The History of Philosophy Visualized in an Interactive Timeline
The connections we make between various philosophers and philosophical schools are often connections that have already been made for us by teachers and scholars on our paths through higher education. Many of us who have taken a philosophy class or two leave it at that, content we’ve got the gist of things and that specialists can parse the details perfectly well without us. But there are those curious people who continue to read abstruse and difficult philosophy after their intro classes are over, for the sheer, perverse joy of it, or from a burning desire to understand truth, beauty, justice, or whatever.
And then there are those who embark on a thorough self-guided tour of Western philosophical history, attempting, without the aid of university departments and faddish interpretive schemes, to weave the disparate strains of thought together. One such autodidact and academic outsider, designer Deniz Cem Önduygu of Istanbul, has combined an encyclopedic mind with a talent for rigorous outline organization to produce an interactive timeline of the history of philosophical ideas. It is “a purely personal project,” he writes, “that I’m doing in my own time, with my limited knowledge, for myself.”
Önduygu shares the project not to show off his learning but, more humbly, to “get feedback and to make it accessible to those who are interested.” It may be precious few people who have both the time and inclination to teach themselves the history of philosophy, but if you are one of them, this incredibly dense infographic is as good a place to start as any, and while it may appear intimidating at first glance, its menu in the upper right corner allows users to zero in on specific thinkers and schools, and to confine themselves to smaller, more manageable areas of the whole.
As for the timeline itself, “viewers can zoom in and out,” notes Daily Nous, “and see philosophers listed in chronological order, with ideas they’re associated with listed beneath them. These ideas, in turn, are connected by green lines to similar or supporting ideas elsewhere on the timeline, and connected by red lines to opposing or refuting ideas elsewhere on the timeline. If you hover your mouse cursor over a single idea, all but it and its connected ideas fade. You can then click on the idea to bring those connected ideas closer for ease of viewing.”
The designer admits this is a “never-ending work in progress” and mainly a source for reminding himself of the main arguments of the philosophers he’s surveyed. The major sources for his timeline are “Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy and Thomas Baldwin’s Contemporary Philosophy, along with other works for specific philosophers and ideas.” But many of the connections Önduygu draws in this extensive web of green and red are his own.
He explains his rationale here, noting, “The lines here do not always depict a direct transfer between two people; I think of them as tracing the development of an idea throughout time within our collective conception.” Spend some more time with this impressive project at the History of Philosophy Summarized & Visualized (the site works best in Chrome), and feel free to get in touch with its creator with constructive criticism. He welcomes feedback and is open to opposing ideas, as every lifelong learner should be.
via Daily Nous
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue
Among a number of influential women in electronic music whom we’ve profiled here before, French avant-garde composer Eliane Radigue stands out for her single-minded dedication to “a certain music that I wished to make,” as she says in the video portrait above, “this particular music and no other.” Her compositions are haunting and meditative, “prefiguring the concept of ‘deep listening,’ expressed by Pauline Oliveros some years later,” as Red Bull Academy notes in an extensive profile of Radigue.
Using feedback, tape loops, field recordings, and, beginning in the 70s, the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer, Radigue “developed soundscapes… an interweaving of electronic drones, subsequently assimilated to what would later be called drone music.” But she has rejected the term as too static, stressing the variations and constant change in her music:
In Radigue’s work, sounds interact with each other like the cells of an organism, progressing in glissando in an extremely slow and subtle way. “I had found my own vocabulary. For me, maintaining the sound did not interest me as such; it was primarily a means to bring out the overtones, harmonics and subharmonics. This is what made it possible to develop this inner richness of sound.”
Radigue seems particularly self-assured, possessed of an intuitive sense of her work’s directions from the beginning. “I cannot start a piece if I don’t have an idea of what it would become, but what I would call the spirit,” she says in an interview with Electronic Beats.
“The spirit of what I wanted to do should be there… And I keep that spirit, that theme in mind, quite often several months before I start to do something. So, when I come to make the sounds it’s already there.”
But her career took many turns on a path through the compositional centers of mid-century avant-garde music. After studying traditional music theory as a child, she left her home in Nice at 19 and married the artist Arman. She was swept into an “exciting bohemian life” that would soon take her, in 1955, into the orbit of musique concrete pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.
