The David Foster Wallace Audio Archive: A Little Gift For the Novelist’s 50th Birthday

in Literature | February 21st, 2012

When we fea­tured David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s big, uncut inter­view yes­ter­day, one impor­tant detail escaped us — the fact that the nov­el­ist would have turned 50 years old today. Kind of a stun­ning thought, espe­cial­ly if you vivid­ly remem­ber the wun­derkind tak­ing the lit­er­ary world by storm with Infi­nite Jest in 1996. Seems like only yes­ter­day.

To cel­e­brate his 50th, we’re high­light­ing for you The David Fos­ter Wal­lace Audio Project — a site that brings togeth­er most of the mean­ing­ful DFW audio avail­able on the web. Built in 2009 by Jor­dyn Bonds and Ryan Walsh, a short while after the nov­el­ist com­mit­ted sui­cide, the audio site is divid­ed into four sec­tions:

• Inter­views & Pro­files
• Read­ings
• Eulo­gies & Remem­brances
• ‘Brief Inter­views’ Staged Read­ings

As you sift through the col­lec­tion, you will find 70+ clips, includ­ing a seg­ment of DFW’s 2005 com­mence­ment speech at Keny­on Col­lege, his first and sec­ond appear­ances on the Char­lie Rose Show, his read­ing from “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” at UCLA, and the author con­tem­plat­ing the play of Roger Fed­er­er. Dive into the full col­lec­tion here.

Animated: Robert Johnson’s Classic Blues Tune Me and the Devil Blues

in Animation, Music | February 20th, 2012

Last year, we fea­tured a slick ani­ma­tion of Cross Road Blues by the leg­endary blues­man Robert John­son. This morn­ing, one of our Twit­ter friends high­light­ed for us a 2007 ani­ma­tion of John­son’s Me and the Dev­il Blues, cre­at­ed by Dutch artist Ineke Goes. Record­ed in 1937 in only two takes, the song helped cement the leg­end of the blues­man. Accord­ing to the old tale, John­son made a Faus­t­ian bar­gain with the dev­il, sell­ing his soul in exchange for bound­less musi­cal tal­ent. And that he had. But, of course, the dev­il even­tu­al­ly demands his pay­back. John­son died in 1938.

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David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)

in Books, Politics, Television | February 20th, 2012

In 2003, an inter­view­er from Ger­man pub­lic tele­vi­sion sta­tion ZDF sat down with nov­el­ist David Fos­ter Wal­lace in a hotel room. The ensu­ing con­ver­sa­tion, whose raw, unedit­ed 84 min­utes (find links to the com­plete inter­view below) made it to the inter­net after Wal­lace’s sui­cide, remains the most direct, expan­sive, and dis­arm­ing­ly rough-hewn media treat­ment of his themes, his per­son­al­i­ty, and the fas­ci­nat­ing (if at times chill­ing) feed­back loop between them.

You can also expe­ri­ence this con­ver­sa­tion in short, the­mat­i­cal­ly orga­nized clips; above, we have “David Fos­ter Wal­lace on Polit­i­cal Think­ing in Amer­i­ca.” Wal­lace express­es his con­cerns about the strong influ­ence of tele­vi­sion ads on elec­tions, which means, he says, “we get can­di­dates who are behold­en to large donors and become, in some ways, cor­rupt, which dis­gusts the vot­ers, makes them even less inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, less will­ing to read and do the work of cit­i­zen­ship.” This he sees cou­pled with an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mar­ket­ing cul­ture which stokes “that feel­ing of hav­ing to obey every impulse and grat­i­fy every desire” — “a strange kind of slav­ery.”

