How Blade Runner Captured the Imagination of a Generation of Electronic Musicians

in Music | November 22nd, 2019

“I feel that there is ‘Before Blade Run­ner’ and ‘After Blade Run­ner,’” says direc­tor Denis Vil­leneuve. “The movie was like a land­mark in film his­to­ry aes­thet­ic.” The quote comes from this FACT­magazine pro­mo released ahead of Villeneuve’s 2017 sequel Blade Run­ner 2049, which exam­ines the impact the sound­track had on sci­ence fic­tion films and elec­tron­ic music, as well how its entire aes­thet­ic echoed into the ‘90s and beyond.

Com­pos­er Van­ge­lis and direc­tor Rid­ley Scott had worked togeth­er pre­vi­ous­ly on a Chanel com­mer­cial, and the com­pos­er had thought the choice to use his music was “brave,” accord­ing to Vil­leneuve. A few years lat­er Van­ge­lis would be asked to com­pose the score, which he did, impro­vis­ing over footage.

The gear­heads in the doc point out the Lex­i­con 224 reverb, a great ana­log effects unit, as well as the “beast,” the Yahama CS80, which would often go out of tune. (Check out YouTube user Per­fect Cir­cuit try­ing out some of its fea­tures).

“The best time (the synth) found its voice was on that album,” says musi­cian Kue­do.
The doc also inter­views Tricky, Gary Numan, Ikoni­ka, Abay­o­mi, Clare Wieck, Kue­do, Mogwai’s Stu­art Braith­waite, and music pro­duc­er Hans Berg, all of whom have found Blade Run­ner creep­ing into their work inten­tion­al­ly or sub­lim­i­nal­ly. Ikoni­ka even calls her music alter-ego a “repli­cant,” after the film’s androids. But the film for her was a warn­ing: “You could see the future tak­ing over and it would be the good times,” she says about the ear­ly ‘80s. And “then Blade Run­ner was like, after that, this is going to hap­pen.” The sound­track has gone on to have its own series of re-releas­es, just like Scott has released a Director’s Cut of the film.

First, it was nev­er prop­er­ly released as an album until 1994. Imme­di­ate­ly bootlegs appeared col­lect­ing much more of the score from the film. In 2002, the best of them, the “Esper Edi­tion,” deliv­ered 33 tracks from the score. (And there’s a fur­ther “Retire­ment Edi­tion” of the “Esper” kick­ing around out there.) Then in 2007, Uni­ver­sal Music released a 25th anniver­sary edi­tion, with an extra disc of music com­posed for the film and *anoth­er* disc of *new* music Van­ge­lis com­posed for the release. All of which shows a work that is beloved and held dear by fans.

Now that we’ve hit the month depict­ed in the film, and Los Ange­les doesn’t exact­ly look like the open­ing scene (smoke and fire, yes; rain, not so much), it’s time to take stock of its dystopi­an vision.

As musi­cian Kue­do says, “Almost 40 years lat­er we’re still chas­ing it, but it’s still there ahead of us.”

Note: Vil­leneuve chose Christo­pher Nolan favorite Hans Zim­mer to com­pose the sequel’s score, work­ing with Ben­jamin Wallfisch…both much safer choic­es than Van­ge­lis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Blade Run­ner Get­ting Adapt­ed into a New Ani­me Series, Pro­duced by Cow­boy Bebop Ani­ma­tor Shinichi­ro Watan­abe

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

Stream 72 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopi­an Future

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Download Hellvetica, a Font that Makes the Elegant Spacing of Helvetica Look as Ugly as Possible

in Design | November 15th, 2019

Among typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, all non-con­trar­i­ans love Hel­veti­ca. Some, like film­mak­er Gary Hus­twit and New York sub­way map cre­ator Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, even made a doc­u­men­tary about it. Cre­at­ed by Swiss graph­ic design­er Max Miedinger with Haas Type Foundry pres­i­dent Eduard Hoff­mann and first intro­duced in 1957, Hel­veti­ca still stands as a visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of not just mod­ernism but moder­ni­ty itself. That owes in part to its clean, unam­bigu­ous lines, and also to its use of space: as all the afore­men­tioned typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts will have noticed, Hel­veti­ca leaves lit­tle room between its let­ters, which imbues text writ­ten in the font with a cer­tain solid­i­ty. No won­der it so often appears, more than half a cen­tu­ry after its debut, on the sig­nage of pub­lic insti­tu­tions as well as on the pro­mo­tion of prod­ucts that live or die by the osten­si­ble time­less­ness of their designs.

But as times change, so must even near-per­fect fonts: hence Hel­veti­ca Now. “Four years ago, our Ger­man office [was] kick­ing around the idea of cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca,” Charles Nix, type direc­tor at Hel­veti­ca-rights-hold­er Mono­type tells The Verge. “They had iden­ti­fied a short laun­dry list of things that would be bet­ter.” What short­com­ings they found arose from the fact that the font had been designed for an ana­log age of opti­cal print­ing, and “when we went dig­i­tal, a lot of that nuance of opti­cal siz­ing sort of washed away.” Ulti­mate­ly, the project was less about updat­ing Hel­veti­ca than restor­ing char­ac­ters lost in its adap­ta­tion to dig­i­tal, includ­ing “the straight-legged cap­i­tal ‘R,’ sin­gle-sto­ry low­er­case ‘a,’ low­er­case ‘u’ with­out a trail­ing serif, a low­er­case ‘t’ with­out a tail­ing stroke on the bot­tom right, a beard­less ‘g,’ some round­ed punc­tu­a­tion.”

The devel­op­ment of Hel­veti­ca Now also neces­si­tat­ed a close look at all the ver­sions of Hel­veti­ca so far devel­oped (the most notable major revi­sion being Neue Hel­veti­ca, released in 1983) and adapt­ing their best char­ac­ter­is­tics for an age of screens. Few of those char­ac­ter­is­tics demand­ed more atten­tion than the spac­ing — or to use the typo­graph­i­cal term, the kern­ing. But how­ev­er aston­ish­ing a show­case it may be, Hel­veti­ca Now does­n’t dri­ve home the impor­tance of the art of kern­ing in as vis­cer­al a man­ner as anoth­er new type­face: Hel­l­veti­ca, designed by New York cre­ative direc­tors Zack Roif and Matthew Wood­ward. Much painstak­ing labor has also gone into Hel­l­veti­ca’s kern­ing, but not to make it as beau­ti­ful as pos­si­ble: on the con­trary, Roif and Woodard have tak­en Hel­veti­ca and kerned it for max­i­mum ugli­ness.

The Verge’s Jon Porter describes Hel­l­veti­ca as “a self-aware Com­ic Sans with kern­ing that’s some­how much much worse.” If that most hat­ed Win­dows font has­n’t been enough to inflict psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tur­bance on the design­ers in your life, you can head to Hel­l­veti­ca’s offi­cial site and “expe­ri­ence it in all its uneven, gap­py glo­ry.” Roif and Woodard have made Hel­l­veti­ca free to use, some­thing that cer­tain­ly can’t be said of any gen­uine ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca. In fact, the sheer cost of licens­ing that most mod­ern of all fonts has, in recent years, pushed even the for­mer­ly Hel­veti­ca-using likes of Apple, Google, and IBM to come up with their own type­faces instead — all of which, telling­ly, resem­ble Hel­veti­ca. We can con­sid­er them all weapons in the life of a design­er, which, as Vignel­li put it, “is a life of fight. Fight against the ugli­ness.” Hap­py down­load­ing…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­ic Sans Turns 25: Graph­ic Design­er Vin­cent Connare Explains Why He Cre­at­ed the Most Hat­ed Font in the World

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

Van Gogh’s Ugli­est Mas­ter­piece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Paint­ing, The Night Café (1888)

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

The First High-Resolution Map of America’s Food Supply Chain: How It All Really Gets from Farm to Table

in Food & Drink, Maps | November 14th, 2019

The phrase “farm to table” has enjoyed vogue sta­tus in Amer­i­can din­ing long enough to be fac­ing dis­place­ment by an even trendi­er suc­ces­sor, “farm to fork.” These labels reflect a new aware­ness — or an aspi­ra­tion to aware­ness — of where, exact­ly, the food Amer­i­cans eat comes from. A vast and fer­tile land, the Unit­ed States pro­duces a great deal of its own food, but giv­en the dis­tance of most of its pop­u­la­tion cen­ters from most of its agri­cul­tur­al cen­ters, it also has to move near­ly as great a deal of food over long domes­tic dis­tances. Here we have the very first high-res­o­lu­tion map of that food sup­ply chain, cre­at­ed by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois study­ing “food flows between coun­ties in the Unit­ed States.”

“Our map is a com­pre­hen­sive snap­shot of all food flows between coun­ties in the U.S. – grains, fruits and veg­eta­bles, ani­mal feed, and processed food items,” writes Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Civ­il and Envi­ron­men­tal Engi­neer­ing Megan Konar in an explana­to­ry post at The Con­ver­sa­tion. (The top ver­sion shows the total tons of food moved, and the bot­tom one is bro­ken down to the coun­ty scale.)

“All Amer­i­cans, from urban to rur­al are con­nect­ed through the food sys­tem. Con­sumers all rely on dis­tant pro­duc­ers; agri­cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing plants; food stor­age like grain silos and gro­cery stores; and food trans­porta­tion sys­tems.” The map visu­al­izes such jour­neys as that of a ship­ment of corn, which “starts at a farm in Illi­nois, trav­els to a grain ele­va­tor in Iowa before head­ing to a feed­lot in Kansas, and then trav­els in ani­mal prod­ucts being sent to gro­cery stores in Chica­go.”

Konar and her col­lab­o­ra­tors’ research arrives at a few sur­pris­ing con­clu­sions, such as that Los Ange­les coun­ty is both the largest ship­per and receiv­er of food in the U.S. Not only that, but almost all of the nine coun­ties “most cen­tral to the over­all struc­ture of the food sup­ply net­work” are in Cal­i­for­nia. This may sur­prise any­one who has laid eyes on the sub­lime­ly huge agri­cul­tur­al land­scapes of the Mid­west “Corn­belt.” But as Konar notes, “Our esti­mates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Corn­belt. So, in anoth­er year, the net­work may look dif­fer­ent.” And of the grain pro­duced in the Mid­west, much “is trans­port­ed to the Port of New Orleans for export. This pri­mar­i­ly occurs via the water­ways of the Ohio and Mis­sis­sip­pi Rivers.”

Konar also warns of trou­bling frail­ties: “The infra­struc­ture along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are crit­i­cal, but have not been over­hauled since their con­struc­tion in 1929,” and if they were to fail, “com­mod­i­ty trans­port and sup­ply chains would be com­plete­ly dis­rupt­ed.” The ana­lyt­i­cal minds at Hack­er News have been dis­cussing the impli­ca­tions of the research shown on this map, includ­ing whether the U.S. food sup­ply chain is real­ly, as one com­menter put it, “very brit­tle and con­tains many weak points.” The Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Civ­il Engi­neers, as Konar tells Food & Wine, has giv­en the coun­try’s civ­il engi­neer­ing infra­struc­ture a grade of D+, which at least implies con­sid­er­able room for improve­ment. But against what from some angles look like long odds, food keeps get­ting from Amer­i­can farms to Amer­i­can tables — and Amer­i­can forks, Amer­i­can mouths, Amer­i­can stom­achs, and so on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

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

The Virtual Choir: Watch a Choir Conductor Digitally Unite 3500 Singers from Around the World

in Music, Technology | November 13th, 2019

For decades we’ve been hear­ing promis­es about how com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy will one day elim­i­nate dis­tance itself, mak­ing every­one around the globe feel as if they might as well be in the same room. Such a future would have its down­side as well as its upside, but even now, approach­ing the third decade of the 21st cen­tu­ry, it has­n’t quite arrived yet. Nev­er­the­less, we’ve already grown so used to the idea of real-time glob­al col­lab­o­ra­tion that it takes an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly ambi­tious project to let us step back and appre­ci­ate the tech­no­log­i­cal real­i­ty that makes it pos­si­ble. Take, for exam­ple, con­duc­tor Eric Whitacre’s Vir­tu­al Choir, whose per­for­mance of Whitacre’s own piece “Lux Arumque” appears above.

“Vir­tu­al,” here, is a bit of a mis­nomer, encour­ag­ing as it does Gib­son­ian visions of the 100-per­cent dig­i­tal voic­es of syn­thet­ic singers res­onat­ing pure­ly in cyber­space. And while Whitacre’s project would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out stream­ing dig­i­tal audio and video tech­nol­o­gy — as well as the infra­struc­ture of what we may as well still call cyber­space — it begins with the real voic­es of 100-per­cent ana­log humans.

185 such humans, to be pre­cise, based in twelve coun­tries, and all of them vis­i­ble on their sep­a­rate screens as Whitacre plays the role of con­duc­tor on his own. The much larg­er-scale per­for­mance of “Water Night,” a piece com­posed for the poet­ry of Octavio Paz, brings togeth­er 3,746 videos from 73 coun­tries, neces­si­tat­ing a cred­its sequence longer than the piece itself.

The Vir­tu­al Choir grew, as many such immense works do, from a small seed: “It all start­ed with this one young girl who sent me this video of her­self singing one of my choral pieces,” says Whitacre in this video on the prepa­ra­tion for the Vir­tu­al Choir’s “Sleep” video. “I was struck so hard by the beau­ty, the inti­ma­cy of it, the sweet­ness of it, and I thought, ‘Boy, it would be amaz­ing if we could get 100 peo­ple to do this and cut it all togeth­er.” The expe­ri­ence of assem­bling this vir­tu­al choir, or even hear­ing it, shows that “singing togeth­er and mak­ing music togeth­er is a fun­da­men­tal human expe­ri­ence,” and on a scale hard­ly imag­in­able a gen­er­a­tion or two ago. But on the most basic lev­el, even this new way of mak­ing music is mere­ly an expan­sion of the old­est way of mak­ing music: with one human voice, then anoth­er, and anoth­er.

via Swiss Miss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Fans Joy­ous­ly Sing the Entire­ty of Bob Marley’s Leg­end Album in Uni­son

25 John Lennon Fans Sing His Album Work­ing Class Hero Word for Word, and Note for Note

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Watch Choirs Around the World Sim­u­late the Rain­storm in Toto’s “Africa” Using Only Their Hands

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

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

The Internet Archive Is Digitizing & Preserving Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

in Archives, History, Libraries, Music | November 11th, 2019

There seems to be wide­spread agreement—something spe­cial was lost in the rushed-to-mar­ket move from phys­i­cal media to dig­i­tal stream­ing. We have come to admit that some old­er musi­cal tech­nolo­gies can­not be improved upon. Musi­cians, pro­duc­ers, engi­neers spend thou­sands to repli­cate the sound of old­er ana­log record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, with all its quirky, incon­sis­tent oper­a­tion. And fans buy record play­ers and vinyl records in sur­pris­ing­ly increas­ing num­bers to hear the warm and fuzzy char­ac­ter of their sound.

Neil Young, who has relent­less­ly crit­i­cized every aspect of dig­i­tal record­ing, has dis­missed the resur­gence of the LP as a “fash­ion state­ment” giv­en that most new albums released on vinyl are dig­i­tal mas­ters. But buy­ers come to vinyl with a range of expec­ta­tions, writes Ari Her­stand at Dig­i­tal Music News: “Vinyl is an entire expe­ri­ence. Won­der­ful­ly tac­tile…. When we stare at our screens for the major­i­ty of our days, it’s nice to look at art that doesn’t glow and isn’t the size of my hand.” Vinyl can feel and look as good as it sounds (when prop­er­ly engi­neered).

While shiny, dig­i­tal­ly mas­tered vinyl releas­es pop up in big box stores every­where, the real musi­cal wealth lies in the past—in thou­sands upon thou­sands of LPs, 45s, 78s—relics of “the only con­sumer play­back for­mat we have that’s ful­ly ana­log and ful­ly loss­less,” says vinyl mas­ter­ing engi­neer Adam Gon­salves. Few insti­tu­tions can afford to store thou­sands of phys­i­cal albums, and many rar­i­ties and odd­i­ties exist in van­ish­ing­ly few­er copies. Their crack­le and hiss may be for­ev­er lost with­out the inter­ven­tion of dig­i­tal preser­va­tion­ists like the Inter­net Archive.

The Archive is “now expand­ing its dig­i­ti­za­tion project to include LPs,” reports Faye Lessler on the organization’s blog. This will come as wel­come news to cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans, ana­log con­ser­va­tion­ists, and vinyl enthu­si­asts of all kinds, who will most­ly agree that dig­i­ti­za­tion is far bet­ter than extinc­tion, though the tac­tile and visu­al plea­sures may be irre­place­able. The Archive has focused its efforts on the over 100,000 audio record­ings from the Boston Pub­lic Library’s col­lec­tion, “in order to pre­vent them from dis­ap­pear­ing for­ev­er when the vinyl is bro­ken, warped, or lost.”

“These record­ings exist in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats, includ­ing wax cylin­ders, 78 rpms, and LPs,” though the project is cur­rent­ly focused on the lat­ter. “They span musi­cal gen­res includ­ing  clas­si­cal, pop, rock, and jazz, and con­tain obscure record­ings like this album of music for baton twirlers, and this record of radio’s all-time great­est bloop­ers.” The method of rapid­ly con­vert­ing the arti­facts at the rate of ten LPs per hour (which you can read more about at the Archive blog) serves as a tes­ta­ment to what dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy does best—using machine learn­ing and meta­da­ta to auto­mate the archival process and cre­ate exten­sive, search­able data­bas­es of cat­a­logue infor­ma­tion.

Cur­rent­ly, the project has uploaded 1,180 record­ings to its site, “but some of the albums are only avail­able in 30 sec­ond snip­pets due to rights issues,” Lessler points out. Browse the “Unlocked Record­ings” cat­e­go­ry to hear 750 dig­i­tized LPs avail­able in full: these include a record­ing of Gian Car­lo Menot­ti’s bal­let The Uni­corn, the Gor­gon, and the Man­ti­core, fur­ther up; The Beget­ting of the Pres­i­dent, above, a satire of Nixon’s rise to pow­er as Bib­li­cal epic, read by Orson Welles in his King of Kings’ voice; and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Con­cer­to no. 1 in B‑flat minor, played by Van Cliburn, below.

The range and vari­ety cap­tured in this collection—from fire­works sound effects to Elton John’s sec­ond, self-titled album to clas­sic Pearl Bai­ly to 80s new wave band The Com­mu­nards to Andres Segovia play­ing Bach to the Smokey and the Ban­dit 2 soundtrack—will out­last copy­right restric­tions. And they will leave behind an exten­sive record, no pun intend­ed, of the LP: “our pri­ma­ry musi­cal medi­um for over a gen­er­a­tion,” says the Archive’s spe­cial projects direc­tor CR Saik­ley, “wit­ness to the birth of both Rock & Roll and Punk Rock… inte­gral to our cul­ture from the 1950s to the 1980s.” Vinyl remains the most revered of musi­cal for­mats for good reason—reasons future gen­er­a­tions will dis­cov­er, at least vir­tu­al­ly, for them­selves some­day.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Every Record Shop in the World

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

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

An Animated Leonard Cohen Offers Reflections on Death: Thought-Provoking Excerpts from His Final Interview

in Animation, Life, Magazines, Music | November 11th, 2019

A month before Leonard Cohen died in Novem­ber, 2016, The New York­er’s edi­tor David Rem­nick trav­eled to the songwriter’s Los Ange­les home for a lengthy inter­view in which Cohen looked both for­ward and back.

As a for­mer Zen monk, he was also adept at inhab­it­ing the present, one in which the shad­ow of death crept ever clos­er.

His for­mer lover and muse, Mar­i­anne Ihlen, had suc­cumbed to can­cer ear­li­er in the sum­mer, two days after receiv­ing a frank and lov­ing email from Cohen:

Well, Mar­i­anne, it’s come to this time when we are real­ly so old and our bod­ies are falling apart and I think I will fol­low you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beau­ty and your wis­dom, but I don’t need to say any­thing more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good jour­ney. Good­bye old friend. End­less love, see you down the road.

The New York­er has nev­er shied from over-the-top phys­i­cal descrip­tions. The cour­te­ous, high­ly ver­bal young poet, who’d evinced “a kind of Michael Cor­leone Before the Fall look, sloe-eyed, dark, a lit­tle hunched” was now very thin, but still hand­some, with the hand­shake of “a court­ly retired capo.”

In addi­tion to an album, You Want It Dark­er, to pro­mote, Cohen had a mas­sive back­log of unpub­lished poems and unfin­ished lyrics to tend to before the sands of time ran out.

At 82, he seemed glad to have all his men­tal fac­ul­ties and the sup­port of a devot­ed per­son­al assis­tant, sev­er­al close friends and his two adult chil­dren, all of which allowed him to main­tain his music and lan­guage-based worka­holic habits.

Time, as he not­ed, pro­vides a pow­er­ful incen­tive for fin­ish­ing up, despite the chal­lenges posed by the weak­en­ing flesh:

At a cer­tain point, if you still have your mar­bles and are not faced with seri­ous finan­cial chal­lenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s under­es­ti­mat­ed as an anal­gesic on all lev­els. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most com­fort­ing activ­i­ties, and the ben­e­fits of it are incal­cu­la­ble.

He had clear­ly made peace with the idea that some of his projects would go unfin­ished.

You can hear his fond­ness for one of them, a “sweet lit­tle song” that he recit­ed from mem­o­ry, eyes closed, in the ani­mat­ed inter­view excerpt, above:

Lis­ten to the hum­ming­bird

Whose wings you can­not see

Lis­ten to the hum­ming­bird

Don’t lis­ten to me.

Lis­ten to the but­ter­fly

Whose days but num­ber three

Lis­ten to the but­ter­fly

Don’t lis­ten to me.

Lis­ten to the mind of God

Which doesn’t need to be

Lis­ten to the mind of God

Don’t lis­ten to me.

These unfin­ished thoughts close out Cohen’s beau­ti­ful­ly named posthu­mous album, Thanks for the Dance, sched­uled for release lat­er this month.

Dianne V. Lawrence, who designed Cohen’s hum­ming­bird logo, a motif begin­ning with 1979’s Recent Songs album, spec­u­lates that Cohen equat­ed the hum­ming­bird’s enor­mous ener­gy usage and sus­te­nance require­ments with those of the soul.

Read Remnick’s arti­cle on Leonard Cohen in its entire­ty here. Hear a record­ing of David Rem­nick­’s inter­view with Cohen–his last ever–below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Pub­lished: Dis­cov­er His Final Poems, Draw­ings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen Wrote a Love Song

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 for her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch J.S. Bach’s “Air on the G String” Played on the Actual Instruments from His Time

in Music | November 5th, 2019

There is no wrong way to lis­ten to the music of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach. You may pre­fer the aus­tere, idio­syn­crat­ic piano inter­pre­ta­tions of Glenn Gould; you may pre­fer the ground­break­ing ana­log-syn­the­siz­er ren­di­tions painstak­ing­ly record­ed by Wendy Car­los (whose ear­ly fans includ­ed Gould him­self); or you may pre­fer faith­ful per­for­mances using only the instru­ments extant in the late 17th to mid-18th cen­tu­ry peri­od in which Bach lived. In that last case, the San Fran­cis­co ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music has you cov­ered. You may remem­ber us pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tur­ing their per­for­mances of Vival­di and Pachel­bel; in the video above, you can hear and see them play Bach.

More specif­i­cal­ly, you can hear them play the sec­ond move­ment, Aria, from Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major, BWV 1068. The instru­ments they play it on include an Ital­ian baroque vio­lin from 1660 and an Aus­tri­an baroque vio­la from 1680, as well as more recent­ly craft­ed exam­ples rig­or­ous­ly mod­eled after instru­ments from that same era. “As instru­ments became mod­ern­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry, builders and play­ers tend­ed to focus on the vol­ume of sound and the sta­bil­i­ty of tun­ing,” says VoM’s expla­na­tion of their use of peri­od instru­ments. “Mod­ern steel strings replaced the old­er mate­ri­als, and instru­ments were often machine made. His­tor­i­cal instru­ments, built indi­vid­u­al­ly by hand and with over­all lighter con­struc­tion, have extreme­ly com­plex over­tones — which we find delight­ful.”

Any lover of Bach’s music has heard this piece many times, not least due to its pop­u­lar­iza­tion in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, in an arrange­ment by Ger­man vio­lin­ist August Wil­helmj, as “Air on the G String.” The orig­i­nal work dates to “some time between the years 1717 and 1723,” writes music blog­ger Özgür Nevres, when Bach com­posed it for his patron Prince Leopold of Anhalt. It also holds the hon­or of being the first work by Bach ever record­ed, “by the Russ­ian cel­list Alek­san­dr Verzh­bilovich and an unknown pianist, in 1902 (as the Air from the Over­ture No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068).” But no mat­ter how many dif­fer­ent record­ings from dif­fer­ent eras of Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major in which you’ve steeped your­self, if you’ve only heard it played on mod­ern instru­ments, a per­for­mance like Voic­es of Music’s shows that it still has sur­pris­es to offer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Sounds of the Actu­al Instru­ments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Han­del Orig­i­nal­ly Com­posed Their Music

The Authen­tic Vivaldi’s The Four Sea­sons: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on Orig­i­nal Man­u­scripts & Played with 18th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

The Authen­tic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script & Played with Orig­i­nal 17th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

All of Bach for Free! New Site Will Put Per­for­mances of 1080 Bach Com­po­si­tions Online

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant

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

The Very First Picture of the Far Side of the Moon, Taken 60 Years Ago

in Astronomy, History, Photography | November 5th, 2019

Six­ty years ago, mankind got its very first glimpse of the far side of the Moon, so called because it faces away from the Earth. (And as astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson have long tak­en pains to point out to Pink Floyd fans, it isn’t “dark.”) Tak­en by the Sovi­et Union, that first pho­to may not look like much today, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the high-res­o­lu­tion col­or images sent back from the sur­face itself by Chi­na’s Chang’e‑4 probe ear­li­er this year. But with the tech­nol­o­gy of the late 1950s, even the tech­nol­o­gy com­mand­ed by the Sovi­ets’ then-world-beat­ing space pro­gram, the fact that it was tak­en at all seems not far short of mirac­u­lous. How did they do it?

“This pho­to­graph was tak­en by the Sovi­et space­craft Luna 3, which was launched a month after the Luna 2 space­craft became the first man-made object to impact on the sur­face of the Moon,” explains astronomer Kevin Hain­line in a recent Twit­ter thread. “Luna 2 fol­lowed Luna 1, the first space­craft to escape a geo­syn­chro­nous Earth orbit.” Luna 3 was designed to take pho­tographs of the Moon, hard­ly an uncom­pli­cat­ed prospect: “To take pic­tures you have to be sta­ble on three-axes. You have to take the pho­tographs remote­ly. AND you have to some­how trans­fer those pic­tures back to Earth.” The first three-axis sta­bi­lized space­craft ever sent on a mis­sion, Luna 3 “had to use a lit­tle pho­to­cell to ori­ent towards the Moon so that now, while sta­bi­lized, it could take the pic­tures. Which it did. On PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM.”

Even those of us who took pic­tures on film for decades have start­ed to take for grant­ed the con­ve­nience of dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy. But think back to all the has­sle of tra­di­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy, then imag­ine mak­ing a robot car­ry them out in space. Once tak­en Luna 3’s pho­tos “were then moved to a lit­tle CHEMICAL PLANT to DEVELOP AND DRY THEM.” (In oth­er words, “Luna 3 had a lit­tle 1 Hour Pho­to inside.”) Then they con­tin­ued into “a device that shone a cath­ode ray tube, like in an old­er TV, through them, towards a device that record­ed the bright­ness and con­vert­ed this to an elec­tri­cal sig­nal.” You can read about what hap­pened then in more detail at Damn Inter­est­ing, where Alan Bel­lows describes how the space­craft sent “the light­ness and dark­ness infor­ma­tion line-by-line via fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed ana­log sig­nal — in essence, a fax sent over radio.”

Sovi­et Sci­en­tists could thus “retrieve one pho­to­graph­ic frame every 30 min­utes or so. Due to the dis­tance and weak sig­nal, the first images received con­tained noth­ing but sta­t­ic. In sub­se­quent attempts in the fol­low­ing few days, an indis­tinct, blotchy white disc began to resolve on the ther­mal paper print­outs at Sovi­et lis­ten­ing sta­tions.” As Luna 3’s pho­tos became clear­er, they revealed, as Hain­line puts it, that “the back­side of the moon was SO WEIRD AND DIFFERENT” — cov­ered in the craters, for exam­ple, which have become its visu­al sig­na­ture. For a mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent to this achieve­ment, we might look not just to Chang’e‑4 but to the image of a black hole cap­tured by the Event Hori­zon Tele­scope this past April — the one that led to an abun­dance of arti­cles like “In Defense of the Blur­ry Black Hole Pho­to” and “We Need to Admit That the Black Hole Pho­to Isn’t Very Good.” Astropho­tog­ra­phy has come a long way, but at least back in 1959 it did­n’t pro­duce quite so many takes.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Pho­tos

8,400 Stun­ning High-Res Pho­tos From the Apol­lo Moon Mis­sions Are Now Online

How Sci­en­tists Col­orize Those Beau­ti­ful Space Pho­tos Tak­en By the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope

There’s a Tiny Art Muse­um on the Moon That Fea­tures the Art of Andy Warhol & Robert Rauschen­berg

The Glo­ri­ous Poster Art of the Sovi­et Space Pro­gram in Its Gold­en Age (1958–1963)

Won­der­ful­ly Kitschy Pro­pa­gan­da Posters Cham­pi­on the Chi­nese Space Pro­gram (1962–2003)

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

Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

in Books, Music | October 31st, 2019

Like some rock stars of his gen­er­a­tion, David Bowie had a lit­er­ary cast of mind; unlike most of those col­leagues, he also made his asso­ci­a­tion with books explic­it. (Not for noth­ing did he appear on that READ poster.) When­ev­er this sub­ject aris­es, it’s tempt­ing to bring up the sto­ry of how The Man Who Fell to Earth direc­tor Nico­las Roeg poked fun at the extreme num­ber of books with which Bowie sur­round­ed him­self dur­ing the time he was act­ing in that film, as we did when we post­ed about the David Bowie book club. Launched by Bowie’s son, the film­mak­er Dun­can Jones, that project was meant to read through Bowie’s own list of top 100 books, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Now, thanks to the work of music jour­nal­ist John O’Con­nell, Bowie’s love of books has a book of its own.

Pub­lished in the UK as Bowie’s Books and in the US as Bowie’s Book­shelf, O’Con­nel­l’s essay col­lec­tion takes the 100 books the man who was Zig­gy Star­dust, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke named as favorites. In each he finds the rel­e­vant ques­tions (or at least fas­ci­nat­ing ones) to ask about each book’s rela­tion­ship to Bowie’s life and work: “How did the pow­er imbued in a sin­gle suit of armor in The Ili­ad impact a man who loved cos­tumes, shift­ing iden­ti­ty, and the siren song of the alter-ego?” Or, “How did the poems of T.S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara, the fic­tion of Vladimir Nabokov and Antho­ny Burgess, the comics of The Beano and The Viz, and the ground­break­ing pol­i­tics of James Bald­win influ­ence Bowie’s lyrics, his sound, his artis­tic out­look?”

Kirkus Reviews notes that “many of Bowie’s selec­tions speak to his obvi­ous pas­sion for music, espe­cial­ly ear­ly rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Mar­cus, Ger­ri Her­shey), his famous Japanophil­ia (Yukio Mishi­ma, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Ger­many (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich).” O’Con­nel­l’s com­pletist analy­sis of Bowie’s top-100-books list, com­posed for an exhi­bi­tion at the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um just six years ago, also reveals “the range and play­ful­ness in Bowie’s read­ing, from hefty tomes on the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion to lad­dish com­ic books like The Beano.” Oth­er essays cov­er Loli­ta, The Gnos­tic Gospels, A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces, and White Noise, all part of a mix­ture that would tan­ta­lize any cul­tur­al crit­ic — much like the work of David Bowie, who still con­sti­tutes a cul­ture unto him­self.

Bowie’s Book­shelf: The Hun­dred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life can be ordered now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

The Sto­ry of How David Jones Became David Bowie Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs: Lis­ten to Them Online

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

The Morals That Determine Whether We’re Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian

in Politics, Psychology | October 3rd, 2019

An old friend once wrote a line I’ll nev­er for­get: “There are two kinds of peo­ple in the world, then there are infi­nite­ly many more.” It always comes to mind when I con­front bina­ry gen­er­al­iza­tions that I’m told define two equal­ly oppos­ing posi­tions, but rarely cap­ture, with any accu­ra­cy, the com­plex­i­ty and con­trari­ness of human beings—even when said humans live inside the same coun­try.

Vot­ing pat­terns, social media bub­bles, and major net­work info­tain­ment can make it seem like the U.S. is split in two, but it is split into, if not an infin­i­ty, then a plu­ral­i­ty of dis­parate ide­o­log­i­cal dis­po­si­tions. But let’s say, for the sake of argu­ment, that there are two kinds of peo­ple. Let’s say the U.S. divides neat­ly into “lib­er­als” and “con­ser­v­a­tives.” What makes the dif­fer­ence between them? Fis­cal pol­i­cy? Edu­ca­tion? Views on “law and order,” social wel­fare, sci­ence, reli­gion, pub­lic ver­sus pri­vate good? Yes, but….

Best-sell­ing NYU psy­chol­o­gist Jonathan Haidt has con­tro­ver­sial­ly claimed that morality—based in emotion—really dri­ves the wedge between com­pet­ing “tribes” engaged in pitched us-ver­sus-them war. The real con­test is gut-lev­el, most­ly cen­tered on dis­gust these days, one of the most prim­i­tive of emo­tion­al respons­es (we learn in the hand-drawn ani­ma­tion of a Haidt lec­ture below). Haidt argues that our sense of us and them is root­ed, irrev­o­ca­bly, in our ear­li­est cog­ni­tions of phys­i­cal space.

Haidt sit­u­ates his analy­sis under the rubric of “moral foun­da­tions the­o­ry,” a school of thought “cre­at­ed by a group of social and cul­tur­al psy­chol­o­gists to under­stand why moral­i­ty varies so much across cul­tures yet still shows so many sim­i­lar­i­ties and recur­rent themes.” Anoth­er moral foun­da­tions the­o­rist, Peter Dit­to, pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy and Social Behav­ior at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine, uses his research to draw sim­i­lar con­clu­sions about “hyper­par­ti­san­ship” in the U.S. Accord­ing to Dit­to, as he describes in the short video at the top, “morals influ­ence if you’re lib­er­al or con­ser­v­a­tive.”

How? Dit­to iden­ti­fies five broad, uni­ver­sal moral cat­e­gories, or “pil­lars,” that pre­dict polit­i­cal thought and behav­ior: harm reduc­tion, fair­ness, loy­al­ty, authority/tradition, and puri­ty. These con­cerns receive dif­fer­ent weight­ing between self-iden­ti­fied lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives in sur­veys, with lib­er­als valu­ing harm reduc­tion and fair­ness high­ly and gen­er­al­ly over­look­ing the oth­er three, and con­ser­v­a­tives giv­ing equal weight to all five (on paper at least). Dit­to does step out­side the bina­ry in the last half of the seg­ment, not­ing that his stud­ies turned up a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple who iden­ti­fied as lib­er­tar­i­ans.

He takes a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in this cat­e­go­ry. Lib­er­tar­i­ans, says Dit­to, don’t rank any moral val­ue high­ly, mark­ing their world­view as “prag­mat­ic” and strik­ing­ly amoral. They appear to be intense­ly self-focused and lack­ing in empa­thy. Oth­er strains—from demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism to anar­chism to fascism—that define Amer­i­can pol­i­tics today, go unmen­tioned, as if they didn’t exist, though they are arguably as influ­en­tial as lib­er­tar­i­an­ism in the strange flow­er­ings of the Amer­i­can left and right, and inar­guably as deserv­ing of study.

The idea that one’s morals define one’s pol­i­tics doesn’t seem par­tic­u­lar­ly nov­el, but the research of psy­chol­o­gists like Haidt and Dit­to offers new ways to think about moral­i­ty in pub­lic life. It also rais­es per­ti­nent ques­tions about the gulf between what peo­ple claim to val­ue and what they actu­al­ly, con­sis­tent­ly, sup­port, and about how the evo­lu­tion of moral sen­si­bil­i­ties seems to sort peo­ple into groups that also share his­tor­i­cal iden­ti­ties, zip codes, and eco­nom­ic inter­ests. Nor can we can­not dis­count the active shap­ing of pub­lic opin­ion through extra-moral means. Final­ly, in a two-par­ty sys­tem, the options are as few as they can be. Polit­i­cal alle­giance can be as much con­ve­nience, or reac­tion, as con­vic­tion. We might be right to sus­pect that any seem­ing political—or moral—unity on one side or the oth­er could be an effect of ampli­fied over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale’s Free Course on The Moral Foun­da­tions of Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: Do Gov­ern­ments Deserve Our Alle­giance, and When Should They Be Denied It?

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Do Ethi­cists Behave Any Bet­ter Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

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