Was Frank Zappa a musical genius? A modernist, avant-garde composer who just happened to work in an idiomatic pastiche of jazz, classical, progressive rock and juvenile shock tactics? The question can be a deeply divisive one. Zappa tends to inspire either intense devotion or intense dislike. But whatever one’s opinion of the man or his music, it’s safe to say that when he wasn’t working alone, Zappa worked in the company of some incredibly talented musicians. And he attracted, as John Rockwell wrote in 1984 at The New York Times, “a tiny following among classical avant-gardists.”
That year, one of his more genteel fans, Pierre Boulez—former music director of the New York Philharmonic and “widely regarded,” notes Rockwell, “as one of the great composers of the [20th] century”—decided to conduct a suite of Zappa songs. Zappa hoped the resulting album, The Perfect Stranger, would help him realize his ambition of having his music taken seriously in classical circles. (“A brief collaboration in 1970 with Zubin Mehta,” writes April Peavey at PRI, “went nowhere.”)
Boulez conducts his own ensemble for three tracks on the album, “The Perfect Stranger,” “Naval Aviation in Art?” and “Dupree’s Paradise.” The remaining four songs are performed by “The Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort,” a Zappaism for the Synclavier, Zappa’s favorite electronic instrument. For all the high seriousness the collaboration implies, Zappa couldn’t help inserting his surreally sardonic sense of humor; always “a compulsive musical comedian,” wrote Rockwell, he wears here “the defensive mask of irony, again.”
Each of the songs has an accompanying scenario. “The Perfect Stranger” imagines that “a door-to-door salesman, accompanied by his faithful gypsy-mutant industrial vacuum cleaner, cavorts licentiously with a slovenly housewife.” In “Love Story,” Zappa wants us to picture “an elderly Republican couple attempting sex while breakdancing.” Many people have had trouble getting past the sophomoric posturing and seeing Zappa’s music as serious art. He often seemed intent on alienating exactly such people.
But perhaps Zappa did not need the pedigree Boulez lent to his work. When listening, for example, to the Mothers of Invention play Zappa’s original arrangement of “Dupree’s Paradise” (top), one has to admit, he created brilliantly complex, rhythmically exciting music and, in the final analysis, represented “a particularly appealing type of quintessentially American composer—genuinely defiant of established categories and divisions that others routinely accept.” Listen to the Boulez/Zappa collaboration The Perfect Stranger in the Spotify playlist above, or access it directly on Spotify here.
In an odd twist of history, two of the wisest and weirdest children’s writers of their generation also happened to have both been fighter pilots during World War II. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, flew reconnaissance missions for the French Air Force before the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany. Roald Dahl, author of—among many others—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG, flew with the Royal Air Force. Both wrote about their flying exploits and both writers, it so happened, were once shot down over Libya, which also happens to be the title of Dahl’s first published story, written for grown-ups and published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946.
There are maybe other uncanny similarities, but one thing Saint-Exupéry never turned his hand to is television. Dahl, on the other hand, had the opportunity to host two TV shows during his lifetime: Way Out in 1961 and Tales of the Unexpected, which aired from 1979 to 1988 and featured several episodes based on Dahl’s own stories. Although he has become renowned for his high-concept kid’s books, at the time of Dahl’s entrée onto the tube, he had mainly achieved fame as a writer of macabre tales published in the New Yorker as well as a script written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “Lamb to the Slaughter.”
Dahl seems a natural fit for the medium, not only as a writer but as a presenter, with his dry wit and suave personality. But his first show, Way Out—eight episodes of which you can now watch on YouTube—came about entirely by accident, or rather, as the serendipitous result of another program’s spectacular failure. This is no exaggeration. Jackie Gleason, perhaps the most famous comedian of his day, had decided in 1961 to attempt a celebrity game show on CBS called You’re in the Picture. The show was such a bomb that it only aired once, and the following week, Gleason appeared on a bare stage for half an hour, the authors of a Filmfax Magazine article write, and “apologized to the American public for the insult to their intelligence that had been perpetrated the week before.”
