11 Hypnotic, Close-Up Minutes Watching Tool’s Legendary Drummer Danny Carey in Action

in Music | October 15th, 2020

Like the great prog drum­mers of old—Bill Bru­ford, Neil Peart, Phil Collins—Tool’s Dan­ny Carey is an arti­san. They don’t make drum­ming like that any­more. He says so him­self (sort of) in an inter­view with Music Radar about his side project Leg­end of the Seag­ull­men with Mastadon’s Brent Hinds. Remem­ber­ing how Robert Fripp would stand on the edge of the stage, watch­ing Tool play when King Crim­son opened for the mod­ern prog-met­al giants, Carey remarks, “We weren’t sync­ing to some bull­shit like so many oth­er bands. We were actu­al­ly play­ing live. It’s a sad thing when almost every band you see isn’t doing that. It’s the clicks and back­ing tracks that are keep­ing time. I’ve nev­er played to a click on stage in my life.”

A “click track,” for those who don’t know, is exact­ly what it sounds like: a play­back of clicks (or any per­cus­sive sound) to the desired tem­po, pumped into a musician’s ear­piece to keep them play­ing in time. A use­ful tool of the record­ing stu­dio, many musi­cians, as Carey says, now use it on stage, along with vocal pitch cor­rec­tion soft­ware and pre-record­ed back­ing tracks to make sure every­thing sounds exact­ly like it does on record.

All of this tech­nol­o­gy ruins the feel of live per­for­mance, Carey main­tains. He would know. He’s been play­ing live since the 80s and play­ing with Tool since the band formed thir­ty years ago. He also jams every oth­er month, he says, “with these weird dudes who played with Miles Davis or Mahav­ish­nu Orches­tra.” So… yeah. The dude’s got some clas­sic chops.

But tech­nol­o­gy isn’t all bad in live music, far from it. Being a drum­mer used to mean that hard­ly any­one could see you on a big stage. You might be the most tal­ent­ed, best-look­ing mem­ber of the band, but you were hid­den away behind your kit with the singers and gui­tarists soak­ing up the glo­ry. Even when cer­tain celebri­ty rock drum­mers get their own stages (with their own mini-roller coast­ers), it can be impos­si­ble to see what they’re doing up close. No longer. Thanks to unob­tru­sive cam­eras that can stream video from any­where, no cor­ner of the stage need be obscured. We can watch a Tool show from over Carey’s shoul­der, as in the video of “Pneu­ma,” live in con­cert, at the top, pro­duced by drum equip­ment com­pa­ny Vic Firth to demon­strate Carey’s new sig­na­ture sticks.

It’s bet­ter to let Carey’s play­ing speak for itself, but for ref­er­ence, “Pneu­ma” comes from Tool’s very eager­ly-await­ed 2019 album Fear Inocu­lum, just one of many tracks “filled with twist after turn, con­ven­tion­al song struc­ture be damned,” Ilya Stemkovsky writes at Mod­ern Drum­mer, “with Carey at the cen­ter of the storm, pro­vid­ing the heav­i­est, most mas­sive bot­tom pos­si­ble. He even gets his own solo per­cus­sion track, ‘Choco­late Chip Trip,’ on which he incor­po­rates gongs and bells, among oth­er sounds.” Maybe this live view, and Tool’s well-deserved Gram­my Win for Best Met­al Per­for­mance this year for “7empest,” will inspire more drum­mers to drop the click and bring back what Carey calls the “ded­i­ca­tion to your vibe” from the days of arti­sanal drum­ming.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Wit­ness Rush Drum­mer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

See Why Gin­ger Bak­er (RIP) Was One of the Great­est Drum­mers in Rock & World Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Incredible Six-Octave Vocal Range of Opera-Singing Punk Diva Nina Hagen

in Music | October 13th, 2020

If you’re a read­er of this site, it’s like­ly you known the name Klaus Nomi, the diminu­tive Ger­man singer who stunned New Wave audi­ences in New York with his angel­ic sopra­no voice and opera cov­ers. If you know of Nomi, you like­ly know of Nina Hagen, who start­ed releas­ing records in her native East Ger­many in the late 70s, mix­ing opera with punk, funk, and reg­gae and cov­er­ing clas­sics from Tina Turn­er to The Tubes “White Punks on Dope.” She became a major star, but her name does not come up often these days. She is long over­due for a revival.

Like Nomi, Hagen was a mas­ter of fright make-up and exag­ger­at­ed, Expres­sion­ist faces. She did not, how­ev­er, have an alien alter-ego or col­lec­tion of space­suits. What she had was a whol­ly orig­i­nal style all her own, full of eccen­tric vocal­iza­tions crit­ic Robert Christ­gau com­pared to The Exor­cist’s Lin­da Blair.

Her stage shows were what Hagen her­self described as “inde­scrib­able.” She applied her “umpteen-octave range,” as Christ­gau wrote, with­out restraint to every imag­in­able kind of mate­r­i­al, from cabaret to Nor­man Greenbaum’s “Spir­it in the Sky.”

Impos­si­ble to clas­si­fy, Hagen was beloved by the likes of the Sex Pis­tols and the Slits. Less than a decade after her 1978 debut with the Nina Hagen Band, she appeared in Tokyo with the Japan­ese Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra in a con­cert broad­cast to 15 coun­tries, per­form­ing the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. (See her that same year, 1985, sing from Car­men in Copen­hagen, Den­mark, just above.) She con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty lat­er in life, fre­quent­ly sings gospel tunes, and released an album called Per­son­al Jesus in 2010 fea­tur­ing a cov­er of the icon­ic Depeche Mode song.

