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

in Music, Technology | September 17th, 2018

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

11,215 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

The Grate­ful Dead’s Final Farewell Con­certs Now Stream­ing Online

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

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’

in Comics/Cartoons | September 11th, 2018

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thompson’s Deca­dent Dai­ly Break­fast: The “Psy­chic Anchor” of His Fre­net­ic Cre­ative Life

How Hunter S. Thomp­son Gave Birth to Gonzo Jour­nal­ism: Short Film Revis­its Thompson’s Sem­i­nal 1970 Piece on the Ken­tucky Der­by

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

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

Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos

in Astronomy, Books, History | September 5th, 2018

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”

in Music | September 3rd, 2018

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R.E.M.’s “Los­ing My Reli­gion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

Why R.E.M.’s 1991 Out of Time May Be the “Most Polit­i­cal­ly Impor­tant Album” Ever

R.E.M Plays “Radio Free Europe” on Their Nation­al Tele­vi­sion Debut on The David Let­ter­man Show (1983)

Two Very Ear­ly Con­cert Films of R.E.M., Live in ‘81 and ‘82

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

John Turturro Introduces America to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Internet

in Film, History, Web/Tech | August 30th, 2018

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…

John Tur­tur­ro Reads Ita­lo Calvino’s Fairy Tale, “The False Grand­moth­er,” in a Short Ani­mat­ed Film

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.

David Lynch Muses About the Magic of Cinema & Meditation in a New Abstract Short Film

in Film | August 30th, 2018

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.

Japanese Musicians Turn Obsolete Machines Into Musical Instruments: Cathode Ray Tube TVs, Overhead Projectors, Reel-to-Reel Tape Machines & More

in Music, Technology | August 29th, 2018

In the 1940s and 50s, exper­i­men­tal com­posers like Hal­im El-Dabh, Pierre Scha­ef­fer, and Pierre Hen­ry began mak­ing exper­i­men­tal com­po­si­tions that Scha­ef­fer would call musique con­crete. They used tape recorders, phono­graphs, micro­phones and oth­er ana­log elec­tro-acoustic devices to cre­ate music, as Hen­ry put it, from “non-musi­cal sounds.” These tech­niques became main­stays of more famil­iar audio art, such as the radio and tele­vi­sion sound designs of the BBC’s Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. With the advent of syn­the­siz­ers, elec­tron­ic music over­took these sound exper­i­ments, just as oth­er new tech­nolo­gies replaced the play­back and record­ing devices used to make them.

A Japan­ese group called Open Reel Ensem­ble recalls this lega­cy of musique con­crete, deploy­ing reel-to-reel tape machines, cath­ode ray tube TVs, over­head pro­jec­tors, and oth­er ana­log tech­nol­o­gy to make 21st cen­tu­ry music with “non-musi­cal sounds.” Head­ed by pro­gram­mer-turned-com­pos­er Ei Wada, the group embraces a very dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al phi­los­o­phy than the exper­i­men­tal elec­tro-acoustic com­posers of the past, who worked in reac­tion to Euro­pean clas­si­cal music, oppos­ing “con­crete” sounds to abstract musi­cal ideas. Wada, on the oth­er hand, was first inspired by hear­ing a game­lan ensem­ble at a per­for­mance in Indone­sia as a very small child.

Giv­en a col­lec­tion of 70s reel-to-reel recorders by a fam­i­ly friend, he attempt­ed to re-cre­ate the polypho­ny of those tra­di­tion­al Javanese gong ensem­bles. He has, writes Moth­er­board, “been on a quest to repro­duce oth­er­world­ly sounds with tech that nobody wants.” But he freely com­bines these out­dat­ed machines with con­tem­po­rary mix­ers, ampli­fiers, light shows, beats, and tem­pos. Formed with friends Haru­ka Yoshi­da and Masaru Yoshi­da, Wada’s Open Reel Ensem­ble might be com­pared to both the avant-garde exper­i­ments of com­posers like John Cage and the pop­u­lar exper­i­ments of hip hop turntab­lists, both of whom used ana­log tech­nol­o­gy in inno­v­a­tive, uncon­ven­tion­al ways.

