“Ever since our species first looked up at the sky, we dreamed of reaching Mars. Back in 2029, that dream became real, when the first humans stepped foot on the Red planet. And, in a few months, a new group of astronauts will make the journey.…”
It all seems like many other Neil deGrasse Tyson videos you’ve seen before. Until he says, “Back in 2029.” Wait, what?
Behold Neil deGrasse Tyson appearing in a clever promo for Ridley Scott’s upcoming film The Martian.
Based on Andy Weir’s bestselling 2011 novel The Martian, the movie will star Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an astronaut who goes on a big mission to Mars — the one so stirringly described by Tyson above. But the journey to Mars is not where the real action happens, and we’ll just leave it at that. No spoilers here.
Vinton himself resisted the rating, not wanting to be lumped in with more regular kiddie fare. It performed disappointingly at the box office despite great critical response from such lofty realms as The New Republic.
Is it really so surprising that families flocking to the Care Bears Movie steered clear of one featuring a shape-shifting, free-floating mask, who terrorizes the children in the film (and presumably, the audience) by conjuring an enchanting little clay kingdom only to rain misfortune upon it. We’re talking smashed coffins, grief-stricken clay mothers wailing over the bodies of their young, helpless victims being swallowed up by cracks that appear in the earth.
“… it was just such a bizarre character, to start with. In fact, I haven’t seen a character quite like that in almost anything else – someone who has this power but no feeling one way or another and just sort-of tells it like it is regarding the future of humanity. We wanted it to be about metamorphosis, visually, and make that a big part of sequence. He transforms and grows up and down from the earth and appears out of nothingness. The design of the character came from an early drawing that Barry Bruce did, where a jester was holding his face on a stick. I thought it was a really interesting way to play it. I ended up doing the voice of the Stranger with a female performer. We wanted it to be almost androgynous, so she and I did it together and made a point of not trying to hide it, even.”
I’m not sure the person or persons responsible for the theatrical trailer, below, got the memo…
You may not be interested in politics, they say, but politics is interested in you. The same, if you believe famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, goes for myth: far from explaining only the origin of the world as believed by extinct societies, it can explain the power of stories we enjoy today — up to and including Star Wars.
The man behind PBS’ well-known series The Power of Myth left behind many words in many formats telling us precisely why, and now you can hear a fair few of them — 48 hours worth — for free on this Spotify playlist. (If you don’t have Spotify’s software already, you can download it free here.)
“From the Star Wars trilogy to the Grateful Dead,” says the Joseph Campbell Foundation, “Joseph Campbell has had a profound impact on our culture, our beliefs, and the way we view ourselves and the world.” This collection, The Lectures of Joseph Campbell, which comes from early in his career, offers “a glimpse into one of the great minds of our time, drawing together his most wide-ranging and insightful talks” in the role of both “a scholar and a master storyteller.” So not only can Campbell enrich our understanding of all the stories we love, he can spin his lifetime of mythological research into teachings that, in the telling, weave into a pretty gripping yarn in and of themselves.
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“A beautiful way to perform one of the world’s great musical treasures.” The video above, and the accompanying 58-character sentence, make up the last tweet from Oliver Sacks, the influential neurologist who passed away earlier today. The clip (originally highlighted on our site back in 2012) features 100 musicians and singers from the Orchestra Simfonica del Valles, Amics de l’Opera de Sabadell, Coral Belles Arts, and Cor Lieder Camera performing what’s now the anthem of the European Union — Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from his Symphony No. 9. It’s a pretty stirring performance, and certainly a worthwhile way to punctuate a Twitter stream. (Side note: Dr. Sacks started following our Twitter stream several years ago, and we still consider it a great honor, a high point in OC history.)
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The documentary above takes you through the creation of a cello in the Barcelona workshop of master luthier Xavier Vidal i Roca. (To watch with English subtitles, click the closed caption icon — “CC” — in the lower right corner.)