Hagen emerged in 1978 along­side a num­ber of the­atri­cal female singers with preter­nat­u­ral­ly unset­tling voic­es, debut­ing at the same time as Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, and Dia­man­da Galas (who has received her own com­par­isons to Lin­da Blair). But her own jour­ney was par­tic­u­lar­ly unusu­al. “Lis­ten­ing to Hagen chat mat­ter-of-fact­ly about her life,” wrote The Irish Times in a review, “Madon­na seems like Doris Day in com­par­i­son, while your pre­tender Lady Gaga is, in Hagen’s own words, ‘a pop pros­ti­tute who has more to do with biki­ni adver­tis­ing.’”

Put more in more pos­i­tive terms, the singer honed her the­atri­cal “quick-change” per­sona through a “bar­rage of influ­ences,” the New York Times not­ed. Crit­ics were divid­ed over her eclec­ti­cism. Rolling Stone called her 1982 solo, Eng­lish-lan­guage debut the “most unlis­ten­able” album ever made, an unfair­ly harsh assess­ment that did­n’t stop her from exper­i­ment­ing with even more dis­so­nant, dis­ori­ent­ing sounds.

As Hagen her­self tells her sto­ry:

I grew up in East Berlin, in a fam­i­ly of artists. I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old I was imi­tat­ing the singers; lat­er I stud­ied opera. But we also got West­ern tele­vi­sion and radio, from the Amer­i­cans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hip­pie and gave flow­ers to police­men. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for Lon­don, I became a punk.

She became a punk diva, that is. Hagen’s vocal range—which you can hear demon­strat­ed in the thor­ough video analy­sis above—over her band’s prog-like jams (as in “Naturträne), con­jured up both angels and demons. She evokes dread with gut­tur­al growls and wide-eyed stares, she can look “child­like, sweet or ter­ri­fy­ing,” or all three at once, and she nev­er lacks the essen­tial qual­i­ty an opera singer needs to make it in rock and roll: a sense of humor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Klaus Nomi Per­forms with Kraftwerk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1982)

Watch Klaus Nomi Debut His New Wave Vaude­ville Show: The Birth of the Opera-Singing Space Alien (1978)

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

How to Lis­ten to Music: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The David Lynch Retrospective: A Two Hour Video Essay on Lynch’s Complete Filmography, from Eraserhead to Inland Empire

in Film | October 12th, 2020

If you were to watch David Lynch’s com­plete fil­mog­ra­phy from begin­ning to end, how would you see real­i­ty after­ward? Video essay­ist Lewis Bond sure­ly has some idea. As the cre­ator of Chan­nel Criswell, whose exam­i­na­tions of auteurs like Andrei Tarkovsky, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, and Mar­tin Scors­ese we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, he once released a med­i­ta­tion on what makes a Lynch film “Lynchi­an.” Now, under the new ban­ner of The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy (and in part­ner­ship with film stream­ing ser­vice MUBI), Bond not only returns to the well of the Lynchi­an, but plunges in deeply enough to come up with The David Lynch Ret­ro­spec­tive.

In two hours, this video essay makes a jour­ney through all the dark recess­es of Lynch’s fea­ture fil­mog­ra­phy — a fil­mog­ra­phy that, admit­ted­ly, can at times seem made up of noth­ing but dark recess­es. It begins in 1977 with Eraser­head, Lynch’s first full-length pic­ture as well as his least remit­ting. How­ev­er har­row­ing its bio­me­chan­i­cal strange­ness, that debut drew the eye of Hol­ly­wood, result­ing in Lynch’s hir­ing to direct The Ele­phant Man, a chiaroscuro vision of the life of deformed 19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish­man Joseph Mer­rick. There fol­lows the infa­mous Dune, which finds Lynch at the helm (at least nom­i­nal­ly) of a $40-mil­lion adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s sci­ence-fic­tion epic, an extrav­a­gant mis­match as was ever made between direc­tor and mate­r­i­al.

Bond men­tions that he con­sid­ered exclud­ing Dune from The David Lynch Ret­ro­spec­tive, see­ing as the direc­tor him­self has dis­owned the pic­ture. Still, no Lynch enthu­si­ast can deny that it brought him to the artis­ti­cal­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing posi­tions that have made the rest of his body of work what it is. But what, exact­ly, is it? Bond draws some pos­si­bil­i­ties from Blue Vel­vet, Lynch’s return to the art house whose mem­o­rably oneir­ic fusion of idyl­lic small-town Amer­i­ca with sadism and voyeurism also func­tions as a state­ment of philo­soph­i­cal and aes­thet­ic intent. Not that Lynch is giv­en to state­ments, per se: as Bond empha­sizes in a vari­ety of ways, none of these works admit of direct expli­ca­tion, and this holds as true for the ultra-pas­tiche road movie Wild at Heart as it does for the split-per­son­al­i­ty neo-noir Lost High­way.

