Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; and Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway
If you’ve read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in English, it’s likely that your translation referred to the transformed Gregor Samsa as a “cockroach,” “beetle,” or, more generally, a “gigantic insect.” These renderings of the author’s original German don’t necessarily miss the mark—Gregor scuttles, waves multiple legs about, and has some kind of an exoskeleton. His charwoman calls him a “dung beetle”… the evidence abounds. But the German words used in the first sentence of the story to describe Gregor’s new incarnation are much more mysterious, and perhaps strangely laden with metaphysical significance.
Translator Susan Bernofsky writes, “both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning “monstrous” or “huge”) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations—virtual nonentities—prefixed by un.” Ungeziefer, a term from Middle High German, describes something like “an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice,” belonging to “the class of nasty creepy-crawly things.” It suggests many types of vermin—insects, yes, but also rodents. “Kafka,” writes Bernofsky, “wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them.”
It’s likely for that very reason that Kafka prohibited images of Gregor. In a 1915 letter to his publisher, he stipulated, “the insect is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance.” The slim book’s original cover, above, instead features a perfectly normal-looking man, distraught as though he might be imagining a terrible transformation, but not actually physically experiencing one.
Yet it seems obvious that Kafka meant Gregor to have become some kind of insect. Kafka’s letter uses the German Insekt, and when casually referring to the story-in-progress, Kafka used the word Wanze, or “bug.” Making this too clear in the prose dilutes the grotesque body horror Gregor suffers, and the story is told from his point of view—one that “mutates as the story proceeds.” So writes Dutch reader Freddie Oomkins, who further observes, “at the physical level Gregor, at different points in the story, starts to talk with a squeaking, animal-like voice, loses control of his legs, hangs from the ceiling, starts to lose his eyesight, and wants to bite his sister—not really helpful in determining his taxonomy.”
Difficulties of translation and classification aside, Russian literary mastermind and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov decided that he knew exactly what Gregor Samsa had turned into. And, against the author’s wishes, Nabokov even drew a picture in his teaching copy of the novella. Nabokov also heavily edited his edition, as you can see in the many corrections and revisions above. In a lecture on The Metamorphosis, he concludes that Gregor is “merely a big beetle” (notice he strikes the word “gigantic” from the text above and writes at the top “just over 3 feet long”), and furthermore one who is capable of flight, which would explain how he ends up on the ceiling.
All of this may seem highly disrespectful of The Metamorphosis’ author. Certainly Nabokov has never been a respecter of literary persons, referring to Faulkner’s work, for example, as “corncobby chronicles,” and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a “petrified superpun.” Yet in his lecture Nabokov calls Kafka “the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plastic saints in comparison with him.” Though a saint he may be, Kafka is “first of all an artist,” and Nabokov does not believe that “any religious implications can be read into Kafka’s genius.” (“I am interested here in bugs, not humbugs,” he says dismissively.)
Rejecting Kafka’s tendencies toward mysticism runs against most interpretations of his fiction. One might suspect Nabokov of seeing too much of himself in the author when he compares Kafka to Flaubert and asserts, “Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author’s private sentiments.” Ungeheueres Ungeziefer, however, is not a scientific term, and its Middle German literary origins—which Kafka would have been familiar with from his studies—clearly connote religious ideas of impurity and sacrifice.
With due respect to Nabokov’s formidable erudition, it seems in this instance at least that Kafka fully intended imprecision, what Bernofsky calls “blurred perceptions of bewilderment,” in language “carefully chosen to avoid specificity.” Kafka’s art consists of this ability to exploit the ancient stratifications of language. His almost Kabbalistic treatment of signs and his aversion to graven images may consternate and bedevil translators and certain novelists, but it is also the great source of his uncanny genius.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicted That the World Will End in 2060
We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin. It’s almost impossible to imagine these two groups of people agreeing on anything other than the ominous portent of their respective messages. But in the early days of the scientific revolution—the days of Shakespeare contemporary Francis Bacon, and later 17th century Descartes—it was not at all unusual to find both kinds of reasoning, or unreasoning, in the same person, along with beliefs in magic, divination, astrology, etc.
Yet even in this maelstrom of heterodox thought and practices, Sir Isaac Newton stood out as a particularly odd co-existence of esoteric biblical prophecy, occult beliefs, and a rigid, formal mathematics that not only adhered to the inductive scientific method, but also expanded its potential by applying general axioms to specific cases.