But as his pained, self-ques­tion­ing expres­sion reveals — espe­cial­ly when it retreats into strange­ly endear­ing post-answer cringes — Wal­lace did not believe he pos­sessed the cure for, or even a pre­cise­ly accu­rate diag­no­sis of, a sick soci­ety. Offer­ing social crit­i­cism at a vast remove from the avun­cu­lar con­dem­na­tion of a Noam Chom­sky or the raised mid­dle fin­ger of a Bill Hicks, Wal­lace dis­cuss­es his fears through a nov­el­ist’s con­scious­ness that longs to, as he explains the desire else­where in the inter­view, “jump over the wall of self and inhab­it some­one else.” When the inter­view­er tells him about her peers’ frus­tra­tion at feel­ing edu­cat­ed but “not being able to do any­thing with it,” Wal­lace puts him­self in the mind of stu­dents who go from study­ing “the lib­er­al arts: phi­los­o­phy, clas­si­cal stuff, lan­guages, all very much about the nobil­i­ty of the human spir­it and broad­en­ing the mind” to “a spe­cial­ized school to learn how to sue peo­ple or to fig­ure out how to write copy that will make peo­ple buy a cer­tain kind of SUV” to “jobs that are finan­cial­ly reward­ing, but don’t have any­thing to do with what they got taught — and per­sua­sive­ly taught — was impor­tant and worth­while.”

Under­neath Wal­lace’s respons­es rush­es a cur­rent of the ques­tions his writ­ing leads read­ers to think — and think hard — about: How far has enter­tain­ment evolved toward pure anes­thet­ic? Can we still sep­a­rate our needs from our wants, if we try? Has post-Gen X irony made us not just col­lec­tive­ly inef­fec­tu­al but that much eas­i­er to sell things to? Can we ever again use terms like “cit­i­zen­ship” with­out instinc­tive­ly sneer­ing at our­selves? To the David Fos­ter Wal­lace novice, these clips make for a help­ful the­mat­ic primer, but the full record­ing (see below) will there­after become required view­ing. The inter­view brims with the kind of asides that make it feel like a page from the note­book of one of Wal­lace’s own favorite lit­er­ary crafts­men, Jorge Luis Borges. Wal­lace won­ders aloud how much of what he says will get edit­ed out, if he can dis­cuss his all-con­sum­ing sus­pi­cion that “there’s some­thing real­ly good on anoth­er chan­nel and I’m miss­ing it” while he’s actu­al­ly on tele­vi­sion, and how to talk to the media about how dif­fi­cult it is to talk to the media while pre­tend­ing you don’t know you’re talk­ing to the media. As he admits after unpack­ing one par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult issue, “It’s all… com­pli­cat­ed.”

The com­plete inter­view can be viewed up top.

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

How the Great George Carlin Showed Louis CK the Way to Success (NSFW)

in Comedy, Life | February 18th, 2012

There’s prob­a­bly not a standup come­di­an big­ger than Louis CK right now. His FX tele­vi­sion show, Louie, earned him two Emmy Award nom­i­na­tions in 2011, and his recent com­e­dy spe­cial, Live at the Bea­con The­ater, made his­to­ry when CK dis­trib­uted the show via the web (not HBO) and net­ted $1,000,000 in sales in a mat­ter of days.

Louis CK is rid­ing a good wave. But times weren’t always so easy. Back in 2010, CK spoke at a trib­ute to George Car­lin (host­ed at the ven­er­a­ble New York Pub­lic Library) and revis­it­ed his ear­ly days in the pro­fes­sion. For years — actu­al­ly 15 long years — CK per­formed the same old act and spun his wheels. Then he looked to Car­lin and turned his career around. As you might expect, the sto­ry is laced with some pro­fan­i­ty. (Come on, it’s Louis CK talk­ing about George Car­lin!) But, when you strip the lan­guage away, you get a good life les­son. Per­se­ver­ance counts. But so does per­spec­tive, get­ting the right per­spec­tive.

Louis CK’s talk appears above. You can find the full Car­lin trib­ute here. And don’t miss a very relat­ed video where Car­lin describes the turn­ing point in his own life — the moment when he learned “not to give a shit” and his com­ic genius came into full bloom.

Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity: The Classic Introduction to Einstein (Free Audio)

in Audio Books, Books, Philosophy, Physics, Science | February 18th, 2012

“Every­body knows that Ein­stein did some­thing aston­ish­ing,” writes Bertrand Rus­sell in the open­ing pas­sage of ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, “but very few peo­ple know exact­ly what it was. It is gen­er­al­ly rec­og­nized that he rev­o­lu­tion­ized our con­cep­tion of the phys­i­cal world, but the new con­cep­tions are wrapped up in math­e­mat­i­cal tech­ni­cal­i­ties. It is true that there are innu­mer­able pop­u­lar accounts of the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, but they gen­er­al­ly cease to be intel­li­gi­ble just at the point where they begin to say some­thing impor­tant.”

Eighty-sev­en years after it was writ­ten, ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty still stands as one of the most intel­li­gi­ble intro­duc­tions to Albert Ein­stein’s the­o­ries. Rus­sell wrote the book in 1925 as a com­pan­ion to his ear­li­er vol­ume, ABC of Atoms. The project of writ­ing books for a gen­er­al read­er­ship was born of neces­si­ty. Rus­sell had no aca­d­e­m­ic appoint­ment, and need­ed the mon­ey. But as Peter Clark explains in his intro­duc­tion to the Rout­ledge fifth edi­tion to ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, the ear­ly 1920s were also a time when Rus­sell was becom­ing increas­ing­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with social and polit­i­cal issues. He believed that many of the social ills of the peri­od, includ­ing the rise of nation­al­ism, were con­se­quences of a wide­spread and entrenched irra­tional­i­ty, born of igno­rance and a lack of edu­ca­tion. Writes Clark:

It was cer­tain­ly a hero­ic peri­od in Rus­sel­l’s life, when he earnest­ly believed that the sort of blind unthink­ing prejudice–which he con­ceived to be fun­da­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble for the hor­rors of the First World War–could be tran­scend­ed by the dis­sem­i­na­tion of knowl­edge and the exer­cise in crit­i­cal rea­son­ing pow­er by all class­es of soci­ety. His huge out­put in this peri­od was designed to bring with­in, as far as pos­si­ble, every­one’s grasp the free­dom of thought and action which knowl­edge and learn­ing brings. That spir­it of enlight­en­ment cer­tain­ly per­vades the ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty.

Thanks to UbuWeb, you can lis­ten to an abridged audio ver­sion of ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty online. The book is read by Eng­lish actor Derek Jaco­bi (who also starred in the film we fea­tured last week on Alan Tur­ing: Break­ing the Code). Jaco­bi reads one of the lat­er edi­tions of ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty. In 1959, and again in 1969, Rus­sell con­sent­ed to revi­sions by physi­cist Felix Pirani. Chap­ter 11 was rewrit­ten by Pirani to incor­po­rate the expan­sion of the uni­verse, which was­n’t announced by Edwin Hub­ble until four years after the first edi­tion of Rus­sel­l’s book. The one trou­bling thing about the text, as it now stands, is that Pirani did­n’t lim­it him­self to the revi­sions made under Rus­sel­l’s super­vi­sion. He made more changes in 1985, fif­teen years after Rus­sel­l’s death.

Stel­lar cours­es focus­ing on Ein­stein’s physics can also be found in our big col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es Online. Just scroll down to the Physics sec­tion.

Name That Movie: 26 Films in One Animated Minute

in Animation, Film | February 17th, 2012

Evan Seitz cre­at­ed this one-minute ani­ma­tion in which each let­ter of the alpha­bet rep­re­sents a famous movie. How many can you name? The answers have been shared on Buz­zfeed and The High Def­i­nite.

Don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Movies Online, which includes many great clas­sics, indies, doc­u­men­taries, noir films and more.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

Francis Bacon on the South Bank Show: A Singular Profile of the Singular Painter

in Art, Television | February 17th, 2012

When did you first feel the rush of stealth­ily man­nered grotes­querie that is Fran­cis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Por­trait of Pope Inno­cent X? If you’ve seen the paint­ing in detail, even in repro­duc­tion, you’ll always remem­ber that moment. By the same token, if you watch this Emmy Award-win­ning pro­file of Fran­cis Bacon (above), you’ll always remem­ber these 51 min­utes. A pro­duc­tion of Lon­don Week­end Tele­vi­sion (now ITV Lon­don), The South Bank Show offered doc­u­men­tary por­traits of well-known artists and per­form­ers from Dou­glas Adams to Steve Reich to Ter­ry Gilliam to the Pet Shop Boys. Only nat­ur­al, then, that it would turn its lens toward Bacon in 1985, when his can­vass­es of human fig­ures, often in trip­tych, just abstract­ed enough to cause sub­con­scious trou­ble, reached a peak on the art mar­ket. Rov­ing from gallery to stu­dio to café to bar, the pro­gram reveals an artist, one then held, in the words of host Melvyn Bragg, to be the great­est liv­ing painter in the world.

This episode end­ed up win­ning an Inter­na­tion­al Emmy, and beyond the dose of vig­or for the craft it can still shoot into the veins of doc­u­men­tar­i­ans both fresh-faced and world-weary, it attests to the sharp­ness of the minds Lon­don Week­end Tele­vi­sion employed back then. Dis­play­ing a com­bi­na­tion of casu­al­ness, spon­tane­ity, rig­or, and cin­e­mat­ic pre­sen­ta­tion rare even in the­atri­cal films, the broad­cast fol­lows Bragg (now best known as the pre­sen­ter of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time) and Bacon in a sin­gle long-form con­ver­sa­tion. It begins, sober­ly enough, in the blue glow of a slide pro­jec­tor and ends, drunk­en­ly enough, in the rud­di­ness of the painter’s favorite “drink­ing club,” carv­ing out spaces in between for Bacon’s imagery as well as its visu­al inspi­ra­tions and ref­er­ents.

The pro­gram finds Bacon ready to dis­cuss his life and work with utter frank­ness: his gam­bling; his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty; his dis­taste for the acad­e­my; his famous paint­ings he’d rather see burned; his habit of not only paint­ing with­out a sketch, but doing so on the “wrong” side of the can­vas. And how often do you see an inter­view over a bot­tle of wine whose par­tic­i­pants have actu­al­ly been drink­ing? “Do you think any­thing exists apart from the moment?” Bragg asks Bacon before the lat­ter stag­gers up to pour anoth­er round. “Are you real?” inter­vie­wee lat­er demands of inter­view­er.

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

Suzanne Vega, “The Mother of the MP3,” Records “Tom’s Diner” with the Edison Cylinder

in Music, Technology | February 16th, 2012

An oft-repeat­ed piece of sound engi­neer­ing apoc­rypha holds that the cre­ators of the MP3 for­mat geared it specif­i­cal­ly to repro­duce, as faith­ful­ly as pos­si­ble, Suzanne Veg­a’s “Tom’s Din­er.” You might know the song in the orig­i­nal; you prob­a­bly know the song in its DNA remix; you could even know the song in that ver­sion Bil­ly Bragg and R.E.M. put togeth­er, or in any of the count­less trib­utes, falling in unusu­al places on the spec­trum between remix­es and cov­ers, that oth­er artists have paid. Alas, that sto­ry isn’t quite true: when we lis­ten to MP3s, we aren’t lis­ten­ing to music com­pressed by a pre­ci­sion-tuned “Tom’s Din­er” deliv­ery sys­tem. But the song did influ­ence the tech­ni­cal­i­ties of what MP3s do to turn songs into small, man­age­able dig­i­tal files. Karl­heinz Bran­den­burg, a key con­trib­u­tor to the MP3 com­pres­sion algo­rithm, did indeed put MP3 tech­nol­o­gy to the test ear­ly in its devel­op­ment by using it to com­press Veg­a’s hit. Upon play­back, he heard enough dis­tor­tion in the singing to per­form some seri­ous tweak­ing.

Evi­dent­ly such a “warm a capel­la voice,” in Bran­den­burg’s words, does­n’t take com­pres­sion well. So how does it stand up to the brute rig­ors of one of the old­est record­ing media in exis­tence? In this video Vega sings “Tom’s Din­er,” with­out ampli­fi­ca­tion, into the horn of a vin­tage Thomas Edi­son phono­graph machine as its nee­dle digs the song straight into wax. Not “wax” as in the vinyl we’ve all played music on — wax as in wax. The tech­ni­cian then read­ies the cylin­der for play­back, winds the crank, and releas­es “Tom’s Din­er 1890”: a speed- and pitch-incon­stant war­ble beneath a car­pet of sur­face noise, but unmis­tak­ably the same stark, haunt­ing­ly jaun­ty melody that worked its way into our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness for decades, touch­ing even those who lack the audio-geek enthu­si­asm to get excit­ed by this bridge between the first era of imper­fect son­ic repro­duc­tion and our own era of imper­fect son­ic repro­duc­tion.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

A Brief, Animated Introduction to Thomas Edison (and Nikola Tesla)

in Animation, History, Technology | February 15th, 2012

Last year, Jere­mi­ah War­ren cel­e­brat­ed the 154th birth­day of Niko­la Tes­la by cre­at­ing (in less than 36 hours) a short, ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to Tes­la’s work, which con­tributed to the birth of com­mer­cial elec­tric­i­ty. Now War­ren turns to Thomas Edi­son, the great inven­tor, who gave us the phono­graph, the motion pic­ture cam­era, the long-last­ing elec­tric light bulb, among oth­er inven­tions. Hold­ing 1,093 US patents in his name, Edi­son is appar­ent­ly the fourth most pro­lif­ic inven­tor in his­to­ry. And, it’s worth not­ing, he once employed Tes­la before lat­er becom­ing his rival.

In times past, we have high­light­ed Edis­on’s tech­nol­o­gy in action. Don’t miss Mark Twain Cap­tured on Film by Thomas Edi­son (1909), Edi­son him­self recit­ing “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb” in an Ear­ly Voice Record­ing, Bike Tricks Caught on Film Cour­tesy of Mr. Edi­son, and The World’s First (and Slight­ly Scan­dalous) Hand-Tint­ed Motion Pic­ture, anoth­er Edi­son cre­ation.

Want to share intel­li­gent media with friends? Sim­ply fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and we’ll make it a cinch.

Trotsky, Russian Revolutionary, Makes Debut Performance Before Microphone (1932)

in History, Politics | February 15th, 2012

Many moons ago, we fea­tured a speech by Leon Trot­sky giv­en in his Mex­i­can exile in 1937. Turns out record­ings of his tele­vi­sion address­es go back even fur­ther. The short clip above was record­ed in Den­mark in 1932 and is titled “Trotzky makes debut per­for­mance before micro­phone”. (A lit­tle aside: The clip was pro­duced by Fox Movi­etone News, a news­reel that ran in the U.S. from 1928 to 1963. Would Fox still show some­thing like this today?) In Novem­ber 1932, Trot­sky left his exile in Turkey to accept an invi­ta­tion by the Dan­ish Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Stu­dents’ Asso­ci­a­tion to come to Copen­hagen and speak about the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. You can read the text of the speech called “In Defence of Octo­ber” held on Novem­ber 27 here. There are also two impres­sive pho­tos secret­ly tak­en by a pho­to­jour­nal­ist. There was a lot of com­mo­tion sur­round­ing Trot­sky’s trip to Den­mark: the Dan­ish Com­mu­nist Par­ty, con­trolled by Stal­in, staged demon­stra­tions and the Roy­al Fam­i­ly protest­ed against his vis­it — they held Trot­sky respon­si­ble for the vio­lent deaths of their rel­a­tives, the Tsar and his fam­i­ly. Nev­er­the­less, Trot­sky deliv­ered his speech before an audi­ence of about 2,500. The video address was record­ed in Eng­lish two weeks lat­er, on Decem­ber 10, 1932.

To see oth­er famous lead­ers mak­ing their debut per­for­mances, check out Mahat­ma Gand­hi in his First Record­ed Video and Nel­son Mandela’s First-Ever Inter­view.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.