Some of the group’s work is a kind of exper­i­men­tal dance music, as you can see in the live per­for­mance fur­ther up; some is more ambi­ent sound art, as in Wada’s solo ven­ti­la­tion fan per­for­mance above, with implic­it com­men­tary on Japan’s econ­o­my and the dis­pos­able nature of con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy. “All these tech objects are a sym­bol of Japan’s eco­nom­ic growth,” says Wada. “but they also get thrown away in great num­bers. It’s good to not just say bye to things that are thrown away but to instill old things with new mean­ing, and cel­e­brate their unique points.”

The detourn­ing of tech­nol­o­gy that would oth­er­wise end up as land­fill requires some inge­nu­ity, giv­en the increas­ing rar­i­ty of such instru­ments. In the per­for­mance above, we see Wada play with invent­ed devices his group calls in Eng­lish the “Exhaust Fan­cil­la­tor” and in Japan­ese a kankisen­thiz­er, a neol­o­gism formed from the word for ven­ti­la­tion fan. “We used laser cut­ters and 3D print­ers to design the ven­ti­la­tion fans,” he says. This will­ing­ness to impro­vise, invent, and repur­pose what­ev­er works makes for some fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments that are as much per­for­mance art as sound com­po­si­tion.

In the Wada per­for­mance above from 2010, he uses old tube TVs as drums, hit­ting the screens to trig­ger both sound and light effects and bring­ing to mind not only the sound art of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, but also the 1980s video instal­la­tions of Nam June Paik, ful­ly immer­sive expe­ri­ences that fore­ground their tech­no­log­i­cal arti­fice even as they pro­duce an inex­plic­a­ble kind of mag­ic.

via This is Colos­sal 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to an Archive of Record­ings by Delia Der­byshire, the Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer & Com­pos­er of the Dr. Who Theme Song

Hear the One Night Sun Ra & John Cage Played Togeth­er in Con­cert (1986)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

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

NASA Creates a Visualization That Sets Breathtaking Footage of the Moon to Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (Moonlight)

in Astronomy, Music | August 15th, 2018

From NASA’s Ernie Wright comes “Moon­light (Clair de Lune),” a visu­al­iza­tion that takes beau­ti­ful images of the lunar ter­rain and sets them to Claude Debussy’s 1905 com­po­si­tion, Clair de Lune (1905). Here’s how Wright describes the project:

This visu­al­iza­tion attempts to cap­ture the mood of Claude Debussy’s best-known com­po­si­tion, Clair de Lune (moon­light in French). The piece was pub­lished in 1905 as the third of four move­ments in the com­poser’s Suite Berga­masque, and unlike the oth­er parts of this work, Clair is qui­et, con­tem­pla­tive, and slight­ly melan­choly, evok­ing the feel­ing of a soli­tary walk through a moon­lit gar­den. The visu­als were com­posed like a nature doc­u­men­tary, with clean cuts and a most­ly sta­tion­ary vir­tu­al cam­era. The view­er fol­lows the Sun through­out a lunar day, see­ing sun­ris­es and then sun­sets over promi­nent fea­tures on the Moon. The sprawl­ing ray sys­tem sur­round­ing Coper­ni­cus crater, for exam­ple, is revealed beneath reced­ing shad­ows at sun­rise and lat­er slips back into dark­ness as night encroach­es. The visu­al­iza­tion was cre­at­ed to accom­pa­ny a per­for­mance of Clair de Lune by the Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra Pops, led by con­duc­tor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Cen­ter for the Per­form­ing Arts in Wash­ing­ton, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a cel­e­bra­tion of NASA’s 60th anniver­sary. The visu­al­iza­tion uses a dig­i­tal 3D mod­el of the Moon built from Lunar Recon­nais­sance Orbiter glob­al ele­va­tion maps and image mosaics. The light­ing is derived from actu­al Sun angles dur­ing lunar days in 2018.