Then comes 1999’s The Straight Sto­ry, a movie about an old man who dri­ves a trac­tor across the Amer­i­can Mid­west to vis­it his broth­er. Bond frames the lat­ter as the most Lynchi­an choice the direc­tor could have made, its seem­ing­ly thor­ough mun­dan­i­ty shed­ding light on his per­cep­tion of cin­e­ma and real­i­ty itself. It also low­ers the Lynch-fil­mog­ra­phy binge-watcher’s psy­cho­log­i­cal defens­es for the simul­ta­ne­ous Hol­ly­wood fan­ta­sy and night­mare to come, Mul­hol­land Dri­ve. Though Bond describes it as “the zenith of all that’s Lynchi­an,” not every fan agrees that it’s Lynch’s mas­ter­piece: some opt for the impen­e­tra­ble three-hour dose of pure Lynchi­an­ism (and cryp­tic sit­com rab­bits) that is Inland Empire. Bond describes Inland Empire, still Lynch’s most recent fea­ture, as “a tor­tur­ous film, and this should be seen only as com­pli­men­ta­ry.” There speaks a true Lynchi­an.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

A Young David Lynch Talks About Eraser­head in One of His First Record­ed Inter­views (1979)

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demys­ti­fies It All

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic Jazz Musicians

in Design, Jazz, Music | October 5th, 2020

In the 1950s and 60s, one record label stood “like a bea­con,” writes Robin Kin­ross at Eye, among a host of Civ­il Rights era inde­pen­dents that helped jazz “escape the racial-com­mer­cial con­straints applied by White Amer­i­cans, and find its own place, unpa­tro­n­ised and rel­a­tive­ly free of exploita­tion.” That label, Blue Note, ush­ered in the birth of the cool—both cool jazz and its many hip signifiers—as much through graph­ic design as through its metic­u­lous approach to record­ing.

Blue Note album cov­ers may seem prin­ci­pal­ly dis­tin­guished by the pho­tog­ra­phy of Fran­cis Wolff, whose instincts behind the cam­era pro­duced visu­al icon after icon. But the label’s style depend­ed on the lay­out, graph­ic design, and let­ter­ing of Reid Miles, who drew on min­i­mal­ist Swiss trends in “over 500 album cov­ers for Blue Note Records,” design­er Rea­gan Ray writes. “He pio­neered the use of cre­ative­ly-arranged type over mono­chro­mat­ic pho­tog­ra­phy, which is a style that is still wide­ly used in graph­ic design today.”

As we not­ed in a recent post on Blue Note’s leg­endary design team, Reid’s let­ter­ing some­times edged the pho­tog­ra­phy to the mar­gins, or off the cov­er alto­geth­er. Jazz greats were giv­en the free­dom to cre­ate the music they want­ed, but it was the design­ers who had to sell their cre­ativ­i­ty to the pub­lic in a visu­al lan­guage.

They had done so with dis­tinc­tive type­faces before Reid, of course. But the art of let­ter­ing became far more inter­est­ing through his influ­ence, both more play­ful and more refined at the same time.

Since type­face has always played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the music’s com­mer­cial suc­cess, Ray decid­ed to com­pile sev­er­al hun­dred sam­plings of album let­ter­ing of jazz musician’s names, “for easy brows­ing and analy­sis” of type­face as an essen­tial ele­ment all on its own. The gallery may attempt “to cov­er most of the genre’s sig­nif­i­cant musi­cians,” but there are, Ray admits, many inevitable omis­sions.

Nonethe­less, it’s a for­mi­da­ble visu­al record of the var­i­ous looks of jazz in let­ter­ing, and the visu­al iden­ti­ties of its biggest artists over the course of sev­er­al decades. Ray does not name any of the design­ers, which is frus­trat­ing, but those in the know will rec­og­nize the work of Reid and oth­ers like album cov­er pio­neer Alex Stein­weiss. You may well spot let­ter­ing by Mil­ton Glaser, whom Ray pre­vi­ous­ly cov­ered in a huge curat­ed gallery of the famous designer’s album art.

The names behind the big names mat­ter, but it’s the musi­cians them­selves these indi­vid­u­al­ized type­faces are meant to imme­di­ate­ly evoke. Con­sid­er just how well most all of these exam­ples do just that—representing each artist’s music, peri­od, and image with the per­fect font and graph­ic arrange­ment, each one a unique logo. Some­what like the music it rep­re­sents, Ray’s gallery is, itself, a col­lec­tive tour-de-force per­for­mance of visu­al jazz.

Vis­it Ray’s gallery here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Clas­sic Jazz Album Cov­ers Ani­mat­ed & Brought to Life

The Ground­break­ing Art of Alex Stein­weiss, Father of Record Cov­er Design

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy: A Former Facebook Insider Explains How the Platform’s Algorithms Polarize Our Society

in Current Affairs, Life, Technology, TED Talks | October 5th, 2020

Is this what we want? A post-truth world where tox­i­c­i­ty and trib­al­ism trump bridge build­ing and con­sen­sus seek­ing? —Yaël Eisen­stat

It’s an increas­ing­ly famil­iar occur­rence.

A friend you’ve enjoyed recon­nect­ing with in the dig­i­tal realm makes a dra­mat­ic announce­ment on their social media page. They’re delet­ing their Face­book account with­in the next 24 hours, so shoot them a PM with your email if you’d like to stay in touch.

Such deci­sions used to be spurred by the desire to get more done or return to neglect­ed pas­times such as read­ing, paint­ing, and going for long uncon­nect­ed nature walks.

These announce­ments could induce equal parts guilt and anx­i­ety in those of us who depend on social media to get the word out about our low-bud­get cre­ative projects, though being prone to Inter­net addic­tion, we were near­ly as like­ly to be the one mak­ing the announce­ment.