This went on for several more weeks, then Gleason invited celebrity friends on for impromptu interviews and “when things started getting desperate,” had a chimp on as a guest star. One CBS network head at the time remembered the show later as the greatest disaster of his decades-long career in television. Enter producer David Susskind, “a man who could deliver a program quickly and under pressure,” and a great fan of Roald Dahl. Cooking up the idea of “an eerie, chilling creepy drama,” Susskind says, with “a nether world sense to it,” he approached Dahl with an offer to replace Gleason’s travesty with adaptations of his stories and the opportunity to host.
Only one of Dahl’s stories made it into the show, the first episode “William & Mary” (above), about a man planning to become a brain in a jar. But the show was an instant hit with critics, especially Dahl’s brief, darkly humorous opening and closing monologues. One critic described him as “a thin Alfred Hitchcock, an East Coast Rod Serling.” And like Serling’s show, Way Out—which was spelled in a title card after the first episode with an inexplicable single apostrophe as ’Way Out—trafficked in sci-fi and psychological horror. But the two shows were not in competition. Twilight Zone and Way Out both aired on the same network, CBS, and the time slot of Gleason’s failed show happened to directly precede The Twilight Zone, just then ending its second season. Dahl’s show was billed as a “companion program” to Serling’s.
Sadly for all the praise showered upon ’Way Out, it did not attract a large enough audience to get renewed for a second season, and it would be another 18 years before Dahl returned to television. But even had he never returned, or never even made his first program, Dahl’s significant contribution to TV history would be secure. His first children’s book, The Gremlins, originally written in 1943 for a failed Disney project, inspired what is perhaps the most well-known Twilight Zone episode of them all, the William Shatner-starring “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which involves a certain terrifying shock on an airplane and was so effective, it was remade for Twilight Zone, the film. The episode adapted a story by Richard Matheson, but it was Dahl who first came up with the idea.
Back in 2010, we began featuring a series of videos from filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. Called Everything is a Remix, the four-part video series explored the idea that (to quote from one of my earlier posts) “great art doesn’t come out of nowhere. Artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials into something beautiful and new.” That applies to musicians, filmmakers, technologists, and really anyone in a creative space.
If you would like to watch the original series in its totality, I would refer you to the video below. Above, you can now watch a new Kirby Ferguson video that delves into the concept of Fair Use–a concept defined by the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use website essentially as “any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and ‘transformative’ purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.” They go on to say: “Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an infringement.”
Needless to say, fair use is an important concept if you’re making your own videos on Youtube, or if you’re a teacher using media in the classroom.
By the end of his short video, if you’re still not clear what Ferguson means by Fair Use, you’re in luck. He’s giving you the opportunity to submit questions to be answered by “a real live lawyer in a follow up video.” He also includes extra resources at the end of the segment.
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Few filmmakers have ever figured out how to make a motion picture about an already larger-than-life personality, and personalities haven’t come much larger in recent history than Freddie Mercury’s. Talk of a movie about the Queen frontman, who died in 1991, has gone on for years: Dexter Fletcher came up as a potential director, and for the role of Mercury both Ben Wishaw and Sacha Baron Cohen have at different times been attached. But now the film has entered production, having found a director in Bryan Singer, he of the X‑Men franchise, and a star in Rami Malek, best known as the lead in the television series Mr. Robot.
But can Malek — or indeed anyone currently living — convince as Mercury? The first piece of evidence has surfaced in the form of the clip at the top of the post, shot on set as the cast recreates Queen’s 1985 comeback performance at Live Aid. The band “seemed to intuit right from the start the importance of the day, though they were very nervous backstage.
But once onstage they completely own it, even more so Freddie Mercury who rises to the occasion as a front man and as a singer, giving one of his best performances,” writes Ted Mills of the real concert video, which we featured just this past May here on Open Culture. The show opens by going straight into“Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen’s signature eight-minute rock opera, which gives the new movie its working title.