Yet many of Newton’s general principles would seem totally inimical to the naturalism of most physicists today. As he was formulating the principles of gravity and three laws of motion, for example, Newton also sought the legendary Philosopher’s Stone and attempted to turn metal to gold. Moreover, the devoutly religious Newton wrote theological treatises interpreting Biblical prophecies and predicting the end of the world. The date he arrived at? 2060.
Newton seems, writes science blog Another Pale Blue Dot, “as confident of his predictions in this realm as he was in the rational world of science.” In a 1704 letter exhibited at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, above, Newton describes his “recconing”:
So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.
Newton further demonstrates his confidence in the next sentence, writing that his intent, “though not to assert” an answer, should in any event “put a stop the rash conjectures of fancifull men who are frequently predicting the time of the end.” Indeed. So how did he arrive at this number? Newton applied a rigorous method, that is to be sure.
If you have the patience for exhaustive description of how he worked out his prediction using the Book of Daniel, you may read one here by historian of science Stephen Snobelen, who also points out how widespread the interest in Newton’s odd beliefs has become, reaching across every continent, though scholars have known about this side of the Enlightenment giant for a long time.
For a sense of the exacting, yet completely bizarre flavor of Newton’s prophetic calculations, see another Newton letter at the of the post, transcribed below.
Prop. 1. The 2300 prophetick days did not commence before the rise of the little horn of the He Goat.
2 Those day [sic] did not commence a[f]ter the destruction of Jerusalem & ye Temple by the Romans A.[D.] 70.
3 The time times & half a time did not commence before the year 800 in wch the Popes supremacy commenced
4 They did not commence after the re[ig]ne of Gregory the 7th. 1084
5 The 1290 days did not commence b[e]fore the year 842.
6 They did not commence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 1084
7 The diffence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the seven weeks.
Therefore the 2300 years do not end before ye year 2132 nor after 2370.
The time times & half time do n[o]t end before 2060 nor after [2344]
The 1290 days do not begin [this should read: end] before 2090 [Newton might mean: 2132] nor after 1374 [sic; Newton probably means 2374]
The editorial insertions are Professor Snobelen’s, who thinks the letter dates “from after 1705,” and that “the shaky handwriting suggests a date of composition late in Newton’s life.” Whatever the exact date, we see him much less certain here; Newton pushes around some other dates—2344, 2090 (or 2132), 2374. All of them seem arbitrary, but “given the nice roundness of the number,” writes Motherboard, “and the fact that it appears in more than one letter,” 2060 has become his most memorable dating for the apocalypse.
It’s important to note that Newton didn’t believe the world would “end” in the sense of cease to exist or burn up in holy flames. His end times philosophy resembles that of a surprising number of current day evangelicals: Christ would return and reign for a millennium, the Jewish diaspora would return to Israel and would, he wrote, set up “a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom.” We hear such statements often from televangelists, school boards, governors, and presidential candidates.
As many people have argued, despite Newton’s conception of his scientific work as a bulwark against other theologies, it ultimately became a foundation for Deism and Naturalism, and has allowed scientists to make accurate predictions for hundreds of years. 20th century physics may have shown us a much more radically unstable universe than Newton ever imagined, but his theories are, as Isaac Asimov would put it, “not so much wrong as incomplete,” and still essential to our understanding of certain fundamental phenomena. But as fascinating and curious as Newton’s other interests may be, there’s no more reason to credit his prophetic calculations than those of the Millerites, Harold Camping, or any other apocalyptic doomsday sect.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Iconic Design of the Doomsday Clock Was Created 75 Years Ago: It Now Says We’re 100 Seconds to Midnight
Image via The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Last year, the fates handed the New York Times’ Maria Cramer an enviably striking lede: “Humanity is 100 seconds away from total annihilation. Again.” That we all know immediately what she was writing about speaks to the power of graphic design. Specifically, it speaks to the power of graphic design as practiced by Martyl Langsdorf, who happened to be married to ex-Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf. This connection got her the gig of creating a cover for the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She came up with a simple image: the upper-left corner of a clock, its hands at seven minutes to midnight.