The opening shots of luthier Eduard Bosque Miñana taking measurements have the jazzy feel of a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood segment, but once music scholar Ramón Andres gets into the act, things take a turn toward the philosophical.
His thoughts as to the ways the “king of all instruments” speaks to the human condition are commensurate with the level of craftsmanship its construction requires.
(Though seeing Miñana patiently fit a steam-shaped curve to the developing instrument’s c‑bout leads me to question Andres’ choice of anthropomorphizing pronoun. With a waistline like that, surely this cello is a deep-voiced queen.)
The master luthier himself acknowledges that there is always a bit of mystery as to how any given instrument will sound. Most modern cellos are copies of ancient instruments. With the design set, the luthier must channel his or her creative expression into the construction, working with similarly ancient tools — chisels, palette knives, and the like. If power tools come into play, director Laura Vidal keeps them offscreen.
The effect is meditative, hypnotic…I was glad to have the mystery preserved, even as I agree with cellist Lito Iglesias that musicians should make an effort to understand their instruments’ construction, and the reasons behind the selection of particular woods and shapes.
Iglesias also notes that the luthier is the unsung partner in every public performance, the one the audience never thinks to acknowledge.
Despite his onetime friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of spirituality and his indirect influence on 12-Step programs. But Jung’s journey to self-understanding and what he called “individuation” was an intensely private, personal affair that took place over the course of sixteen years, during which he created an incredible, folio-sized work of religious art called The Red Book: Liber Novus. In the video above, you can get a tour through Jung’s private masterpiece, presented in an intensely hushed, breathy style meant to trigger the tingly sensations of a weird phenomenon called “ASMR” (recently the subject of a This American Life segment). Given the book’s disorienting and often disturbing content, this over-gentle guidance seems appropriate.
After his break with Freud in 1913, when he was 38 years old, Jung had what he feared might be a psychotic break with reality as well. He began recording his dreams, mystical visions, and psychedelic inner voyages, in a stylized, calligraphic style that resembles medieval European illuminated manuscripts and the occult psychic journeys of Aleister Crowley and William Blake.
Jung had the work bound, but not published. It’s “a very personal record,” writes Psychology Today, “of Jung’s complicated, tortuous and lengthy quest to salvage his soul.” Jung called this process of creation the “numinous beginning” to his most important psychological work. After many years spent locked in a bank vault, The Red Book finally came to light a few years ago and was translated and published in an expensive edition.
And for a very thorough survey of Jung’s book, listen to the lecture series by longtime Jung scholar Dr. Lance S. Owens, who delivers one set of talks for lay people and another more in-depth set for a group of clinical psychologists. Above and below, you can hear the first two parts of Owen’s more general lecture on Jung’s “numinous beginning,” a book, “unlike anything in the modern age; a work completely without category or comparison.” Visit the Gnostic Society Library site to stream and download the remaining lectures.
You can learn a lot about an architect from looking at the buildings they designed, and you can learn even more by looking at the buildings they lived in, but you can learn the most of all from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. For that best-known of all American architects, this house stands still today not just as his home but as one of his notable works, and as the studio in which he designed other notable works (including Fallingwater). Wright’s enthusiasts make pilgrimages out to Spring Green, Wisconsin to pay their respects to this singular house on a hill, which offers tours from May through October.
For those less inclined toward architectural pilgrimages, we have this HD 360-degree “virtual visit” of Taliesin (also known as Taliesin East since 1937, when Wright built a Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona). “The center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s world was Taliesin East,” write the online tour’s developers. “It was his home, workshop, architectural laboratory and inspiration for nearly all his life.” In the comfort of your web browser, you can “experience what he saw daily, surrounded by Asian art, expansive views of Wisconsin’s rolling hills, his own courtyard gardens and a space to relax before a fire watched over by a portrait of his mother.”
