Give Dr. Andrew Weil three minutes, and he can teach you a 60-second technique for falling asleep. Above, the alternative medicine guru walks you through the 4–7‑8 breathing method. As he demonstrates, it “takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.” And once you master it, you can use the 4–7‑8 breathing technique (explained and demonstrated in greater detail here ) to lower your anxiety levels (useful these days!), navigate tension-filled moments, and deal with food cravings.
Elsewhere, Weil has said, “If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly.” Hence why he created an audio recording, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing, which you can still purchase online.
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Albert Einstein is the rare figure who’s universally known, but almost entirely for his professional achievements. Few of us who can explain the theory of relativity can also say much about the personal life of the man who came up with it, though that doesn’t owe to a lack of documentation. Thanks to science YouTuber Toby Hendy, we have, for example, some of the love letters he wrote to the women who constituted a veritable parade through his life. Also, in another video for her channel Tibees, Hendy reads the letters he wrote in the process of divorcing his first wife, the Serbian physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić.
Einstein married Marić in January 1903, says Hendy, “after they had been together for around five years. The relationship was in its prime, and so was the academic productivity. It was in 1905 that Einstein would publish his four major papers that would change the face of physics. By 1912, however, Einstein had started having an affair with his cousin,” Elsa Lowenthal.
By 1914, Einstein wrote to Marić a letter “detailing some conditions of them continuing to live together,” if not quite as man and wife. The conditions read as follows:
CONDITIONS
A. You will make sure:
1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; 2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room; 3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:
1. my sitting at home with you; 2. my going out or travelling with you.
C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way; 2. you will stop talking to me if I request it; 3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.
Though they agreed to put this stringent plan into effect, less than two weeks later, he wrote to Elsa, “Yesterday my wife left for good with the children” — and “you, dear little Elsie, will now become my wife and become convinced that it is not at all so hard to live by my side.”
Einstein did marry Lowenthal in 1919, and the union, though hardly characterized by ideal faithfulness, did last until her death in 1935. There would be plenty of other women, but none who played quite the same role in his life as Marić, not only the mother of his children, but also — according to some historians — a collaborator on some of his accomplishments in physics. According to Lost Women of Science, “there is little tangible evidence to support the claims that Marić was a co-author of Einstein’s first major work. That said, there are plenty of personal testimonies from those who knew Marić and Einstein that her involvement was likely.” One condition of their divorce settlement, at any rate, held that Marić receive his Nobel Prize money, were he to win it, which he went on to do a couple of years later. This makes clear that, whatever the importance of her own scientific work, she must’ve had a good head on her shoulders.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
If you happen to be a high school student in Florida who’s eager to read A Clockwork Orange, that urge may turn out to be harder to satisfy than you imagine. Anthony Burgess’ harrowing, linguistically inventive novel of a grim near future has come out on top in PEN America’s latest ranking of banned books: that is, books removed or prevented even from entering public school libraries, most commonly in the state of Florida, with Texas and Tennessee as runners-up. Further down the list appears another widely known dystopian saga, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; Toni Morrison’s tale of Depression-era race relations The Bluest Eye; and even such long-popular “young adult” standards as Judy Blume’s Forever… and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Since its publication in 1962, “A ClockworkOrange has faced multiple book banning attempts due to the sexual violence it depicts,” says Carnegie Mellon University’s Banned Books Project. “In 1973, a bookseller in Orem, Utah, was arrested for selling the novel along with two other ‘obscene’ books.”
Bans followed “in 1976 in Aurora, Colorado, in 1977 in Westport, Connecticut, and in 1982 in Anniston, Alabama. As recently as 2019, members of the Florida Citizens Alliance” — in yet another example of the surprising tendency toward cultural authoritarianism in the Sunshine State — “have lobbied to ban the book along with almost one hundred other ‘pornographic’ novels.”