Enjoy…

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1913

Pianist Plays Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Rav­el & Debussy for Blind Ele­phants in Thai­land

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969

in History, Science, Television | July 24th, 2018

Dur­ing a recent din­ner a few friends and I found our­selves rem­i­nisc­ing about for­ma­tive moments in our col­lec­tive youth. The con­ver­sa­tion took a decid­ed­ly down­beat turn when a nation­al­ly tele­vised moment we all remem­bered all too well came up: the 1986 explo­sion of the space shut­tle Chal­lenger. Like mil­lions of oth­er schoolkids at the time we had been glued to the live broad­cast, and became wit­ness­es to hor­ror. “It was NASA’s dark­est tragedy,” writes Eliz­a­beth How­ell at Space.com, an acci­dent that “changed the space pro­gram for­ev­er.”

The con­trast with our par­ents’ indeli­ble mem­o­ries of a tele­vised space broad­cast from sev­en­teen years ear­li­er could not be stark­er. On July 20, 1969, the nation wit­nessed what could eas­i­ly be called NASA’s great­est tri­umph, the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing, which not only real­ly hap­pened, but was broad­cast live on CBS, with com­men­tary by Wal­ter Cronkite and for­mer astro­naut Wal­ly Schirra and live audio from Mis­sion Con­trol in Hous­ton and Buzz Aldrin him­self, “whose job dur­ing the land­ing,” Jason Kot­tke writes, “was to keep an eye on the LM (lunar module)’s alti­tude and speed.”

We don’t hear much from Neil Armstrong—“he’s busy fly­ing and furi­ous­ly search­ing for a suit­able land­ing site. But it’s Arm­strong that says after they land, ‘Hous­ton, Tran­quil­i­ty Base here. The Eagle has land­ed.’” Kottke’s fas­ci­nat­ing descrip­tion of the events points out details that height­en the dra­ma, such as the fact that Armstrong’s heartrate “peaked at 150 beats per minute at land­ing” (his rest­ing heartrate was 60 bpm). At around 10 min­utes to land­ing, the astro­nauts link to Mis­sion Con­trol cut out briefly, which must have been ter­ri­fy­ing.

“Then there were the inter­mit­tent 1201 and 1202 pro­gram alarms, which nei­ther the LM crew nor Hous­ton had encoun­tered in any of the train­ing sim­u­la­tions.” These turn out “to be a sim­ple case,” notes NASA, “of the com­put­er try­ing to do too many things at once.” Giv­en that the Lunar Module’s com­put­er only had 4KB of mem­o­ry, this is hard­ly a sur­prise. What is aston­ish­ing is that such a rel­a­tive­ly prim­i­tive machine could han­dle the task at all.

The film view­ers saw on their screens was not, of course, a live feed—CBS did not have cam­eras in space or on the moon—but rather an ani­ma­tion.

The CBS ani­ma­tion shows the fake LM land­ing on the fake Moon before the actu­al land­ing — when Buzz says “con­tact light” and then “engine stop”. The ani­ma­tion was based on the sched­uled land­ing time and evi­dent­ly couldn’t be adjust­ed. The sched­uled time was over­shot because of the crater and boul­ders sit­u­a­tion men­tioned above.

There were, how­ev­er, cam­eras mount­ed on the Lunar Mod­ule, and that 16mm footage of the land­ing, which you can see above, was lat­er released. And then there’s that moon walk (which real­ly hap­pened), which you can see below—blurry and indis­tinct but no less amaz­ing.

Just a lit­tle over eight years “since the flights of Gagarin and Shep­ard,” NASA writes, “fol­lowed quick­ly by Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s chal­lenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out,” it hap­pened. Arm­strong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins land­ed on the moon. Arm­strong and Aldrin walked around and col­lect­ed sam­ples for two hours, then returned safe­ly to Earth. In a post-flight press con­fer­ence, Arm­strong called the suc­cess­ful mis­sion “a begin­ning of a new age,” and it was, though his opti­mism would seem almost quaint when a cou­ple decades lat­er, the U.S. turned its sights on weaponiz­ing space.

Read more about this extra­or­di­nary event at NASA and Kot­tke.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Vivian Debunks the Age-Old Moon Land­ing Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry

The Source Code for the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Mis­sion Is Now Free on Github

Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Go Through Cus­toms and Sign Immi­gra­tion Form After the First Moon Land­ing (1969)

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

Noam Chomsky Defines The Real Responsibility of Intellectuals: “To Speak the Truth and to Expose Lies” (1967)

in Politics | July 18th, 2018

Image by Andrew Rusk, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The nov­el medi­um of social media—and the nov­el use of Twit­ter as the offi­cial PR plat­form for pub­lic figures—allows not only for end­less amounts of noise and dis­in­for­ma­tion to per­me­ate our news­feeds; it also allows read­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to refute state­ments in real time. Whether cor­rec­tions reg­is­ter or sim­ply get drowned in the sea of infor­ma­tion is per­haps a ques­tion for a 21st cen­tu­ry Mar­shall McLuhan to pon­der.

Anoth­er promi­nent the­o­rist of old­er forms of media, Noam Chom­sky, might also have an opin­ion on the mat­ter. In his 1988 book Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent, writ­ten with Edward Her­man, Chom­sky details the ways in which gov­ern­ments and media col­lude to delib­er­ate­ly mis­lead the pub­lic and social­ly engi­neer sup­port for wars that kill mil­lions and enrich a hand­ful of prof­i­teers.

More­over, in mass media com­mu­ni­ca­tions, those wars, inva­sions, “police actions,” regime changes, etc. get con­ve­nient­ly erased from his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry by pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als who serve the inter­ests of state pow­er. In one recent exam­ple on the social medi­um of record, Twit­ter, Richard N. Haas, Pres­i­dent of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, expressed dis­may about the dis­turbing­ly cozy state of affairs between the U.S. Admin­is­tra­tion and Putin’s Rus­sia by claim­ing that “Inter­na­tion­al order for 4 cen­turies has been based on non-inter­fer­ence in the inter­na­tion­al affairs of oth­ers and respect for sov­er­eign­ty.”

One recent cri­tique of for­eign pol­i­cy bod­ies like CFR would beg to dif­fer, as would the his­to­ry of hun­dreds of years of colo­nial­ism. In a very Chom­sky-like rejoin­der to Haas, jour­nal­ist Nick Turse wrote, “This might be news to Iraqis and Afghans and Libyans and Yeme­nis and Viet­namese and Cam­bo­di­ans and Lao­tians and Kore­ans and Ira­ni­ans and Guatemalans and Chileans and Nicaraguans and Mex­i­cans and Cubans and Domini­cans and Haitians and Fil­ipinos and Con­golese and Rus­sians and….”

Gen­uine con­cerns about Russ­ian elec­tion tam­per­ing notwith­stand­ing, the list of U.S. inter­ven­tions in the “affairs of oth­ers” could go on and on. Haas’ ini­tial state­ment offers an almost per­fect exam­ple of what Chom­sky iden­ti­fied in anoth­er essay, “The Respon­si­bil­i­ty of Intel­lec­tu­als,” as not only a “lack of con­cern for truth” but also “a real or feigned naiveté about Amer­i­can actions that reach­es star­tling pro­por­tions.”

“It is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of intel­lec­tu­als to speak the truth and to expose lies,” wrote Chom­sky in his 1967 essay. “This, at least, may seem enough of a tru­ism to pass over with­out com­ment. Not so, how­ev­er. For the mod­ern intel­lec­tu­al, it is not at all obvi­ous.” Chom­sky pro­ceeds from the pro-Nazi state­ments of Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger to the dis­tor­tions and out­right false­hoods issued rou­tine­ly by such thinkers and shapers of for­eign pol­i­cy as Arthur Schlesinger, econ­o­mist Walt Ros­tow, and Hen­ry Kissinger in their defense of the dis­as­trous Viet­nam War.

The back­ground for all of these fig­ures’ dis­tor­tions of fact, Chom­sky argues, is the per­pet­u­al pre­sump­tion of inno­cence on the part of the U.S., a fea­ture of the doc­trine of excep­tion­al­ism under which “it is an arti­cle of faith that Amer­i­can motives are pure, and not sub­ject to analy­sis.” We have seen this arti­cle of faith invoked in hagiogra­phies of past Admin­is­tra­tions whose domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al crimes are con­ve­nient­ly for­got­ten in order to turn them into foils, stock fig­ures for an order to which many would like to return. (As one for­mer Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date put it, “Amer­i­ca is great, because Amer­i­ca is good.”)

Chom­sky would include the rhetor­i­cal appeal to a nobler past in the cat­e­go­ry of “impe­ri­al­ist apologia”—a pre­sump­tion of inno­cence that “becomes increas­ing­ly dis­taste­ful as the pow­er it serves grows more dom­i­nant in world affairs, and more capa­ble, there­fore, of the uncon­strained vicious­ness that the mass media present to us each day.”

We are hard­ly the first pow­er in his­to­ry to com­bine mate­r­i­al inter­ests, great tech­no­log­i­cal capac­i­ty, and an utter dis­re­gard for the suf­fer­ing and mis­ery of the low­er orders. The long tra­di­tion of naiveté and self-right­eous­ness that dis­fig­ures our intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry, how­ev­er, must serve as a warn­ing to the third world, if such a warn­ing is need­ed, as to how our protes­ta­tions of sin­cer­i­ty and benign intent are to be inter­pret­ed.

For those who well recall the events of even fif­teen years ago, when the U.S. gov­ern­ment, with the aid of a com­pli­ant press, lied its way into the sec­ond Iraq war, con­don­ing tor­ture and the “extra­or­di­nary ren­di­tion” of sup­posed hos­tiles to black sites in the name of lib­er­at­ing the Iraqi peo­ple, Chomsky’s Viet­nam-era cri­tiques may sound just as fresh as they did in the mid-six­ties. Are we already in dan­ger of mis­re­mem­ber­ing that recent his­to­ry? “When we con­sid­er the respon­si­bil­i­ty of intel­lec­tu­als,” Chom­sky writes, the issue at hand is not sole­ly indi­vid­ual moral­i­ty; “our basic con­cern must be their role in the cre­ation and analy­sis of ide­ol­o­gy.”

What are the ide­o­log­i­cal fea­tures of U.S. self-under­stand­ing that allow it to recre­ate past errors again and again, then deny that his­to­ry and sink again into com­pla­cen­cy, per­pet­u­at­ing crimes against human­i­ty from the Cam­bo­di­an bomb­ings and My Lai mas­sacre, to the grotesque scenes at Abu Ghraib and the drone bomb­ings of hos­pi­tals and wed­dings, to sup­port­ing mass killings in Yemen and mur­der of unarmed Pales­tin­ian pro­tes­tors, to the kid­nap­ping and caging of chil­dren at the Mex­i­can bor­der?

The cur­rent rul­ing par­ty in the U.S. presents an exis­ten­tial threat, Chom­sky recent­ly opined, on a world his­tor­i­cal scale, dis­play­ing “a lev­el of crim­i­nal­i­ty that is almost hard to find words to describe.” It is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of intel­lec­tu­als, Chom­sky argues in his essay—including jour­nal­ists, aca­d­e­mics, and pol­i­cy mak­ers and shapers—to tell the truth about events past and present, no mat­ter how incon­ve­nient those truths may be.

Read Chomsky’s full essay, “The Respon­si­bil­i­ty of Intel­lec­tu­als,” at The New York Review of Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

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