Even going by just a minute and a half of footage, shot shakily, in low resolution, and at a distance, it must be said that Malek does look to make an uncanny Mercury, right down to that distinctive jog onto the stage at Wembley Stadium. In the Late Show with Stephen Colbert clip just above, Malek talks about his experience watching the surviving members of Queen watch his performance as Mercury for the first time — and at the iconic Abbey Road Studios, no less. “How did they take you?” Colbert asks. “They took me,” Malek responds, leaving us to wait until December of next year to judge for ourselves how he brings their beloved lead singer back to life — and whether, by whatever combination of training and technological wizardry, the film gets it right down to that one-of-a-kind voice.
After the hurricanes pass, the question has surely been asked: How to save those wet, damaged books? Above, you can watch a visual primer from the Syracuse University Libraries–people who know something about taking care of books. It contains a series of tips–some intuitive, some less so–that will give you a clear action plan the next time water and paper meet.
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Early Enlightenment French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes invented a new genre of philosophy, we might say, one that would dominate the century to come. Before Locke, Leibniz, or Kant, Descartes stood out as a “theist rationalist.” Rather than trusting in revelation, he leaned solely on logic and reason, creating a set of “rules for the direction of the mind,” the title of one of his books. He believed we might think our way—solely unaided by unreliable external sources—to belief in God and “all the knowledge that we may need for the conduct of life.”
Descartes’ proofs of God may not sound so convincing to modern ears, slipping as they do into the language of faith when convenient. But in other respects, he seems distinctly contemporary, or at least like a contemporary of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He believed that philosophy suffered from improper definitions and lacked clarity of thought. And like the early 20th-century logical positivists, he put tremendous store in logic and mathematics as analytic tools for acquiring knowledge about the world. These, along with the scientific method Descartes championed, were indeed the sole means of acquiring such knowledge.
Descartes, then, has become known for introducing the radical “method of doubt,” which supposedly strips away all prejudice and preconception, every article of belief, to get at the most fundamentally ascertainable core of knowledge. Upon doing this in his 1637 Discourse on Method, the French philosopher famously found that the only thing he could say for certain was that he must exist because he could see himself doubting his existence—cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” The process involved casting aside all authority and tradition, which made Descartes a hero to French Revolutionists. His freethinking also made him very much the enemy of many in the Catholic church.
Describing in Discourse on Method how he had abandoned all reliance on other texts and resolved to derive the answers to his questions from experience and reason, he seemed to dismiss the authority not only of church hierarchy and dogma but of scripture itself. Rather than fixing God at the center of the universe, Descartes used the “Archimedean point” of his own certain existence to anchor “an epistemologically unsteady world.” Nonetheless, he was committed to keeping faith intact, even as he seemingly demolished the foundations of its existence, including—for Catholics—the cherished idea that priests could turn bread into flesh.
It might have been an attempt at self-preservation or appeasement, but it seems more to reflect sincere belief: in the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes sought to prove the existence of God in much the same way as he had proved his own existence, through circular reasoning and arguments that split mind and matter into two distinct camps. Descartes created a dualist view of the world that became a major problem in his philosophy. At the time, many of his critics were less concerned with this ontological puzzle than they were with the possibility of his heretical thought interfering in world affairs.
Descartes’ radical doubt threatened not only church doctrine but also church politics. One scholar claims to have found evidence that a Catholic priest—fearing the French freethinker would jeopardize the conversion of Sweden’s Queen Christina to Catholicism—murdered Descartes with an arsenic-laced communion wafer. If so, it would have been a cruelly ironic death, perhaps by design, for the man who dared to write in the Meditations that transubstantiation—one of the Church’s central supernatural teachings—should be “rejected by theologians as irrational, incomprehensible and hazardous for the faith,” and to hope for a time when “my theory will be accepted in its place as certain and indubitable.”
