The Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

in Philosophy, Photography | November 22nd, 2012

Philoso­phers have often rumi­nat­ed on the aes­thet­ics of pho­tog­ra­phy. Roland Barthes’ Cam­era Luci­da begins with a poignant memo­ri­al­iza­tion of his moth­er, as remem­bered through her pho­to­graph. Pierre Bourdieu’s Pho­tog­ra­phy: A Mid­dle-Brow Art won­dered why and how the medi­um became so wide­spread that “there are few house­holds, at least in towns, which do not pos­sess a cam­era.” And Jacques Derrida’s posthu­mous Athens, Still Remains, a trav­el mem­oir accom­pa­nied by the pho­tographs of Jean-Fran­cois Bon­homme, begins with the mys­ti­cal phrase “We owe our­selves to death.”

For Barthes and Der­ri­da, pho­tog­ra­phy was a medi­um of sus­pend­ed mortality—every pho­to­graph a memen­to mori. For anoth­er philoso­pher, the cryp­tic, poly­math, and noto­ri­ous­ly surly Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, pho­tog­ra­phy was a con­crete expres­sion of his pre­ferred means of per­cep­tion. As he famous­ly wrote in the Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, “Don’t think, look!” For the unsen­ti­men­tal­ly cere­bral Wittgen­stein, a pho­to­graph is not a memo­r­i­al, but a “prob­a­bil­i­ty.” The philosopher’s archive at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge includes the pho­to­graph above, a true “prob­a­bil­i­ty” in that it does not rep­re­sent any one per­son but is a com­pos­ite image of his face and the faces of his three sis­ters, made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the “found­ing father of eugen­ics,” Fran­cis Gal­ton. The four sep­a­rate pho­tographs that Wittgen­stein and Gal­ton blend­ed togeth­er are below.

Of the com­pos­ite image, keep­er of the Wittgen­stein archives Michael Nedo writes that “Wittgen­stein was aim­ing for dif­fer­ent clar­i­ty expressed by the pho­tog­ra­phy of fuzzi­ness.”:

Gal­ton want­ed to work out one prob­a­bil­i­ty, where­as Wittgen­stein saw this as a sum­ma­ry in which all man­ner of pos­si­bil­i­ties are revealed in the fuzzi­ness.

Fuzzi­ness is a word rarely applied to Wittgenstein’s thought—at least his ear­ly work in the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus where his only goal is a clar­i­ty of thought that sup­pos­ed­ly dis­solves all the “fuzzy” prob­lems of phi­los­o­phy in a series of ellip­ti­cal apho­risms. The philoso­pher also called him­self a “dis­ci­ple of Freud,” in that he sought to “think in pic­tures,” and reach beyond lan­guage to the images pro­duced by dreams and the uncon­scious, “to enable us to see things dif­fer­ent­ly.” Wittgenstein’s pho­tographs are as strange­ly detached and mys­te­ri­ous as the man him­self. Salon has a gallery of the philosopher’s pho­tographs, which includes the por­trait of him (below), tak­en at his instruc­tion in Swansea, Wales in 1947. It’s an icon­ic image; Wittgen­stein half-sneers dis­dain­ful­ly at the cam­era, his steady gaze a chal­lenge, while the black­board behind him shows a riot of scratch­es and scrawls. In the upper right-hand cor­ner, the word RAW hangs omi­nous­ly above the philosopher’s head.

Wittgenstein’s grim por­trait presents a con­trast to the warmer recent pho­to­graph­ic por­traits of philoso­phers like those in Steve Pyke’s new book of philoso­pher por­traits Philoso­phers. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Pyke’s por­traits of philoso­phers like Richard Rorty, David Chalmers, and Arthur Dan­to. For much a much less for­mal series of por­traits of con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers as every­day peo­ple, swing by the Tum­blr Looks Philo­soph­i­cal.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Alice’s Restaurant Illustrated: A Thanksgiving Counterculture Classic

in Animation, Music | November 22nd, 2012

Alice’s Restau­rant. It’s now a Thanks­giv­ing clas­sic, and some­thing of a tra­di­tion around here. Record­ed in 1967, the 18+ minute coun­ter­cul­ture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, start­ing on Thanks­giv­ing Day 1965. And it builds steadi­ly into a satir­i­cal protest against the Viet­nam War draft. We have fea­tured Guthrie’s clas­sic dur­ing past years. But, for this Thanks­giv­ing, we give you the illus­trat­ed ver­sion. Hap­py Thanks­giv­ing to all who will cel­e­brate today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bed Peace Revis­its John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Viet­nam War Protest

Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occu­py Wall Street

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Record­ings

The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (As Told by Those Who Helped Him Make It)

in Film | November 21st, 2012

Last year, we fea­tured Mak­ing The Shin­ing, the behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Stephen King-adapt­ing hor­ror film shot by his teenage daugh­ter Vivian. (Find Part 1 below, and Part 2 here.) If you can’t get enough knowl­edge about Kubrick­’s work­ing meth­ods — and true Kubrick afi­ciona­dos nev­er can — you’ll want to watch Stair­cas­es to Nowhere as well. This extend­ed cut ver­sion of the film offers some­thing of an oral his­to­ry of The Shin­ing’s pro­duc­tion from those who toiled hard on it: a scenic artist and prop man, a cam­era oper­a­tor, a cam­era tech­ni­cian, a con­ti­nu­ity super­vi­sor, and even a pub­li­cist. Those who know Kubrick­’s work know that, in every aspect of film­mak­ing, the man had very spe­cif­ic ideas about what he want­ed. He also had high expec­ta­tions for his crew’s abil­i­ty to real­ize them, even if that would require untest­ed, or even yet unen­vi­sioned, tech­niques and devices. One inter­vie­wee describes Kubrick as “a frus­trat­ed tech­ni­cian,” and indeed, this doc­u­men­tary fills out the image of the direc­tor as an artis­tic inno­va­tor will­ing to exper­i­ment and impro­vise with the phys­i­cal tech­nol­o­gy of film­mak­ing.

The on-set sto­ries told in Stair­cas­es to Nowhere come, so the video descrip­tion puts it, as “extracts from full-length inter­views with each of the con­trib­u­tors about their careers work­ing at stu­dios in Elstree and Bore­ham­wood, and form part of ‘The Elstree Project’ — a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Elstree Screen Her­itage and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hert­ford­shire. This work has been done on a vol­un­tary basis with stu­dent vol­un­teers and staff giv­ing up their own time to help pre­serve the lega­cy of the ‘British Hol­ly­wood’.”  You can learn more about the project at its offi­cial site, which con­tin­ues to doc­u­ment the Eng­lish towns of Bore­ham­wood and Elstree’s rich his­to­ry of film and tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion. The Amer­i­can-born but British-res­i­dent Kubrick cer­tain­ly found some­thing that worked for him in Eng­land. Whether that came down to a sim­ple affin­i­ty for the coun­try or the coun­try’s tol­er­ance of his uncom­mon­ly rig­or­ous approach to craft, you can’t argue with the results today — as much as the man indi­vid­u­al­ly re-paint­ing hun­dreds of ball­room tiles gold for light­ing rea­sons might have felt like argu­ing at the time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Astronaut Sunita Williams Gives an Extensive Tour of the International Space Station

in Astronomy, Video - Science | November 21st, 2012

After a 125-day stay aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, ISS Com­man­der Suni­ta (Suni) Williams touched down in Kaza­khstan on Mon­day, along with Flight Engi­neers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malanchenko. Part of what is known as Expe­di­tion 33, the three board­ed their Soyuz TMA-05M on Sun­day to return to Earth, but before they left, Williams down­linked an exten­sive tour above of the ISS orbital lab­o­ra­to­ry. Williams has giv­en sev­er­al inter­views from her ISS post, so you may have already seen her float­ing weight­less in front of the cam­era, a nim­bus of dark hair around her face.

Here we see a num­ber of inter­est­ing fea­tures of the sta­tion. She begins with the Japan­ese lab­o­ra­to­ry, then moves to the Euro­pean mod­ule, “Colum­bus,” where many of the med­ical exper­i­ments take place. Inter­est­ing­ly, every sur­face is a suit­able work­sta­tion; since there’s no ref­er­ence for floor, walls, or ceil­ing, and no need for any­thing to stand on, one can maneu­ver into any posi­tion with­out los­ing a sense of direc­tion. As Williams demon­strates the “sleep sta­tions,” phone booth-size com­part­ments with sleep­ing bags, she shows how the astro­nauts can also sleep in any posi­tion at all with­out feel­ing like they’re “upside-down” or dis­ori­ent­ed in any way. There’s also a lengthy tour of the “facil­i­ties” (in case you’ve ever won­dered how that works) and the “cupo­la,” a small trans­par­ent room like a WWII gun­nery sta­tion where the astro­nauts can gaze out at their home plan­et.

