The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemian Coffee Bars Documented in a Vintage 1959 Newsreel

in Food & Drink, History | April 15th, 2016

I live in Seoul, by some mea­sures the most cof­fee shop-sat­u­rat­ed city in the world. But mod­ern cof­fee life here (which I recent­ly wrote about for the Los Ange­les Review of Books) only real­ly devel­oped after Star­bucks came to town around the turn of the 21st cen­tu­ry. We’ve now got more Star­bucks loca­tions per capi­ta than any­where else, and even so, the home­grown Kore­an chains well out­num­ber those under the green mer­maid. To under­stand how the cof­fee-house cul­ture we know across the world today took its shape, we have to look back to Lon­don in the late 1950s, specif­i­cal­ly as cap­tured in the Look at Life news­reel on the city’s bohemi­an cof­fee house boom just above.

“Cof­fee is big busi­ness,” says its nar­ra­tor, over a mon­tage of neon signs adver­tis­ing places like The Cof­fee House, Las Vegas Cof­fee Bar, Heav­en & HELL Cof­fee Lounge, and La Roca. “The cof­fee bar boom in Britain began in 1952, when the first espres­so machine arrived from Italy and was set up here, in Lon­don’s Soho.” The city’s many entre­pre­neurs vig­or­ous­ly seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty — maybe too vig­or­ous­ly, since “for every three cof­fee bars that opened up, two closed down.” They had­n’t planned on a few dif­fer­ent fac­tors, includ­ing over­head high enough that “if a char­ac­ter sits for half an hour over one cup of cof­fee, his share of the rent, heat, light, and ser­vice mount to the point where the man­age­ment is pay­ing him.”

They should’ve count­ed them­selves lucky that the likes of me and my gen­er­a­tion weren’t alive back then to, on a sim­i­lar­ly sin­gle cof­fee, spend half the day typ­ing on our lap­tops. But Lon­don’s mid­cen­tu­ry cof­fee hous­es soon learned to diver­si­fy, offer­ing Look at Life plenty–in its vivid col­ors and with its broad sense of humor–of life to look at: we see cof­fee bars hop­ping with live music and those who dance to it; juke­box cof­fee bars geared toward pom­padoured hip­sters; the film indus­try-beloved cof­fee bar in which T.S. Eliot once wrote the immor­tal line, “I have mea­sured out my life with cof­fee spoons”; an “invis­i­ble cof­fee house” behind whose false news­stand front “curi­ous char­ac­ters con­gre­gate”; the Moka, which William S. Bur­roughs once shut down with his cut-up tech­niques; and even the famous Le Macabre, dec­o­rat­ed with count­less skele­tal memen­tos mori.

The news­reel also finds its way to a cof­fee shop estab­lished by a news­pa­per where “uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and oth­er assort­ed eggheads meet to put the world right — or more often left,” which reminds me of Guardian Cof­fee, a pop-up cof­fee house in a ship­ping-con­tain­er com­plex in Lon­don’s Shored­itch (in some sense, the Soho of the 21st cen­tu­ry) co-run by the epony­mous news­pa­per, which I vis­it­ed on my last trip to Eng­land. The Guardian Cof­fee exper­i­ment has since end­ed, but the Guardian has retained its inter­est in the bev­er­age itself, as evi­denced by recent arti­cles like Rosie Spinks’ “The Caf­feine Curse: Why Cof­fee Shops Have Always Sig­naled Urban Change.”

“As the cof­fee shop has become a byword for what every­one hates about urban change and gen­tri­fi­ca­tion – first come the cre­atives and their cof­fee shops, then the young pro­fes­sion­als, then the lux­u­ry high-ris­es and cor­po­rate chains that push out orig­i­nal res­i­dents – it’s worth ask­ing if that charge is fair,” Spinks writes. “As the func­tion of the cof­fee house in Lon­don has evolved over time, was its ear­ly iter­a­tion so rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than the ones many of us type and sip away in today?” And what­ev­er form they take, cof­fee hous­es remain, as Look at Life calls them, “bright — or dim — fan­ci­ful, imag­i­na­tive new addi­tions to the British scene.” Or the Amer­i­can scene, or the Kore­an scene, or indeed the glob­al scene.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Cre­ates Ad for Cof­fee in the 1650s

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

Hip­sters Order­ing Cof­fee

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Glass: The Oscar-Winning “Perfect Short Documentary” on Dutch Glassmaking (1958)

in Film | March 29th, 2016

You’ll find many a bold claim on Wikipedia, even on the page for Bert Haanstra’s Glass, a 1958 short doc­u­men­tary on glass­mak­ing in the Nether­lands, which, as of this writ­ing, men­tions that the film “is often acclaimed to be the per­fect short doc­u­men­tary.” Just the sort of thing you’d want to take with a grain of salt, right? But if you watch Glass itself, which won the 1959 Acad­e­my Award for Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject, you might find your­self join­ing in on that sup­posed cho­rus of acclaim.