For many, the break was tem­po­rary. More of a social media fast, a chance to reeval­u­ate, rest, recharge, and ulti­mate­ly return.

Legit­i­mate con­cerns were also raised with regard to pri­va­cy. Who’s on the receiv­ing end of all the sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion we’re offer­ing up? What are they doing with it? Is some­one lis­ten­ing in?

But in this elec­tion year, the deci­sion to quit Face­book is apt to be dri­ven by the very real fear that democ­ra­cy as we know it is at stake.

For­mer CIA ana­lyst, for­eign ser­vice offi­cer, and—for six months—Facebook’s Glob­al Head of Elec­tions Integri­ty Ops for polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing, Yaël Eisen­stat, address­es these pre­oc­cu­pa­tions in her TED Talk, “Dear Face­book, This is How You’re Break­ing Democ­ra­cy,” above.

Eisen­stat con­trasts the civil­i­ty of her past face-to-face ”hearts and minds”-based engage­ments with sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists and anti-West­ern cler­ics to the polar­iza­tion and cul­ture of hatred that Facebook’s algo­rithms foment.

As many users have come to sus­pect, Face­book rewards inflam­ma­to­ry con­tent with ampli­fi­ca­tion. Truth does not fac­tor into the equa­tion, nor does sin­cer­i­ty of mes­sage or mes­sen­ger.

Lies are more engag­ing online than truth. As long as [social media] algo­rithms’ goals are to keep us engaged, they will feed us the poi­son that plays to our worst instincts and human weak­ness­es.

Eisen­stat, who has val­ued the ease with which Face­book allows her to main­tain rela­tion­ships with far-flung friends, found her­self effec­tive­ly demot­ed on her sec­ond day at the social media giant, her title revised, and her access to high lev­el meet­ings revoked. Her hir­ing appears to have been pure­ly orna­men­tal, a pal­lia­tive ruse in response to mount­ing pub­lic con­cern.

As she remarked in an inter­view with The Guardian’s Ian Tuck­er ear­li­er this sum­mer:

They are mak­ing all sorts of reac­tive changes around the mar­gins of the issues, [to sug­gest] that they are tak­ing things seri­ous­ly – such as build­ing an ad library or ver­i­fy­ing that polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers reside in the coun­try in which they adver­tis­ing – things they should have been doing already. But they were nev­er going to make the fun­da­men­tal changes that address the key sys­temic issues that make Face­book ripe for manip­u­la­tion, viral mis­in­for­ma­tion and oth­er ways that the plat­form can be used to affect democ­ra­cy.

In the same inter­view she assert­ed that Facebook’s recent­ly imple­ment­ed over­sight board is lit­tle more than an inter­est­ing the­o­ry that will nev­er result in the total over­haul of its busi­ness mod­el:

First of all, it’s anoth­er exam­ple of Face­book putting respon­si­bil­i­ty on some­one else. The over­sight board does not have any author­i­ty to actu­al­ly address any of the poli­cies that Face­book writes and enforces, or the under­ly­ing sys­temic issues that make the plat­form absolute­ly rife for dis­in­for­ma­tion and all sorts of bad behav­iour and manip­u­la­tion.

The sec­ond issue is: it’s basi­cal­ly an appeal process for con­tent that was already tak­en down. The big­ger ques­tion is the con­tent that remains up. Third, they are not even going to be oper­a­tional until late fall and, for a com­pa­ny that claims to move fast and break things, that’s absurd.

Nine min­utes into her TED Talk, she offers con­crete sug­ges­tions for things the Face­book brass could do if it was tru­ly seri­ous about imple­ment­ing reform:

• Stop ampli­fy­ing and rec­om­mend­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion and bias-based hatred, no mat­ter who is behind it—from con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists to our cur­rent pres­i­dent.
• Dis­con­tin­ue per­son­al­iza­tion tech­niques that don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between tar­get­ed polit­i­cal con­tent and tar­get­ed ads for ath­let­ic footwear.
• Retrain algo­rithms to focus on a met­rics beyond what users click or linger on.
• Imple­ment safe­ty fea­tures that would ensure that sen­si­tive con­tent is reviewed before it is allowed to go viral.

Hope­ful­ly view­ers are not feel­ing maxed out on con­tact­ing their rep­re­sen­ta­tives, as gov­ern­ment enforce­ment is Eisenstat’s only pre­scrip­tion for get­ting Face­book to alter its prod­uct and prof­it mod­el. And that will require sus­tained civic engage­ment.

She sup­ple­ments her TED Talk with rec­om­men­da­tions for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence engi­neer Guil­laume Chaslot’s insid­er per­spec­tive op-ed “The Tox­ic Poten­tial of YouTube’s Feed­back Loop” and The Fil­ter Bub­ble: How the New Per­son­al­ized Web Is Chang­ing What We Read and How We Think by MoveOn.org’s for­mer Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Eli Paris­er.

