A First Look at How Tony Soprano Became Tony Soprano: Watch the New Trailer for The Many Saints of Newark

in Film, Television | June 30th, 2021

When The Sopra­nos drew to a close four­teen years ago, its ambigu­ous yet some­how defin­i­tive final scene hard­ly promised a con­tin­u­a­tion of the New Jer­sey mafia saga. Since then, fans have had to make do with reflec­tions, his­to­ries, and exege­ses, up to and includ­ing re-watch pod­casts host­ed by the actors them­selves. As time has passed the show has only drawn high­er and high­er acclaim, which can’t be said about every prod­uct of the ongo­ing “gold­en age of tele­vi­sion dra­ma” The Sopra­nos got start­ed. A return to the well was per­haps inevitable, and indeed has just been announced: The Many Saints of Newark, a pre­quel film co-writ­ten by David Chase, the cre­ator cred­it­ed with con­tribut­ing to the orig­i­nal series a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of its genius.

Onscreen, The Sopra­nos drew its pow­er from one Sopra­no above all: local mob boss Tony Sopra­no, as por­trayed by James Gan­dolfi­ni in what has been ranked among the great­est screen act­ing achieve­ments of all time. Whether or not Tony sur­vived that final scene, Gan­dolfi­ni died in 2013, and ever since it has been impos­si­ble to imag­ine any oth­er actor por­tray­ing the char­ac­ter — or at least por­tray­ing the char­ac­ter in a mod­ern-day set­ting.

Telling the sto­ry of a Tony Sopra­no in his youth, with a young actor nec­es­sar­i­ly play­ing him, has remained a viable propo­si­tion. Into that role, for the 1960s and 70s-set The Many Saints of Newark, has stepped Gan­dolfini’s real-life son Michael.

For the then-20-year-old Michael Gan­dolfi­ni, tak­ing over his father’s role had to be a daunt­ing prospect, espe­cial­ly since he’d nev­er seen The Sopra­nos before. At least one binge-watch of the series (among oth­er rig­or­ous forms of prepa­ra­tion) lat­er, he deliv­ered the per­for­mance of which you can take a first look in The Many Saints of Newark’s new trail­er above. “As rival gangs try to wrest con­trol from the DiMeo crime fam­i­ly in the race-torn city of Newark,” Con­se­quence Film’s Ben Kaye writes of its sto­ry, the young Antho­ny Sopra­no, a promis­ing but indif­fer­ent stu­dent with an eye on col­lege, “gets swept up in the vio­lence and crime by his uncle Dick­ie Molti­san­ti.” As Sopra­nos fans know full well, “Antho­ny becomes the feared mob head Tony Sopra­no and treats Dickie’s son, Christo­pher, as his pro­tégé.” Evi­dent­ly, an anti­hero of Tony’s stature is made, not born.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

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

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­nos’ Final Scene

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

The Nine Minute Sopra­nos

James Gan­dolfi­ni Shows Kinder, Soft­er, Gen­tler Side on Sesame Street (2002)

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 or on Face­book.

The Acoustics of Stonehenge: Researchers Build a Model to Understand How Sound Reverberated within the Ancient Structure

in History, Science | June 28th, 2021

It’s impos­si­ble to resist a Spinal Tap joke, but the cre­ators of the com­plete scale mod­el of Eng­land’s ancient Druidic struc­ture pic­tured above had seri­ous inten­tions — to under­stand what those inside the cir­cle heard when the stones all stood in their upright “henge” posi­tion. A research team led by acousti­cal engi­neer Trevor Cox con­struct­ed the mod­el at one-twelfth the actu­al size of Stone­henge, the “largest pos­si­ble scale repli­ca that could fit inside an acoustic cham­ber at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sal­ford in Eng­land, where Cox works,” reports Bruce Bow­er at Sci­ence News. The tallest of the stones is only two feet high.

This is not the first time acoustic research has been car­ried out on Stone­henge, but pre­vi­ous projects were “all based on what’s there now,” says Cox. “I want­ed to know how it sound­ed in 2200 B.C., when all the stones were in place.” The exper­i­ment required a lot of extrap­o­la­tion from what remains. The con­struc­tion of “Stone­henge Lego” or “Mini­henge,” as the researchers call it, assumes that “Stonehenge’s out­er cir­cle of stand­ing sarsen stones — a type of sil­crete rock found in south­ern Eng­land — had orig­i­nal­ly con­sist­ed of 30 stones.” Today, there are 17 sarsen stones in the out­er cir­cle among the 63 com­plete stones remain­ing.

“Based on an esti­mat­ed total 157 stones placed at the site around 4,200 years ago, the researchers 3‑D print­ed 27 stones of all sizes and shapes,” Bow­er explains. “Then, the team used sil­i­cone molds of those items and plas­ter mixed with oth­er mate­ri­als to re-cre­ate the remain­ing 130 stones. Sim­u­lat­ed stones were con­struct­ed to min­i­mize sound absorp­tion, much like actu­al stones at Stone­henge.” Once Cox and his team had the mod­el com­plet­ed and placed in the acoustic cham­ber, they began exper­i­ment­ing with sound waves and micro­phones, mea­sur­ing impulse respons­es and fre­quen­cy curves.

What were the results of this son­ic Stone­henge recre­ation? “We expect­ed to lose a lot of sound ver­ti­cal­ly, because there’s no roof,” says Cox. Instead, researchers found “thou­sands upon thou­sands of reflec­tions as the sound waves bounced around hor­i­zon­tal­ly.” Par­tic­i­pants in rit­u­al chants or musi­cal cel­e­bra­tions inside the cir­cle would have heard the sound ampli­fied and clar­i­fied, like singing in a tiled bath­room. For those stand­ing out­side the mon­u­ment, or even with­in the out­er cir­cle of stones, the sound would have been muf­fled or damp­ened. Like­wise, the arrange­ment would have damp­ened sound enter­ing the inner cir­cle from out­side.

Indeed, the effect was so pro­nounced that “the place­ment of the stones was capa­ble of ampli­fy­ing the human voice by more than four deci­bels, but pro­duced no echoes,” notes Art­net. This sug­gests that the site’s acoustic prop­er­ties were not acci­den­tal, but designed as part of its essen­tial func­tion for an elite group of par­tic­i­pants, “even though the site’s con­struc­tion would have required a huge amount of man­pow­er.” This is hard­ly dif­fer­ent from oth­er mon­u­men­tal ancient reli­gious struc­tures like pyra­mids and zig­gu­rats, built for roy­al­ty and an elite priest­hood. But it’s only one inter­pre­ta­tion of the structure’s pur­pose.

While Cox and his team do not believe acoustics were the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion for Stonehenge’s design — astro­log­i­cal align­ment seems to have been far more impor­tant — it clear­ly played some role. Oth­er schol­ars have their own hypothe­ses. Research still needs to account for envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors — or why “Stone­henge hums when the wind blows hard,” as musi­col­o­gist Rupert Till points out. Some have spec­u­lat­ed the stones may have been instru­ments, played like a giant xylo­phone, a the­o­ry test­ed in a 2013 study con­duct­ed by researchers from the Roy­al Col­lege of Art, but this, too, remains spec­u­la­tive.

As the great Stone­henge enthu­si­ast Nigel Tufnel once sang, “No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.” But what­ev­er it sound­ed like, Cox and his col­leagues have shown that the best seats were inside the inner cir­cle. Read the research team’s full arti­cle here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Ancient Astron­o­my of Stone­henge Decod­ed

An Artist Vis­its Stone­henge in 1573 and Paints a Charm­ing Water­col­or Paint­ing of the Ancient Ruins

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

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

This Is “The End”: A Video Exploration of The Doors’ Existential Epic

in Music | June 28th, 2021

If you had bro­ken up with your col­lege boyfriend and he told you that he writ­ten an 11-minute song about you while on enough LSD to kill a horse, would you want to hear it? Or would you block his num­ber on your phone?

Or maybe because said boyfriend is Jim Mor­ri­son and the band is the Doors and the song is “The End,” we’ll let it slide, because whether or not you think Jim’s lyrics are super deep or super­cil­ious, the groove is unde­ni­able, four small fur­ry musi­cians gath­ered togeth­er in a stu­dio and groov­ing on a raga, con­jur­ing up East­ern mys­ti­cism with West­ern instru­ments.

In Polyphonic’s explain­er video on “The End,” he pulls apart The Doors’ mag­num opus, the clos­er to its 1967 debut album, ana­lyz­ing the song in real time as it unspools. (There’s a few moments where Poly­phon­ic and Mor­ri­son are vocal­iz­ing at the same time—we rec­om­mend turn­ing on cap­tions).

The girl­friend in ques­tion was Mary Wer­be­low, Morrison’s steady in the ear­ly ‘60s before he chose the path of putting his poet­ry to music. The Werbelow/Morrison cou­ple had to die for the Doors to be born, in a sense, and Mor­ri­son start­ed the lyrics as a good­bye song, a stan­dard pop trope at the time. (There’s a very touch­ing, rare inter­view with Wer­be­low here). But Mor­ri­son took it in anoth­er direc­tion, we could say.

“The End” might be the first musi­cal exam­ple of the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre. Defined by Noah Segan and Adam Egypt Mor­timer when talk­ing about film, the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre “uses dream imagery, para­nor­mal ideas, or the hor­ror genre to express the emo­tion­al dra­ma of heart­break.” Segan and Mortimer’s def­i­n­i­tion deals only with film, but Mor­ri­son does the same thing with song, a lit­tle over ten years before the films they dis­cuss. “The End” is a breakup song that breaks down the psy­che like LSD, send­ing the injured par­ty back to basics, and into a uni­verse of arche­types. Things are dying. Things are being reborn. There’s a blue bus which is call­ing us, and that is either a ref­er­ence to the Solar Boat in Egypt­ian mythol­o­gy or a ref­er­ence to the San­ta Mon­i­ca bus sys­tem (accord­ing to one wag in the com­ments). Or hey, maybe it is both, because Mor­ri­son is tap­ping into some­thing here, much like James Joyce cre­at­ed lay­ers of myth with­in the quo­tid­i­an. (Mor­ri­son achieves this by walk­ing back­wards into it, how­ev­er.)

Poly­phon­ic gets into the song’s Oedi­pal Cliff Notes sec­tion, describ­ing how it all came flum­ing out of Mor­ri­son on stage, the band hav­ing dragged him to a gig at the Whiskey a Go-Go after he con­sumed “10,000 mikes” (i.e. 10,000 micro­grams, about ten full dos­es) of LSD. A few days lat­er the “kill your teach­ers, kill your par­ents” riff was com­mit­ted to tape, this time also on LSD.

For all its pre­tense the song still works. And though Mor­ri­son nev­er did rec­on­cile with his girl­friend, the song did find its soul mate when Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la used “The End” as the open­ing to Apoc­a­lypse Now, anoth­er work of art that drained the life force from its cre­ator. There are no real cov­er ver­sions of “The End,” and there are no films past Coppola’s that can use it with­out irony. It exists like a totem, to be found and puz­zled over.

(But because this is late cap­i­tal­ism and every­thing is ter­ri­ble, Polyphonic’s segue into a spon­sor ad at 11:46 is some­thing won­drous to behold in its per­verse beau­ty. Be warned, my only friend.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Doors’ Ray Man­zarek Walks You Through the Writ­ing of the Band’s Icon­ic Song, “Rid­ers on the Storm”

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

A Young, Clean Cut Jim Mor­ri­son Appears in a 1962 Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­mo Film

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Watch an Accurate Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Computer, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, from Start to Finish

in Astronomy, History, Science | June 14th, 2021

There’s noth­ing like an ancient mys­tery, espe­cial­ly one as seem­ing­ly insol­u­ble as the ori­gins of “the world’s first com­put­er,” the Antikythera mech­a­nism. Dis­cov­ered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the cor­rod­ed col­lec­tion of gears and dials seemed fake to sci­en­tists at first because of its inge­nious­ness. It has since been dat­ed to 100 to 150 BC and has inspired decades of research and spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tion. Yet, no one knows who made it, and more impor­tant­ly, no one knows how it was made.

“The dis­tance between this device’s com­plex­i­ty and oth­ers made at the same time is infi­nite,” says Adam Woj­cik, a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don. “Frankly, there is noth­ing like it that has ever been found. It’s out of this world.”

The expres­sion should not make us think of ancient aliens — the Antikythera mech­a­nism con­tains more than enough evi­dence of human lim­i­ta­tion, show­ing a geo­cen­tric mod­el of the cos­mos with the only five plan­ets its mak­er would have known.

The 2,000-plus year-old device con­tin­ues to reveal its secrets, includ­ing hid­den inscrip­tions found dur­ing CT scans of the object, as Smith­son­ian report­ed in 2015. The mech­a­nism is “sim­i­lar in size to a man­tel clock, and bits of wood found on the frag­ments sug­gest it was housed in a wood­en case. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large cir­cu­lar face with rotat­ing hands. There was a knob or han­dle on the side, for wind­ing the mech­a­nism for­ward or back­ward. And as the knob turned, trains of inter­lock­ing gear­wheels drove at least sev­en hands at var­i­ous speeds. Instead of hours and min­utes, the hands dis­played celes­tial time.”

If the Antikythera mech­a­nism is a “celes­tial clock,” who bet­ter to design and build its recon­struc­tion than a clock­mak­er? That is exact­ly what we see in the videos above, cre­at­ed for the clock­mak­ing YouTube chan­nel Click­spring. Using the best sci­en­tif­ic mod­el of the mech­a­nism to date — pub­lished this year by Dr. Tony Freeth and col­leagues of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism Research Project — Click­spring shows how the device might have fit togeth­er and makes edu­cat­ed guess­es about the right place­ment of its dozens of small parts.

You can see a pre­view of the Antikythera recon­struc­tion project at the top, watch the full project above, and see indi­vid­ual episodes show­cas­ing dif­fer­ent phas­es of con­struc­tion on YouTube. The mod­el “con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence,” Freeth writes, “and match­es the descrip­tions in the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself.” What no one can fig­ure out, how­ev­er, is just how the ancient Greek arti­sans who made it shaped pre­ci­sion met­al parts with­out lath­es and oth­er mod­ern tools of the machine-mak­ers trade. Researchers, and clock­mak­ers, may have pieced togeth­er the Antikythera puz­zle, but the mys­tery of how it came into exis­tence at all remains unsolved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

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

Wikipedia’s Surprising Power in Shaping Science: A New MIT Shows How Wikipedia Shapes Scientific Research

in Science, Wikipedia | June 14th, 2021

If you were in high school or col­lege when Wikipedia emerged, you’ll remem­ber how stren­u­ous­ly we were cau­tioned against using such an “unre­li­able source” for our assign­ments. If you went on to a career in sci­ence, how­ev­er, you now know how impor­tant a role Wikipedia plays in even pro­fes­sion­al research. It may thus sur­prise you to learn that stu­dents still get more or less the same warn­ing about what, two decades lat­er, has become the largest ency­clo­pe­dia and fifth most-vis­it­ed web site in the world. “Many of us use Wikipedia as a source of infor­ma­tion when we want a quick expla­na­tion of some­thing,” say MIT’s cita­tion guide­lines. “How­ev­er, Wikipedia or oth­er wikis, col­lab­o­ra­tive infor­ma­tion sites con­tributed to by a vari­ety of peo­ple, are not con­sid­ered reli­able sources for aca­d­e­m­ic cita­tion.”

That quo­ta­tion appears, some­what iron­i­cal­ly, in a recent MIT research paper called “Sci­ence is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evi­dence From a Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­al.” Its authors, Neil C. Thomp­son from MIT and Dou­glas Han­ley from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh, use both “Big Data” and exper­i­men­tal approach­es to sup­port their claim that “incor­po­rat­ing ideas into a Wikipedia arti­cle leads to those ideas being used more in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture.”

Test­ing the exis­tence of an under­ly­ing causal rela­tion­ship, they “com­mis­sioned sub­ject mat­ter experts to cre­ate new Wikipedia arti­cles on sci­en­tif­ic top­ics not cov­ered in Wikipedia.” Half of these arti­cles were added to Wikipedia, and half retained as a con­trol group. “Review­ing the rel­e­vant jour­nal arti­cles pub­lished lat­er, they find that “the word-usage pat­terns from the treat­ment group show up more in the prose in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture than do those from the con­trol group.”

In oth­er words, Wikipedia does indeed appear to shape sci­ence — or as Whar­ton pro­fes­sor Ethan Mol­lick put it on Twit­ter, “The secret heart of acad­e­mia is… Wikipedia.” Expand­ing on the idea, he added that “Wikipedia is used like a review arti­cle,” which sur­veys the cur­rent state of a par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic field. “Review arti­cles are extreme­ly influ­en­tial on the direc­tion of sci­en­tif­ic research, and while Wikipedia arti­cles are gen­er­al­ly less influ­en­tial, there are more of them, they are more up-to-date, and they are free.” That last point — and the implied con­trast to tra­di­tion­al, sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals with their often shock­ing­ly high sub­scrip­tion fees — becomes a key point in Thomp­son and Han­ley’s advo­ca­cy for pub­lic repos­i­to­ries of knowl­edge in gen­er­al, with their pow­er to gal­va­nize research across the whole world. The pow­er of open cul­ture is con­sid­er­able; the pow­er of open sci­ence, per­haps even more so.

You can read Han­ley and Thomp­son’s study on the pow­er of Wikipedia free online: “Sci­ence is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evi­dence From a Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­al.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Wikipedia: A Web Site That Turns Every Wikipedia Edit Into Ambi­ent Music in Real Time

NASA’s New Online Archive Puts a Wealth of Free Sci­ence Arti­cles Online

Roy­al Soci­ety Opens Online Archive; Puts 60,000 Papers Online

Free Online Cours­es: The Sci­ences

200 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion

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 or on Face­book.

Discover Ibn Sina (Avicenna), a Missing Pixel in Your Image of Philosophy: Partially Examined Life Episode #267 Featuring Peter Adamson

in Philosophy, Podcasts, Religion | May 14th, 2021

Most Amer­i­can stu­dents in phi­los­o­phy live on a diet of ancient Greek phi­los­o­phy on the one hand, and then “mod­ern” phi­los­o­phy, which starts around the time of Descartes (the 17th cen­tu­ry), with numer­ous schools and approach­es spilling into the present day. If you get any­thing from between those ancient days and moder­ni­ty, it’s prob­a­bly some church­men, i.e. Augus­tine (from the 4th cen­tu­ry) and Thomas Aquinas (the 13th cen­tu­ry), with per­haps a few Romans thrown in there and (if you’re Jew­ish) Mai­monides (12th cen­tu­ry).

But a key part of this lin­eage was the East­ward turn that the great works of Greek and Roman phi­los­o­phy took dur­ing the so-called Dark Ages, when they were pre­served and copied in the Islam­ic world, and this peri­od pro­duced a wealth of phi­los­o­phy includ­ing two fig­ures who became influ­en­tial enough in the West that their names were Latinized: Ibn Sīnā (980‑1037 C.E.) and Ibn Rushd, a.k.a. Aver­roes (1126–1198). Aquinas was very famil­iar with these fig­ures and incor­po­rat­ed them into his influ­en­tial works, and in the case of Ibn Sina, at least, impor­tant fig­ures like John Locke had def­i­nite­ly known at least about his views, if not his actu­al works.

On the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, which has been going for 13 years now, we range wide­ly over the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy but had not actu­al­ly cracked the Islam­ic world. Luck­i­ly, Ibn Sīnā is one of the favorite philoso­phers of one of our favorite guests, Peter Adam­son of King’s Col­lege Lon­don. Peter runs his own pod­cast, The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy (With­out Any Gaps), which as the name implies, cov­ers Medieval phi­los­o­phy with admirable thor­ough­ness, cov­er­ing not only Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd, but also fig­ures like al-Rāzī, al-Fārābī, Al-Ghazālī, and many oth­ers.

Peter was good enough to rec­om­mend some read­ings to intro­duce us and our lis­ten­ers to this fig­ure, some of which he actu­al­ly wrote. Because of the vol­ume, redun­dan­cy, and style of Ibn Sīnā’s writ­ings, some sort of guide to col­lect and to some degree explain pas­sages is essen­tial for get­ting a han­dle on this idio­syn­crat­ic and bril­liant thinker. He wrote at least three dif­fer­ent ver­sions of his all-encom­pass­ing sys­tem, which was influ­enced by and meant to sup­plant Aris­totle’s. In addi­tion to philosophical/theological top­ics, it includ­ed math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, psy­chol­o­gy, and more. So instead of try­ing to read a whole work cov­er­ing all that, it makes more sense to pick indi­vid­ual top­ics and then look at the var­i­ous for­mu­la­tions he gave about these.

Our two top­ics for this dis­cus­sion were a pecu­liar argu­ment for the exis­tence of God — with impor­tant impli­ca­tions for talk­ing about meta­physics more gen­er­al­ly — and an argu­ment for the imma­te­ri­al­i­ty of the soul, which like­wise tells us a lot about the way that Ibn Sīnā thought about knowl­edge and its rela­tion to the world.

The argu­ment for the exis­tence of God was lat­er called by Thomas Aquinas “the argu­ment from con­tin­gency.” It posits that things in the world don’t sim­ply exist, but that they require some­thing else to sup­port their exis­tence. This isn’t a cause is the chrono­log­i­cal sense that we talk about it: a pri­or event that gave rise to the thing. Rather, the mate­r­i­al com­po­nents of some­thing in a cer­tain arrange­ment make it con­tin­ue to exist as that thing right now; for exam­ple, a house exists because its com­po­nent wood parts exist, with nails and such hold­ing them in place. And the wood in turn has its char­ac­ter because of its physical/chemical com­po­nents, etc. If these com­po­nent caus­es weren’t in place, the thing would not exist; the thing is thus “con­tin­gent,” mean­ing it might well not have exist­ed were it not for those caus­es.

This pic­ture of the uni­verse thus includes a giant net­work of causal­i­ty, but does that net­work itself rest on any­thing? Accord­ing to Ibn Sīnā, there must be some­thing that is not con­tin­gent that holds every­thing else up. But is this thing God (in the sense that a good Mus­lim of his time would rec­og­nize it)? Ibn Sīnā then has a long series of argu­ments to show one by one that just by being “the nec­es­sary being,” this enti­ty also must be unique, must be all-pow­er­ful, gen­er­ous, and all the oth­er things one would expect God to be.

The argu­ment for the immor­tal­i­ty of the soul is per­haps Ibn Sīnā’s most famous argu­ment, often called the fly­ing or float­ing man argu­ment. It’s a thought exper­i­ment where­by you imag­ine you’ve just been cre­at­ed, but ful­ly mature, so you can think, but with no mem­o­ry, and your sens­es are inop­er­a­ble. You can’t even feel grav­i­ty or the ground under your feet (thus the “fly­ing” part). Accord­ing to Ibn Sīnā, you would still in such a sit­u­a­tion know that you exist. Since your appre­hen­sion of self did not include any part of your body (you could­n’t feel your body at all), that is sup­posed to prove that your body is not an essen­tial part of what you are.

Ibn Sīnā thought this argu­ment defin­i­tive because of his the­o­ry of knowl­edge by which if you know any­thing at all, then you know about the essen­tial com­po­nents of that thing. If you know what a tri­an­gle is, you know that it’s an abstract geo­met­ri­cal fig­ure with three straight sides. If you know what a horse is, you know that it’s a bio­log­i­cal ani­mal with a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter that you can iden­ti­fy. And to know what you are essen­tial­ly, you only need know that feel­ing of your own mind; any­thing else about that mind being asso­ci­at­ed with a par­tic­u­lar body that lives in a par­tic­u­lar part of the world and is just knowl­edge of con­tin­gent, rela­tion­al facts about your­self.

PEL hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Dylan Casey grap­ple in detail with Peter about these argu­ments, both on this record­ing and on a sec­ond part of the dis­cus­sion for those that want to hear more. To read more about these argu­ments and get the cita­tions to the texts we read for this dis­cus­sion, see the essay for this episode at partiallyexaminedlife.com. The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy pod­cast also fea­tures four mono­logues and an inter­view about Ibn Sīnā. Don’t let this gap in your knowl­edge of major fig­ures in intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry remain unfilled!

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Pret­ty Much Pop, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. He is a writer and musi­cian work­ing out of Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. Read more Open Cul­ture posts about The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life.

Image by Solomon Grundy.

In 1926, Nikola Tesla Predicts the World of 2026

in History, Technology | May 12th, 2021

Not long after Niko­la Tes­la died in 1943, the world seemed to for­get him. The first pub­lic trib­ute paid to his con­sid­er­able research and devel­op­ment in the realm of elec­tric­i­ty there­after came in 1960 with the intro­duc­tion of the tes­la, the SI unit of mag­net­ic flux den­si­ty. But in the decades since Tes­la has enjoyed an after­life as an icon of under-appre­ci­at­ed pre­science. Some of this rep­u­ta­tion is based on inter­views giv­en in the 1920s and 1930s, when he was still a celebri­ty. Take the short Col­liers mag­a­zine pro­file from 1926 in which he fore­sees the emer­gence of devices that will allow us “to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er instant­ly, irre­spec­tive of dis­tance”; a man, Tes­la pre­dicts, “will be able to car­ry one in his vest pock­et.”

This arti­cle is one source of the words spo­ken in the Voic­es of the Past video above. In it, Tes­la also speaks of a future huge­ly enriched by the “wire­less ener­gy” he spent much of his career pur­su­ing. It will pow­er “fly­ing machines” in which “we shall ride from New York to Europe in a few hours.” A house­hold’s dai­ly news­pa­per “will be print­ed ‘wire­less­ly’ in the home dur­ing the night.”

Thanks to instant world­wide com­mu­ni­ca­tion, “inter­na­tion­al bound­aries will be large­ly oblit­er­at­ed and a great step will be made toward the uni­fi­ca­tion and har­mo­nious exis­tence of the var­i­ous races inhab­it­ing the globe.” All the while, new gen­er­a­tions of ever bet­ter-edu­cat­ed women “will ignore prece­dent and star­tle civ­i­liza­tion with their progress.”

Many will applaud Tes­la’s views on the advance­ment of women, though here his think­ing takes a turn that may give pause even to the most for­ward-think­ing among us today: “The acqui­si­tion of new fields of endeav­or by women, their grad­ual usurpa­tion of lead­er­ship, will dull and final­ly dis­si­pate fem­i­nine sen­si­bil­i­ties, will choke the mater­nal instinct, so that mar­riage and moth­er­hood may become abhor­rent and human civ­i­liza­tion draw clos­er and clos­er to the per­fect civ­i­liza­tion of the bee.” The inven­tor of alter­nat­ing cur­rent has much to say in favor of api­an soci­ety, “the most high­ly orga­nized and intel­li­gent­ly coor­di­nat­ed sys­tem of any form of non­ra­tional ani­mal life.” And so why not restruc­ture human civ­i­liza­tion around a sin­gle queen?

This video also draws on a 1937 inter­view with Tes­la in Lib­er­ty mag­a­zine, which fea­tures even more dis­com­fit­ing propo­si­tions. “The only method com­pat­i­ble with our notions of civ­i­liza­tion and the race is to pre­vent the breed­ing of the unfit by ster­il­iza­tion and the delib­er­ate guid­ance of the mat­ing instinct,” Tes­la insists. “The Sec­re­tary of Hygiene or Phys­i­cal Cul­ture will be far more impor­tant in the cab­i­net of the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Sec­re­tary of War.” Despite per­haps hav­ing crossed the line into mad-sci­en­tism, Tes­la remained inci­sive about the per­sis­tent con­di­tion of humans under high tech­nol­o­gy. “We suf­fer from the derange­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion because we have not yet com­plete­ly adjust­ed our­selves to the machine age,” he claims. “The solu­tion of our prob­lems does not lie in destroy­ing but in mas­ter­ing the machine.” Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, of course, many of us would be con­tent sim­ply to gain mas­tery over the one in our vest pock­et.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of the Inter­net & Smart Phone in 1926

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest

Futur­ist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Tele­phone, Free Col­lege & Pneu­mat­ic Tubes Aplen­ty

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Hear an Ancient Chi­nese His­to­ri­an Describe The Roman Empire (and Oth­er Voic­es of the Past)

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 or on Face­book.

Stream a Massive Archive of Grateful Dead Concerts from 1965–1995

in Music | April 15th, 2021

Image by Herb Greene, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Once we’re done with it, the audi­ence can have it.” — Jer­ry Gar­cia

It so hap­pens that one of the great­est things about the Inter­net is also one of the not-so-great­est things: you hard­ly ever have to leave the house any­more. Of course, for traders and col­lec­tors of bootlegs, this has been a major boon. Obscure tapes a fan might spend years track­ing down in pre­vi­ous times can now be searched, found, and down­loaded with ease. And — as a spe­cial added bonus — their qual­i­ty won’t degrade with every copy.

For Dead­heads, espe­cial­ly, such easy online access has been crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant in main­tain­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple who love the Grate­ful Dead, when there hasn’t been a Grate­ful Dead show in years. That’s enough time for new gen­er­a­tions of Dead­heads to emerge, and to dis­cov­er and grow up with a resource their elders could only dream about: the Inter­net Archive’s Grate­ful Dead col­lec­tion, which cur­rent­ly fea­tures over 15,000 record­ings (most­ly com­plete con­certs) and con­tin­ues to expand as more are added.

Sure, it’s not quite com­pen­sa­tion for nev­er get­ting to see, and tape, the band in per­son, but these days, such a thing would prob­a­bly be impos­si­ble in any case, even if Jer­ry Gar­cia hadn’t died in 1995. (Last year, to keep fans’ spir­its up, band mem­bers Mick­ey Hart, Bob Weir, and Don­na Jean God­chaux wel­comed famous spe­cial guests on YouTube and broad­cast unre­leased filmed con­certs in the week­ly “Shake­down Stream.”) For those raised on Dead tapes, the archive must feel like com­ing home. For oth­ers, it can be a bewil­der­ing col­lec­tion of dates, venues, and loca­tions.

How to nav­i­gate the thou­sands of record­ings of the esti­mat­ed 2,200 con­certs cap­tured on tape by the band and their fans over the course of decades? A few years back, one fan made a list of the “10 Essential/Best Grate­ful Dead Shows,” all of which you can down­load and/or stream and pore over to your heart’s con­tent.

“I am not an old Dead Head, or a mem­ber of the 4‑decade club,” he admits. “In fact, I nev­er saw a show, see­ing as I was born in 2001.” It’s not his fault, but he’s entered an are­na where fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment about such things is a mat­ter of course.

1. 09–21-72, The Spec­trum, Philadel­phia, PA
2. 05–08-77, Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, Itha­ca, NY
3. 02–27-69, Fill­more West, San Fran­cis­co, CA
4. 05–02-70, Harpur Col­lege, Bing­ham­ton, NY
5. 08–27-72, Vene­ta, OR
6. 07–07-89, JFK Sta­di­um, Philadel­phia, PA
7. 05–26-72, The Strand Lyceum, Lon­don, Eng­land
8. 12–31-78, Win­ter­land Are­na, San Fran­cis­co, CA
9. 11–08-69, Fill­more The­ater, San Fran­cis­co, CA
10. 12–06-73, Cleve­land Pub­lic Hall, Cleve­land, OH
11. 06–26-74, Prov­i­dence Civic Cen­ter, Prov­i­dence, RI

See the top ten list above (includ­ing links to shows), find hon­or­able men­tions here, a short­er list by Mike Mineo here, and add your own picks in the com­ments. And con­sid­er the fact that a band who devot­ed more time to tour­ing than any­thing else “had just one Top Forty hit in thir­ty years,” Nick Paum­garten writes at The New York­er (though “not for lack of try­ing”). They more than their share of ter­ri­ble nights onstage (by their own admis­sion) but still inspire peo­ple who will nev­er see them play.

“Each tape seemed to have its own par­tic­u­lar note of decay, like the taste of the barn­yard in a wine or a cheese,” writes Paum­garten of learn­ing to savor these con­certs: “You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.” For Dead­heads, it can be hard to pick favorites, espe­cial­ly if you haven’t heard them all yet. Immerse your­self in live Dead now at the Inter­net Archive’s Grate­ful Dead Col­lec­tion here. Browse by the year of the record­ings here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

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

The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge: Part 3

in History, Media | April 6th, 2021

Edi­tor’s Note: MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kauf­man has just pub­lished The New Enlight­en­ment and the Fight to Free Knowl­edge, a book that takes a his­tor­i­cal look at the pow­er­ful forces that have pur­pose­ly crip­pled our efforts to share knowl­edge wide­ly and freely. His new work also maps out what we can do about it. Gen­er­ous­ly, Peter has made his book avail­able through Open Cul­ture by pub­lish­ing three short essays along with links to the cor­re­spond­ing freely licensed sec­tions of his book. Today, you can read his third essay “The Repub­lic of Images” (below). Find his first essay, “The Mon­ster­verse” here, his sec­ond essay “On Wikipedia, the Ency­clopédie, and the Ver­i­fi­a­bil­i­ty of Infor­ma­tion” here, and pur­chase the entire book online.

In Novem­ber 1965, after some hondling between the Carnegie Cor­po­ra­tion and the Ford Foun­da­tion, a senior exec­u­tive from Carnegie called for­mer pres­i­dent of MIT James Kil­lian with an invi­ta­tion. Would Kil­lian be inter­est­ed in assem­bling a com­mis­sion to study edu­ca­tion­al tele­vi­sion with an eye toward strength­en­ing the Amer­i­can sys­tem of learn­ing on screen, and could he start right away? Kil­lian jumped; a com­mis­sion was formed; and two years, eight meet­ings, 225 inter­views, and 92 site vis­its lat­er, the Carnegie Commission’s report comes out, a bill gets writ­ten, the bill becomes law, and Pres­i­dent John­son is sign­ing the 1967 Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion Act to cre­ate pub­lic tele­vi­sion and radio.

At the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny, John­son said, “Today, we reded­i­cate a part of the air­waves – which belong to all the peo­ple – and we ded­i­cate them for the enlight­en­ment of all the peo­ple. We must con­sid­er,” he said, “new ways to build a great net­work for knowl­edge – not just a broad­cast sys­tem, but one that employs every means of send­ing and stor­ing infor­ma­tion that the indi­vid­ual can use.”

Heady stuff.  But it gets even bet­ter:

Think of the lives that this would change:
The stu­dent in a small col­lege could tap the resources of a great uni­ver­si­ty. […]
The coun­try doc­tor get­ting help from a dis­tant lab­o­ra­to­ry or a teach­ing hos­pi­tal;
A schol­ar in Atlanta might draw instant­ly on a library in New York;
A famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspi­ra­tions into some far-off class­room, so that no child need be neglect­ed.
Even­tu­al­ly, I think this elec­tron­ic knowl­edge bank could be as valu­able as the Fed­er­al Reserve Bank.
And such a sys­tem could involve oth­er nations, too – it could involve them in a part­ner­ship to share knowl­edge and to thus enrich all mankind.
A wild and vision­ary idea? Not at all. Yesterday’s strangest dreams are today’s head­lines and change is get­ting swifter every moment.
I have already asked my advis­ers to begin to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a net­work for knowl­edge – and then to draw up a sug­gest­ed blue­print for it.

The sys­tem he was sign­ing into law, John­son said, “will be free, and it will be inde­pen­dent – and it will belong to all of our peo­ple.”

A new net­work for knowl­edge.

Imag­ine.

Fifty years lat­er, total­ly (seem­ing­ly) unre­lat­ed, then MIT pres­i­dent Charles Vest went on to speak of some­thing else, some­thing that became MIT Open Course­ware.  Togeth­er with new foun­da­tions – this time the Hewlett Foun­da­tion and the Mel­lon Foun­da­tion led the way – Vest envi­sioned “a tran­scen­dent, acces­si­ble, empow­er­ing, dynam­ic, com­mu­nal­ly con­struct­ed frame­work of open mate­ri­als and plat­forms on which much of high­er edu­ca­tion world­wide can be con­struct­ed or enhanced:”

A meta-uni­ver­si­ty that will enable, not replace, res­i­den­tial cam­pus­es, that will bring cost effi­cien­cies to insti­tu­tions through the shared devel­op­ment of edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als. That will be adap­tive, not pre­scrip­tive.  It will serve teach­ers and learn­ers in both struc­tured and infor­mal con­texts.  It will speed the prop­a­ga­tion of high-qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion and schol­ar­ship.  It will build bridges across cul­tures and polit­i­cal bound­aries. And it will be par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant to the devel­op­ing world.

Today, in our time of severe truth decay, our great epis­temic cri­sis, it might be time again to envi­sion anoth­er inter­ven­tion, for­ma­tive and trans­for­ma­tion­al as the estab­lish­ment of pub­lic broad­cast­ing, imag­i­na­tive and dar­ing as the launch of open course­ware and the open edu­ca­tion move­ment.  Indeed, some­thing as breath­tak­ing as the events above, and their own vital for­bear over a cen­tu­ry ago – the found­ing of a net­work of pub­lic libraries across Amer­i­ca and oth­er parts of the world (which also hap­pened with Andrew Carnegie’s finan­cial sup­port).

The orig­i­nal Enlight­en­ment brought us Newton’s physics, Rousseau’s polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, Linnaeus’s tax­onomies, Montesquieu’s laws, the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, the Dec­la­ra­tion of the Rights of Man – it was the Age of Rea­son.  Its founders – as we not­ed in [Parts 1 and II on] Open Cul­ture – com­prised between them­selves what became known as the great Repub­lic of Let­ters.  They were all men, though; and they all were white; while they had access to their own means and to the mean of media pro­duc­tion, and they deliv­ered new sys­tems of think­ing much of the mod­ern world is based on today, their cir­cles were lim­it­ed; their imag­i­na­tions were not our imag­i­na­tions.

Today we have a chance to do more – to take advan­tage of the cul­tures and com­mu­ni­ties that have arisen in the cen­turies and from the strug­gles since that time, to launch a new Enlight­en­ment, and to real­ize per­haps in bold­er and more secure ways this new net­work for knowl­edge.  Video, more than text now, has tak­en over the inter­net; video is a new key to our net­worked world. The com­pa­ny Cis­co Sys­tems – which makes many of the devices that con­nect us – deploys a fore­cast­ing tool it calls the Visu­al Net­work­ing Index (VNI). The lat­est VNI tells us that there were 3.4 bil­lion Inter­net users on the plan­et in 2017, almost half of the planet’s cur­rent pop­u­la­tion of 7.7 bil­lion peo­ple. By 2022, there will be 4.8 bil­lion Inter­net users: 60 per­cent of the plan­et, and more peo­ple in the world will be con­nect­ed to the Inter­net than not. By 2022, more than 28 bil­lion “devices and con­nec­tions” will be online. And – here’s the kick­er – video will make up 82 per­cent of glob­al Inter­net traf­fic. Video is dom­i­nant already. Dur­ing peak evening hours in the Amer­i­c­as, Net­flix can account for as much as 40 per­cent of down­stream Inter­net traf­fic, and Net­flix – Net­flix alone – con­sti­tutes 15 per­cent of Inter­net traf­fic world­wide. All this fore­cast­ing was com­plet­ed before the pan­dem­ic; before 125 mil­lion cas­es of Coro­na virus; before 3 mil­lion deaths world­wide; before the explo­sion of Zoom.

We are liv­ing in a video age. What will be our next media inter­ven­tion?  How do knowl­edge insti­tu­tions secure their deserved­ly cen­tral place in search and on the web?  We need to look over our rights vis-à-vis the gov­ern­ment and the giant com­pa­nies that increas­ing­ly con­trol our Inter­net; we need to look at the grow­ing pow­er we have to con­tribute to access to knowl­edge and share our wealth espe­cial­ly in the online Com­mons; we need to make sure that the pub­lic record, espe­cial­ly video (and espe­cial­ly video of all the lies and crimes, and of all the out­ra­geous false­hoods lead­ers cir­cu­late about COVID) is all archived and pre­served. We need to strength­en how much of the net­work we own and con­trol.

What’s impor­tant is that we have begun to reach toward the point where there is equi­ty in the lead­er­ship of our knowl­edge insti­tu­tions. No longer are white men and only white men in charge of the Library of Con­gress, for exam­ple, or the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion, or, and thus by exten­sion, of our new Enlight­en­ment. New and diverse study and action groups are being formed specif­i­cal­ly to address our infor­ma­tion dis­or­der. But many more of our lead­ing knowl­edge insti­tu­tions – and, crit­i­cal­ly, foun­da­tions and fund­ing agen­cies again – need to lead this work.  This is a 20^th-anniver­sary year for MIT Open Course­Ware, for Wikipedia, and for Cre­ative Com­mons; indeed, MIT OCW starts to cel­e­brate its birth­day this month. Many oth­er like-mind­ed pro­gres­sive insti­tu­tions and their sup­port­ers are on the move. That net­work for knowl­edge is com­ing again: this time, our new Enlight­en­ment moment will belong to all of us.

Peter B. Kauf­man works at MIT Open Learn­ing and is the author of The New Enlight­en­ment and the Fight to Free Knowl­edge. 

Meet Les Rallizes Dénudés, the Mysterious Japanese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influence Is Everywhere

in Music | April 1st, 2021

For those young peo­ple – includ­ing you – who live this mod­ern ago­nis­ing ado­les­cence and who are want­i­ng the true rad­i­cal music, I sin­cere­ly wish the dia­logue accom­pa­nied by pierc­ing pain will be born and fill this recital hall.

– text from late 60s’ Les Ral­lizes Dénudés con­cert fly­ers

In Span­ish writer Car­los Ruiz Zafón’s best­selling nov­el The Shad­ow of the Wind, nar­ra­tor Daniel Sem­pere spends his ado­les­cence try­ing to solve the mys­tery of an obscure dead nov­el­ist. Fans of the book might see Daniel’s detec­tive sto­ry in Grayson Haver Currin’s quest to learn more about Japan­ese psych rock band Les Ral­lizes Dénudés and its elu­sive founder Takashi Mizu­tani. The band has inspired devo­tion and end­less fas­ci­na­tion among their small cult fol­low­ing. But Currin’s inves­ti­ga­tions met with one after anoth­er dead end. Les Ral­lizes Dénudés is, he writes, “a band that’s exist­ed behind a veil of secre­cy for so long that it’s almost impos­si­ble to tell where facts end and where fan­ta­sy begins.”

It does not help that many people’s first and last encounter with Les Ral­lizes Dénudés was Julian Cope’s 2007 Japrock­sam­pler, a gen­er­ous, even ency­clo­pe­dic intro­duc­tion to post-war Japan­ese rock and roll. The book played “a piv­otal role in expos­ing Amer­i­can and Eng­lish audi­ences to Les Ral­lizes Dénudés’ tantric gui­tar shrieks,” yet its mea­ger chap­ter on the band is appar­ent­ly rid­dled with inac­cu­ra­cies, includ­ing the claim that the band nev­er record­ed in the stu­dio in their entire 29-year exis­tence. They did, in 1991, 24 years after they began play­ing stages in Tokyo.

So how did any­one hear about them if they did­n’t make or pro­mote albums? “Through bootlegs, bootlegs and more bootlegs,” Cope wrote. Here he does not exag­ger­ate, but even where he does, “it’s in the ser­vice of truth,” Dan­ger­ous Minds argues, going on to sum­ma­rize the “skele­tal” biog­ra­phy Cope sketch­es out for the band:

Takashi Mizu­tani formed the group as a col­lege stu­dent in the ‘60s, when, Cope writes, French cul­ture still found devo­tees among post­war Japan­ese youth look­ing for a rev­o­lu­tion­ary alter­na­tive to Uncle Sam. That means: Cool for these guys was ice cold. Dead­pan as the Vel­vets or Space­men 3, Mizu­tani and his band­mates iden­ti­fied with the loud­est, dark­est and most destruc­tive aspects of psych-rock.

Les Ral­lizes Dénudés is leg­endary for good rea­son, as you can learn in the Band­splain­ing video at the top. One thing we do know about them is that a for­mer bassist appar­ent­ly hijacked an air­plane for the Japan­ese Red Army Fac­tion (then found asy­lum in North Korea), but “it’s actu­al­ly not the most inter­est­ing thing about them.” Those who already know a cer­tain kind of psy­che­del­ic rock may hear the dark, echoey drone of White Light/White Heat-era Vel­vet Under­ground and lat­er bands like Bri­an Jon­estown Mas­sacre or Moon Duo, as well as the No Wave noise rock of Son­ic Youth and hazy shoegaze of My Bloody Valen­tine.

The band’s echo­ing vocals and swirling, wail­ing peals of fuzzed-out gui­tar “fore­shad­owed the next five decades of under­ground rock,” the Band­splain­ing video notes. This seems to be the case whether the musi­cians inspired by Les Ral­lizes Dénudés had ever heard their music direct­ly. Japan­ese under­ground music “only began reach­ing West­ern ears in the ear­ly 90s,” writes Alan Cum­mings, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don pro­fes­sor of Japan­ese trans­la­tion, dra­ma, cul­ture, and his­to­ry, and a fore­most West­ern author­i­ty on Japan­ese psych rock. When the music first reached lis­ten­ers out­side Japan, how­ev­er, it wasn’t Les Ral­lizes Dénudés they first heard.

Cum­mings, who saw Les Ral­lizes Dénudés live in Japan, wrote “what might be the first Eng­lish piece to ever men­tion the band” ten years lat­er in 1999 in a Wire arti­cle on under­ground Japan­ese rock. “What is or was a ral­lize, and why it should be naked,” he remarked of their non­sen­si­cal French name, “remains unknown,” like most every­thing else about them. This was by design. As one musi­cian liv­ing in Tokyo put it, their ubiq­ui­tous obscu­ri­ty was “part of the Les Ral­lizes Dénudés strat­e­gy.”

You start hear­ing about this band, and once you know what their music sounds like, you hear their influ­ence every­where. Yet they’re not any­where. They’re ether. They’re smoke.

Les Ral­lizes Dénudés are so obscure in Japan, they don’t receive a men­tion in the fol­low-up arti­cle Cum­mings wrote for the Wire in 2013, in which he sur­veys the under­ground Japan­ese rock scene once again. He also admits to being part of a mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of Japan­ese sub­cul­tures and adopt­ing an atti­tude of “fan­ta­sy and pro­jec­tion” that he traces back to the 19th cen­tu­ry. In the case of Les Ral­lizes Dénudés, how­ev­er, fan­ta­sy and pro­jec­tion are often all we have to work with in the sto­ry of a band whose sound is every­where but whose for­mer asso­ciates and mem­bers, includ­ing Mizu­tani him­self, don’t wish to be found. As Cur­rin writes, “Peo­ple not only talk about Mizu­tani as a folk leg­end; they talk about peo­ple who sim­ply know him as such.”

Thanks to YouTube and the preva­lence of cam­corders at Les Ral­lizes Dénudés shows, hours of footage of the band per­form­ing live can be viewed online, avail­able to peo­ple out­side the small com­mu­ni­ty of cas­sette and VHS tapers and traders who kept their leg­end alive. See some of that footage above, includ­ing an hour and a half long “doc­u­men­tary” that con­sists of noth­ing but the band’s hyp­not­ic jams.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Ambi­ent Music of Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra, the Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese Com­pos­er

Zam­rock: An Intro­duc­tion to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psy­che­del­ic Rock Scene

Hear Enchant­i­ng Mix­es of Japan­ese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Dis­co, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s

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