What’s It Like Drumming For Prince?: Drummer Hannah Welton Describes the Genius of His Musicianship

in Music | May 18th, 2022

Tes­ti­mo­ni­als to Prince’s mind-blow­ing musi­cian­ship flood­ed the media after his death, from cel­e­brat­ed stars and not-so-famous musi­cians who played in the artist’s back­ing bands over the decades. In the for­mer cat­e­go­ry, we have Prince’s own musi­cal hero, Ste­vie Won­der — no slouch as a mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist — whose Songs in the Key of Life stood as a “per­fect album” for the Pur­ple One. Won­der describes their jam ses­sions as “amaz­ing” for the vari­ety of peo­ple and cul­tures Prince could bring togeth­er, and for the incred­i­ble range of his tal­ent.

“He could play clas­si­cal music if he want­ed to,” said Won­der, in tears after Prince’s death. “He could play jazz if he want­ed to, he could play coun­try if he want­ed to. He played rock, you know, he played blues. He played pop. He played every­thing.…” He played all 27 instru­ments on his debut album, from elec­tric gui­tar, bass, and piano to “mini-Moog, poly-Moog, Arp string ensem­ble, Arp Pro Soloist, Ober­heim four-voice, clavinet, drums, syn­drums, water drums, slap­sticks, bon­gos, con­gas, fin­ger cym­bals, wind chimes, orches­tral bells, wood­blocks, brush trap, tree bell, hand claps and fin­ger snaps.”

He did all of this with lit­tle to no for­mal train­ing, teach­ing him­self to com­pose in near­ly any idiom and to switch up gen­res and styles with ease. In short, Prince was a “genius,” says drum­mer Han­nah Wel­ton in the Drumeo video above. Wel­ton joined the New Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion in 2012, then helped form his new back­ing band, 3rdeyegirl. In the video above, the hard-work­ing drum­mer makes it clear that she does not use this word friv­o­lous­ly. “I don’t know that I ever heard an off note,” she says. “Piano, gui­tar, drums, nobody touched any of those instru­ments the way that he did.”

Wel­ton also talks about what she learned from Prince — after their first meet­ing when he asked her to play ping pong. “One thing,” she says, is that “the space between the notes is just a funky as the notes them­selves.” In the hour-long les­son, Wel­ton shows off her own drum skills in songs like “Wom­en’s Intu­ition” (which she wrote with her hus­band Joshua Wel­ton, one of Prince’s pro­duc­ers) and talks more about her time with the untouch­able musi­cian, includ­ing how he recruit­ed her after see­ing her on YouTube and what it’s like to have a “drum-off/bass-off” with him. As for whether she ever beat Prince in ping pong, you’ll have to watch to find out.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blis­ter­ing “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” Gui­tar Solo (2004)

The Lit­tle Prince: Footage Gets Unearthed Of the Pop Star at Age 11

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

The Animated Map of Quantum Computing: A Visual Introduction to the Future of Computing

in Computer Science | May 18th, 2022

If you lis­ten to the hype sur­round­ing quan­tum com­put­ing, you might think the near future shown in Alex Gar­land’s sci-fi series Devs is upon us — that we have com­put­ers com­plex enough to recre­ate time and space and recon­struct the human mind. Far from it. At this still-ear­ly stage, quan­tum com­put­ers promise much more than they can deliv­er, but the tech­nol­o­gy is “poised,” writes IBM “to trans­form the way you work in research.” The com­pa­ny does have — as do most oth­er oth­er big mak­ers of what are now called “clas­si­cal com­put­ers” — a “roadmap” for imple­ment­ing quan­tum com­put­ing and a lot of cool new tech­nol­o­gy (such as the quan­tum run­time envi­ron­ment Quiskit) built around the qubit, the quan­tum com­put­er ver­sion of the clas­si­cal bit.

The com­put­er bit, as we know, is a bina­ry enti­ty: either 1 or 0 and noth­ing in-between. The qubit, on the oth­er hand, mim­ics quan­tum phe­nom­e­na by remain­ing in a state of super­po­si­tion of all pos­si­ble states between 1 and 0 until users inter­act with it, like a spin­ning coin that only lands on one face if it’s phys­i­cal­ly engaged. And like quan­tum par­ti­cles, qubits can become entan­gled with each oth­er. Thus, “Quan­tum com­put­ers work excep­tion­al­ly well for mod­el­ing oth­er quan­tum sys­tems,” writes Microsoft, “because they use quan­tum phe­nom­e­na in their com­pu­ta­tion.” The pos­si­bil­i­ties are thrilling, and a lit­tle unset­tling, but no one’s mod­el­ing the uni­verse, or even a part of it, just quite yet.