So, yes, I will admit, I’ve always liked to imag­ine the inte­ri­or of the ISS like the smooth, padded cor­ri­dors of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001, but the real­i­ty is still seri­ous­ly cool. The Wash­ing­ton Post has a slideshow of Expe­di­tion 33’s touch­down near the town of Arka­lyk in north­ern Kaza­khstan, and the video below shows the small cer­e­mo­ny that greet­ed the crew hours after their arrival back on Earth.

via Uni­verse Today

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Mashup Duet: Miles Davis Improvising on LCD Soundsystem

in Music | November 20th, 2012

It’s cute. It’s clever. Just two Youtube videos in sync. Noth­ing more. Enjoy. h/t Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

‘The Sound of Miles Davis’: Clas­sic 1959 Per­for­mance with John Coltrane

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

John Coltrane Plays Only Live Per­for­mance of A Love Supreme

Adam Savage (Host of MythBusters) Explains How Simple Ideas Become Great Scientific Discoveries

in Life, Science, TED Talks | November 20th, 2012

A good TED talk is like a com­mer­cial for a great idea. There might not be much meat to sink into, but like any good ad agency, TED has its own unique for­mu­la for mak­ing even the most eso­teric sub­ject grab­by.

Who, after all, would have thought that a video of a British guy lec­tur­ing about how schools kill cre­ativ­i­ty would get more than 8 mil­lion hits? Evi­dent­ly the folks at TED did, and were they ever right.

Good TED talks come in a few fla­vors. That British guy I men­tioned? Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about con­tem­po­rary edu­ca­tion is one of TED’s best pol­i­cy cri­tique talks (and its most pop­u­lar over­all). There are also the per­son­al sto­ries that com­pel and the demon­stra­tions of great new ideas.

This talk by actor and edu­ca­tor Adam Sav­age might fall into more than one of those buck­ets. In the video above, Savage—who designed mod­els for two Star Wars movies and hosts Myth­busters on the Dis­cov­ery Channel—talks plain and sim­ple about some of humanity’s most amaz­ing sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. He walks us through how Eratos­thenes cal­cu­lat­ed the Earth’s cir­cum­fer­ence more than 2000 years ago and how Hip­poly­te Fizeau mea­sured the speed of light in the mid-1880s.

These two men used noth­ing more than their own brains and a few rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple tools to make aston­ish­ing­ly accu­rate obser­va­tions. It’s stuff we already know, but in true TED style Sav­age makes the whole thing rev­e­la­to­ry and inspir­ing.

“What hap­pens when you think about the dis­cov­er­ies and what they were think­ing is you under­stand that they were not so dif­fer­ent from us,” Sav­age says. “The peo­ple who made these dis­cov­er­ies just thought a lit­tle bit hard­er about what they were look­ing at. And they were a lit­tle bit more curi­ous.”

Savage’s video is part of TEDEd’s Lessons Worth Shar­ing, which comes bun­dled with oth­er videos and exer­cis­es that teach­ers can use to dis­cuss the notion that sim­ple ideas can lead to sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery.

It’s also a very good  com­mer­cial for curios­i­ty. Sev­en and a half min­utes pro­mot­ing curios­i­ty. Take a look. Curios­i­ty, as Sav­age says, can change the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Adam Sav­age (Host of Myth­busters) Tells Sarah Lawrence Grads to Think Broad­ly … and Don’t Work for Fools

1370 TED Talks List­ed in a Neat Spread­sheet

TED-Ed Brings the Edgi­ness of TED to Learn­ing

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. See more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