If you don’t much care for modern medicine, entire industries have arisen to provide you with more “alternative” or “natural” varieties of remedies, mostly involving the consumption of plants. Publishers have put out guides to their use by the dozens. In a way, those books have a place in a long tradition, stretching back to a time well before modern medicine existed as something to be an alternative to. Just recently, the British Library digitized the oldest such volume, a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript known as the Cotton MS Vitellius C III. The book, writes the British Library’s Alison Hudson, “is the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal, or book describing plants and their uses.” (The sole condition note: “leaves damaged by fire in 1731.”)
The manuscript’s Old English is actually the translation of “a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognized as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.” It also includes “translations of Late Antique texts on the medicinal properties of badgers” and another text “on medicines derived from parts of four-legged animals.”
(Somehow one doesn’t imagine those latter sections playing quite as well with today’s alternative-medicine market.) Each entry about a plant or animal features “its name in various languages; descriptions of ailments it can be used to treat; and instructions for finding and preparing it.”
Quite a few of the species with which the guide deals would have been directly known to few or no Anglo-Saxons in those days, and some of the entries, such as the one describing dragonswort as ideally “grown in dragon’s blood,” seem more fanciful than others. As with many a Medieval work, the book freely mixes fact and lore: to pick the mandrake root (pictured at the top of the post), “said to shine at night and to flee from impure persons,” the guide recommends “an iron tool (to dig around it), an ivory staff (to dig the plant itself up), a dog (to help you pull it out), and quick reflexes.” You can behold these and other pages of the Cotton MS Vitellius C III in zoomable high resolution at the British Library’s online manuscript viewer. While the remedies themselves might never have been particularly effective, their accompanying illustrations do remain strange and amusing even a millennium later — and isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine?
There are bands one casually encounters through greatest hits or breakthrough albums, on which they sound exactly like themselves and no one else. It’s impossible to imagine anyone but Fleetwood Mac making Rumors or Tusk. Or anyone but Pink Floyd recording Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon. But just like Fleetwood Mac, when we look back before Floyd’s best-known work, we find, as Mark Blake writes at Team Rock, that “they were a very different proposition.”
And yet it wasn’t that Pink Floyd radically shuffled the lineup—though they had, since their first album, lost founding singer and guitarist Syd Barrett to mental illness and taken on David Gilmour to replace him. It’s that the same four musicians who re-invented psych-rock in the early 70s with “Money,” “Time,” and “Great Gig in the Sky,” sounded nothing like that blues/funk/disco/prog hybrid in the late 60s. Some of the same elements were there—the sardonic sense of humor, love for sound effects and extended jam sessions—but they cohered in much more alien and experimental shapes.
The title track of 1968’s Saucerful of Secrets, for example, opens with four minutes of dissonant horror-movie organ drones, which give way to primal drumming around which piano chords and sci-fi noises fall haphazardly, then resolve in a closing wordless choral passage. Not a single, cynical lyric about the pains of modern life to be found. The following year’s Ummagumma continued to build the band’s experimental foundations, and in-between these projects, they recorded film soundtracks that, again, do not make one think of laser-lit arena rock shows.
But there is plenty of connective tissue between the various phases of Floyd, much of it, like the bulk of their 1970 soundtrack for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, officially unreleased. We can add to that list an attempted album called Household Objects, which they began in 1970 and abandoned in ’74. The project, drummer Nick Mason admitted, represents the then-largely-instrumental band “still looking for a coherent direction,” and in so doing, abandoning instruments altogether. On Household Objects, they made serendipitous discoveries using—as the title clearly stated—found sounds, in the vein of John Cage or the avant-garde composers of musique concrete.
In 1971, Abbey Road studios tape operator John Leckie, who went on to produce the heavily Floyd-influenced Muse, remembers the band “making chords up from the tapping of beer bottles, tearing newspapers for rhythm, and letting off aerosol cans to get a hi-hat sound.” Keyboardist Richard Wright recalls spending “days getting a pencil and a rubber band till it sounded like a bass.” The idea began two years earlier when the band performed a composition called Work that “involved,” writes Blake, “sawing wood and boiling kettles on stage.”