The notoriety of A Clockwork Orangein this regard probably owes something to the steely luridness of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, which was banned in England by Kubrick himself. It makes, in any case, for an ironic object of a book ban, given its themes. Burgess was inspired to write this novel of juvenile ultra-delinquency, as he explains in the interview clip above, by “talk in the nineteen-sixties of the possibility of getting these young thugs and not putting them in jail, because jail is needed for professional criminals, but rather putting them through a course of conditioning” to make them behave less like organisms than machines: the “clockwork oranges” of the title. The state, it seemed, “was all too ready to take over our brains and turn us into good little citizens without the power of choice” — a process that plausibly begins by restricting the choice of reading material.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
No historical figure better fits the definition of “Renaissance man” than Leonardo da Vinci, but that term has become so overused as to become misleading. We use it to express mild surprise that one person could use both their left and right hemispheres equally well. But in Leonardo’s day, people did not think of themselves as having two brains, and the worlds of art and science were not so far apart as they are now.
That Leonardo was able to combine fine arts and fine engineering may not have been overly surprising to his contemporaries, though he was an extraordinarily brilliant example of the phenomenon. The more we learn about him, the more we see how closely related the two pursuits were in his mind.
He approached everything he did as a technician. The uncanny effects he achieved in painting were the result, as in so much Renaissance art, of mathematical precision, careful study, and firsthand observation.
His artistic projects were also experiments. Some of them failed, as most experiments do, and some he abandoned, as he did so many scientific projects. No matter what, he never undertook anything, whether mechanical, anatomical, or artistic, without careful planning and design, as his copious notebooks testify. As more and more of those notebooks have become available online, both Renaissance scholars and laypeople alike have learned considerably more about how Leonardo’s mind worked.
“No other collection counts more original papers written by Leonardo,” notes Google. The Codex Atlanticus “consists of 1119 papers, most of them drawn or written on both sides.” Its name has “nothing to do with the Atlantic Ocean, or with some esoteric, mysterious content hidden in its pages.” The 12-volume collection acquired its title because the drawings and writings were bound with the same size paper that was used for making atlases. Gathered in the 16th century by sculptor Pompeo Leoni, the papers descended from Leonardo’s close student Giovan Francesco Melzi, who was entrusted with them after his teacher’s death.
The history of the Codex itself makes for a fascinating narrative, much of which you can learn at Google’s Ten Key Facts slideshow. The notebooks span Leonardo’s career, from 1478, when he was “still working in his native Tuscany, to 1519, when he died in France.” The collection was taken from Milan by Napoleon and brought to France, where it remained in the Louvre until 1815, when the Congress of Vienna ruled that all artworks stolen by the former Emperor be returned. (The emissary tasked with returning the Codex could not decipher Leonardo’s mirror writing and took it for Chinese.)
The Codex contains not only engineering diagrams, anatomy studies, and artistic sketches, but also fables written by Leonardo, inspired by Florentine literature. And it features Leonardo’s famed “CV,” a letter he wrote to the Duke of Milan describing in nine points his qualifications for the post of military engineer. In point four, he writes, “I still have very convenient bombing methods that are easy to transport; they launch stones and similar such in a tempest full of smoke to frighten the enemy, causing great damage and confusion.”
As if in illustration, elsewhere in the Codex, the drawing above appears, “one of the most celebrated” of the collection.” It was “shown to traveling foreigners visiting the Ambrosiana [the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, where the Codex resides] since the 18th century, usually arousing much amazement.” It is still amazing, especially if we consider the possibility that its artistry might have been something of a byproduct for its creator, whose primary motivation seems to have been solving technical problems—in the most elegant ways imaginable.
We’ve focused a fair bit here on the work of Delia Derbyshire, pioneering electronic composer of the mid-twentieth century—featuring two documentaries on her and discussing her role in almost creating an electronic backing track for Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday.” There’s good reason to devote so much attention to her: Derbyshire’s work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop laid the bedrock for a good deal of the sound design we hear on TV and radio today.
And, as we pointed out previously, her electronic music, recorded under her own name and with the band White Noise, influenced “most every current legend in the business—from Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers to Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.”
Yet for all her influence among dance music composers and sound effects wizards, Derbyshire and her music remain pretty obscure—that is except for one composition, instantly recognizable as the original theme to the BBC’s sci-fi hit Doctor Who (hear it at the top), “the best-known work of a ragtag group of technicians,” writes The Atlantic, “who unwittingly helped shape the course of 20th-century music.” Written by composer Ron Grainer, the song was actually brought into being by the Radiophonic Workshop, and by Derbyshire especially. The story of the Doctor Who theme’s creation is almost as interesting as the tune itself, with its “swooping, hissing and pulsing” that “manages to be at once haunting, goofy and ethereal.” Just above, you can see Derbyshire and her assistant Dick Mills tell it in brief.