While working as an intern for the composers (“If I claimed to be more, I don’t think they would have accepted me, because they were both the damndest machos!”), Radigue learned their methods and collaborated on their compositions. In 1967, she worked with Henry on L’Apocalypse de Jean, a piece designed to last for 24 hours. She ended her (unpaid) apprenticeship that year and began focusing on her own work, like Vice Versa (1970, excerpted further up) and Geerlriandre (1972, above) and Triptych (1978, below).
You can hear more of Radigue’s work at Ubuweb, including a more recent synthesizer piece recorded in 1992, as well as a 1980 interview for program The Morning Concert with Charles Amirkhanian. That same year, she became a convert to Tibetan Buddhism, and her work—like the Adnos series, below—was inspired by the religion’s history, her own meditation practice, and texts like the Bardo Thodol.
As the pulsing, droning, humming compositions she created throughout the late 20th century have become integral to the sound of the 21st, Radique has moved on, since 2001, to writing work for acoustic instruments. She made her last electronic piece, I’lle-Re-sonante, in 2000. The move came in part from requests she received from musicians, but it also represents a deliberate turn away from modern technology. “There’s always something missing with digital,” she says, even if it is somehow cleaner and clearer.”
Radigue has always favored the absorption of analogue sound, intent on taming its unpredictability as a meditator tames the darting, leaping, busy mind. “My music is always changing,” she says, “It comes from the first access I had to electronic sounds which was the wild sounds coming from feedback,” the noise of a microphone and a speaker getting too close to each other. “If you find the right place, which is very narrow, then you can move it very slowly and it changes but that requires a lot of patience.”
The word could define her entire approach, one radically opposed to instant gratification and quick fixes, focused singularly on outcomes while also fully present for the process.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Brian Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Soundtracks
Think of “interviewing Brian Eno” (listen to it here) like a piece of his generative music. Yes, the man has no problems talking and actually encourages it. But input the same old questions about those same four albums (you know them, right?) and you get the same old answers as output. Feed in a completely different subject–like his favorite film soundtracks–and lo and behold, a very intriguing 80 minutes follows.
That’s what happened when Hugh Cornwell (lead vocalist of The Stranglers) interviewed Mr. Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno–that’s Brian to you–in 2013 for his short-lived internet radio show on film.
Eno has always had an interest in film. As he mentions in the second half of the show, he produced his 1976/78 album Music for Films not for any specific film, but in the hopes that they would be used for soundtracks in the future. Also, he hoped that the descriptive titles–“Alternative 3,” “Patrolling Wire Borders”–and the evocative music would lead listeners to create films in their heads. Since then every track has been used at least once, and documentarians like Adam Curtis have used Eno to great effect.
The only track, he reveals, on that album to be written for a film was closer “Final Sunset” put to great, transcendent use in Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastiane.
But if you think Eno might choose similar ambient tracks or instrumentals during the rest of the interview, you’re in for a surprise.
As he grew up, Eno had no exposure to what was “cool” and what was not. And that led to an ear that heard things stripped of cultural context. When he plays a track from the musical Oklahoma called “The Farmer and the Cowboy,” we might just be able to put aside our memories of high school productions and hear the weird, humorous and very exciting vocal arrangement underneath. Similarly, despite not being the biggest fan of Elvis Presley at the time (“I was a snob,” Eno says), he selects this jaunty pop number “Didja Ever” from G.I. Blues. “One of the wittiest, cleverest bits of writing,” as he calls it, written by Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards, who wrote at least one song in every subsequent Presley movie.
Eno also has space for the jazz of Miles Davis and the evocative score for Louis Malle’s 1961 film Elevator to the Gallows, in particular how it was recorded: improvised live while watching the screen. (Not mentioned: its huge influence on Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack.)
There’s much more in the interview to check out, including the source of a sample used in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and one of David Bowie’s best but most underrated songs. Listen here.
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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.
Read More...A Brief History of Guitar Distortion: From Early Experiments to Happy Accidents to Classic Effects Pedals
The sound of rock and roll is the sound of a distorted guitar, but the history of that sound predates the genre by a few years. It started out with blues and Western swing guitarists, searching “for a dirtier sound,” writes Noisey in a brief history, “a sound that reflected the grittiness of their music.” That sound was pioneered by a guitarist named Junior Barnard, who played with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and designed his own humbucking pickups to produce a fatter, louder tone and push his small amp into overdrive. As the Polyphonic video above notes, Barnard was an aggressive player who needed aggressive tones, and so, as guitarists have always done, he invented the means himself.