Household Objects recording sessions, writes Rolling Stone, “consisted of Pink Floyd playing songs on hand mixers, light bulbs, wood saws, hammers, brooms and other home appliances. Recording in this manner was excruciating.” Wright and Gilmour grew exasperated and the band moved on to other things, namely Wish You Were Here. All that seemingly remains of Household Objects are the two tracks here, “The Hard Way” (an instance where rubber bands sound like a bass) and “Wine Glasses,” the latter employing, you guessed it, wine glasses. But like so much of Floyd’s lesser-known or forgotten experimental work, these sessions created the backdrop for their more accessible hits. “Wine Glasses” survived in “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” In the video just above, you can see David Gilmour work out the glass arrangements for his performance of the song in the 2006 Royal Albert Hall concert film Remember That Night.
Earlier this summer, artists painted a 10-story high mural of Muddy Waters in the heart of Chicago. Now, Philadelphia answered with a mural of its own, right at the corner of 29th and Diamond. There, you’ll find a giant painting of John Coltrane by artist Ernel Martinez, which takes visual cues from another Coltrane mural that graced the side of a Philly building from 2002 until 2014.
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When you think of the accomplishments of the Islamic world, what comes to mind? For most of this century so far, at least in the West, the very notion has had associations in many minds with not creation but destruction. In 2002, mathematician Keith Devlin lamented how “the word Islam conjures up images of fanatical terrorists flying jet airplanes full of people into buildings full of even more people” and “the word Baghdad brings to mind the unscrupulous and decidedly evil dictator Saddam Hussein.” Ironically, writes Devlin, “the culture that these fanatics claim to represent when they set about trying to destroy the modern world of science and technology was in fact the cradle in which that tradition was nurtured. As mathematicians, we are all children of Islam.”
You don’t have to dig deep into history to discover the connection between Islam and mathematics; you can simply see it. “In Islamic culture, geometry is everywhere,” says the narrator of the brief TED-Ed lesson above. “You can find it in mosques, madrasas, palaces, and private homes.”
Scripted by writer and consultant on Islamic design Eric Broug, the video breaks down the complex, abstract geometric patterns found everywhere in Islamic art and design, from its “intricate floral motifs adorning carpets and textiles to patterns of tilework that seem to repeat infinitely, inspiring wonder and contemplation of eternal order.”
And the tools used to render these visions of eternity? Nothing more advanced than a compass and a ruler, Broug explains, used to first draw a circle, divide that circle up, draw lines to construct repeating shapes like petals or stars, and keep intact the grid underlying the whole pattern. The process of repeating a geometric pattern on a grid, called tessellation, may seen familiar indeed to fans of the mathematically minded artist M.C. Escher, who used the very same process to demonstrate what wondrous artistic results can emerge from the use of simple basic patterns. In fact, Escher’s Dutch countryman Broug once wrote an essay on the connections between his art and that of the Islamic world for the exhibit Escher Meets Islamic Art at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum.
Escher first encountered tessellations on a trip to the Islamic world himself, in the “colorful abstract decorations in the 14th century Alhambra, the well-known palace and fortress complex in Southern Spain,” writes Al.Arte’s Aya Johanna Daniëlle Dürst Britt. “Although he visited the Alhambra in 1922 after his graduation as a graphic artist, he was already interested in geometry, symmetry and tessellations for some years.” His fascinations included “the effect of color on the visual perspective, causing some motifs to seem infinite — an effect partly caused by symmetry.” His second visit to Alhambra, in 1936, solidified his understanding of the principles of tessellation, and he would go on to base about a hundred of his own pieces on the patterns he saw there. Those who seek the door to infinity understand that any tradition may hold the keys.
The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from. — Lynda Barry
She demanded that all participating staff members surrender their phones and other such personal devices.