Brian Eno Once Composed Music for Windows 95; Now He Lets You Create Music with an iPad App

in iPad, iPhone, Music, Technology | November 20th, 2012

Now run­ning through my speak­ers, even as I write this: Bri­an Eno’s lat­est album, Lux. The disc offers four pieces of ambi­ent music, a style that, even if Eno did­n’t tech­ni­cal­ly invent it, he cer­tain­ly took it to a new lev­el of fas­ci­na­tion and pop­u­lar­i­ty. He com­posed these tracks — if “com­posed” is indeed the word — as gen­er­a­tive music, a process rather than a style, but one he named and has pro­mot­ed since the nineties. For a def­i­n­i­tion of gen­er­a­tive music, I turn to Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appen­dices, a book that does not leave my night­stand. “One of my long-term inter­ests has been the inven­tion of ‘machines’ and ‘sys­tems,’ ” he writes, “to make music with mate­ri­als and process­es I spec­i­fied, but in com­bi­na­tions and inter­ac­tions I did not. My first released piece of this kind was Dis­creet Music (1975), in which two sim­ple melod­ic cycles of dif­fer­ent dura­tions sep­a­rate­ly repeat and are allowed to over­lay each oth­er arbi­trar­i­ly.”

In Lux, we have the lat­est iter­a­tion of that musi­cal mod­el. But even if this new record or its pre­de­ces­sors won’t make your playlist, there’s at least one Bri­an Eno com­po­si­tion with which you’ll already feel inti­mate­ly famil­iar. I refer, of course, to the Win­dows 95 start­up sound. Eno describes the musi­cal chal­lenge as fol­lows: “The thing from the agency said,‘We want a piece of music that is inspir­ing, uni­ver­sal, blah- blah, da-da-da, opti­mistic, futur­is­tic, sen­ti­men­tal, emo­tion­al,’ this whole list of adjec­tives, and then at the bot­tom it said ‘and it must be three and one quar­ter sec­onds long.’ ”

From that list of 150 vague words, Eno craft­ed 84 minia­ture pieces of music. You may have heard the one Microsoft ulti­mate­ly went with hun­dreds, or thou­sands, of times. Obvi­ous­ly they’ve sound­ed the same on every play, and this very fact dis­pleas­es their cre­ator, espe­cial­ly when he cre­ates with gen­er­a­tive sys­tems in the first place. “What I always want­ed to do was sell the sys­tem itself, so that a lis­ten­er would know that the music was always unique,” Eno con­tin­ues in A Year. “With com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy I began to think there might be a way of doing it.” Com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, which has come a long way since the days of Win­dows 95, has brought us to the release of Scape, the first gen­er­a­tive music iPad app ($5.99) from Eno and Peter Chil­vers. “The idea is that you assem­ble pieces of music out of son­ic build­ing blocks — we call them ‘ele­ments’ — which then respond intel­li­gent­ly to each oth­er,” Eno says in the intro­duc­to­ry video just above. Scape fol­lows Bloom and Trope, the duo’s pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tive music apps for the iPhone. Does it strike you as strange that the man behind such an icon­ic Microsoft theme now releas­es apps only for Apple devices? It’s no big sur­prise: Eno even com­posed the Win­dows 95 sound on a Mac.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Resurrecting the Sounds of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s New Biopic

in Film, History | November 20th, 2012

If you’re head­ing to see Steven Spiel­berg’s new biopic of Abra­ham Lin­coln, you can go there know­ing one thing (oth­er than Daniel Day-Lewis has deliv­ered anoth­er Acad­e­my Award-win­ing per­for­mance) — and that’s that the direc­tor, cast and crew paid close atten­tion to the his­tor­i­cal details. In an inter­view yes­ter­day, Sal­ly Field (who plays Lin­col­n’s wife Mary Todd) described how she immersed her­self in the lan­guage of the era, pored over let­ters exchanged between Lin­coln and his wife, gained 25 pounds to resem­ble Mary’s doc­u­ment­ed mea­sure­ments. And then there’s this curi­ous detail. Dur­ing the film­ing of Lin­coln (watch the trail­er below), Daniel Day-Lewis and Sal­ly Field nev­er spoke to one anoth­er out of char­ac­ter. They knew each oth­er sim­ply as “Mary Lin­coln” and “Mr. Lin­coln” through­out.