Your clued-in Face­book friends have no doubt already point­ed you to the doc­u­men­tary The Social Dilem­ma, which is now avail­able on Net­flix. Or per­haps to Jaron Lanier’s Ten Argu­ments for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Read the tran­script of Yaël Eisenstat’s TED Talk here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Prob­lem with Face­book: “It’s Keep­ing Things From You”

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Inter­net Algo­rithms: A Chill­ing Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Inter­net Today

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

An Animated Reading of “The Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense Poem That Somehow Manages to Make Sense

in Literature, Poetry | October 2nd, 2020

“I can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented—and a good many that haven’t been invent­ed just yet.” —Hump­ty Dump­ty

“The Jab­ber­wocky,” Lewis Carroll’s clas­sic poem from Through the Look­ing Glass, and What Alice Found There—the sec­ond install­ment of the most famous­ly non­sen­si­cal adven­ture in lit­er­ary history—is “full of seem­ing­ly non­sen­si­cal words that some­how man­age to make sense,” says nar­ra­tor Jack Cut­more-Scott in the ani­mat­ed read­ing above from TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion. That word, non­sense, is asso­ci­at­ed with Carroll’s fan­ta­sy world more than any oth­er, but what does it mean for a sto­ry to be non­sense and be intel­li­gi­ble at the same time?

Car­roll, a math­e­mati­cian by train­ing, under­stood the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of non­sense, which “T.S. Eliot remind­ed us, is not an absence of sense but a par­o­dy of it,” as J. Patrick Lewis writes at The New York Times. “Some of the port­man­teau words Car­roll invented—chortle, bur­ble, frab­jous and others—are now ful­ly vest­ed mem­bers of the lex­i­con. And the verse’s struc­ture is a mir­ror, as Alice dis­cov­ered, of clas­si­cal Eng­lish poet­ry.” Car­roll com­posed the first four lines ten years before Through the Look­ing Glass, as a par­o­d­ic “Stan­za of Anglo-Sax­on Poet­ry” to amuse his fam­i­ly.

It may help, or not, to keep in mind that Car­roll is not only mock­ing Eng­lish poet­ic forms and con­ven­tions, but a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal form of Eng­lish that is most­ly unrec­og­niz­able to mod­ern read­ers, and cer­tain­ly to Alice. But the poem’s syn­tax and struc­ture are so famil­iar that we can eas­i­ly piece togeth­er a mon­ster-slay­ing nar­ra­tive in which, as Alice remarks, “some­body killed some­thing.”

The ever-hum­ble Hump­ty Dump­ty is hap­py to explain, as was Car­roll in his orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion, to which he attached a glos­sary very sim­i­lar to the egg’s def­i­n­i­tions and gave “the lit­er­al Eng­lish” of the first stan­za as:

“It was evening, and the smooth active bad­gers were scratch­ing and bor­ing holes in the hill side; all unhap­py were the par­rots, and the grave tur­tles squeaked out“.

There were prob­a­bly sun dials on the top of the hill, and the “boro­goves” were afraid that their nests would be under­mined. The hill was prob­a­bly full of the nests of “raths”, which ran out squeak­ing with fear on hear­ing the “toves” scratch­ing out­side. This is an obscure, but yet deeply affect­ing, rel­ic of ancient Poet­ry.

Does this help? It does explain the mood Car­roll is after, and he achieves it. The Jab­ber­wocky is fun­ny and play­ful and all the rest, but it is also deeply unset­tling in its obscure mys­ter­ies and fright­en­ing descrip­tions of its title char­ac­ter.

In John Tenniel’s famous illus­tra­tion of the beast, it appears as a scaly, leath­ery drag­on with a face some­where between a deep-sea fish and an over­grown sew­er rat. The ani­ma­tion by Sjaak Rood gives it a more clas­si­cal­ly drag­on-like appear­ance, in the crazed style of Ralph Stead­man, while the Ban­der­snatch looks like some­thing Paul Klee would have invent­ed. The choice of artis­tic influ­ences here shows Rood con­nect­ing deeply with the non­sense tra­di­tion in mod­ern art, one which also turns famil­iar forms into night­mar­ish beings that fill our heads with ideas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

O Frab­jous Day! Neil Gaiman Recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jab­ber­wocky” from Mem­o­ry

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Illus­trat­ed by Sal­vador Dalí in 1969, Final­ly Gets Reis­sued

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hand-Colored Maps of Wealth & Poverty in Victorian London: Explore a New Interactive Edition of Charles Booth’s Historic Work of Social Cartography (1889)

in History, Maps | September 28th, 2020

Map­ping has always been con­tentious, no mat­ter where you look in time. Maps pre­serve ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions on paper, ratio­nal­iz­ing phys­i­cal space as they ren­der it in two dimen­sions. No mat­ter how didac­tic, they can become polit­i­cal weapons. In the case of Charles Booth’s visu­al­ly impres­sive Maps Descrip­tive of Lon­don Pover­ty, we have a series of maps whose own assump­tions can some­times seem at odds with their osten­si­ble pur­pose: to improve the liv­ing con­di­tions of London’s poor.

Booth’s “colour­ful pover­ty maps were cre­at­ed between 1886 and 1903,” Zoe Craig writes at Lon­don­ist, as part of a “ground-break­ing study into the lives of ordi­nary Lon­don­ers.” A phil­an­thropist born into wealth in the ship­ping trade, Booth took it upon him­self to study pover­ty in Lon­don in order to ini­ti­ate social reforms.

He suc­ceed­ed. The study, con­duct­ed by Booth and a team of researchers, led to the cre­ation of Old Age pen­sions, which Booth called “lim­it­ed social­ism,” as well as school meals for hun­gry chil­dren. He was clear about that fact that he saw such reforms as a bul­wark against social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.