“Use cas­es are large­ly exper­i­men­tal and hypo­thet­i­cal at this ear­ly stage,” McK­in­sey Dig­i­tal writes in a report for busi­ness­es, while also not­ing that usable quan­tum sys­tems may be on the mar­ket as ear­ly as 2030. If the roadmaps serve, that’s just around the cor­ner, espe­cial­ly giv­en how quick­ly quan­tum com­put­ers have evolved in rela­tion to their (expo­nen­tial­ly slow­er) clas­si­cal fore­bears. “From the first idea of a quan­tum com­put­er in 1980 [an idea attrib­uted to Nobel prize-win­ning physi­cist Richard Feyn­man] to today, there has been a huge growth in the quan­tum com­put­ing indus­try, espe­cial­ly in the last ten years,” says Dominic Wal­li­man in the video above, “with dozens of com­pa­nies and star­tups spend­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in a race to build the world’s best quan­tum com­put­ers.”

Wal­li­man offers not only a (non-hyped) map of the pos­si­ble future, but also a map of quan­tum com­put­ing’s past. He promis­es to clear up mis­con­cep­tions we might have about the “dif­fer­ent kinds of quan­tum com­put­ing, how they work, and why so many peo­ple are invest­ing in the quan­tum com­put­ing indus­try.” We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly seen Wal­li­man’s Domain of Sci­ence chan­nel do the same for such huge fields of sci­en­tif­ic study as physics, chem­istry, math, and clas­si­cal com­put­er sci­ence. Here, he presents cut­ting-edge sci­ence on the cusp of real­iza­tion, explain­ing three essen­tial ideas — super­po­si­tion, entan­gle­ment, and inter­fer­ence — that gov­ern quan­tum com­put­ing. The pri­ma­ry dif­fer­ence between quan­tum and clas­si­cal com­put­ing from the point of view of non-spe­cial­ists is algo­rith­mic speed: while clas­si­cal com­put­ers could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly per­form the same com­plex func­tions as their quan­tum cousins, they would take ages to do so, or would halt and fiz­zle out in the attempt.

Will quan­tum com­put­ers be able to sim­u­late nature down to the sub­atom­ic lev­el in the future? McK­in­sey cau­tions, “experts are still debat­ing the most foun­da­tion­al top­ics for the field.” Despite the indus­try’s rapid growth, “it’s not yet clear,” Wal­li­man says, “which approach” among the many he sur­veys “will win out in the long run.” But if the roadmaps serve, we may not have to wait long to find out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

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

An Architect Breaks Down the Design Details of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

in Architecture, Film | May 17th, 2022

Wes Ander­son­’s The Grand Budapest Hotel fea­tures many notable play­ers: Willem Dafoe, Til­da Swin­ton, F. Mur­ray Abra­ham, and pre­sid­ing above all, Ralph Fiennes as cel­e­brat­ed concierge Mon­sieur Gus­tave H. But it is Gus­tave’s domain, the tit­u­lar alpine health resort, that fig­ures most promi­nent­ly in the film, tran­scend­ing place, time, and polit­i­cal regime. Such an estab­lish­ment could only exist with­in Ander­son­’s cin­e­mat­ic imag­i­na­tion, which dic­tates the man­ner in which he intro­duces it to his view­ers. “It’s obvi­ous­ly a mod­el,” says archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er in the video above. “It’s fake” — an adjec­tive that, when applied to a Wes Ander­son pro­duc­tion, can only be a com­pli­ment.

Wyet­zn­er sure­ly means it that way, giv­en how much inter­est he shows through the video in the details of the Grand Budapest Hotel as con­struct­ed and revealed, one set at a time, by Ander­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. Envi­sioned as a kind of “French chateau grow­ing out of the moun­tain,” the build­ing incor­po­rates a mansard roof, a “rus­ti­cat­ed base” with the look of an ancient aque­duct, and Art Nou­veau canopies of the kind still seen at the entrances of the Paris Métro.

Wyet­zn­er explains the over­all image as “one of those sana­to­ri­ums you would see in the moun­tains of Europe up until the nine­teen-thir­ties” but designed by the Seces­sion­ists, who intend­ed to “uni­fy archi­tec­ture, paint­ing, and the dec­o­ra­tive arts.”