Asked later why she set the clock to that time in particular, Langsdorf explained that “it looked good to my eye.” That quote appears in a post at the Bulletin addressing frequently asked questions about what’s now known as the Doomsday Clock, “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.” In the 75 years since its introduction, its minute hand has been moved backward eight times and forward sixteen times; currently it still stands where Cramer reported it as having remained last January, at 100 seconds to midnight.
To the public of 1947, “midnight” signified above all the prospect of humanity’s self-destruction through the use of nuclear weapons. But as technology itself has advanced and proliferated, the means of auto-annihilation have grown more diverse. This year’s Doomsday Clock statement cites not just nukes but carbon emissions, infectious diseases, and “internet-enabled misinformation and disinformation.” Earlier this month, the Bulletin reminded us that even as 2022 began, “we called out Ukraine as a potential flashpoint in an increasingly tense international security landscape. For many years, we and others have warned that the most likely way nuclear weapons might be used is through an unwanted or unintended escalation from a conventional conflict.”
Now that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought this nightmare scenario to life,” many have found themselves glancing nervously at the Doomsday Clock once again. This also happened after the election of Donald Trump, which prompted the Vox video above on the Clock’s history and purpose. Its iconic status, as celebrated in the new book The Doomsday Clock at 75, has long outlasted the Cold War, but the device itself isn’t without its critics. Bulletin co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch once articulated the latter as meant “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality,” a somewhat controversial intention. One could also raise objections to using an inherently linear and unidirectional concept like time to represent a probability resulting from human action. Yet somehow more technically suitable images — “100 centimeters from the edge,” say — don’t have quite the same ring.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Fan Faithfully Reconstructs Cream’s Final Concert: Watch a New Version of the Show with the Correct Song Order and Run-Time (1968)
The original rock supergroup, Cream, lasted two years, changed the course of rock music, barely held together because of rancor between members and said goodbye in 1968. Their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London was one for the ages. Maybe not their best performance, but one of their most energetic. And inside the cavernous Hall, the three men laid down a wall of undeniable sound.
Too bad that it wasn’t properly documented, despite a series of cameras there that evening. A Youtube denizen called Mike Lefton has tried to rectify the history by assembling a cut of the 70-minute concert that plays in real time. It’s the kind of fan project for which YouTube is designed—something not professional enough for official release, but vitally important for the fans.
Go on to the BezosBorg site (you know, it rhymes with Glamazon), and you can find a concert film offered on Blu-Ray. What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Cream fans will tell you. Instead of letting the band play, the official Farewell Concert leaves off several songs, and includes a “totally square voiceover by Patrick Allen (who refers to the band as “The Cream” throughout),” according to the moviesteve.com website, while another reviewer notes this could be the genesis of Spinal Tap’s intentionally bad interviews. (But let’s be fair, the 1960s in general were filled with non-rock journalists interviewing musicians as if they were alien life forms. D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back is a compendium of such cringey moments.)
On top of that, director Allen really overdid the zoom lens, which was everywhere those days. It’s funny to see how it was used to “spice up” rock band footage, where really you could just hold the camera on Ginger Baker playing drums.
This edit cuts Allen’s footage together with black and white footage from the BBC, and generally does a fair job filling in the gaps, letting the concert stand on its own merits. It had plenty—the aforementioned Ginger Baker’s drum solo on “The Toad.” The repetition of footage is easy to spot—Jack Bruce tunes his guitar quite a lot, Eric Clapton looks offstage, and Baker smokes the final half-inch of a rollie over the hour—but Mike Lefton made this one for the fans, which is more than you can say for Allen, who made it for frightened BBC viewers still unsure about what all this “rock and roll” music was about. Enjoy.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Real Footage of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance: Watch Clips from the First Documentary Feature Film Ever Made (1919)
Last week we featured the recent discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which has spent more than a century at the bottom of the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. It sank there in 1915, after having been entrapped and slowly crushed by pack ice for the most of a year. That marked the end of what had started as the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the story. When it had become clear that there was no hope for Endurance, writes Rain Noe at Core77, “Shackleton and five of the crew then sailed 800 miles in a lifeboat to Stromness, an inhabited island and whaling station in the South Atlantic, where they were able to organize a rescue party. Shackleton located and rescued his crew four months later.”