Her victims were as jangled by this prospect as your average iPhone-addicted teen, but surrendered, agreeing to write by hand, another antiquated notion Barry subscribes to:
The delete button makes it so that anything you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so nothing new has a chance. Writing by hand is a revelation for people. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a different way of thinking that goes along with them.
Barry—who told the Onion’s AV Club that she crafted her book What It Is with an eye toward bored readers stuck in a Jiffy Lube oil-change waiting room—is also a big proponent of doodling, which she views as a creative neurological response to boredom:
Boring meeting, you have a pen, the usual clowns are yakking. Most people will draw something, even people who can’t draw. I say “If you’re bored, what do you draw?” And everybody has something they draw. Like “Oh yeah, my little guy, I draw him.” Or “I draw eyeballs, or palm trees.” … So I asked them “Why do you think you do that? Why do you think you doodle during those meetings?” I believe that it’s because it makes having to endure that particular situation more bearable, by changing our experience of time. It’s so slight. I always say it’s the difference between, if you’re not doodling, the minutes feel like a cheese grater on your face. But if you are doodling, it’s more like Brillo. It’s not much better, but there is a difference. You could handle Brillo a little longer than the cheese grater.
Meetings and classrooms are among the few remaining venues in which screen-addicted moths are expected to force themselves away from the phone’s inviting flame. Other settings—like the Jiffy Lube waiting room—require more initiative on the user’s part.
Once, we were keener students of minor changes to familiar environments, the books strangers were reading in the subway, and those strangers themselves. Our subsequent observations were known to spark conversation and sometimes ideas that led to creative projects.
Now, many of us let those opportunities slide by, as we fill up on such fleeting confections as Candy Crush, funny videos, and all-you-can-eat servings of social media.
It’s also tempting to use our phones as defacto shields any time social anxiety looms. This dodge may provide short term comfort, especially to younger people, but remember, Barry and many of her cartoonist peers, including Daniel Clowes, Simon Hanselmann, and Ariel Schrag, toughed it out by making art. That’s what got them through the loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom of their middle and high school years.
The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me… It was on those quiet weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to make stories in comics form.
Barry is far from alone in encouraging adults to peel themselves away from their phone dependency for their creative good.
Photographer Eric Pickersgill’sRemoved imagines a series of everyday situations in which phones and other personal devices have been rendered invisible. (It’s worth noting that he removed the offending articles from the models’ hands, rather that Photoshopping them out later.)
Computer Science Professor Calvin Newport’s recent book, Deep Work, posits that all that shallow phone time is creating stress, anxiety, and lost creative opportunities, while also doing a number on our personal and professional lives.
Author Manoush Zomorodi’s recent TED Talk on how boredom can lead to brilliant ideas, below, details a weeklong experiment in battling smartphone habits, with lots of scientific evidence to back up her findings.
But what if you wipe the slate of digital distractions only to find that your brain’s just… empty? A once occupied room, now devoid of anything but dimly recalled memes, and generalized dread over the state of the world?
The aforementioned 2010 AV Club interview with Barry offers both encouragement and some useful suggestions that will get the temporarily paralyzed moving again:
I don’t know what the strip’s going to be about when I start. I never know. I oftentimes have—I call it the word-bag. Just a bag of words. I’ll just reach in there, and I’ll pull out a word, and it’ll say “ping-pong.” I’ll just have that in my head, and I’ll start drawing the pictures as if I can… I hear a sentence, I just hear it. As soon as I hear even the beginning of the first sentence, then I just… I write really slow. So I’ll be writing that, and I’ll know what’s going to go at the top of the panel. Then, when it gets to the end, usually I’ll know what the next one is. By three sentences or four in that first panel, I stop, and then I say “Now it’s time for the drawing.” Then I’ll draw. But then I’ll hear the next one over on another page! Or when I’m drawing Marlys and Arna, I might hear her say something, but then I’ll hear Marlys say something back. So once that first sentence is there, I have all kinds of choices as to where I put my brush. But if nothing is happening, then I just go over to what I call my decoy page. It’s like decoy ducks. I go over there and just start messing around.
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