The atri­um, the cir­cu­lar recep­tion desk, the elab­o­rate­ly mul­lioned win­dows, the palette of pinks and reds: these fea­tures under­score the tit­u­lar grandeur of the tit­u­lar hotel. (They also, like the sym­me­try of so much of its con­struc­tion, remind us whose movie we’re watch­ing.) But before long, every­thing changes: the hotel finds itself in the Sovi­et nine­teen-six­ties, topped with anten­nae, paint burnt orange and avo­ca­do green, out­fit­ted with plas­tic lam­i­nate and illu­mi­nat­ed ceil­ings. “Sovi­et archi­tec­ture has this rep­u­ta­tion for being very drab, and very sad, almost,” says Wyet­zn­er, and the “updat­ed” Grand Budapest Hotel reflects this. But the Sovi­ets were also “one of the orig­i­na­tors of mod­ernism,” a move­ment whose stern opti­mism comes through in the film’s set designs — as, faint­ly but per­sis­tent­ly, does the fin de siè­cle ele­gance of the ever-more-dis­tant past.

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!

Relat­ed con­tent:

What’s the Big Deal About Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel? Matt Zoller Seitz’s Video Essay Explains

Acci­den­tal Wes Ander­son: Every Place in the World with a Wes Ander­son Aes­thet­ic Gets Doc­u­ment­ed by Red­dit

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Why Do Wes Ander­son Movies Look Like That?

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Rolling Stones Play a Gig in Communist Warsaw and a Riot Ensues (1967)

in History, Music, Politics | May 17th, 2022

My Name is called Dis­tur­bance.… – “Street Fight­ing Man”

More than two decades before Ger­man band the Scor­pi­ons blew their alleged­ly CIA-penned “Wind of Change” over the end of the Cold War; before the “hard rock Wood­stock” in Moscow; before Bruce Spring­steen rocked East Berlin and rang the “Chimes of Free­dom,” anoth­er band took the stage behind the Iron Cur­tain: one not par­tic­u­lar­ly well-known at the time for mak­ing geopo­lit­i­cal state­ments.

In 1967, the Rolling Stones record­ed and released Between the But­tons and major hits “Ruby Tues­day” and “Let’s Spend the Night Togeth­er.” They tried to com­pete with the Bea­t­les with stabs at psy­che­delia on Their Satan­ic Majesties Request. They did­n’t record what is some­times con­sid­ered their most polit­i­cal song, “Street Fight­ing Man,” for anoth­er two years, and that song — with its options of street fight­ing or singing for a rock and roll band — has nev­er been mis­tak­en for a peace anthem.

It was­n’t peace the band court­ed in their orig­i­nal plan to play Moscow. “They start­ed toy­ing with the idea of per­form­ing in Moscow and becom­ing the most con­tro­ver­sial rock band to play on the oth­er side of the Iron Cur­tain,” writes Woj­ciech Olek­si­ak at Culture.pl. “Both the Sovi­et Union and the UK denied their requests. How is it, Olek­si­ak asks, “that in 1967 — the mid­dle of the Cold War — Mick, Kei­th, Bri­an, Bill, and Char­lie came to Poland and per­formed in War­saw, at a huge hall known for being tra­di­tion­al­ly used for the Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s ple­nary con­gress­es?” You’ll find the answer in the video at the top from Band­splain­ing.

Just above, see footage of the con­cert itself, culled from news­reel footage and TV broad­casts. The uploader has done us the kind­ness of putting time­stamps in the video for the three songs shown here:

00:00 — Paint It Black

00:43 — 19th Ner­vous Break­down

01:06 — (I Can’t Get No) Sat­is­fac­tion

The Stones were “by no means the first west­ern group to play in com­mu­nist Poland,” writes Pol­ish musi­cian and jour­nal­ist Paweł Brodowsky, who was in the audi­ence. “By that time I had already seen The Ani­mals, The Hol­lies, Lulu, and Cliff Richard and the Shad­ows.” It did­n’t hurt that Władysław Jakubows­ki, the deputy direc­tor of Pagart — “a state-owned con­cert agency,” writes Sam Kemp at Far Out — “had some sym­pa­thy for Poland’s young music fans” (just as Gor­bachev would in the time of glas­nost). None of the oth­er acts caused any­thing like the chaos that would ensue when the Stones came to War­saw.

Bands allowed into the coun­try came from a list of names Jakubows­ki col­lect­ed from young Pol­ish jour­nal­ists. How Jakubows­ki achieved the required per­mis­sions from his high­er-ups is some­thing of a mys­tery, Olek­siek writes. Why the deputy direc­tor let the Stones into the coun­try even more so. Their rep­u­ta­tion for destruc­tion pre­ced­ed them: “He must have heard about The Rolling Stones’ wreck­ing of the Olympia, the most famous con­cert hall in Paris. He was a close friend of Bruno Coqua­trix, its direc­tor.” At any rate, the War­saw con­cert turned into a riot. The band could not be blamed, entire­ly.

Hear­ing about the Stones’ arrival, thou­sands of young fans lined up for tick­ets. “What most of them did­n’t know,” Kemp writes, “was that the bulk of them had already been reserved for com­mu­nist par­ty mem­bers and their fam­i­lies.” The hall was also packed beyond capac­i­ty, “with fans hang­ing off the edge of bal­conies.” Police fought to keep fans away from the stage and the seat­ed crowds of dour bureau­crats. Richards and Jag­ger antag­o­nized the cops with obscen­i­ties, mak­ing tick­et­less fans who’d breached the doors even more rabid.

Out­side, as you can see in the short Pol­ish doc­u­men­tary above, a full-blown riot with tear gas and dogs had bro­ken out. This was a time when riots seemed to break out every­where. (Mick Jag­ger has cit­ed the Paris upris­ings of 1968 as a source for “Street Fight­ing Man.”) But at the end of the six­ties, few oth­er bands could boast not only of play­ing the com­mu­nist East­ern Bloc, but of inspir­ing may­hem from the stage on both sides of the Cold War lines.

And yet, this is not the end of the sto­ry. The Stones returned to War­saw over fifty years lat­er, in 2018, this time with a point­ed polit­i­cal state­ment made at the behest of Lech Wałęsa, in oppo­si­tion to a rule lim­it­ing the age of judges to 65. “I am too old to be a judge but not too old to sing,” Jag­ger shout­ed in Pol­ish from the stage. He then launched into the band’s first song on the setlist. And, yes, it was my favorite and maybe yours too: “Street Fight­ing Man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

A Char­lie Watts-Cen­tric View of the Rolling Stones: Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Footage of Char­lie & the Band Per­form­ing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line”

The Rolling Stones Jam with Mud­dy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Leg­endary Checker­board Lounge (1981)

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

The White House’s Forgotten 1970s Vinyl Record Collection: Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, Captain Beefheart, Donna Summer & More

in History, Music | May 16th, 2022

Though it may not be for every­one, the job of Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca does have its perks. Take, for exam­ple, the abil­i­ty to screen any film you like at the White House: here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured lists of movies watched by Richard Nixon, Jim­my Carter, and Ronald Rea­gan. But for Carter in par­tic­u­lar, music seems to have been even more impor­tant than cin­e­ma. So explains John Chuldenko, step­son of that for­mer pres­i­den­t’s son Jack, in the episode of The 1600 Ses­sions above. In it, he tells of his redis­cov­ery of an insti­tu­tion cre­at­ed under Nixon, great­ly expand­ed under Carter, and packed away under Rea­gan: the White House Record Library.

“The Library, begun by First Lady Pat Nixon, was curat­ed by a vol­un­teer com­mis­sion of not­ed music jour­nal­ists, schol­ars, and oth­er experts,” says the White House His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. When it came time to update it at the end of the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, writes Wash­ing­to­ni­an’s Rob Brun­ner, “the selec­tion process would be head­ed by John Ham­mond, a huge­ly influ­en­tial fig­ure who had signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Spring­steen.” Ham­mond also enlist­ed genre experts like “Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet pianist John Lewis, who was respon­si­ble for jazz, and Boston music crit­ic Bob Blu­men­thal, who led the pop picks.”

The result­ing col­lec­tion of more than 2,000 LPs con­tains more than a few albums you would­n’t expect to hear at the White House. These include Van Mor­rison’s Astral Weeks, Randy New­man’s Good Old Boys (which con­tains “one of the great­est cri­tiques of both South­ern and North­ern racism,” as Blu­men­thal recalls), Talk­ing Heads’ More Songs About Build­ings and Food, Cap­tain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Repli­ca, and Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s the Sex Pis­tols. On the more dance­able end of the spec­trum, the White House Record Library also includes Funkadelic’s, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Don­na Sum­mer — all of their work select­ed express­ly for pres­i­den­tial use.

Hav­ing last been updat­ed in 1981 and sum­mar­i­ly cart­ed off to “a secure undis­closed stor­age facil­i­ty,” the Library remains a musi­cal time cap­sule of that era. So Chuldenko dis­cov­ered when, fol­low­ing a thread of fam­i­ly lore, he man­aged to track down a cura­tor who could arrange a lis­ten­ing ses­sion for him. “There is no rap or hip-hop in there,” he said to Wash­ing­ton­ian. “There’s no elec­tron­ic music. There are no boy bands, no Madon­na or Brit­ney Spears. No Michael Jack­son!” Hav­ing suc­ceed­ed in his mis­sion of find­ing the White House Record Library, he’s set for him­self the even more for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of bring­ing it up to date. Cer­tain­ly its geo­graph­i­cal purview will have to widen, giv­en how Amer­i­ca now lis­tens to so much music from beyond its bor­ders. Would the White House care to hear any K‑pop rec­om­men­da­tions?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Announces an Archive That Will House His Man­u­scripts, Let­ters & Col­lec­tion of 10,000+ Vinyl Records

Google Gives 360° Tour of the White House

Lis­ten to James Baldwin’s Record Col­lec­tion in a 478-track, 32-Hour Spo­ti­fy Playlist

The Library of Con­gress Makes Its Archives Free for DJs to Remix: Intro­duc­ing the “Cit­i­zen DJ” Project

David Bowie Lists His 25 Favorite LPs in His Record Col­lec­tion: Stream Most of Them Free Online

The Inter­net Archive Is Dig­i­tiz­ing & Pre­serv­ing Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

How Hans Zimmer Created the Otherworldly Soundtrack for Dune

in Film, Music | May 16th, 2022

Many emo­tion­al moments were made at this year’s big awards shows. The Slap, amidst so many his­toric wins; poignant trib­utes and crim­i­nal omis­sions; for­mer actor-turned-wartime-hero-pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky’s speech, the return of Louis C.K…. Everybody’s got a lot to process. Pop cul­ture can feel like a St. Vitus dance. One half-expects celebri­ties to start drop­ping from exhaus­tion. But then there’s Hans Zimmer’s Oscar accep­tance speech, deliv­ered in a white ter­ry bathrobe, a minia­ture Oscar stat­uette in his pock­et, a big goofy, 2 a.m. grin on his face. The man could not have looked more relaxed, win­ning his sec­ond Oscar 30 years after The Lion King.

Was he still in lock­down? No. On the night in ques­tion, Zim­mer was in a hotel in Ams­ter­dam, on tour with his band. “His cat­e­go­ry was among the eight that were hand­ed out before the tele­vised broad­cast began,” Yahoo reports, “but he made sure his fans knew just how thrilled he was.” Zim­mer post­ed a mini-accep­tance speech to social media. “Who else has paja­mas like this?” he joked to the oth­er musi­cians gath­ered in the room. “Actu­al­ly, let me say this, and this is for real. Had it not been for you, most of the peo­ple in this room, this would nev­er have hap­pened.” He is, as he says, “for real.”

As the musi­cians who worked with Zim­mer on his Oscar-win­ning Dune sound­track (stream it here) have gone on the record to say, the process was high­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive. “He’ll out­line the desired end result rather than pre­scrib­ing a spe­cif­ic means of get­ting there,” gui­tarist Guthrie Gov­an told The New York Times. “For one cue, he just said, ‘This needs to sound like sand.’ ” Zim­mer’s meth­ods offer new ways out of the cul-de-sac much of the cre­ative indus­try seems to find itself in, repeat­ing the same unhealthy com­pul­sions. “If some­one has a great idea,” he says, “I’m the first one to say, yes. Let’s go on that adven­ture.”

Along with col­lab­o­ra­tion, there is vision, and the willingness–as Zim­mer says in Van­i­ty Fair video inter­view at the top–to “invent instru­ments that don’t exist. Invent sounds that don’t exist.” Such future-think­ing has always char­ac­ter­ized his approach, from his synth pop and new wave work in the late 70s, includ­ing a stint killing the radio star with the Bug­gles, to his ground­break­ing film com­po­si­tion work on Rain Man, The Thin Red Line, and the grit­ty block­busters of Christo­pher Nolan. Though he’s scored action and adven­ture films unlike­ly to ever be con­sid­ered art, Zim­mer’s own way of work­ing is thor­ough­ly avant-garde.