Today we can watch the Endurance’s demise on film, as shot by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. “How is it possible that the film footage survived this ordeal?” Noe writes. “After the crew abandoned ship, food was the main thing to be carried away by the men, and Hurley had to decide which photo negatives and film reels to salvage.” Hurley himself later described this agonizing process, at the end of which “about 400 plates were jettisoned and 120 retained. Later I had to preserve them almost with my life; for a time came when we had to choose between heaving them overboard or throwing away our surplus food — and the food went over!”
Even relatively early in the era of cinema, Hurley must have understood the power of the image — as, it seems, did his captain. The footage Hurley could salvage retained a striking clarity, and it went into 1919’s South, which is now considered to be the very first documentary feature. “South was first exhibited by Ernest Shackleton in 1919 to accompany his lectures,” writes Ann Ogidi at the BFI’s Screenonline, “and it has some of the quality of a lecture. Excerpts of the journey are interspersed with scientific and biological observations.” And “just when the dramatic tension reaches its height, there are almost 20 inexplicable minutes of nature footage, showing sea lions gamboling, penguins and other birds.”
Crisply restored in the 1990s, South “is best thought of as that multi-media documentary lecture that Shackleton would have presented with stills, paintings, film and music woven together to spin the yarn, and for Hurley’s exquisite photography that keeps alive the story of that group of extraordinary men.” So writes BFI curator Bryony Dixon in a recent piece on the miraculous survival of not just Shackleton and his men, but of Hurley’s handiwork. And it was Hurley who then went right back out to the island of South Georgia to “take wildlife footage that the newspaper editor Ernest Perris, who sponsored the film, was convinced was needed to make the film interesting to the public.” Perris was daring enough to fund the first documentary feature, but also prescient in his conception of the form — a conception proven definitively right, more than eighty years later, by the box-office performance of March of the Penguins.
via Core77
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Brian Eno Creates a List of 20 Books That Could Rebuild Civilization
Creative Commons image via Wikimedia Commons
Artist and music producer Brian Eno wrote one of my very favorite books: A Year with Swollen Appendices, which takes the form of his personal diary of the year 1995 with essayistic chapters (the “swollen appendices”) on topics like “edge culture,” generative music, new ways of , pretension, CD-ROMs (a relevant topic back then), and payment structures for recording artists (a relevant topic again today). It also includes a fair bit of Eno’s correspondence with Stewart Brand, once editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and now president of the Long Now Foundation, “a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture” meant to “help make long-term thinking more common” and “creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”
It so happens that Eno now sits on the Long Now Foundation’s board and has had a hand in some of its projects. Naturally, he contributed suggested reading material to the foundation’s Manual of Civilization, a collection of books humanity could use to rebuild civilization, should it need rebuilding. Eno’s full list, which spans history, politics, philosophy, sociology, architecture, design, nature, and literature, runs as follows:
- Seeing Like a State by James C Scott
- The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
- Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
- The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel
- Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill
- Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese
- A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al
- The Face of Battle by John Keegan
- A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
- Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
- The Notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci
- The Confidence Trap by David Runciman
- The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein
- Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Hrdy
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Cambridge World History of Food (2‑Volume Set) by Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
- The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe by Marjorie Blamey & Christopher Grey Wilson
- Printing and the Mind of Man by John Carter & Percy Muir
- Peter the Great: His Life and World by Richard Massie
If you’d like to know more books that have shaped Eno’s thinking, do pick up a copy of A Year with Swollen Appendices. Like all the best diarists, Eno makes plenty of references to his day-to-day reading material, and at the very end — beyond the last swollen appendix — he includes a bibliography (below), on which you’ll find more from Christopher Alexander, a reappearance of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, and even Steward Brand’s own How Buildings Learn (on a television version of which the two would collaborate). You can find other writers and thinkers’s contributions to the Manual of Civilization here.