What we learn from them is fascinating, considering that compositions like this are now created in powerful computer systems with dozens of separate tracks and digital effects. The Doctor Who theme, on the other hand, recorded in 1963, was made even before basic analog synthesizers came into use. “There are no musicians,” says Mills, “there are no synthesizers, and in those days, we didn’t even have a 2‑track or a stereo machine, it was always mono.” (Despite popular misconceptions, the theme does not feature a Theremin.) Derbyshire confirms; each and every part of the song “was constructed on quarter-inch mono tape,” she says, “inch by inch by inch,” using such recording techniques as “filtered white noise” and something called a “wobbulator.” How were all of these painstakingly constructed individual parts combined without multitrack technology? “We created three separate tapes,” Derbyshire explains, “put them onto three machines and stood next to them and said “Ready, steady, go!” and pushed all the ‘start’ buttons at once. It seemed to work.”
The theme came about when Grainer received a commission from the BBC after his well-received work on other series. He “composed the theme on a single sheet of A4 manuscript,” writes Mark Ayres in an extensive online history, “and sent it over from his home in Portugal, leaving the Workshop to get on with it.” Aware that the musique concrète techniques Derbyshire and her team used “were very time-consuming, Grainer provided a very simple composition, in essence just the famous bass line and a swooping melody,” as well as vaguely evocative instructions for orchestration like “wind bubble” and “cloud.” Ayres writes, “To an inventive radiophonic composer such as Delia Derbyshire, this was a gift.” Indeed “upon hearing it,” The Atlantic notes, “a very impressed Grainer barely recognized it as his composition. Due to BBC policies at the time, Grainer—against his objections—is still officially credited as the sole writer.” But the credit for this futuristic work—which sounds absolutely like nothing else of the time and “which brought to a wide audience methods once exclusive to the high modernism of experimental composition”—should equally go to Derbyshire and her team. You can contrast that ahead-of-its-time original theme with all of the iterations to follow in the video just above.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
To many of us, the concept of solitary confinement may not sound all that bad: finally, a reprieve from the siege of social and professional requests. Finally, a chance to catch up on all the reading we’ve been meaning to do. Finally, an environment conducive to this meditation thing about whose benefits we’ve heard so much. (Perhaps we made those very assurances to ourselves when the COVID-19 pandemic set in.) But according to the animated TED-Ed lesson above, written by psychiatrist and correctional mental health expert Terry Kupers, the negatives of the experience would well outweigh the positives. It all comes by way of answering the question, “What happens to your brain without any social contact?”
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, isolation takes its greatest toll when imposed against the will of the isolated, and even more so when imposed for an indefinite duration. “Early on, stress hormones may spike, and as time passes, that stress can become chronic,” says the video’s narrator.
Without the availability of social interactions as “a sounding board where we can gauge how rational our perceptions are,” one’s “sense of identity and reality becomes threatened.” The stage is therefore set for “depression, obsessions, suicidal ideation, and, for some, delusions and hallucinations.” Sleeping difficulties can manifest on the more strictly physical end, potentially accompanied by “heart palpitations, headaches, dizziness, and hypersensitivity.”
While traveling in the United States, Charles Dickens bore witness to the punishment by solitary confinement already in effect in American prisons, coming away with the impression that it was “worse than any torture of the body.” He wrote that after a visit to a Philadelphia penitentiary, whose very name reflects the theory, held by the Quaker groups who introduced the practice in the late eighteenth century, that it could “bring about reflection and penitence.” After much research on the matter, Kupers has come to the conclusion that, in fact, it “does immense damage that is contrary to rehabilitation, while failing to reduce prison violence.” If you’re reading this, you may not be especially likely to be sentenced to involuntary confinement. But the next time you start feeling out of sorts for reasons you can’t pin down, consider how long it’s been since you’ve spent real time with real people.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogeneous compendium of creatures from ancient folktale, myth, and demonology around the world.
Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind.
Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world.” Although a lesser field than angelology, the influence of this fascinatingly diverse canon only broadened over time.
“The natives recorded in the Talmud” soon became “thoroughly integrated” with the many demons of Christian Europe and the Islamic world, forming a sprawling hell whose denizens hail from at least three continents, and who have mixed freely in alchemical, astrological, and other occult works since at least the 13th century and into the present. One example from the early 20th century, a 1902 treatise on divination from Isfahan, a city in central Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of watercolors added in 1921 that could easily be mistaken for illustrations from the early Middle Ages.
The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.”
The author of the treatise, a rammal, or soothsayer, himself “attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits,” writes Ali Karjoo-Ravary, now an assistant professor of Islamic history at Columbia University. Predating Islam, “the depiction of demons in the Near East… was frequently used for magical and talismanic purposes,” just as it was by occultists like Aleister Crowley at the time these illustrations were made.
“Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings,” the Public Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fantastic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plenty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delighted.
A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail).
There’s a playful Boschian quality to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our perspective as absurd, he apparently took his bizarre inventions absolutely seriously. So too, we might assume, did the illustrator here. We might wonder, as Woolf did, about this work as the product of “suffering human beings… attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” What kinds of ordinary, material concerns might have afflicted this artist, as he (we presume) imagined demons gouging the eyes and licking the feet of people tucked safely in their beds?
While reporting on the Eurovision Song Contest, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane “asked a man named Seppo, from the seven-hundred-strong Eurovision Fan Club of Norway, what he loved about Eurovision. ‘Brotherhood of man,’ he said — a slightly ambiguous answer, because that was the name of a British group that entered, and won, the contest in 1976.” And the concept has a longer history in European music than that: Friedrich Schiller claimed to be celebrating it when he wrote his poem “An die Freude,” or “To Joy,” which Ludwig van Beethoven adapted a few decades thereafter into the final movement of his Symphony No. 9. Later still, in 1972, that piece of music was adopted by the Council of Europe as the continent’s anthem; in 1985, the European Union made it official as well.
In a sense, “Ode to Joy” is a natural choice for a musical representation of Europe, not just for its explicit themes, but also for the obvious ambition of the symphony that includes it to capture an entire civilization in musical form.
Its complexity and contradiction may be easier to appreciate through these videos, which constitute a visualization by Stephen Malinowski, creator of the Music Animation Machine, previously featured here on Open Culture for his animated scores of everything from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 to Debussy’s Clair de lune. As one of the most frequently performed symphonies in the world, Beethoven’s 9th comes to us laden with a fair amount of cultural baggage, but Malinowski’s sparely elegant rendering lets us listen while keeping our mind on the essentials of its structure.
That structure, as the viewing experience emphasizes, is not a particularly simple one. Though already deaf, Beethoven nevertheless composed this final complete symphony with layer after ever-changing yet interlocking layer, drawing from a variety of musical traditions as well as pieces he’d already written for other purposes. At its 1824 premiere in Vienna, Symphony No. 9 received no fewer than five standing ovations, though over the centuries since, even certain of its appreciators question whether the final movement really fits in with the rest. Indeed, some even regard “Ode to Joy” as kitschy, an exercise unbecoming of the symphony as a whole, to say nothing of the man who composed it. But then, it’s undeniable that European culture has since achieved heights of kitsch unimaginable in Beethoven’s day.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Jane Goodall, the revered conservationist, passed away today at age 91. In her honor, we’re featuring above a National Geographic documentary called Jane. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film draws “from over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the National Geographic archives for over 50 years.” The documentary offers an intimate portrait of Goodall and her chimpanzee research that “challenged the male-dominated scientific consensus of her time and revolutionized our understanding of the natural world.” It’s set to an orchestral score by composer Philip Glass.
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Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned, but chances are you haven’t had much occasion to remember it since. Still, it would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of Virginia, home of the Great Stalacpipe Organ. As its name suggests, that attraction is an organ made out of stalactites, the geological formations that grow from cave ceilings. Not long after the discovery of Luray Caverns itself in 1878, its stalactites were found to resonate through the underground space in an almost musical fashion when struck — a property Leland W. Sprinkle took to its logical conclusion in the mid-nineteen fifties.
“During a tour of this world-famous natural wonder, Mr. Sprinkle watched in awe, which was still customary at the time, as a tour guide tapped the ancient stone formations with a small mallet, producing a musical tone,” says Luray Caverns’ official site. “Mr. Sprinkle was greatly inspired by this demonstration and the idea for a most unique instrument was conceived.”