Other forerunners achieved distorted tones by cranking early amps like the 18-watt Fender Super, first introduced in 1947, all the way up, until the vacuum tubes clipped the signal to keep from breaking. Goree Carter, sometimes credited with recording the first rock and roll song, “Rock A While,” pushed the overdriven sound in a heavier direction than Barnard, playing dirty Chuck Berry-like licks in 1949 before Chuck Berry’s first hit. Distortion, a sound audio engineers struggled mightily to avoid in live sound and recording, gave blues-based guitarists exactly what they needed for the loud, lewd postwar sounds of rock.
The distorted tones of the 40s came from a deliberate desire for grit. Later, even dirtier, guitar tones were the result of happy accidents. Another contender for the first rock and roll recording—Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm’s 1951 “Rocket 88”—contains some very distorted rhythms from guitarist Willie Kizart, who, legend has it, dropped his tweed Fender amp before the session. Sam Phillips “leaned into” the sound, notes Polyphonic, immediately hearing its serendipitous potential.
Seven years later, the evil overdrive of Link Wray’s instrumental “Rumble”—so sinister it was once banned from radio—came from an intentional equipment failure. Wray repeatedly stabbed the speaker cone of his amp with a pencil.
Do-it-yourself distortion continued into the sixties. Following Wray’s lead, the Kinks’ Dave Davies slashed his amp’s speaker with a razor blade for the fuzzed-out attack of “You Really Got Me” in 1965. But a few years earlier, “fuzz” had already been codified in an effects pedal: Gibson’s 1962 Maestro FZ‑1 Fuzz-Tone, partly inspired by another accident, a faulty mixing board connection that distorted Grady Martin’s bass solo in the Marty Robbins’ 1961 country tune “Don’t Worry” (below, at 1:25). The Fuzz-Tone most famously drove Keith Richards’ riff in “Satisfaction,” but it didn’t sell well. Other, more popular fuzz boxes followed, like the Arbiter Fuzz Face, Jimi Hendrix’s choice for his distorted tones.
Hendrix brilliantly innovated new guitar effects, and the powerful Marshall amps he played through also drove the distorted sounds of Clapton, Townshend, Page, Blackmore, etc., who competed for grittier and heavier tones and in the process more or less invented metal guitar. In the seventies and eighties, distorted tones took on some standardized forms, thanks to transistors and classic effects pedals like the Ibanez Tube Screamer, ProCo Rat, and Boss DS‑1. Distinctions between overdrive, distortion, and fuzz effects can get technical, but in the early days of rock and roll, distorted guitar tones came from whatever worked, and it’s that wild early sound of gear pushed to its limits and beyond that every modern distortion effect attempts to replicate.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Monster, 600-Speaker Sound System–Changed Rock Concerts & Live Music Forever
There is a scene in Return of the Jedi when Luke Skywalker defeats the monstrous, man-eating Rancor, crushing its skull with a portullis, and we see the beast’s keeper, a portly shirtless gentleman in leather breeches and headgear, weeping over the loss of his beloved friend. I think of this scene when I read about a night in 1974 at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom when Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart walked on the stage and found the band’s sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley standing in front of “a solid wall of over 600 speakers.”
As Enmore Audio tells it:
Tears streamed down his face and he whispered to the mass of wood, metal, and wiring, with the tenderness of any parent witnessing their child’s first recital, “I love you and you love me—how could you fail me?”
The story sums up Owsley’s total dedication to what became known as “The Wall of Sound,” a feat of technical engineering that “changed the way technicians thought about live engineering.” The “three-story behemoth… was free of all distortion… served as its own monitoring system and solved many, if not all of the technical problems that sound engineers faced at that time.” But, while it had required much trial and error and many refinements, it did not fail, as you’ll learn in the Polyphonic video above.
Live sound problems not only bedeviled engineers but bands and audiences as well. Throughout the sixties, rock concerts grew in size and scope, audiences grew larger and louder, yet amplification did not. Low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard over the sound of screaming fans. Without monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. This “noise crisis,” writes Motherboard, “confronted musicians who went electric at the height of the war in Vietnam,” but it has been “routinely snuffed from the annals of modern music.”
In dramatic recreations of the period, drums and guitars boom and wail over the noise of stadium and festival crowds. For ears accustomed to the power of modern sound systems, the actual experience, by contrast, would have been underwhelming. Most Beatles fans know the band quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. Things improved somewhat, but the Dead, “obsessed with their sound to compulsive degrees,” could not abide the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation. Still, they weren’t about to give up playing live, and certainly not with Owsley on board.
“A Kentucky-born craftsman and former ballet dancer”—and a manufacturer and distributer of “mass quantities of high-grade LSD,” whose profits financed the Dead for a time—Owsley applied his obsession with “sound as both a concept and a physical thing.” To solve the noise crisis for the Dead, he first built an innovative sound system in 1973 (after serving a couple stints in prison for selling acid). The following year, he suggested putting the PA system behind the band, “a crazy idea at the time.”
His experiments in ‘74 evolved to include line arrays—“columns of speakers… designed to control the dispersion of sound across the frequency range”—noise-canceling microphones to clear up muddy vocals, six separate sound systems that could isolate eleven channels, and a quadraphonic encoder for the bass, “which took a signal,” Enmore notes, “from each string and projected it through its own set of speakers.” The massive Wall of Sound could not last long. It had to be streamlined into a far more manageable and cost-effective touring rig. All the same, Owsley and the band’s willingness take ideas and execution to extreme lengths changed live sound forever for the better.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Hunter S. Thompson Hated Getting Caricatured as “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury: ‘If I Ever Catch That Little Bastard, I’ll Tear His Lungs Out’
Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury is hardly the cultural touchstone it once was, but then again, neither are comic strips in general, and political strips in particular. No amount of urbane witticism and sequential narrative humor can compete with the crazed jumble of arcane memes in the 21st century. Hunter S. Thompson may have written about the late-20th century political scene as a hallucinatory nightmare, but perhaps even he would be surprised at how close reality has come to his hyperbole.
In its heyday, Trudeau’s topical, liberal-leaning satire of politicians, political journalists, clueless hippies, and cynical corporate and academic elites hit the target more often than it missed. For many fans, one of Trudeau’s most beloved characters, Uncle Duke—a caricature of Thompson introduced in 1974—was a perfect bullseye. Writer Walter Isaacson paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to the character as his “hero” on the strip’s 40th anniversary. Duke even made an animated appearance on Larry King Live in 2000 (below), announcing his candidacy for president after serving as Governor of American Samoa and Ambassador to China.
It would be a tremendous understatement to say that Thompson himself was not flattered by the portrayal. The amoral Duke—a “self-obsessed, utterly unscrupulous epitome of evil who has sent a chill down readers’ spines,” writes The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, sent Thompson into a paroxysm of rage. The gonzo writer saw the character “as a form of copyright infringement.” He “sent an envelope of used toilet paper to Trudeau and once memorably said: ‘If I ever catch that little bastard, I’ll tear his lungs out.’” The threats got even more specific and gruesome.
“Hunter despised Trudeau,” writes Thompson biographer William McKeen in his book Outlaw Journalist. “’He’s going to be surprised someday,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m going to set him on fire first, then crush every one of his ribs, one by one, starting from the bottom.’” He had been turned into a joke. Jan Wenner, “when he couldn’t get Hunter to write for him… put him on the cover of Rolling Stone anyway, as Uncle Duke in a Trudeau-drawn cover.” Thompson pondered a $20 million libel suit. “All over America,” he ranted, “kids grow up wanting to be firemen and cops, presidents and lawyers, but nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character.”
The mockery began immediately after Uncle Duke first appeared in the strip in 1974. In a High Times interview, Thompson describes the day he first learned of the character:
It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I’d been inside the press section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, “Uncle Duke,” I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn’t seem to make any sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I had no idea what this outburst meant…It was a weird experience, and as it happened I was sort of by myself up there on the stairs, and I thought: “What in the fuck madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.
While Trudeau seems to have taken the physical threats seriously, he didn’t back down from his relentless satirical takedowns of Thompson’s violent tendencies, paranoia, and comically exaggerated substance abuse. As Dangerous Minds describes, in 1992, Trudeau published a book called Action Figure!: The Life and Times of Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke “that chronicled the misadventures of Uncle Duke.” It also “came with a five-inch action figure of the dear Uncle Duke along with a martini glass, an Uzi, cigarette holder, a bottle of booze, and a chainsaw.”
See the Uncle Duke action figure at the top—one of a half-dozen images Dangerous Minds pulled from eBay (his t‑shirt reads “Death Before Unconsciousness.”) As much as Thompson despised Uncle Duke, and Trudeau for creating him, he himself helped feed the caricature—with his alter ego Raoul Duke and his chronicles of his own bizarre behavior. Trudeau’s admiration, of a sort, for Thompson’s excesses was a continuing driver of the writer’s fame, for good or ill. “Uncle Duke was who fans craved,” writes Sharon Eberson at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “and Thompson often felt obliged” to live up to his cartoon image.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos
Today we know what no previous generation knew: the history of the universe and of the unfolding of life on Earth. Through the astonishing achievements of natural scientists worldwide, we now have a detailed account of how galaxies and stars, planets and living organisms, human beings and human consciousness came to be.
With this knowledge, the question of what role we play in the 14-billion-year history of the universe imposes itself with greater poignancy than ever before. In asking ourselves how we will tell the story of Earth to our children, we must inevitably consider the role of humanity in its history, and how we connect with the intricate web of life on Earth.
In Journey of the Universe–a multimedia educational project that features a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philosopher Brian Thomas Swimme and historian of religions Mary Evelyn Tucker provide an elegant, science-based narrative to tell this epic story, leading up to the challenges of our present moment. The authors describe the origins of humans on Earth, how we developed a symbolic consciousness, and how our ability to communicate using symbols make humans a “planetary presence.”
We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the survival of the species and entire ecosystems depend primarily on human activity, and the choices humans make.
Weaving together the findings of modern science together with enduring wisdom found in the humanistic traditions of the West, Asia, and indigenous peoples, the authors explore cosmic evolution as a profoundly wondrous process based on creativity, connection, and interdependence, and they envision an unprecedented opportunity for the world’s people to address the daunting ecological and social challenges of our times.
Developed over several decades, and inspired by the authors’ long collaboration with Thomas Berry, Journey of the Universe boasts an impressive roster of science advisors including Ursula Goodenough, Craig Kochel, and Terry Deacon.
Journey of the Universe is a multimedia educational project that includes:
1.) The Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Time Specialization available on Coursera, created by Yale. This is a collection of three Massive Online Open Courses that take students through the scientific and cultural cosmology found throughout Journey of the Universe, as well as deep into its lineage with cultural historian and cosmologist Thomas Berry:
Course 1: Journey of the Universe: The Unfolding of Life
Course 2: Journey of the Universe: Weaving Knowledge and Action
Course 3: The Worldview of Thomas Berry: The Flourishing of the Earth Community
2) The Journey of the Universe Film, winner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern California Emmy® Award for best documentary. You can watch the trailer for the film above
3) The Journey of the Universe Book, published by Yale University Press. Translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian.
4) The Journey of the Universe Conversation Series, a twenty-part educational series integrates the perspectives of the sciences and the humanities into a retelling of our 13.7 billion year story. In a series of one-on-one interviews, scientists, historians, and environmentalists explore the unfolding story of the universe and Earth and the role of the human in responding to our present challenges.
R.E.M. Reveals the Secrets Behind Their Emotionally-Charged Songs: “Losing My Religion” and “Try Not to Breathe”
People lose their religion all the time. It happens in all sorts of ways. And R.E.M.’s 1991 song “Losing My Religion” has spoken to so many in the midst of these experiences that we might wonder if singer/songwriter Michael Stipe had a similar life change when he wrote those lyrics. Not so much, he says above in an interview with Dutch station Top 2000 a gogo. “What the song is about has nothing to with religion,” he says.
The lyric comes from an old Southern colloquialism meaning that something so upsetting has happened “that you might lose your religion.” Stipe used that old-time notion as a metaphor for unrequited love, a different kind of faith, one he describes in painfully tentative terms: “holding back, then reaching forward, then pulling back again, then reaching forward again.”
He explains another of the song’s ambiguities hidden within the elliptical lyrics: “You don’t ever really know if the person that I’m reaching out for is aware of me, if they even know that I exist.” It’s the heady turmoil of a romantic crush raised to the heights of saintly suffering. A brooding, alt-rock version of love songs like “Earth Angel.” Given the role of devotion in so much religious practice, there’s no reason the song can’t still be about losing one’s religion for listeners, but now we know what Stipe himself had in mind.
Some other fun facts we learn about this huge hit: Stipe recorded the song almost naked and kind of pissed-off—he had pushed to deliver his vocals in one emotional take, but the studio engineer seemed half-asleep. And his awkward, angular dance in the oh-so-90s video directed by Tarsem Singh, above? He pulled his inspiration from Sinead O’Connor’s St. Vitus dance in 1990s’ “The Emperor’s New Clothes” video and—no surprise—from David Byrne’s “riveting” herky-jerky moves.
While the record company saw the song’s mass appeal, bassist Mike Mills expresses his initial surprise at their choice of “Losing My Religion” as Out of Time’s first single: “That’s a great idea. It makes no sense at all, it’s 5 minutes long, it has no chorus, and a mandolin is the lead instrument. It’s perfect for R.E.M. because it flouts all the rules.” This period saw the band further developing its moody downbeat folk side, yet the album that produced this song also gave us “Shiny Happy People,” the poppiest, most upbeat song R.E.M.—and maybe any band—had ever recorded, a true testament to their emotional range.
The following year, Automatic for the People came out, drawing on material written during the Out of Time sessions and again featuring two singles that vastly contrasted in tone, maudlin tearjerker “Everybody Hurts” and the celebratory Andy Kaufman tribute “Man on the Moon.” Another song from that album that didn’t get as much attention, “Try Not to Breath,” hearkens back to a much earlier R.E.M. folk song, the Civil War-themed “Swan Swan H” from Life’s Rich Pageant.
As we hear the band explain above in an episode of Song Exploder, the song began its life on a Civil War-era instrument, the dulcimer. Then its sonic influences expanded to include two of Peter Buck’s favorite musical genres, surf rock and spaghetti western. The episode contains many more fascinating insider insights from R.E.M. about “Try Not to Breathe,” which may be one of the saddest songs they’ve ever written, a song about choosing to die rather than suffer.
Hear the song’s original demo and references to Blade Runner, get a glimpse into Stipe’s visual songwriting process, and learn the very personal inspiration from his family history for lyrics like “baby don’t shiver now, why do you shiver now?” Unlike “Losing My Religion,” this song does, in some ways, pull musically and emotionally from Stipe’s religious background.
via Laughing Squid
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...John Turturro Introduces America to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Internet
There are only two kinds of story, holds a quote often attributed to Leo Tolstoy: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. When it set about producing A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet, a “community service video” geared to viewers unfamiliar with the World Wide Web, internet portal company Lycos went with the latter. That stranger, a history teacher and aspiring comedian named Sam Levin, comes to a town named Tick Neck, Pennsylvania, his car having broken down early in a cross-country drive to a gig in Las Vegas. In order to update his manager/sister on the situation, he stops into the rural hamlet’s only diner and orders “coffee, half regular and half decaf — and the telephone book.”
Sam doesn’t make a call; instead he unplugs the diner’s phone, connects the line to his computer, looks up his internet service provider’s local number, and (after the requisite modem sounds) gets on the information superhighway. Today we know few activities as mundane as going online at a coffee shop, but the townspeople, innocent even of e‑mail, are transfixed. Sam shows a couple of kids how to search for information on haunted houses and college scholarships, and soon the students become the teachers, demonstrating online games to friends, chat rooms to a cranky old-timer (“I don’t like this word network at all. Network of what? Spies, probably”) and even state government feedback forms to the mayor of Tick Neck (who describes herself as “not much with a keyboard”).
Though at times it feels like the 1950s, the year was 1999, perhaps the last moment before America’s complete internet saturation — before social media, before streaming video, before blogs, before almost everything popular online today. “The video for Internet ‘newbies’ starring John Turturro was made available for free rental on the community service shelf of over 4,000 Blockbuster Video stores, West Coast Video stores, public school libraries and classrooms across the United States,” says a contemporary article at Newenglandfilm.com. “The production was funded by Lycos who has instituted a campaign to better educate the public about the World Wide Web.”
Those of us on the Web in the 1990s will remember Lycos, which ran one of the popular search engines before the age of Google. Launched in 1994 as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which might explain A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet’s setting), Lycos was in 1999 the most visited online destination in the world, and the next year Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica acquired it for a cool $12.5 billion. Turturro, not to be outdone, had in 1998 ascended to a high level of the countercultural zeitgeist with his role in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, the purple-clad bowler Jesus Quintana — very much not a stranger anyone would want going online with their kids, but Turturro has always had a formidable range.
History hasn’t recorded how many newbies A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet helped to start surfing the Web, but the video remains a fascinating artifact of attitudes to the internet during its first period of enormous growth. “My family doesn’t own a computer,” the young boy tells Sam, “and my dad doesn’t like ’em. He says facts are facts.” (That last sentence, innocuous at the time, does take on a new resonance today.) The boy’s teenage sister excitedly describes the internet as “like going to the library, department store, and post office, all at the same time.” Entering his credit card number to buy an auto-repair manual for the skeptical mechanic, Sam says (with a strange defensiveness) that “it’s completely private. I’ve done it before and it’s not a problem.” As with any stranger of legend who comes to town, Sam leaves Tick Neck a changed place — though not nearly as much as the Tick Necks of the world have since been changed by the internet itself.
Related Content:
How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Television Broadcast Explains This “Simple” Process
From the Annals of Optimism: The Newspaper Industry in 1981 Imagines its Digital Future
In 1999, David Bowie Predicts the Good and Bad of the Internet
What’s the Internet? That’s So 1994…
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Read More...David Lynch Muses About the Magic of Cinema & Meditation in a New Abstract Short Film
One of the wonderful things about David Lynch is that, despite interviews, several documentaries on his creative process, plenty of behind-the-scenes footage of him directing, and the release of a whole memoir/biography told both subjectively *and* objectively…despite all that, the man is still an enigma. Even when he returned 25 years later to familiar ground with the third season of Twin Peaks, there was no sign of self-parody, and he delivered some of the most brilliant work of his career. How the hell does he do it?
That being said, if you have read his book Catching the Big Fish or have heard him in interviews, this short film directed by his son Austin Lynch and Case Simmons, and presented by Stella McCartney, might not be anything new. If you are just now discovering Lynch, then this is a quick primer on his creative process and his devotion to Transcendental Meditation as a way to dive into that creativity and, eventually, bring peace to the world.
Austin Lynch is one of three Lynch children to work in entertainment. The eldest Jennifer Lynch directed Boxing Helena and wrote the Twin Peaks spin-off book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Riley Lynch is a musician and appeared in two episodes of the recent Twin Peaks.
Given the pedigree, Lynch and Simmons manage to honor David Lynch without copying his style. The short abstract profile also features very short cameos by Stella McCartney, Børns, Lola Kirk, and several others.
The director appears here and there during the nine minutes, backlit by subtle colored lights in a private screening room, watching a movie. What movie? It doesn’t matter.
“It’s so magical, I don’t know why, to go into a theater and have the lights go down,” Lynch says. “It’s very quiet and then the curtains start to open. And then you go into a world.”
The directors link this to a familiar Lynch tale of the beginning of his film career, when Lynch was painting at the beginning of his art school years and the canvas started to move and make sounds. No matter how many times Lynch tells this story, there’s something so odd about it. Is he talking in metaphor? Did he hallucinate? Did he get visited by a force beyond this reality? Are his greatest Lynchian moments his way of trying to make sense of that one episode?
He also talks about the circle that goes from the film to the audience and back, a feedback loop that musicians also talk about, and is the reason Lynch still loves the cinema as an event space. Performance spaces figure prominently in his works, whether it’s the Club Silencio in Mulholland Dr., the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, or the various lodges and performance areas in Twin Peaks. (It’s also why he despises watching films on iPhones, apart from the size.)
Lynch explains here how he became a filmmaker through studying meditation, how it saved him from anger and despair, and how these techniques led to landing bigger creative fish from “the ocean of solutions” and expanding artistic intuition.
Is Lynch enlightened? No, but he’s closer than most of us:
“Every day for me gets better and better,” he concludes. “And I believe that enlivening unity in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say peace to all of you.”
Related Content:
What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay
Hear David Lynch Read from His New Memoir Room to Dream, and Browse His New Online T‑Shirt Store
Watch All of the Commercials That David Lynch Has Directed: A Big 30-Minute Compilation
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.
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