- Best Ideas: A Compendium of Social Innovation edited by Nicholas Albery
- A Foreshadowing of the 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets by Christopher Alexander
- Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andric
- Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber
- The Artful Universe by John Barrow
- Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
- The Creators by Daniel Boorstin
- Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery edited by B.A. Botkin
- How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
- Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel
- The Transformation of War by Martin van Creveld
- The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto
- River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins
- Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
- Defence Policy Making edited by G.M. Dillon
- Women En Large: Image of Fat Nudes by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
- Trust by Francis Fukuyama
- Edge City by Joel Garreau
- Ecce Homo by George Grosz
- Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall
- Managing the Commons by Garrett Hardin and John Baden
- The Middle Ages by Friedrich Herr
- Going Bugs by James Hillman
- Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes
- The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johann Huizinga
- The State We’re In by Will Hutton
- Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization by Kevin Kelly
- Wild Blue Yonder by Nick Krotz
- Fetish Girls by Eric Kroll
- The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Artificial Life by Steven Levy
- Planetary Overload by A.J. McMichael
- Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
- Erotica Universalis by Gilles Neret
- Living Without a Goal by Jay Ogilvy
- Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
- Evolution of Consciousness by Robert E. Ornstein
- Art and Pornography and Man’s Rage for Chaos by Morse Peckham
- Works and Texts by Tom Phillips
- The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
- In Search of a Better World by Karl Popper
- Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone
- Postcards by Annie Proulx
- Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
- The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
- England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage
- Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave
- Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain
- I am That: Conversations with Sri Nisaragadatta Maharaj
- Face of the Gods and Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson
- Ocean of Sound by David Toop
- The Seven Cultures of Capitalism by Charles Hampden Turner
- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
- Art and Anarchy by Edgar Wind
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...When Movies Came on Vinyl: The Early-80s Engineering Marvel and Marketing Disaster That Was RCA’s SelectaVision
Anyone over 30 remembers a time when it was impossible to imagine home video without physical media. But anyone over 50 remembers a time when it was difficult to choose which kind of media to bet on. Just as the “computer zoo” of the early 1980s forced home-computing enthusiasts to choose between Apple, IBM, Commodore, Texas Instruments, and a host of other brands, each with its own technological specifications, the market for home-video hardware presented several different alternatives. You’ve heard of Sony’s Betamax, for example, which has been a punchline ever since it lost out to JVC’s VHS. But that was just the realm of video tape; have you ever watched a movie on a vinyl record?
Four decades ago, it was difficult for most consumers to imagine home video at all. “Get records that let you have John Travolta dancing on your floor, Gene Hackman driving though your living room, the Godfather staying at your house,” booms the narrator of the television commercial above.
How, you ask? By purchasing a SelectaVision player and compatible video discs, which allow you to “see the entertainment you really want, when you want, uninterrupted.” In our age of streaming-on-demand this sounds like a laughably pedestrian claim, but at the time it represented the culmination of seventeen years and $600 million of intensive research and development at the Radio Company of America, better known as RCA.
Radio, and even more so its successor television, made RCA an enormous (and enormously profitable) conglomerate in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, it commanded the resources to work seriously on such projects as a vinyl record that could contain not just music, but full motion pictures in color and stereo. This turned out to be even harder than it sounded: after numerous delays, RCA could only bring SelectaVision to market in the spring of 1981, four years after the internal target. By that time, after the company had been commissioning content for the better part of a decade (D. A. Pennebaker shot David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust concert in 1973 on commission from RCA, who’d intended to make a SelectaVision disc out of it), the format faced competition from not just VHS and Betamax but the cutting-edge LaserDisc as well.
Nevertheless, the SelectaVision’s ultra-densely encoded vinyl video discs — officially known as capacitance electronic discs, or CEDs — were, in their way, marvels of engineering. You can take a deep dive into exactly what makes the system so impressive, which involves not just a breakdown of its components but a complete retelling of the history of RCA, though the five-part Technology Connections miniseries at the top of the post. True completists can also watch RCA’s video tour of its SelectaVision production facilities, as well as its live dealer-introduction broadcast hosted by Tom Brokaw and featuring a Broadway-style musical number. SelectaVision was also rolled out in the United Kingdom in 1983, thus qualifying for a hands-on examination by British retro-tech Youtuber Techmoan.