Prashant Par­vat­neni at The Essen­tial Mys­tery calls Glass “at once a pas­sion­ate cel­e­bra­tion of human labour and crafts­man­ship and a bit­ing cri­tique of the mech­a­nis­tic mass-pro­duc­tion of objects. On the very sur­face this doc­u­men­tary can appear as a demon­stra­tive film keen­ly elu­ci­dat­ing the very basic process­es that go into the mak­ing of hand­made glass­ware and jux­ta­pos­ing it with the process of bot­tle-mak­ing in a mech­a­nised fac­to­ry.

Yet this very jux­ta­po­si­tion cou­pled with a Haanstra’s strong styl­is­tic inter­ven­tion takes the film into a polem­i­cal space.” Tak­ing a slight­ly dif­fer­ent tone, Colos­sal’s Christo­pher Job­son high­lights the jazz of the tra­di­tion­al half, and the “whim­si­cal score of more syn­the­sized music” in the mod­ern half. “Also,” he adds, “there’s a ton of great smok­ing!”

Job­son does­n’t men­tion that these guys also some­how man­age to keep smok­ing even while blow­ing glass — an impres­sive feat indeed, and just one of the impres­sive qual­i­ties on dis­play in Glass’ brief run­time. Even­tu­al­ly, the footage turns back from the fac­to­ry to the work­shop, and soon it begins oscil­lat­ing between the two, cut­ting to the jazzy rhythm and even mak­ing the machines and work­men into musi­cal instru­ments of a kind. The Dutch glass­mak­ing indus­try has sure­ly changed in the past half-cen­tu­ry, but stu­dents of Dutch film can’t ignore the work of Haanstra, who in addi­tion to this and oth­er doc­u­men­taries short and long, direct­ed fea­tures includ­ing Fan­fare, still one of the most pop­u­lar films in the Nether­lands ever. But as any film his­to­ri­an might sus­pect — and here comes anoth­er bold claim — Glass will out­live them all.

Glass will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Man Cre­ates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Look at Cre­ativ­i­ty (1968)

Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short, The Dot and the Line, Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try and Hard Work (1965)

Watch the Funky, Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Film Fea­tur­ing the Music of Herb Alpert & the Tijua­na Brass (1966)

36 Free Oscar Win­ning Films Avail­able on the Web

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Discovering Electronic Music: 1983 Documentary Offers a Fun & Educational Introduction to Electronic Music

in Music | March 16th, 2016

The late six­ties and sev­en­ties pro­duced an explo­sion of elec­tron­ic music that arrived on the scene as an almost entire­ly new art form. So much so that when com­pos­er Wendy Car­los released an album of Bach com­po­si­tions played on the Moog syn­the­siz­er, it was as though she had invent­ed anoth­er genre of music, rather than played baroque pieces on a new instru­ment. We had fore­moth­ers like Delia Der­byshire, exper­i­men­tal bands like Sil­ver Apples and Sui­cide, inno­va­tors like Bri­an Eno and David Bowie and Kraftwerk, dis­co pio­neers like Gior­gio Moroder and Don­na Sum­mer… the list of elec­tron­ic musi­cians at work cre­at­ing the genre before the 1980s could go on and on.

You won’t learn any of that from the 1983 doc­u­men­tary above, Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music, which is not at all to damn the short film; on the con­trary, what this pre­sen­ta­tion offers us is some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent from the usu­al sur­vey course in great men and women of com­mer­cial music. With an under­stat­ed, ped­a­gog­i­cal tone, Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music gen­tly leads its view­ers through a thought­ful intro­duc­tion to elec­tron­ic music itself—what it con­sists of, how it dif­fers from acoustic music, what kind of equip­ment pro­duces it, and how that equip­ment works.

There are many musi­cians fea­tured here, but none of them stars. They demon­strate, with com­pe­ten­cy and pro­fes­sion­al­ism, the ways var­i­ous elec­tron­ic instru­ments and (now seem­ing­ly pre­his­toric) com­put­er sys­tems work. We do hear lots of clas­si­cal music played on syn­the­siz­ers, though not by the enig­mat­ic and reclu­sive Wendy Car­los. And we hear mod­ern com­po­si­tions as well, though few you’re like­ly to rec­og­nize, from “Jean-Claude Ris­set, Dou­glas Leedy, F.R. Moore, Stephan Soomil, Rory Kaplan, Ger­al Strang and more for­got­ten genius­es of ear­ly elec­tron­ic music,” writes Elec­tron­ic Beats.