In the video above, we get to lis­ten to sound design­er Ben Burtt talk about his own quest for his­tor­i­cal authen­tic­i­ty — that is, how he tried to recap­ture the sounds that Lin­coln heard dur­ing his life­time. Of course, we don’t have audio record­ings from the 1860s. But Burtt found cre­ative ways to res­ur­rect sounds from the peri­od, like record­ing the tick-tocks of Lin­col­n’s per­son­al watch, or cap­tur­ing the sounds made by mahogany doors that still stand in the White House. We’ll let Burtt explain the rest above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Sur­viv­ing Wit­ness of the Lin­coln Assas­si­na­tion (1956)

Louis CK Plays Abra­ham Lin­coln, America’s 16th Pres­i­dent and (Yes) Stand-Up Come­di­an Too

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Direct­ed as a Teenag­er

Watch The White Shadow, the Recently-Discovered and Earliest-Surviving Hitchcock Film

in Film | November 19th, 2012

We’ve hooked you up with 20 free Alfred Hitch­cock movies online. We’ve writ­ten about Hitch­cock, the new Antho­ny Hop­kins-star­ring film that opens this week. Now we’d like to direct your atten­tion dear Open Cul­ture read­ers to The White Shad­ow. Even if you think you’ve seen every Hitch­cock movie, you prob­a­bly haven’t seen this one, giv­en that its sur­viv­ing ele­ments only recent­ly came to light. “For­get about that Alfred Hitch­cock movie star­ring Antho­ny Hop­kins that opens next week,” says the Hol­ly­wood Reporter. “Fans can watch anoth­er film with the famed director’s fin­ger­prints all over it — the old­est one any­one could pos­si­bly see, in fact — start­ing today [ … ] the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing fea­ture cred­it­ed to Hitch­cock.” It comes to us as a project of the New Zealand Film Archive, whose efforts have made the film stream­able here.

The catch: only three reels of The White Shad­ow sur­vive. But that’s three more than cinephiles could enjoy before their sud­den dis­cov­ery last year. A fundrais­ing dri­ve draw­ing on Hitch­cock enthu­si­asts the world over made pos­si­ble the restora­tion and scor­ing of these reels, not to men­tion their online stream­ing avail­abil­i­ty through Jan­u­ary 15, 2013.

You’ll even get a suite of asso­ci­at­ed fea­tures, includ­ing notes by crit­ic David Ster­ritt, a bio of salvager/projectionist Jack Mur­taugh, and a slide show doc­u­ment­ing the dis­cov­ery of the film. But this is Hitch­cock we’re talk­ing about, and even though The White Shad­ow came only three years into his career and appears in a halved state, it still deliv­ers his sig­na­ture com­bi­na­tion of atmos­phere, sus­pense, and con­trolled sen­sa­tion­al­ism. Whether or not you also plan to see Hop­kins play Hitch­cock or have a 20-pic­ture online Hitch­cock marathon, enjoy, while you can, this par­tial Parisian tale of twin sis­ters, “one angel­ic and the oth­er with­out a soul.”

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

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

22 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Mar­tin Scors­ese Brings “Lost” Hitch­cock Film to Screen in Short Faux Doc­u­men­tary

François Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (Free Audio)

Hitch­cock on Hap­pi­ness

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

David Sedaris Reads You a Story By Miranda July

in Literature, Podcasts, Radio | November 19th, 2012

Thanks to his fre­quent appear­ances on radio’s This Amer­i­can Life, David Sedaris pos­sess­es one of the most rec­og­niz­able author voic­es in the world. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly light and insin­u­at­ing, it has come to seem as much a part of his oeu­vre as the San­ta­land Diaries and his anec­dotes about his par­ents, sib­lings and boyfriend. His arch spin on var­i­ous region­al and gen­er­a­tional phras­es is noth­ing if not instant­ly rec­og­niz­able.

What a plea­sure, then, to hear the sin­cer­i­ty with which he deploys this instru­ment in ser­vice of a fel­low author’s work. Invit­ed to choose a sto­ry to read aloud for the New York­er’s fic­tion pod­cast, Sedaris went with “Roy Spivey” by Miran­da July, anoth­er writer who could nev­er be accused of hid­ing behind her work. One sus­pects there are ele­ments of auto­bi­og­ra­phy with­in this tale, though don’t dri­ve your­self nuts try­ing to fig­ure out the iden­ti­ty of the male movie star seat­ed next to the main char­ac­ter. Just enjoy the non-wink­ing gen­eros­i­ty with which Sedaris embod­ies July’s female nar­ra­tor, even when called upon to get her through a bath­room scene that — in spir­it, any­way — recalls one of his most cel­e­brat­ed, non­fic­tion­al fol­lies.

(Speak­ing of which, stay tuned for the post-sto­ry inter­view for the sort of admis­sion Sedaris fans have come to crave.)

For more lit­er­ary read­ings, see our pre­vi­ous post: The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day’s region­al accent does noth­ing for her book sales.