You can also get a view of “the actual drafting tables where Wright designed his most famous buildings” and the drawings on them, all while “staff historian Keiran Murphy shares the history, the personal stories and points out special objects in the room” (if you choose to keep the “tour guide” option turned on). And Taliesin certainly doesn’t lack history, either personal or architectural. Wright built its first iteration in 1911, and it lasted until a paranoid servant burnt it down in 1941, axe-murdering seven people there (including Wright’s live-in ladyfriend and her children) in the process. Wright, who’d been away at the time of the tragedy, recovered from the shock of it all, then set to work on Taliesin II, though he didn’t really live in it until after he returned from his work on Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel in 1922.
Three years later, another fire (this time probably due to an electrical problem) badly damaged the house again, necessitating the design of a Taliesin III, which he could begin only after digging himself out of a financial hole in 1928. It is more or less that Taliesin that you can see today, whether you visit in person or through the internet. If you feel sufficiently inspired as a result, you could even apply to study at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture located there. While the house won’t likely turn you into an architectural genius just by osmosis, at least you can rest assured that it has probably put its most dramatic disasters behind it.
You can always learn something from your elders. 8‑year-olds can learn from 9‑year-olds, just as octogenarians can learn from nonagenarians. With age comes wisdom. That’s the premise of this touching, farewell video from the CBC’s WireTap radio show, which is about to go off the air.
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I recall with uncharacteristic clarity the first time I heard the B‑52s. Forced on a youth-group ski trip by my parents, I arrived an angry thirteen-year-old wanna-be punk: mohawk, ripped jeans, patched leather jacket, disaffected scowl, and feigned air of adolescent cynical world-weariness. Pop music, I had already decided, was for suckers. The only sounds that spoke to me were loud, abrasive, and deliberately unlovely. Then someone in our dorm put on “Rock Lobster” and it blew my narrow mind. Though the ostensible purpose of this church-sponsored vacation was to stir up some Protestant piety, I came away converted instead to the gospel of new wave. I credit my awakening to Kate Pierson’s otherworldly wail, Cindy Wilson’s throaty harmonies, and Ricky Wilson’s bizarrely tuned guitar.
Maybe it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but it was a decisive moment in my young fandom, after which I found myself seeking out the odd, angular, jangly sounds I’d first heard on that B‑52s record—and finding them in Johnny Marr’s Smiths guitar work, every early R.E.M. album, and in more morose form, in The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, and countless mopey British post-punks. What surprised me at the time was learning how many of these bands arrived on the scene at the same time as the nastier, grittier bands that scored my angst-ridden entry into callow teenage-hood. We’re familiar with the story of new wave bands like Talking Heads and Television’s beginnings at CBGB’s. But around that same time, in 1976, Georgia’s B‑52s got their start in the college town of Athens. As one interviewee says—in the above short documentary on the Southern art-rock scene that also birthed R.E.M.—“the B‑52s started the music scene as we think of it.”
Taking their sound from surf rock, 50s doo-wop and girl group harmonies, and a weirdness that is Athens’ own, the B‑52s carved out a space for themselves within music that had something in common with the Ramones except it was hyper-colorful, thrift-store kitschy, and unapologetically campy. Their warped take on 50s and 60s dance rock—complete with Pierson and Wilson’s “B‑52” beehives—first broke out with “Rock Lobster” (a song John Lennon once credited with influencing his comeback). You can see them open with the song at the top in 1978 at Atlanta’s Downtown Cafe, just prior to the release of their debut album. (Stick around to watch the rest of the 28-minute set.) Fred Schneider, the band’s wry, flamboyant frontman, introduces each band member with a series of quirky pseudonyms. Above, they do my personal favorite, “52 Girls”—with its pounding tom-tom surf rhythms and sung-shouted lyrics about “The principal girls of the USA.” Just below catch another early gig from 1980, at New Jersey’s Capitol Theater.
The B‑52s plugged along through the 80s—suffered the loss of Ricky Wilson to AIDS—then hit it very big on the pop charts with “Love Shack” and “Roam” from 1989’s Cosmic Thing. For my money, though, nothing beats the glorious joyfulness of their debut, which sounds like the most fun any band has ever had making a record together.