The study’s sev­en­teen vol­umes are filled with pic­turesque accounts. “Pick­ing through the tid­bits of infor­ma­tion from these people’s lives will make you feel a bit like a Vic­to­ri­an cos­tume dra­ma police detec­tive,” Craig remarks. This ref­er­ence to polic­ing feels point­ed, giv­en the role of the police in main­tain­ing class hier­ar­chies in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. As an Amer­i­can, it can be hard to look at Booth’s map and not also see the 20th redlin­ing prac­tices in U.S. cities. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the cat­e­gories Booth applied to London’s class­es:

Called ‘Inquiry Into the Life and Labour of the Peo­ple in Lon­don’, the epic work stud­ied fam­i­lies and res­i­dents liv­ing across Lon­don, and coloured the streets accord­ing to their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion: between black for ‘low­est class, vicious, semi-crim­i­nal’ through pink for mixed ‘some com­fort­able, some poor’ to orange for ‘wealthy’.

As in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pater­nal­is­tic 1965 report on the Black under­class in the U.S., the lan­guage rein­forces Social Dar­win­ist ideas that deem the “low­est class” unfit for full par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il society—“vicious, semi-crim­i­nal…”

Of course, the social and his­tor­i­cal con­text dif­fers marked­ly, but we might also con­sid­er Fear­gus O’Sullivan’s obser­va­tions at Bloomberg City­Lab. A new pub­lished edi­tion of the map, he writes, “accom­pa­nied by com­pelling if bleak peri­od pho­tos, reveals a city that pos­sess­es echoes of Lon­don today. It depicts, after all, a dense­ly-packed metrop­o­lis with a cos­mopoli­tan pop­u­la­tion where immense­ly wealthy peo­ple lived just around the cor­ner from neigh­bors who were strug­gling to make ends meet.”

Maps may not cre­ate the social con­di­tions they describe, but they can help per­pet­u­ate them, ren­der­ing peo­ple vis­i­ble in ways that allow for even more con­trol over their lives. Crit­i­cisms of Booth’s study claimed that not only did the pro­posed reforms not go far enough but that the report described London’s class struc­ture while offer­ing lit­tle to no analy­sis of the caus­es of pover­ty. In lan­guage that sound­ed less objec­tion­able to Vic­to­ri­an ears, the poor are most­ly blamed for their own con­di­tion.

None of the study’s par­tic­u­lar lim­i­ta­tions take away from the graph­ic achieve­ments of its maps and explana­to­ry charts. They are, the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics writes, a strik­ing “ear­ly exam­ple of social car­tog­ra­phy.” The LSE hosts an incred­i­bly detailed, search­able, high-res­o­lu­tion inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the maps, assem­bled togeth­er and over­laid on a mod­ern GPS map of Lon­don. They also detail the var­i­ous edi­tions of the maps as they appeared between 1898 and 1903.

Hand-col­ored and based on the 1869 Ord­nance Sur­vey, the maps seemed “suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant” to Booth to war­rant “com­pre­hen­sive revi­sion.” Here, the police appear in per­son to guide the process. “Social inves­ti­ga­tors accom­pa­nied police­men on their beats across Lon­don,” the LSE writes, “and record­ed their own impres­sions of each street and the com­ments of the police­men.” You can read the police note­books from these sur­veys at the LSE and learn more about the 12 dis­trict maps and the demo­graph­ic data they rep­re­sent at Map­ping Lon­don. The LSE print­ed a hard­cov­er print edi­tion of Booth’s work in 2019, com­plete with 500 illus­tra­tions. You can pur­chase a copy here. Or vis­it the inter­ac­tive edi­tion here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

Syn­chro­nized, Time­lapse Video Shows Train Trav­el­ing from Lon­don to Brighton in 1953, 1983 & 2013

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay

in Television | September 28th, 2020

The ongo­ing “gold­en age” of pres­tige tele­vi­sion dra­ma began more than twen­ty years ago, but how many shows have tru­ly sur­passed The Sopra­nos, the one that start­ed it all? How­ev­er many series come and go, rais­ing large and often obses­sive fan bases with their vary­ing mix­tures of crime, his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, sci­ence fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, and intrigue, none have shown the cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er of this six-sea­son tale of a mob boss in turn-of-the-21st-cen­tu­ry New Jer­sey. That The Sopra­nos remains rel­e­vant owes in part to the vision of cre­ator David Chase as well as to the tour de force per­for­mance of star James Gan­dolfi­ni.

Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, has stronger words of appro­ba­tion: Gan­dolfini’s is “prob­a­bly the great­est act­ing achieve­ment ever com­mit­ted to the screen, small or big.” In the video essay “How James Gan­dolfi­ni Nav­i­gates Emo­tion” he mar­shals in sup­port of this claim just one scene, but a scene that fea­tures Gan­dolfi­ni at the height of his dra­mat­ic pow­ers.

Tak­en from the fifth-sea­son episode “Uniden­ti­fied Black Males,” orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2004 (and co-writ­ten by Matthew Wein­er, lat­er to cre­ate the pres­tige-TV fran­chise Mad Men), this selec­tion takes place in the office of Tony’s psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Jen­nifer Melfi, played by Lor­raine Brac­co. (When The Sopra­nos debuted, two months before the pre­miere of Harold Ramis’ Ana­lyze This, a mob­ster in ther­a­py was very much a nov­el idea.)