Conception was one thing, but execution quite another: it took him three years to locate just the right stalactites, shave them down to ring out at just the right frequency, and rig them up with electronically activated, keyboard-controlled mallets. For the technically minded Sprinkle, who worked at the Pentagon as a mathematician and electronics scientist, this must not have been quite as tedious a labor as it sounds.
The result was the biggest, the oldest (at least according to the age of the cave itself), and arguably the weirdest musical instrument on Earth, a lithophone for the mid-twentieth century’s heroic age of engineering. You can see the Great Stalacpipe Organ in the video from Veritasium at the top of the post, and hear a recording of Sprinkle himself playing it below that. In the video just above, YouTuber and musician Rob Scallon gets a chance to take it for a spin. Viewers of his channel know how much experience he has with exotic instruments (including the glass armonica, originally invented by Ben Franklin, which we’ve featured here on Open Culture), but even so, the opportunity to play a cave — and to make use of its surround sound avant la lettre — hardly comes every day. Here we have proof that the old, weird America endures, and that the Great Stalacpipe Organ is its ideal soundtrack.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Punk rock has a robust tradition of gross-out, offensive comedy—one carried into the present by bands like Fat White Family and Diarrhea Planet, who may not exist were it not for Fear, an unstable L.A. band led by an obnoxious provocateur who goes by the name Lee Ving. Like fellow L.A. punks the Germs, Circle Jerks, and Black Flag, Fear gets credit for pioneering a California punk sound known for adolescent brattiness and a total lack of pretension to any kind of artfulness or cool.
Like many of their peers, Fear rose to prominence when Penelope Spheeris featured them in her 1981 punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Part I. But before that seminal film’s release, Fear was discovered by John Belushi, who first caught the band on a local L.A. music show called New Wave Theatre in 1980. He tracked down Ving, who tells Rolling Stone, “we had a couple of beers and became fast friends.” At the time, Belushi was at work on his comedy Neighbors with Dan Aykroyd and contracted the band to record a song for the film (his last before his death in 1982).
The film’s producers, Rolling Stone writes, “were appalled” by the song “and refused to use it,” so to make it up to Ving and company, Belushi pushed to have the band booked on Saturday Night Live on Halloween, 1981. The resulting performance has become legendary for what happened, and what didn’t, and led to Fear becoming, says Ving, “one of the esteemed members of the permanently banned.” You can watch a clip above of the band playing “Beef Boloney” and “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones” (introduced by Donald Pleasance), and just below see Ving in a clip from an interview show discussing the ill-fated gig.
Belushi stage-managed the band’s appearance, striving for authenticity by bringing into the studio what Ving calls “an actual punk rock audience rather than just Mr. and Mrs. Missouri.” (That audience included now-legends Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, members of New York hardcore band the Cro-Mags, and Tesco Vee of the Meatmen.) The resulting mosh pit was nothing out of the ordinary for the typical punk show. But, unsurprisingly, “the real audience at Saturday Night Live was scared to death,” says Ving, “They didn’t know what was happening with all the mayhem.”
During the riotous proceedings, SNL producer Dick Ebersol “got hit in the chest with a pumpkin,” some equipment was damaged, and during the final song, “Let’s Have a War,” an audience member grabbed the microphone and yelled out “F*ck New York!” The profanity freaked out NBC, who cut the broadcast short and shelved the footage for several years. The New York Post later quoted an unnamed NBC technician as saying, “This was a life-threatening situation. They went crazy. It’s amazing no one got killed.” The paper also quoted a figure of $400,000 for damages to the Rockefeller Center set.
But as Billboard reported two weeks later, the figure was totally erroneous (supplied to the Post by Ving as a practical joke, as he says above). “We had to pay $40 in labor penalties. That was the extent of it,” said SNL spokesman Peter Hamilton. As for the shock to viewers, it seems the network received “all of 12 complaints” after the broadcast. Ving himself found the overreaction ridiculous, and NBC’s long shelving of the footage—only recently made available in a truncated version—a humorless mistake. “They seem to be… losing the sense of humor about the whole idea,” he told Rolling Stone, “I had a sense of humor at the whole idea of starting Fear. It was extremely humorous to me, and I think John saw that humor.”
Indeed he did, but Belushi’s appreciation for Fear’s antics was ahead of its time. Now we can see, at least in part, what all the fuss was about. And we can also finally hear the long-shelved single for Neighbors that Belushi recorded with the band.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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