Though the band has always been a highly collaborative ensemble, Kate Pierson’s huge voice came to shape their sound over the years. She would go on to record the torch song “Candy” with Iggy Pop and the ridiculous, love-it-or-hate-it “Shiny Happy People” with her hometown peers R.E.M. Now, at 67, she’s putting out her first solo album, Guitars and Microphones. Listen to the super-catchy title track above, and hear an interview with Pierson on NPR here and another on WBEZ’s Sound Opinions here. For more on the B‑52s early years, see retrospectives on Dangerous Minds and Pitchfork. You owe it to yourself to get to know this band. They may not change your life like they did mine, but they might just expand your understanding of pop music’s possibilities.
Bob Kane created Batman in 1939 as a way to fulfill the public’s need for more comic book superheroes in the wake of Superman. And, by 1943, Batman made his way from pulpy print to the screen for first time.
In this video tribute to the many looks of Batman through the ages, Jacob T. Swinney advances chronologically, but also thematically, focusing on the interplay between Batman and his sidekick Robin; the fetishization of Batman’s tool belt; and the evolution of his costume from fabric (his classic look up through the ’80s) to the BDSM-inspired rubber outfits that have lasted since Michael Keaton donned the solid black get-up through Christian Bale’s interpretation. (It does seem that Ben Affleck’s version will not deviate from this course, but add some armor. He will also continue to perch on top of spires and tall buildings and stand watch over the city.)
The other evolution worth noticing is in Batman’s voice, and what it says about America’s relationship with authority. In the early serials up through Adam West’s iconic TV version, Batman speaks in clipped but enunciated tones, somewhere in the region of newscasters and G‑men. This connects Batman to the detective part of his character and telegraphs his innate goodness. But once Keaton takes on the role, Batman speaks in a low, gravely tone to suit his vigilante ethos, designed for meetings in dark alleys. This is how we want our heroes now.
This “serious” shift takes its cue from Frank Miller’s groundbreaking The Dark Knight Returns comic book, which is ground zero for every superhero film since that wears its gritty realism on its sleeve. This affected speech reaches its fairly ridiculous apotheosis in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, where both hero and villain are incomprehensible. The only thing left is parody, and that’s how we end this video, with Will Arnett’s voice animating the Lego Movie’s version of the superhero: affected, narcissistic, and believing too much in his own myth.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Even if you don’t like comic books, think of names like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and you get a very clear mental picture indeed. Classic superheroes live, breathe, battle supervillians, and even die and return to life across decades upon decades of storylines (and often more than one at once), but we all know them because, just like the most enduring corporate logos, they also stand as surpassingly effective works of commercial art. But given that countless different artists in various media have had to render these superheroes over those decades, how have their images remained so utterly consistent?
That owes to documents such as the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide, scanned and recently posted to a Facebook group for fans of comic-book artist José Luis García-López. Having spent most of his career with DC Comics, caretaker of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and many other well-known and much-licensed heroes and villains besides, García-López surely knows in his very bones the sort of details of costume, physique, posture, and bearing these style guides exist to convey.
Being 33 years old, this particular style guide doesn’t perfectly reflect the way all of DC’s superheroes look today, what with the aesthetic changes made to keep them hip year on year. But you’ll notice that, while fashions tend to have their way with the more minor characters (longtime DC fans especially lament the headband and big hair this style guide inflicted upon Supergirl), the major ones still look, on the whole, pretty much the same. Sure, Superman has the strength and the flight, Batman has the wealth and the vast armory of high-tech crime-fighting tools, and Wonder Woman can do pretty much anything, but all those abilities pale in comparison to the sheer power of their design. You can flip through the rest of the Style Guide here.
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, the movie will star Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an astronaut who goes on a big mission to Mars — the one so stirringly described by Tyson above. But the journey to Mars is not where the real action happens, and we’ll just leave it at that. No spoilers here.
. For my money, though, nothing beats the glorious joyfulness of their debut, which sounds like the most fun any band has ever had making a record together.
. Listen to the super-catchy title track above, and hear an 