“Tony Sopra­no is going to have a pan­ic attack in this ther­a­py ses­sion,” says Puschak, and “the way James Gan­dolfi­ni builds to that attack” demon­strates “how he car­ries us with him through a com­plex sequence of emo­tions.” Here Gan­dolfi­ni ris­es to the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of lying con­vinc­ing­ly: not con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that Dr. Melfi believes him, but con­vinc­ing­ly in the sense that we believe the grap­ple with con­flict­ing truths and untruths that char­ac­ter­izes Tony’s life. Tony must pin his recent spate of pan­ic attacks on some­thing oth­er than his cousin Tony B, who com­mit­ted a hit he should­n’t have. That Tony does­n’t quite believe his own words Gan­dolfi­ni trans­mits with “his tone, his eyes, and the tilt of his head.” He uses the musi­cal­i­ty of Tony’s speech, “some com­bi­na­tion of left­over Ital­ian rhythms and a New York-inflect­ed North Jer­sey accent,” to build to “larg­er and larg­er crescen­does.”

As it fore­shad­ows the approach­ing emo­tion­al tur­moil, his “rhyth­mic anger, like waves crash­ing on the shore, is hyp­not­ic, draw­ing you deep­er into his men­tal and emo­tion­al space with each new cycle.” Tony then dou­bles down on his lie, try­ing to cov­er for his cousin by invent­ing on the spot a sto­ry about hav­ing been beat­en up by a gang of shoe thieves in 1986. Only lat­er in the scene does the truth come out, or at least par­tial­ly leak out, even as Gan­dolfi­ni por­trays Tony strug­gling to fight back the pan­ic attack that has emerged as a result of telling these sto­ries. For all the tech­nique it show­cas­es, the scene ends in a clas­si­cal­ly dra­mat­ic fash­ion, with a kind of cathar­sis — which, if you know The Sopra­nos, you know is hard­ly the word Tony has for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­no’s Final Scene

James Gan­dolfi­ni Reads from Mau­rice Sendak’s Children’s Sto­ry In The Night Kitchen

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopra­nos with the Talk­ing Sopra­nos Pod­cast, Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli & Steve Schirri­pa

How Humphrey Bog­a­rt Became an Icon: A Video Essay

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Understanding Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Distributed to High Schools in the 1970s

in Education, Film | September 25th, 2020

Pop quiz, hot shot. World War III has dev­as­tat­ed civ­i­liza­tion. As a pris­on­er of sur­vivors liv­ing beneath the ruins of Paris, you’re made to go trav­el back in time, to the era of your own child­hood, in order to secure aid for the present from the past. What do you do? You prob­a­bly nev­er faced this ques­tion in school — unless you were in one of the class­rooms of the 1970s that received the study guide for Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée. Like the inno­v­a­tive 1962 sci­ence-fic­tion short itself, this edu­ca­tion­al pam­phlet was dis­trib­uted (and recent­ly tweet­ed out again) by Janus Films, the com­pa­ny that first brought to Amer­i­can audi­ences the work of auteurs like Ing­mar Bergman, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa.

Writ­ten by Con­necti­cut prep-school teacher Tom Andrews, this study guide describes La Jetée as “a bril­liant mix­ture of fan­ta­sy and pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic romance” that “explores new dra­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry and forms, and rush­es with a stun­ning log­ic and a pow­er­ful impact to its shock­ing cli­max.”

The film does all this “almost entire­ly in still pho­tographs, their sta­t­ic state cor­re­spond­ing to the strat­i­fi­ca­tion of mem­o­ry.” More prac­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, at “twen­ty-sev­en min­utes in length, La Jetée is an ide­al class-peri­od vehi­cle” that “can help stu­dents spec­u­late on the awe­some poten­tial of life as it may exist after a third world war” as well as “man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, not only as it may occur in the future, but as it already has occurred in our past.”

“Why do you sup­pose Mark­er filmed La Jetée in still pho­tographs? What sig­nif­i­cance does the one moment of live action have?” “How does Mark­er’s con­cept of time and space com­pare with that of H.G. Wells in the lat­ter’s nov­el, The Time Machine?” “If the man of this sto­ry has helped his cap­tors to per­fect the tech­nique of time trav­el, why do they wish to liq­ui­date him?” These and oth­er sug­gest­ed dis­cus­sion ques­tions appear at the end of the study guide, all of whose pages you can read at Socks. It was pro­duced for Films for Now and The Human Con­di­tion, “two reper­to­ries for high school assem­blies and group dis­cus­sions” based on Janus’ for­mi­da­ble cin­e­ma library. (François Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows also looks to have been among their edu­ca­tion­al offer­ings.) You can see fur­ther analy­sis of La Jetée in A.O. Scot­t’s New York Times Crit­ics’ Picks video, as well as the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion video essay Echo Cham­ber: Lis­ten­ing to La Jetée.