SelectaVision lasted just three years. Its failure was perhaps overdetermined, and not just by the bad timing resulting from its troubled development. In the early 1980s, the idea of buying pre-recorded video media lacked the immediate appeal of “time-shifting” television, which had become possible only with video tape. Nor did RCA, whose marketing centered on the possibility of building a permanent home-video library in the manner of one’s music library, foresee the possibility of rental. And though CEDs were ultimately made functional, they remained cumbersome, able to hold just one hour of video per side and notoriously subject to jitters even on the first play. Yet as RCA’s ad campaigns emphasized, there really was a “magic” in being able to watch the movies you wanted at home, whenever you wanted to. In that sense, at least, we now live in a magical world indeed.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Watch a Very Nervous, 23-Year-Old David Byrne and Talking Heads Performing Live in NYC (1976)
“This is a person who is profoundly uncomfortable addressing an audience and yet puts himself in that position,” David Byrne told Studio 360’s Kurt Anderson in 2019, as they watched some of the above footage of his 23-year-old self fronting a live Talking Heads’ performance back in 1976.
Everything was pretty new back in that Bicentennial year.
Talking Heads had formed the year before, when Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz, who’d been bandmates at the Rhode Island College of Design, moved to New York City with Frantz’s girlfriend, bassist Tina Weymouth.
The venue hosting this live performance, New York City’s legendary experimental art space, The Kitchen, was slightly less wet behind the ears, having opened its doors in 1971. (Some 30 years later, elder statesman Byrne was the guest of honor at its annual spring gala.)
However you define it — New Wave, no wave, post-punk art pop — the band’s sound was also fresh, though Byrne suggests, in the interview with Anderson, there was nothing new about his youthful cockiness:
…like a lot of bands, artists, everything else, any period really, you tend to think that, um, the pervasive stuff around you is crap and you and your friends are…we’re doing the real stuff.
And optimistically, one might think, since we’re doing the real stuff and it has real soul and passion, and it’s of its moment, it represents its moment, and so immodestly, you think, “Of course! Things are just going to fall into your lap because you’re doing something that has some truth to it. Uh…that certainly doesn’t always happen.
It happened comparatively quickly for Talking Heads.
Several of the songs they performed as a trio that March night at the Kitchen made it onto Talking Heads: 77, the debut studio album recorded barely a year later, by which time a fourth member, Jerry Harrison, had joined on keyboards and guitar.
Of particular note above is Psycho Killer, which earned the band both notoriety, owing to the coincidental timing of 1976 and 1977’s Son of Sam murders, and their first Billboard Hot 100 spot.
“This song was written a long time ago,” the young Byrne stutters into the microphone at the Kitchen, then apologizes for fiddling with his clothes and equipment.
(“It’s all good!” Frantz calls out encouragingly from behind his drum kit.)
According to the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads, Byrne began work on the song in college:
When I started writing this (I got help later), I imagined Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman-type ballad. Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies.
Fans may note a disparity in the lyrics between this performance and recorded versions of the song. Here, the second verse goes:
Listen to me, now I’ve passed the test
I think I’m cute, I think I’m the best
Skirt tight, don’t like that style
Don’t criticize what I know is worthwhile
Psycho Killer stayed on the shelf for David Byrne’s American Utopia, the Broadway show recently filmed by Spike Lee. But it gave a far more polished Byrne an excellent opener for Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense.
The uncomfortable young frontman dressed like a “proletariat everyman,” who the Kitchen’s press release described as “a cross between Ralph Nader, Lou Reed, and Tony Perkins.” And he has since managed to acquire some impressive performance chops over the course of a still flourishing career.
This is your chance to catch him at that awkward age when, as Byrne told Kirk Anderson, he performed “because he had to”:
There was this means of communication that was being a performer and writing songs and singing them (that) was a way of, kind of being present to other people — not just girls, but other people in general.
Setlist for The Kitchen, March 13, 1976:
00:00 — Introduction/soundcheck
02:13 — The Girls Want To Be With the Girls (Featured on More Songs About Buildings and Food in 1978)
06:05 — Psycho Killer (Featured on Talking Heads: 77 in 1977, with different lyrics)
The lyrics of the 2nd verse of Psycho Killer is different from the recorded version!