Ear­ly in the film, its pre­sen­ter talks about the specif­i­cal­ly mod­ern appeal of elec­tron­ic music: com­posers can work direct­ly with sound like a sculp­tor or painter, rather than com­pos­ing on paper and wait­ing to hear that writ­ten music per­formed by musi­cians. Much of Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music shows us com­posers and musi­cians doing just that, with the thor­ough­ly mat­ter-of-fact man­ner of the most com­pelling­ly dry pub­lic tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries and with the strange­ly sooth­ing qual­i­ty com­mon to both Mr. Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood and Bob Ross’s paint­ing lessons. Like the sound of the ana­log syn­the­siz­ers and antique com­put­er sequencers it fea­tures, the doc­u­men­tary has an eerie beau­ty all its own.

Find more doc­u­men­taries in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

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

A Collection of Sun Ra’s Business Cards from the 1950s: They’re Out of This World

in Music | March 8th, 2016

One of the hard­est things to mas­ter as an inde­pen­dent musi­cian is the art of pro­mo­tion. Though many artists are extro­verts and atten­tion-seek­ers, many more are by nature intro­vert­ed, or at least inner-direct­ed, and dis­in­clined to embrace the tools of the mar­ket­ing trade. In days of yore, when such things as major record labels still roamed the earth at large, much of the pro­mo­tion could be left up to those majes­tic, lum­ber­ing beasts. These days, when the major­i­ty of work­ing musi­cians have to keep their day jobs and learn to do their own pro­duc­tion, styling, book­ing, and PR, it’s essen­tial to get over any squea­mish­ness about blow­ing your own horn. If you’re look­ing for point­ers, con­sid­er the exam­ple of self-invent­ed musi­cal genius Sun Ra, a mas­ter of self-pro­mo­tion.

No one bet­ter under­stood what Sun Ra was up to than Sun Ra him­self, and he knew how to sell his very out-there free jazz move­ment to a pub­lic used to more mun­dane pre­sen­ta­tions. As Mike Walsh at Mis­sion Creep suc­cinct­ly puts it, “noth­ing about Sun Ra’s six-decade musi­cal career could be called nor­mal.” He more or less re-invent­ed what it meant to be a jazz musi­cian and band­leader. It was in the 1950s that he real­ly came into his own. After work­ing steadi­ly as a tour­ing side­man for sev­er­al oth­er musi­cians, the man born Her­man Blount changed his name first to Le Sony’r Ra, then Sun Ra, and put togeth­er his famous “Arkestra.”

His shows began to incor­po­rate the elab­o­rate cos­tum­ing he became known for, and he would often stop the music “to lec­ture on his favorite sub­jects,” writes Jez Nel­son at The Guardian, “Egyp­tol­ogy and space. He began to claim he had been abduct­ed by aliens and was in fact from Sat­urn.” The act was both dead­ly seri­ous space opera (he rehearsed his band for 12 hours at a stretch, after all) and absur­dist schtick, and it both trans­port­ed audi­ences to new worlds and made them laugh out loud.

Sun Ra’s busi­ness cards from the 50s cap­ture this tonal spec­trum between avant-garde per­for­mance art and high-con­cept free jazz com­e­dy. Adver­tis­ing new releas­es, a band-for-hire, and ongo­ing local Chica­go res­i­den­cies, they com­bine the strict pro­fes­sion­al­ism of a work­ing band­leader with the word­play and silli­ness Ra loved: he calls his coterie “Atonites,” which psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Robert L. Camp­bell reads as mean­ing both “wor­ship­pers of Aton,” Egypt­ian sun god, and “per­form­ers of aton­al music.” Audi­ences are invit­ed to “Dance the Out­er Space Way. Hear songs sung the Out­er Space Way by Clyde ‘Out of Space’ Williams” (one­time singer with the band). And the card at the top of the post makes per­haps the sim­plest, most com­pelling pitch of them all: “Why buy old sounds?” Indeed.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sun Ra’s Full Lec­ture & Read­ing List From His 1971 UC Berke­ley Course, “The Black Man in the Cos­mos”

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The Cry of Jazz: 1958’s High­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Film on Jazz & Race in Amer­i­ca (With Music by Sun Ra)

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

Learn How to Code for Free: A DIY Guide for Learning HTML, Python, Javascript & More

in Computer Science, How to Learn for Free | March 7th, 2016

This week, we’re launch­ing the begin­ning of a new, ongo­ing series. We’re cre­at­ing guides that will teach you how to learn impor­tant sub­jects on your own, using free resources avail­able on the web. Want an exam­ple? Just look below. Here you’ll find a list of free resources–online cours­es, instruc­tion­al videos, YouTube chan­nels, text­books, etc.–that will teach how to code for free. If we’re miss­ing great items, please add your sug­ges­tions in the com­ments below.

This col­lec­tion is just a start, and it will con­tin­ue to grow over time. In the mean­time, if there are oth­er guides you’d like to see us devel­op in the com­ing weeks, please let us know in the com­ments sec­tion too. We’re hap­py to get your feed­back.

How to Code (Soft­ware)

• Codecad­e­my: A free site for learn­ing every­thing from Mak­ing a Web­site to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tuto­ri­als to design projects of their own choos­ing. The site also makes it easy to track your progress. Oth­er top­ics you can learn include: Cre­ate an Inter­ac­tive Web­site, Ruby, Javascript, HTML & CSS, SQL and more. Reg­is­ter and sign up for all class­es here. (See our post on Codecad­e­my here.)
• Code School: Code School cours­es are built around a cre­ative theme and sto­ry­line so that it feels like you’re play­ing a game, not sit­ting in a class­room. The site offers a set of free cours­es cov­er­ing JavaScript, jQuery, Python, Ruby and more.
• Free Code Camp: An open source com­mu­ni­ty that helps you learn to code. You can work through self-paced cod­ing chal­lenges, build projects, and earn cer­ti­fi­ca­tions. Accord­ing to Wired, the site “fea­tures a sequence of online tuto­ri­als to help the absolute begin­ner learn become a web devel­op­er, start­ing with build­ing a sim­ple web­page. Stu­dents move on to pro­gram­ming with JavaScript and, even­tu­al­ly, learn­ing to build com­plete web appli­ca­tions using mod­ern frame­works such as Angu­lar and Node.”
• The Odin Project: Made by the cre­ators of Viking Code School, an online cod­ing boot­camp, the Odin Project offers free cod­ing lessons in web devel­op­ment. Top­ics include: HTML, CSS, JavaScript & jQuery, Ruby pro­gram­ming, Ruby on Rails. Find an intro­duc­tion to the cur­ricu­lum here.

• Google’s Python Class:  A free class (used with­in Google itself) for peo­ple with a lit­tle bit of pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence who want to learn Python. The class includes writ­ten mate­ri­als, lec­ture videos, and lots of code exer­cis­es to prac­tice Python cod­ing.
• Google’s C++ Course: Wel­come to Google’s C++ Class. This class includes writ­ten mate­ri­als, lec­ture videos, exam­ples, and exer­cis­es to prac­tice C++ cod­ing.
• Cod­ing for Kids from Code.org: Code.org, a non-prof­it, has cre­at­ed a fun way for stu­dents to learn the basics of cod­ing. They’ve launched Star Wars: Build­ing a Galaxy with Code, a tuto­r­i­al designed to teach stu­dents how to write JavaScript. There’s also a ver­sion that teach­es code with Minecraft, and a sep­a­rate beginner’s tuto­r­i­al for kids between the ages of 6 and 10.
• Online Computer/Coding Cours­es from Major Uni­ver­si­ties:
  • You can find dozens of free cours­es, cov­er­ing all facets of cod­ing, list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es. The cours­es come from top uni­ver­si­ties.
  • Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) focused on Cod­ing are reg­u­lar­ly offered through providers like Cours­era, edx, Udac­i­ty, Ali­son, Future­Learn, MIT, and Khan Acad­e­my. Ude­my itself has a short course called “The Best Free Resources To Learn How To Pro­gram.”
  • Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Intro to Com­put­er Sci­ence: Get free access to Har­vard’s pop­u­lar intro­duc­to­ry cod­ing course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Com­bines cours­es typ­i­cal­ly known else­where as “CS1” and “CS2.”
  • Stan­ford’s Free Course on Devel­op­ing Apps with iOS: If you’re look­ing to devel­op apps for iPhone or iPad, this handy Stan­ford course will go a long way.

• YouTube Chan­nels for Learn­ing Cod­ing: Chan­nels you might want to vis­it include:
  • Coder’s Guide: Fea­tures videos on HTML web devel­op­ment, cross-plat­­form Java pro­gram­ming, begin­ner .net pro­gram­ming with Visu­al Basic and client side JavaScript web devel­op­ment.
  • Code Course: Learn to code and build things with easy to fol­low tuto­ri­als. A num­ber of videos focus on PHP. Find more mate­ri­als on the chan­nel’s web site.
  • LearnCode.academy: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CSS Lay­outs, Respon­sive Design etc.
  • DevTips: Web design and web devel­op­ment.
  • The New Boston: Pro­gram­ming, web design, net­work­ing, video game devel­op­ment, graph­ic design, etc.
  • The Google Devel­op­ers Chan­nel: Offers lessons, talks, the lat­est news & best prac­tices in sub­jects like Android, Chrome, Web Devel­op­ment, Poly­mer, Per­for­mance, iOS & more.
  • You can find more YouTube Chan­nels here: 33 Use­ful Youtube-chan­nels for learn­ing Web Design and Devel­op­ment.
• Free Pro­gram­ming Text­books from Github: Access 500+ “free pro­gram­ming books that cov­er more than 80 dif­fer­ent pro­gram­ming lan­guages on the pop­u­lar web-based Git repos­i­to­ry host­ing ser­vice.”
• Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Text­books: On our site, find a list of free text­books (aka open text­books) writ­ten by knowl­edgable schol­ars.

Sources that helped us cre­ate this list above include: Inc., Learn to Code with Me, and Web­Build­De­sign.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Charlie Chaplin Gets Strapped into a Dystopian “Rube Goldberg Machine,” a Frightful Commentary on Modern Capitalism

in Comics/Cartoons, Film, Technology | March 7th, 2016

I get into a lot of con­ver­sa­tions these days about how we used to con­sid­er tech­no­log­i­cal progress good by def­i­n­i­tion, but now — despite or maybe because of the far­ther-pro­gressed-than-ever state of our tech­nol­o­gy — we feel a bit wary about it all. We line up for the lat­est smart­phone, but as we do we reflect upon how it increas­ing­ly looks we’ll nev­er line up for the jet­packs, fly­ing cars, and moon colonies we dreamed of in child­hood. We enjoy our phones, but we resent them as well, remem­ber­ing those long-ago assur­ances that tech­nol­o­gy would increase our leisure, not fill it with anx­i­ety about insuf­fi­cient­ly rapid respons­es, nag­ging left­over work, and missed-out-on infor­ma­tion of every kind. When did the trust between our tech and our­selves break down?

Not so recent­ly, it turns out — or rather, not just recent­ly. The human-tech­nol­o­gy rela­tion­ship goes through its good times and its bad patch­es, and at any giv­en time some of us like the direc­tion its progress looks to be mov­ing in more than oth­ers do. You may have heard of one par­tic­u­lar­ly well-known tech­no­log­i­cal crit­ic of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, a car­toon­ist by the name of Rube Gold­berg. More like­ly, you’ve heard of the pre­pos­ter­ous­ly elab­o­rate machines he drew in his car­toons.

One rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ple, an “auto­mat­ic sui­cide device for unlucky stock spec­u­la­tors,” involves the ring of a phone (“prob­a­bly a mes­sage from your bro­ker say­ing you are wiped out”) which wakes up a doz­ing office man­ag­er whose stretch­ing hits a lever which launch­es a toy glid­er which hits a dwarf whose jump­ing up and down in pain works a jack which lifts up a pig to the lev­el of a pota­to, and when he eats the pota­to… well, in any case, the process ends up, some time lat­er, pulling the trig­ger of a gun mount­ed right over the tick­er­tape machine. “If the tele­phone call is not from your bro­ker,” Gold­berg notes, you’ll nev­er find out the mis­take because you’ll be dead any­way.

“The sur­re­al­ism of Goldberg’s car­toon inven­tions,” writes Bren­dan O’Con­nor at The Verge, while meant to enter­tain, “also reveals a dark skep­ti­cism of the era in which they were made. The machines were sym­bols, Gold­berg wrote, of ‘man’s capac­i­ty for exert­ing max­i­mum effort to accom­plish min­i­mal results.’ ” They had a strong appeal in that “era of increas­ing automa­tion, and increas­ing con­cern about automa­tion, exem­pli­fied in Char­lie Chaplin’s 1936 mas­ter­piece Mod­ern Times. One of the film’s dystopi­an curiosi­ties, the Bil­lows Feed­ing Machine, invent­ed by Mr. J. Wid­de­combe Bil­lows, has a dis­tinct­ly Rube Gold­ber­gian qual­i­ty to it — this is like­ly no coin­ci­dence, as Gold­berg and Chap­lin were friends.”

In the clip at the top, we see the Bil­lows Feed­ing Machine in action, not quite ful­fill­ing its promise to “elim­i­nate the lunch hour, increase your pro­duc­tion, and decrease your over­head.” The dis­ap­point­ed high­er-ups ren­der their ver­dict: “It’s no good — it isn’t prac­ti­cal.” A mod­ern-day J. Wid­de­combe Bil­lows would know bet­ter how to respond to them: it’s still in beta.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Falling Water: A Rube Gold­berg Machine That Makes a Fine Cock­tail

Stu­dents Tells the Passover Sto­ry with a Rube Gold­berg Machine

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Three Great Films Star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, the True Icon of Silent Com­e­dy

Dis­cov­er the Cin­e­mat­ic & Comedic Genius of Char­lie Chap­lin with 60+ Free Movies Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

World Science U Lets You Take Free Physics Courses from Leading Minds in the Field

in Online Courses, Science | March 3rd, 2016

Two years ago, World Sci­ence U debuted on the net, promis­ing to bring free sci­ence cours­es to any­one, from high school­ers to retirees. (We wrote about it here.) The cours­es would be taught by the top sci­en­tists in their fields, fea­tur­ing lec­tures, ani­ma­tions, inter­ac­tive exer­cis­es, feed­back, and even vir­tu­al office hours. At the time, how­ev­er, Bri­an Greene’s project to bring the lat­est in research on string the­o­ry, par­ti­cle physics, dark ener­gy, rel­a­tiv­i­ty and more fea­tured only two cours­es.

Since then, World Sci­ence U has tak­en off. It now offers “Sci­ence Unplugged,” a series of short videos that offer answers to layper­son ques­tions about sci­ence; “Mas­ter Class­es” which are short class­es about var­i­ous sub­jects (most­ly in physics) that take a few hours to com­plete; and “Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es” which take eight to ten weeks to com­plete and are designed for the more advanced learn­er. These lat­ter two offer­ings offer cer­tifi­cates upon com­ple­tion.

The cur­rent ros­ter of lec­tures is impres­sive: MIT’s Alan Guth teach­es Infla­tion­ary Cos­mol­o­gy; U. Chicago’s Michael Turn­er (who coined the term “dark ener­gy”) presents the Dark Side of the Uni­verse; Stan­ford’s Andrei Linde takes you into the Mul­ti­verse; and Cal­tech’s Maria Spirop­u­lu probes Nature’s Con­stituents, to name a few Mas­ter Class­es. Mean­while Bri­an Greene cur­rent­ly teach­es two of the uni­ver­si­ty cours­es: “Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: A Math-Based Intro­duc­tion” and (high­light­ed above) “Space, Time and Ein­stein: A Con­cep­tu­al Tour of Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty.”

All of the cours­es are absolute­ly free but the videos are only avail­able if you reg­is­ter with World Sci­ence U.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Bri­an Greene Breaks Down Einstein’s The­o­ry of Grav­i­ta­tion­al Waves for Stephen Col­bert

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Michio Kaku & Bri­an Green Explain String The­o­ry in a Nut­shell: Ele­gant Expla­na­tions of an Ele­gant The­o­ry

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

Watch the Trailer for a “Fully Painted” Van Gogh Film: Features 12 Oil Paintings Per Second by 100+ Painters

in Animation, Art, Film | February 27th, 2016

Lov­ing Vin­cent, an homage to Vin­cent van Gogh, promis­es to be “the first ful­ly paint­ed fea­ture film in the world.” What does that mean exact­ly? Accord­ing to film­mak­ers Doro­ta Kobiela and Hugh Welch­man, every frame of Lov­ing Vin­cent will be an oil paint­ing on can­vas, cre­at­ed with the same tech­niques Van Gogh used over a cen­tu­ry ago. To make these frames, Kobiela and Welch­man plan to hire skilled painters and put them through a 3‑week inten­sive train­ing course, teach­ing each to paint like Van Gogh him­self. Or so that’s how they explained things dur­ing their Kick­starter cam­paign sev­er­al years ago.

Although pro­duc­tion is still ongo­ing, you can see the first fruits of their labors. Above, watch a trail­er for Lov­ing Vin­cent, which fea­tures (accord­ing to the Youtube blurb accom­pa­ny­ing the video) “12 oil paint­ings per sec­ond, all done by over 100 painters trained in the same style.”

If you’re a tal­ent­ed painter and want to con­tribute to mak­ing this orig­i­nal film (you can get an idea of what that looks like below), please vis­it the Lov­ing Vin­cent web­site and scroll down to the recruit­ment sec­tion. The site also includes oth­er mate­r­i­al that takes you inside the mak­ing of this inno­v­a­tive film.

Enjoy…

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian

in Comedy, History | February 18th, 2016

By Scott Saul:

Richard Pry­or is a leg­endary com­ic, and for good rea­son. He had extra­or­di­nary gifts as a mim­ic, sto­ry­teller, phys­i­cal come­di­an, satirist, and impro­vis­ing actor — gifts he brought togeth­er in an act that had the dan­ger­ous elec­tric­i­ty of an unin­su­lat­ed wire. Mean­while he estab­lished a feed­back loop between his act and his per­son­al life, mak­ing use of all those stage chops to draw com­e­dy out of a life that was painful­ly full of self-sab­o­tage, may­hem, and var­i­ous forms of abuse.

It was my task, as Pryor’s biog­ra­ph­er, to probe the leg­ends of his life, start­ing with the vivid sto­ries he told of his for­ma­tive years in the red-light dis­trict of Peo­ria, Illi­nois. In his stage act and rem­i­nis­cences, Pry­or relat­ed how he’d been raised in a broth­el by a grand­moth­er and father who worked, respec­tive­ly, as madam and pimp, and how he had both suf­fered at their hands and learned from them. He told, too, how he’d made his way in a larg­er world that, while bru­tal, was also touched with grace — that grace he felt when he ven­tured onstage, at school or in a club, and start­ed to find him­self as a per­former. 

Ear­li­er biog­ra­phers had won­dered how much Pry­or had embell­ished his past in build­ing his act around his life sto­ry. In my research I dis­cov­ered a moth­er­lode of mate­r­i­al — fam­i­ly pho­tos, court records, news­pa­per arti­cles, and more — that not only cor­rob­o­rat­ed the out­lines of Pryor’s sto­ry but also filled in the pic­ture and gave it a his­tor­i­cal depth. I could see, for instance, how Pryor’s taboo-bust­ing com­e­dy was root­ed in his child­hood envi­ron­ment, a black work­ing-class under­ground where taboos were bust­ed on a reg­u­lar basis, and hypocrisies called to account. You can watch a short, four-minute film above that sets the sto­ry of the young Richard and his fam­i­ly against the back­drop of “Roarin’ Peo­ria.”

Ulti­mate­ly, I dis­cov­ered so much in my research into Pryor’s for­ma­tive years that I felt it couldn’t be con­tained in the book I was writ­ing (in which Pryor’s first two decades in Peo­ria make up only one of five sec­tions). So I built a dig­i­tal com­pan­ion where you can explore over 200 doc­u­ments from “Richard Pryor’s Peo­ria”. Here you can see, through the young Richard’s report card, how he strug­gled in the con­fines of Peo­ria schools. You can see, through the divorce case of his par­ents, how his moth­er (con­trary to reports that she aban­doned him) tried, unsuc­cess­ful­ly, to steal Richard away from his grand­moth­er and father, and from the red-light dis­trict itself. You can see, through the paper trail of Richard’s for­mi­da­ble grand­moth­er Marie, how she fought — with wil­i­ness and blunt force — against her abu­sive hus­band and against the sys­tem of Jim Crow. And you can vis­it the var­i­ous scenes of Richard’s youth, from his family’s tav­ern and the com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter where he first took the stage to the some­times rau­cous, some­times styl­ish clubs where he got his start as an enter­tain­er. 

Richard Pry­or was an excep­tion­al human being — a genius who changed the rules of com­e­dy in Amer­i­ca — and the web­site aims to show how the seeds of that genius were plant­ed. At the same time, it sug­gests how Pryor’s life sto­ry makes rich­er sense when set against larg­er his­tor­i­cal back­drops: the sto­ry of how the Midwest’s pre­mier “Sin City” became, dur­ing the Cold War, a lead­ing “All-Amer­i­can City”; the sto­ry of how black neigh­bor­hoods were demol­ished in “urban renew­al” efforts (Pryor’s child­hood home was itself tar­get­ed by a wreck­ing ball so that Peo­ria might be linked to an inter­state high­way); and, most of all, the sto­ry of how black Amer­i­cans, while locked into seg­re­ga­tion in the Mid­west, defied that sys­tem in inven­tive and force­ful ways.

This post is by Scott Saul, the author of Becom­ing Richard Pry­or (Harper­Collins), now out in paper­back.  He teach­es Amer­i­can his­to­ry and lit­er­a­ture at UC-Berke­ley, and also is the host of the Chap­ter & Verse pod­cast. Fol­low him on Twit­ter @scottsaul4.

The 120 Minutes Archive Compiles Clips & Playlists from 956 Episodes of MTV’s Alternative Music Show (1986–2013)

in Music, Television | February 15th, 2016

In the first cou­ple years after MTV’s 1981 debut, the fledg­ling cable net­work more or less repro­duced the 70’s album-ori­ent­ed rock radio for­mat with video accom­pa­ni­ment, to the exclu­sion of a num­ber of emerg­ing pop­u­lar artists (a fact David Bowie bemoaned in ’83). In the mid-80s, the net­work diver­si­fied: Michael Jackson’s “Bil­lie Jean” broke the col­or bar­ri­er in 1984, and in the fol­low­ing years, the net­work moved toward edgi­er music with shows like Headbanger’s Ball in ’85 (orig­i­nal­ly Heavy Met­al Mania) and, a few years lat­er, Yo! MTV Raps.

In 1986, anoth­er show appeared that solid­i­fied MTV’s status—for a few years at least—as a gen­uine source for new, “alter­na­tive” music, before that term became an emp­ty mar­ket­ing word. Tucked away in a mid­night to 2 A.M. slot, 120 Min­utes ini­tial­ly “guid­ed view­ers through the late ‘80s col­lege rock land­scape, which was large­ly inspired by trends hap­pen­ing in the UK at the time.”

So writes Tyler at Tylerc.com, who hosts the huge­ly impres­sive 120 Min­utes Archive, a recre­ation of the 27-year run of the two-hour music video, news, and inter­view show that broke many an “alter­na­tive” artist in the U.S. and gave many more a plat­form to pro­mote their music, caus­es, and per­son­al­i­ties. Enter the archive here.

I well remem­ber stay­ing up late, the vol­ume turned down as low as pos­si­ble so as not to wake the fam­i­ly, and catch­ing videos for the Pix­ies’ “Here Comes Your Man” (above) and R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World (As We Know It),” among so many oth­er bands art-pop, new wave, post-punk, indus­tri­al, etc. The show was like a video ana­logue to Trouser Press—and brows­ing the online data­base of that “’bible’ of alter­na­tive rock” will give you a good sense of 120 Min­utes’ breadth. Though it fea­tured a very healthy mix of hard­core, elec­tron­ic, and new wave music from both sides of the pond, the show often seemed to be dom­i­nat­ed by British bands like the Cure (whose Robert Smith once guest host­ed), Depeche Mode, the Psy­che­del­ic Furs, and (sec­ond from top) Big Audio Dyna­mite, Mick Jones’ post-Clash project, which Lou Reed dis­cuss­es briefly in the clip at the top from his 1986 stint as a guest host. (See sev­er­al more clips of his host­ing here.)

In the 90s, 120 Min­utes became a show­case for much more home­grown prod­uct as the “blender of post-punk, goth, indus­tri­al, and jan­gle-rock gave way… to a coa­lesced grunge move­ment” after the seis­mic debut of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” in 1991, with the likes of Mud­honey, Soundgar­den, the Dandy Warhols, and the Smash­ing Pump­kins tak­ing over for much of the British new wave. Those who came of age in the 90s will remem­ber the show’s host Matt Pin­field­’s obses­sive, rock critic’s approach to “the rise and fall of alter­na­tive rock.” Soon, the show became a heav­i­ly eclec­tic mix: Brit pop arrived (along with the bag­gy Mad­ch­ester of the Hap­py Mon­days, Stone Ros­es, etc.), and “post-grunge bands, left of cen­ter singer-song­writ­ers, west coast ska-inspired bands, and alter­na­tive hip hop acts” joined the playlist.

The mid-nineties seem like gold­en years in ret­ro­spect. Flush with cash, record com­pa­nies threw mon­ey at any­thing vague­ly Nir­vana-shaped, which enabled a num­ber of excel­lent bands and artists to break out of their local scenes and into larg­er stu­dios and stages like the trav­el­ing cir­cus of Lol­la­palooza. (The sit­u­a­tion also pro­duced a drag of deriv­a­tive, dumb­ed-down awful­ness.) Scroll through the playlists Tyler C has com­piled for 1994, for exam­ple, a year I fond­ly, most­ly, remem­ber, to get a sense of the range of artists and gen­res the show embraced by this time—from the ham­mer­ing indus­tri­al-met­al of Min­istry (above) to the hazy, ethe­re­al psych-folk of Mazzy Star (below). Post-Nir­vana “alter­na­tive rock” went so main­stream that the net­work even­tu­al­ly ran a com­pan­ion show every week­night called Alter­na­tive Nation, so named despite the fact that “alter­na­tive” came to mean pre­cise­ly the oppo­site of the out­sider sta­tus it had once described.

The boom times couldn’t last. As the mil­len­ni­um waned, so did the hey­day of alt-rock music videos. Real­i­ty TV and bub­blegum pop took over. “In the era of TRL,” writes Tyler C, “the future of 120 Min­utes on MTV was uncer­tain.” As MTV rel­e­gat­ed music videos—once its rai­son d’e­tre—to the mar­gins, 120 Min­utes became MTV’s “de fac­to rock show,” then moved to MTV 2, then off the air alto­geth­er in 2003 after a 17-year run. Then, as indie rock ascend­ed to pop­u­lar­i­ty, the show was revived for a 2003–2011 run as Sub­ter­ranean and again as 120 Min­utes until 2013.

Though Tyler C’s exhaus­tive archive con­tains few actu­al clips from the show, it does doc­u­ment 120 Min­utes’ entire his­to­ry, from its under­ground late 80s incep­tion, through the main­stream 90s, and into the sub­dued 2000’s, with playlists from each episode and, writes Buz­zfeed, “his­to­ries of what bands played, descrip­tions of tours the show appeared on, and anec­dotes where pos­si­ble.” You can watch full episodes of the show’s last cou­ple years with Matt Pin­field on MTV Hive (Many, like this one, broad­cast from New York’s Cake Shop).

The archive, Tyler told Buz­zfeed, res­onates with Gen X’ers because “it’s all about nostalgia”—and I can cer­tain­ly tes­ti­fy to that effect—and appeals to younger peo­ple “because that era of music in the ’90s was so impor­tant. It was the age of EVERYTHING alter­na­tive.” For those of us who lived through the decade, and who aged out of MTV’s demo­graph­ic around the time that Tyler aged in, it’s also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to catch up with lat­er sea­sons of the show we prob­a­bly missed. They may be as essen­tial someday—in their own way—as the ones we so wist­ful­ly recall.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Live Per­for­mance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” (1991)

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talk­ing Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dyna­mite

The First 10 Videos Played on MTV: Rewind the Video­tape to August 1, 1981

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