas that by using thermal bands detect actively burning fires.”
The image and caption above come from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. On a related page, they go into some more detail, explaining why good parts of Africa, Chile, Brazil and North America are aflame this summer. Droughts, extreme temperatures, agricultural practices–they’re all part of a worrying picture. View NASA’s picture in a larger format here.
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