10:55 — I Feel It In My Heart (Featured on the deluxe version of Talking Heads: 77, with different lyrics)
15:28 — I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That (Featured on the deluxe version of Talking Heads: 77)
18:15 — Information about the recording
19:00 — Stay Hungry (Featured on More Songs About Buildings and Food)
24:35 — I Want To Live (Featured on compilations such as Sand in the Vaseline, 1992 and Bonus Rarities & Outtakes, 2006)
29:48 — Tentative Decisions (Featured on Talking Heads: 77)
32:55 — No Compassion (assumed, video ends before song starts)
Related Content
Watch the Talking Heads Play a Vintage Concert in Syracuse (1978)
The Talking Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975)
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Russian Invasion of Ukraine Teach-Out: A Free Course from the University of Michigan
From the University of Michigan comes a free short course on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Here’s how they set the context for the course, which you can find on the Coursera platform:
“The armed conflict in Ukraine first started in the beginning of 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Over the past eight years, there has been ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, with regular shelling and skirmishes occurring along Russian and Ukrainian borders in the eastern part of the country. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, plunging the entire country into war and sending shockwaves across the world. With casualties mounting and over one million Ukrainians fleeing the country, the need for dialogue and de-escalation have never been higher. In this Teach-Out, you will learn from a diverse group of guest experts about the history and origins of war in Ukraine, its immediate and long-term impacts, and what you can do to support people in this growing humanitarian crisis. Specifically this Teach-Out will address the following questions:
- How did we get here? Why did Russia invade Ukraine?
— What historical and cultural contexts do we need to know about in order to understand this conflict?
— How is cyber and information warfare impacting the conflict in Ukraine?
— What can be done to stop this war?
— How can we support Ukrainian refugees and displaced peoples?”
Sign up for the course here.
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Read More...Free Coloring Books from The Public Domain Review: Download & Color Works by Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley & More
Did you somehow miss that the Public Domain Review has gotten in on the adult coloring book craze?
If so, don’t feel bad. There were probably a lot of other news items vying for your attention back in March of 2020, when the first volume was released “for diversion, entertainment and relaxation in times of self-isolation.”
By the time the second volume made its debut less than two months later, the first had been downloaded some 30,000 times.
Tell your scarcity mentality to stand down. You may be late to the party, but all 40 images can still be downloaded for free, “to ease and aid pleasurable focus in these oddest of times.”
It’s our belief that odd times call for odd images so we’re reproducing some of our favorites below, though be advised there are also plenty of calming botanical prints and graceful maidens for those craving a less challenging coloring experience.
Behold Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons by Martin Schongauer (c. 1470–75), above!
And below, the 13-year-old Michelangelo’s reproduction in tempera on a wood panel. Biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both told how the young artist visited the fish market, seeking inspiration for the demons’ scales. Perhaps you will be inspired by the barely teenaged High Renaissance master’s palette, though it’s YOUR coloring page, so you do you.
In “Filling in the Blanks: A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze”, historians Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael recount how publisher Robert Sayer’s illustrated book, The Florist, “for the use & amusement of Gentlemen and Ladies” was published with the explicit understanding that readers were meant to color in its botanically semi-inaccurate images:
Comprised of pictures of various flowers, the author gives his (presumably) adult readers detailed instructions for paint mixing and color choice (including the delightful sounding “gall-stone brown”).
Perhaps you will bring some of Sayer’s suggested colors to bear on the above image from Parisian bookseller Richard Breton’s Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (1565), a collection of 120 grotesque woodcut figures intended as a tribute to the bawdy writer (and priest!) François Rabelais, or a possibly just a canny marketing ploy.
Next, let’s color this perky fellow from Giovanni Battista Nazari’s famous alchemical treatise on metallic transmutation, Della tramutatione metallica sogni tre from 1599.
The “winged pig in the world” by Dutch engraver and mapmaker Cornelis Anthonisz doesn’t look very cheerful, does he? He’s on top of the imperial orb, but he’s also an allegory of the corrupt world. Hopefully, this will get sorted by the time pigs fly.
As to Ambroise Paré’s 1598 rendering of a “camphur” … well, let’s just say THIS is what a proper unicorn should look like.
According to an annotated checklist that accompanied the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters’ 75th Anniversary exhibition Search for the Unicorn, Paré, a pioneering French barber surgeon, claimed that it live(d) in the Arabian Desert, and that its horn can cure various maladies, especially poisoning.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. Think about it as you color.
Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, and Aubrey Beardsley, are among the artists whose work you’ll encounter, “arranged in vague order of difficulty — from a simple 17th-century kimono pattern to an intricate thousand-flowered illustration.”
Download Volume 1 of the Public Domain Review Coloring book in US Letter or A4 format.
And here is Volume 2 in US Letter or A4 format.
Related Content
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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