Much lat­er, in the mid-1990s, Ter­ry Gilliam would pay trib­ute with his Hol­ly­wood homage 12 Mon­keys, and Mark­er him­self still had many films to make, includ­ing his sec­ond mas­ter­piece, the equal­ly uncon­ven­tion­al Sans Soleil. But at time of this study guide’s pub­li­ca­tion, La Jetée’s con­sid­er­able influ­ence had only just begun to man­i­fest. It was around then that pio­neer­ing cyber­punk nov­el­ist William Gib­son viewed the film in col­lege. “I left the lec­ture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, pro­found­ly alone,” he lat­er remem­bered. “My sense of what sci­ence fic­tion could be had been per­ma­nent­ly altered.” Per­haps his instruc­tor heed­ed Andrews’ advice that “teach­ers would prob­a­bly do bet­ter not to ‘pre­pare’ their stu­dents for view­ing this film.” Not that any­one, in the 58 years of the film’s exis­tence, has any­one ever tru­ly been pre­pared for their first view­ing of La Jetée.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci­Fi Film, La Jetée, Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet, William Gib­son

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Liberal Arts Can Make People Less Susceptible to Authoritarianism, a New Study Finds

in Current Affairs, Politics | September 23rd, 2020

“Cor­re­la­tion does not equal cau­sa­tion” isn’t always a fun thing to say at par­ties, but it is always a good phrase to keep in mind when approach­ing sur­vey data. Does the study real­ly show that? Might it show the oppo­site? Does it con­firm pre-exist­ing bias­es or fail to acknowl­edge valid coun­terev­i­dence? A lit­tle bit of crit­i­cal think­ing can turn away a lot of trou­ble.

I’ll admit, a new study, “The Role of Edu­ca­tion in Tam­ing Author­i­tar­i­an Atti­tudes,” con­firms many of my own bias­es, sug­gest­ing that high­er edu­ca­tion, espe­cial­ly the lib­er­al arts, reduces author­i­tar­i­an atti­tudes around the world. The claim comes from George­town University’s Cen­ter on Edu­ca­tion and the Work­force, which ana­lyzed and aggre­gat­ed data from World Val­ues Sur­veys con­duct­ed between 1994 and 2016. The study takes it for grant­ed that ris­ing author­i­tar­i­an­ism is not a social good, or at least that it pos­es a dis­tinct threat to demo­c­ra­t­ic republics, and it aims to show how “high­er edu­ca­tion can pro­tect democ­ra­cy.”

Authoritarianism—defined as enforc­ing “group con­for­mi­ty and strict alle­giance to author­i­ty at the expense of per­son­al freedoms”—seems vast­ly more preva­lent among those with only a high school edu­ca­tion. “Among col­lege grad­u­ates,” Eliz­a­beth Red­den writes at Inside High­er Ed, “hold­ers of lib­er­al art degrees are less inclined to express author­i­tar­i­an atti­tudes and pref­er­ences com­pared to indi­vid­u­als who hold degrees in busi­ness or sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics fields.”

The “valu­able bul­wark” of the lib­er­al arts seems more effec­tive in the U.S. than in Europe, per­haps because “Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion places a strong empha­sis on a com­bi­na­tion of spe­cif­ic and gen­er­al edu­ca­tion,” the full report spec­u­lates. “Such gen­er­al edu­ca­tion includes expo­sure to the lib­er­al arts.” The U.S. ranks at a mod­er­ate lev­el of author­i­tar­i­an­ism com­pared to 51 oth­er coun­tries, on par with Chile and Uruguay, with Ger­many rank­ing the least author­i­tar­i­an and India the most—a 6 on a scale of 0–6.

High­er edu­ca­tion also cor­re­lates with high­er eco­nom­ic sta­tus, sug­gest­ing to the study authors that eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty reduces author­i­tar­i­an­ism, which is expressed in atti­tudes about par­ent­ing and in a “fun­da­men­tal ori­en­ta­tion” toward con­trol over auton­o­my.

The full report does go into greater depth, but per­haps it rais­es more ques­tions than it answers, leav­ing the intel­lec­tu­al­ly curi­ous to work through a dense bib­li­og­ra­phy of pop­u­lar and aca­d­e­m­ic sources. There is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of data and evi­dence to sug­gest that study­ing the lib­er­al arts does help peo­ple to imag­ine oth­er per­spec­tives and to appre­ci­ate, rather than fear, dif­fer­ent cul­tures, reli­gions, etc. Lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion encour­ages crit­i­cal think­ing, read­ing, and writ­ing, and can equip stu­dents with tools they need to dis­tin­guish reportage from pure pro­pa­gan­da.

But we might ask whether these find­ings con­sis­tent­ly obtain under actu­al­ly exist­ing author­i­tar­i­an­ism, which “tends to arise under con­di­tions of threat to social norms or per­son­al secu­ri­ty.” In the 2016 U.S. elec­tion, for exam­ple, the can­di­date espous­ing open­ly author­i­tar­i­an atti­tudes and pref­er­ences, now the cur­rent U.S. pres­i­dent, was elect­ed by a major­i­ty of vot­ers who were well-edu­cat­ed and eco­nom­i­cal­ly secure, sub­se­quent research dis­cov­ered, rather than stereo­typ­i­cal­ly “work­ing class” vot­ers with low lev­els of edu­ca­tion. How do such find­ings fit with the data George­town inter­prets in their report? Is it pos­si­ble that those with high­er edu­ca­tion and social sta­tus learn bet­ter to hide con­trol­ling, intol­er­ant atti­tudes in mixed com­pa­ny?

Learn more at this report sum­ma­ry page here and read and down­load the full report as a PDF here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How a Lib­er­al Arts Edu­ca­tion Helped Derek Black, the God­son of David Duke, Break with the White Nation­al­ist Move­ment

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

Why We Need to Teach Kids Phi­los­o­phy & Safe­guard Soci­ety from Author­i­tar­i­an Con­trol

Crit­i­cal Think­ing: A Free Course

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness