The Lost Scenes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons Are Being Controversially Restored with AI
When television mogul Ted Turner died earlier this month, it gave cinephiles occasion to remember his brief but high-profile foray into colorization. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, he commissioned for broadcast colorized versions of more than 100 classic movies, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to It’s a Wonderful Life to Casablanca. It was only thanks to a clause specifying a black-and-white picture in Orson Welles’ contract with RKO that Citizen Kane never got the full Turner treatment. That blessedly failed project is now being invoked again in comparison with the startup Fable Studio’s enterprise, underway even now, of using artificial intelligence to restore Welles’ sophomore feature The Magnificent Ambersons, which was notoriously mutilated by the studio before its release in 1942.
The recut happened in Welles’ absence. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he received what sounds like something more than a request from Nelson Rockefeller, then the government’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, to go to Brazil and shoot a documentary about Carnival in the interest of “Pan-American unity.” Due to a disastrous test screening, as Welles explains in the clip from a 1982 Arena broadcast above, “it was thought by everyone in Hollywood, while I was in South America, that it was too ‘downbeat,’ a famous Hollywood word at the time.” Yet the entire film, to his mind, was about the downfall of the titular family, who lose their wealth and prestige as the society they knew slips out from underneath them during the transformations of the early automobile age: not a widely resonant theme, it seems, in mid-twentieth-century America.
“They destroyed Ambersons,” Welles says of the RKO’s recut, “and the picture itself destroyed me.” Yet even the Bowdlerized version has more than a few admirers. Among them is Edward Saatchi, the movie-loving advertising-company scion behind this AI restoration and/or reconstruction project. “His Amazon-backed generative‑A.I. platform, Showrunner, would feed off the data from the extant version of the film to prompt entire new scenes, based on voluminous production materials that survived, including scripts, photographs, and detailed notes,” writes the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman. “For emotional authenticity, Fable would first shoot live actors, then overlay the footage with the digitized voices and likenesses of the long-dead cast members.” The result has the potential to be unsettling on several levels at once.
As Schulman emphasizes, the film’s concern with the human cost of a technological revolution is hardly lost on Saatchi. “With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization,” says Joseph Cotten’s character, an early automobile investor, in a scene from the studio cut. “It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls — I’m not sure. But automobiles have come, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring.” Even the human mind, he speculates, will be “changed in subtle ways,” a process clearly in effect by the forties. As far as the consequences of AI, we can already see how it’s begun changing the thinking of its early adopters. Saatchi himself displays an ambivalence about the technology, describing it as “potentially the end of human creativity” but also going full-speed-ahead with his unauthorized work on The Magnificent Ambersons — which, at the very least, he’s keeping in black-and-white.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)
Image via Wikimedia Commons
A number of years ago, in a post on the pioneering composer of the original Doctor Who theme, we wrote that “the early era of experimental electronic music belonged to Delia Derbyshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCartney a version of “Yesterday” with an electronic backing in place of strings—helped invent the early electronic music of the sixties through her work with the Radiophonic Workshop, the sound effects laboratory of the BBC. She went on to form one of the most influential, if largely obscure, electronic acts of the decade, White Noise. And yet, calling the early eras of electronic music hers is an exaggeration. Of course her many collaborators deserve mention, as well as musicians like Bruce Haack, Pierre Henry, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and so many others. But what gets almost completely left out of many histories of electronic music, as with so many other histories, is the prominent role so many women besides Derbyshire played in the development of the sounds we now hear around us all the time.
In recognition of this fact, musician, DJ, and “escaped housewife/schoolteacher” Barbara Golden devoted two episodes of her KPFA radio program “Crack o’ Dawn” to women in electronic music, once in 2010 and again in 2013. She shares each broadcast with co-host Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), and in each segment, the two banter in casual radio show style, offering history and context for each musician and composer. Highlighted on Ubu’s former Twitter stream, the first show, “Women in Electronic Music 1938–1982 Part 1” (above) gives Derbyshire her due, with three tracks from her, including the Doctor Who theme.
It also includes music from twenty one other composers, beginning with Clara Rockmore, a refiner and popularizer of the theremin, that weird instrument designed to simulate a high, tremulous human voice. Also featured is Wendy Carlos’s “Timesteps,” an original piece from her A Clockwork Orange score.
The second show, above, fills in several gaps in the original broadcast and “could easily be six hours” says co-host Leidecker, given the sheer amount of electronic music out there composed and recorded by women over the past seventy years. This show includes one of our host Golden’s own compositions, “Melody Sumner Carnahan,” as well as music from Laurie Anderson and musique concrete composer Doris Hays. These two broadcasts alone cover an enormous range of stylistic and technological ground, but for even more discographical history of women in electronic music, see the playlist below, compiled by “Nerdgirl” Antye Greie-Ripatti. Commissioned by Club Transmediale Berlin, the mix includes such well-known names as Yoko Ono, Bjork, and M.I.A., as well as foremothers Derbyshire and Carlos, and dozens more.
In lieu of the radio-show chatter of Golden and Leidecker, we have Greie-Ripatti’s post detailing each artist’s time period, country of origin, and contributions to electronic music history. Many of the composers represented here worked for major radio and film studios, scored feature films (like 1956’s Forbidden Planet), invented and innovated new instruments and techniques, wrote for orchestras, and passed on their knowledge as educators and producers. Greie-Ripatti’s page quotes a Danish electronic producer and performer saying “there is a lot of women in electronic music… invisible women.” Thanks to efforts like hers and Golden’s, these pioneering creators need no longer go unseen or, more importantly, unheard.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art
With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we’ll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy industrialists often decided what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, however, haute cuisine has always relied on the patronage of wealthy donors—or diners. It can be marketed in premade pieces, sold in cookbooks, and made to look easy on TV, but for reasons both cultural and practical, given the nature of food, an exquisitely-prepared dish can only be made accessible to a select few.
Still, we would be mistaken, suggested Futurist poet and theorist F.T. Marinetti (1876–1944), should we neglect to see cooking as an art form akin to all the others in its moral and intellectual influence on us. While hardly the first or the last artist to publish a cookbook, Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook seems at first glance deadly, even aggressively, serious, lacking the whimsy, impractical weirdness, and surrealist art of Salvador Dali’s Les Diners de Gala, for example, or the eclectic wistfulness of the MoMA’s Artist’s Cookbook.
Just as he had sought with his earlier Futurist Manifesto to revolutionize art, Marinetti intended his cookbook to foment a “revolution of cuisine,” as Alex Revelli Sorini and Susanna Cutini point out. You might even call it an act of war when it came to certain staples of Italian eating, like pasta, which he thought responsible for “sluggishness, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity, and neutralism” (anticipating scads of low and no-carb diets to come).
Believing that people “think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink,” Marinetti formulated strict rules not only for the preparation of food, but also the serving and eating of it, going so far as to call for abolishing the knife and fork. A short excerpt from his introduction shows him applying to food the techno-romanticism of his Futurist theory—an ethos taken up by Benito Mussolini, whom Marinetti supported:
The Futurist culinary revolution … has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.
In hindsight, the fascist overtones in Marinetti’s language seem glaring. In 1932, when the Futurist Cookbook was published, his Futurism seemed like a much-needed “jolt to all the practical and intellectual activities,” note Sorini and Cutini. “The subject [of cooking] needed a good shake to reawaken its spirit.” And that’s just what it got. The Futurist Cookbook acted as “a preview of Italian-style Nouvelle Cuisine,” with such innovations as “additives and preservatives added to food, or using technological tools in the kitchen to mince, pulverize, and emulsify.”
Yet, for all the high seriousness with which Marinetti seems to treat his subject, “what the media missed” at the time, writes Maria Popova, “was that the cookbook was arguably the greatest artistic prank of the twentieth century.” In an introduction to the 1989 edition, British journalist and historian Lesley Chamberlain called the Futurist Cookbook “a serious joke, revolutionary in the first instance because it overturned with ribald laughter everything ‘food’ and ‘cookbooks’ held sacred.” Marinetti first swept away tradition in favor of creative dining events the Futurists called “aerobanquets,” such as one in Bologna in 1931 with a table shaped like an airplane and dishes called “spicy airport” (Olivier salad) and “rising thunder” (orange risotto). Lambrusco wine was served in gas cans.
It’s performance art worthy of Dali’s bizarre costumed dinner parties, but fueled by a genuine desire to revolutionize food, if not the actual eating of it, by “bringing together elements separated by biases that have no true foundation.” So remarked French chef Jules Maincave, a 1914 convert to Futurism and inspiration for what Marinetti calls “flexible flavorful combinations.” See several such recipes excerpted from the Futurist Cookbook at Brain Pickings, read the full book in Italian here, and, just below, see Marinetti’s rules for the perfect meal, first published in 1930 as the “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine.”
Futurist cuisine and rules for the perfect lunch
1. An original harmony of the table (crystal ware, crockery and glassware, decoration) with the flavors and colors of the dishes.
2. Utter originality in the dishes.
3. The invention of flexible flavorful combinations (edible plastic complex), whose original harmony of form and color feeds the eyes and awakens the imagination before tempting the lips.
4. The abolition of knife and fork in favor of flexible combinations that can deliver prelabial tactile enjoyment.
5. The use of the art of perfumery to enhance taste. Each dish must be preceded by a perfume that will be removed from the table using fans.
6. A limited use of music in the intervals between one dish and the next, so as not to distract the sensitivity of the tongue and the palate and serves to eliminate the flavor enjoyed, restoring a clean slate for tasting.
7. Abolition of oratory and politics at the table.
8. Measured use of poetry and music as unexpected ingredients to awaken the flavors of a given dish with their sensual intensity.
9. Rapid presentation between one dish and the next, before the nostrils and the eyes of the dinner guests, of the few dishes that they will eat, and others that they will not, to facilitate curiosity, surprise, and imagination.
10. The creation of simultaneous and changing morsels that contain ten, twenty flavors to be tasted in a few moments. These morsels will also serve the analog function […] of summarizing an entire area of life, the course of a love affair, or an entire voyage to the Far East.
11. A supply of scientific tools in the kitchen: ozone machines that will impart the scent of ozone to liquids and dishes; lamps to emit ultraviolet rays; electrolyzers to decompose extracted juices etc. in order to use a known product to achieve a new product with new properties; colloidal mills that can be used to pulverize flours, dried fruit and nuts, spices, etc.; distilling devices using ordinary pressure or a vacuum, centrifuge autoclaves, dialysis machines.
The use of this equipment must be scientific, avoiding the error of allowing dishes to cook in steam pressure cookers, which leads to the destruction of active substances (vitamins, etc.) due to the high temperatures. Chemical indicators will check if the sauce is acidic or basic and will serve to correct any errors that may occur: lack of salt, too much vinegar, too much pepper, too sweet.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...RIP Gladys Mae West, the Pioneering Black Mathematician Who Helped Lay the Foundation for GPS
Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use each and every day. Hers was a distinctively American life, in more ways than one. Seeking an escape from the agricultural labor she’d already gotten to know all too well, she won a scholarship to Virginia State College by becoming her high school class valedictorian; after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first distinguished herself there by verifying the accuracy of bombing tables with a hand calculator, and from there moved on up to the computer programming team.
This was the early nineteen-sixties, when programming a computer meant not coding, but laboriously feeding punch cards into an enormous mainframe. West and her colleagues used IBM’s first transistorized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest computer in the world.
It cost an equivalent of $81,860,000 in today’s dollars, but no other computer had the power to handle the project of calculating the precise shape of Earth as affected by gravity and the nature of the oceans. About a decade later, another team of government scientists made use of those very same calculations when putting together the model employed by the World Geodetic System, which GPS satellites still use today. Hence the tendency of celebratory obituaries to underscore the point that without West’s work, GPS wouldn’t be possible.
Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such mathematicians working for the Navy at Dahlgren. Stories like hers have drawn much greater public interest since the success of Hidden Figures, the Hollywood adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book about the black female mathematicians at NASA during the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West’s own children didn’t know the importance of the once-classified work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she provided that information on a biographical form she filled out for an event hosted by her college sorority, did it become public. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebrity, sought out by academics and journalists eager to understand the contributions of another no-longer-hidden figure. But to their questions about her own GPS use, she reportedly answered that she preferred a good old-fashioned paper map.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Can Genius Be Taught? The Polgár Sisters and the Experiment That Put the Question to the Test
As any new parent soon finds out, there exists a robust market for products, services, and media that promise to boost a child’s intelligence. Some of these offerings come as close as legally possible to holding out the promise of putting any tot on the path to genius, brazenly begging the question of whether it’s possible to raise a genius in the first place. Still, the efforts parents have deliberately made in that direction have occasionally produced notable results, from epochal figures like Mozart or John Stuart Mill to the promising-mathematician-turned-streetcar-transfer-obsessed-recluse William Sidis. More recently came the Polgár sisters, who were successfully raised to become some of the greatest female chess players in history.
Having studied the nature of intelligence at university, their father László got it in his head that, since most geniuses started learning their subjects intensively and early, parents could cultivate genius-level performance in their children by directing that learning process themselves. He sought out a wife both intellectually promising and willing to devote herself to testing this hypothesis. Together they went on to father three daughters, putting them through a rigorous, custom-made education oriented toward chess mastery. Chess became the project’s central subject in large part because of its sheer objectivity, all the better for László Polgár to measure the results of this domestic experiment.
Nor could it have hurt, given the importance of retaining the interest of children, that chess was a game — and one with evocative toy-like pieces — that offers immediate feedback and feelings of accomplishment. For his daughters, Polgár has emphasized, learning involved none of the drudgery and busywork of school. “A child does not like only play: for them it is also enjoyable to acquire information and solve problems,” he writes in his book Raise a Genius! “A child’s work can also be enjoyable; so can learning, if it is sufficiently motivating, and if it means a constant supply of problems to solve that are appropriate for the level of the child’s needs. A child does not need play separate from work, but meaningful action.”
The proof of Polgár’s theories is in the pudding — or at any rate, in the ratings. All three of his daughters became elite chess players. Sofia, the middle one, became the sixth-strongest female player in the world; Susan, the eldest, the top-ranked female player in the world; Judit, the youngest, the strongest female chess player of all time. This despite the fact that their father was an unexceptional chess player, and their mother not a chess player at all. Some eagerly take the story of the Polgár sisters as a vindication of nurture over nature; others, scientific researchers included, argue that it only shows that practice is a necessary condition for this kind of genius, not a sufficient one. For my part, having kept an eye on a pair of infant twins while writing this, I’d be happy if my own kids could just master holding on to their bottles.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More
Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears discussed every day, serious Disney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s original name was Dippy Dawg. But how many of the non-obsessive know that Mickey’s faithful pet Pluto was first called Rover? (We pass over in dignified silence the quasi-philosophical question of why the former dog is humanoid and the latter isn’t.) It is Rover, as distinct from Pluto, who passes into the public domain this new year, one of a cast of now-liberated characters including Blondie and Dagwood as well as Betty Boop — who, upon making her debut in Fleischer Studios’ Dizzy Dishes of 1930, has a somewhat canoid appearance herself. You can see them all in the video above from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, with much more information available in their blog post marking this year’s “Public Domain Day.”
The year 1930, write the Center’s Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, was one “of detectives, jazz, speakeasies, and iconic characters stepping onto the cultural stage — many of whom have been locked behind copyright for nearly a century.”
Novels that come available this year include William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage; among the films are Lewis Milestone’s Best Picture-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, Victor Heerman’s Marx Brothers picture Animal Crackers, and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or. In music, compositions like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You” by the Gershwin Brothers as well as recordings like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by Marian Anderson and “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra have also, at long last, gone public.
Reflection on some of these works themselves suggests something about the importance of the public domain. With the title of Cakes and Ale, another book in this year’s crop, Somerset Maugham makes reference to “a classic public domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”; so, for that matter, does Faulkner, given that the line “as I lay dying” comes from the Odyssey. “To tell new stories, we draw from older ones,” write Jenkins and Boyle. “One work of art inspires another — that is how the public domain feeds creativity.” Today, we’re free to take explicit inspiration for our own work from Nancy Drew, “Just a Gigolo,” Blondie, Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, Hitchcock’s Murder!, and much else besides. And by all means use Rover, but if you also want to bring in Dippy Dawg, you’re going to have to wait until 2028.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Top 10 Alternative Christmas Movie Lists: Horror, Action, Comedy & More
Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That once-contrarian categorization has increasingly been accepted over the past couple of decades, at least since an editor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTiernan’s sturdy piece of one-building eighties Hollywood action may have displaced It’s a Wonderful Life as a holiday home-video tradition in certain households. But it’s also stoked a broader desire for ever more alternative Christmas movies with subtle, even subversive holiday elements. If you, too, can’t handle yet another viewing of Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story, or Home Alone this year, have a look at the top ten lists compiled in these four videos, which offer a selection of films beyond — sometimes well beyond — the established seasonal canon.
These selections come from a variety of genres, including the superhero picture: if you haven’t seen Batman Returns in a few decades, you may have forgotten how thoroughly Tim Burton saturates it with Christmas imagery, albeit of a kind suited to the dank, menacing Gotham City. Those who want to crank up the darkness further still would do well to put on the Canadian sorority-house slasher film Black Christmas, which also appears on more than one of these lists.
Joe Dante’s Yuletide-set Gremlins contains much higher-budget spectacles of destruction, albeit comedic ones; the humor of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, another elaborate mid-eighties auteur project, runs to the dystopian, a sensibility certainly present in the holiday season itself, if seldom treated with such grotesque vividness.
The work of no single professional makes these alternative Christmas movie lists more often than Shane Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon (with Die Hard, the makings of a holiday double bill if ever there was one) and The Long Kiss Goodnight, as well as the writer-director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and The Nice Guys. That all of those pictures are set at Christmastime makes them feel — no matter how heightened, fantastical, or visual effects-saturated they may be — palpably connected to our own reality. It also tends to intensify the drama: as Black remarked in one interview, “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives.” Which hardly means, of course, that it can’t be entertaining.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Why Overconfidence Is Our Most Dangerous Cognitive Bias
In the two-thousands, the magician-comedians Penn and Teller hosted a television series called Bullshit! In it, they took on a variety of cultural phenomena they regarded as worthy of the titular epithet, from ESP to Area 51, exorcism to creationism, feng shui to haute cuisine. Their sardonic arguments were enriched by clips of assorted interviewees —speaking in defense of the topic of the day. Penn once addressed the viewers, saying that we might wonder why anyone agrees to come on the show, given how they must know it will make them come off. But everyone, he explained, confidently believes that their own ideas are the correct ones.
That episode came right to mind while watching the new Veritasium video above, which deals with the phenomenon of overconfidence. Like the oft-cited 93 percent of Americans who believe themselves better drivers than the median, we all fall victim to that affliction at one time or another, to one degree or another; the more interesting matter under investigation is why that should be so.
One can always point to what T. S. Eliot called “the endless struggle to think well of themselves”: wanting to believe that we know it all, we take pains to present ourselves as if we do. But as explained by the professors interviewed here, Carnegie Mellon’s Baruch Fischhoff and Berkeley’s Don A. Moore (author of Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely), the research has also revealed other potential factors in play.
One important candidate is, as ever, stupidity. Much has been made of the Dunning-Kruger effect, previously featured here on Open Culture, which holds that the less competent people are at a task, the more confident they tend to be about their ability to perform it. That would seem to accord with much of our everyday experience, but we should also consider the role played by the basic cognitive limitations that apply to us all. Our brains can only process so much at once, and when they come up against capacity, they default to simplified, and often too-simplified, versions of the problem before them. It all becomes more difficult if we’re insulated from direct, objective feedback, a condition that often results from the kind of success and esteem that can be achieved by projecting — you guessed it — confidence.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Metal Being Played on Punk’s Hallowed Grounds
Punk rock and heavy metal were two genres that evolved over the ‘70s, but seemed to run parallel to each other, despite sharing common fashion, sounds, and attitudes. But then there are moments in history, where everybody plays together in the same sandbox. For example, the above remastered audio, which captures the Australian band AC/DC on their first American tour, playing New York’s CBGB, synonymous now with punk and new wave music.
The date is August 24, 1977, and AC/DC were on a cross-country trip that had taken in both club dates and arenas, where they supported—yes, hard to believe, I know—REO Speedwagon. Their album Let There Be Rock had just dropped in June. The band would be in the States until the winter.
This CBGB gig finds them on the same bill as Talking Heads and the Dead Boys, according to a poster from the time. And while there’s no video for this show, you can find a few photos that document the concert here. You can feel the muggy New York summer in these photos, but also the excitement of an unforgettable gig.
At 15 minutes, the set is short, but still three minutes longer than the Ramones’ first set at the same club three years earlier. That’s pretty metal, man.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.
Read More...A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Movements of the Heavens
Rings with a discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…)
Victorians prevented their most closely kept secrets—illicit love letters, perhaps? Last wills and testaments?—from falling into the wrong hands by wearing the keys to the boxes containing these items concealed in signet rings and other statement-type pieces.
A tiny concealed blade could be lethal on the finger of a skilled (and no doubt, beautiful) assassin. These days, they might be used to collect a bit of one’s attacker’s DNA.
Enter the fictional world of James Bond, and you’ll find a number of handy dandy spy rings including one that doubles as a camera, and another capable of shattering bulletproof glass with a single twist.
Armillary sphere rings like the ones in the British Museum’s collection and the Swedish Historical Museum (top) serve a more benign purpose. Folded together, the two-part outer hoop and three interior hoops give the illusion of a simple gold band. Slipped off the wearer’s finger, they can fan out into a physical model of celestial longitude and latitude.
Art historian Jessica Stewart writes that in the 17th century, rings such as the above specimen were “used by astronomers to study and make calculations. These pieces of jewelry were considered tokens of knowledge. Inscriptions or zodiac symbols were often used as decorative elements on the bands.”
The armillary sphere rings in the British Museum’s collection are made of a soft high-alloy gold.
Jewelry-loving modern astronomers seeking an old school finger-based calculation tool that really works can order armillary sphere rings from Brooklyn-based designer Black Adept.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist in New York City.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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