As he tells it above, the point, in com­pos­ing for Dune, was to throw out the sci­ence fic­tion boil­er­plate, the “orches­tral sounds, roman­tic peri­od tonal­i­ties” that have dom­i­nat­ed at least since Kubrick­’s 2001. On the oth­er hand, Zim­mer says, he want­ed to get rid of mod­ern syn­co­pa­tion. “Maybe in the future, we will not have reg­u­lar beats. Maybe we will have actu­al­ly pro­gressed as human beings that we don’t need dis­co beats to enjoy our­selves,” he says laugh­ing, before going on to demon­strate how he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors cre­at­ed some of the most orig­i­nal music in film his­to­ry. Of course, the dis­co beat is com­fort­ing because it mim­ics the human heart. In mak­ing his Dune score, Zim­mer was com­pos­ing for a kind of post-human future, one dom­i­nat­ed not by award-show dra­ma but by giant sand­worms.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Exper­i­men­tal Score for the New Dune Film

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

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

This Is Spinal Tap Will Get a Sequel 40 Years Later, Reuniting Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer

in Film, Music | May 13th, 2022

Fans of James Cameron’s Avatar are express­ing aston­ish­ment that its long-expect­ed sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, will have tak­en thir­teen years to get to the­aters. That delay, of course, is noth­ing next to the 35 years that sep­a­rat­ed Blade Run­ner and Blade Run­ner 2049, or the 36 between Top Gun and Top Gun: Mav­er­ick, which comes out next month. But the recent­ly announced sequel to This Is Spinal Tap tops them all: “Spinal Tap II will see Rob Rein­er return as both film-mak­er on and off the screen along with Michael McK­ean, Har­ry Shear­er, and Christo­pher Guest,” writes the Guardian’s Ben­jamin Lee. “The film will be released in 2024 on the 1984 orig­i­nal’s 40th anniver­sary.”

Crit­ics praised This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984, but it took time to become a revered clas­sic of the impro­vised-mock­u­men­tary genre. In fact that genre had­n’t exist at all, which result­ed in some view­ers not quite get­ting the joke. “When the film first came out, we showed it in Dal­las and peo­ple came up to me and said, why would you make a movie about a band nobody’s ever heard of?” says direc­tor Rob Rein­er. “And one that’s so bad?”

Or as Christo­pher Guest remem­bers a cou­ple girls at the con­ces­sion counter observ­ing: “These guys are so stu­pid.” The befud­dle­ment extend­ed even to col­lab­o­ra­tors in the film­mak­ing process: “I don’t under­stand this,” said cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Peter Smok­ler, who’d worked on the Alta­mont doc­u­men­tary Gimme Shel­ter. “This isn’t fun­ny. This is exact­ly what they do.”

Such reac­tions pay indi­rect but great trib­ute to the painstak­ing craft and obser­va­to­ry wit of Spinal Tap’s cre­ators. Those cre­ators — Rein­er, Guest, Michael McK­ean, and Har­ry Shear­er — tell these sto­ries in the Today inter­view above, con­duct­ed in 2019 to mark This Is Spinal Tap’s 35th anniver­sary. In that time they’d occa­sion­al­ly reunit­ed as Spinal Tap for live per­for­mances and real albums, the last of which came out in 2009. Per­haps that’s kept them ready to get back into char­ac­ter, pitch-per­fect Eng­lish accents and all, and put on — as they’ll be forced to in a plot shaped by real­is­tic-sound­ing music-indus­try vagaries — one last con­cert. But like any belat­ed sequel, it brings pro­por­tion­al­ly inflat­ed fan expec­ta­tions: specif­i­cal­ly, about whether they’ll be able to go up to twelve.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ori­gins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Cre­at­ed to Pitch the Clas­sic Mock­u­men­tary

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Pro­motes World’s Largest Online Gui­tar Les­son

Ian Rub­bish (aka Fred Armisen) Inter­views the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mock­u­men­tary

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Business, Education, Online Courses | May 13th, 2022

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now comes their latest–a cer­tifi­cate ded­i­cat­ed to Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate con­sists of sev­en cours­es, all col­lec­tive­ly designed to help stu­dents “devel­op dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce strate­gies; attract and engage cus­tomers through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels like search and email; mea­sure mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, ana­lyze e‑commerce per­for­mance, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.” The cours­es include:

• Foun­da­tions of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and E‑commerce
• Attract and Engage Cus­tomers with Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing
• From Likes to Leads: Inter­act with Cus­tomers Online
• Think Out­side the Inbox: Email Mar­ket­ing
• Assess for Suc­cess: Mar­ket­ing Ana­lyt­ics and Mea­sure­ment
• Make the Sale: Build, Launch, and Man­age E‑commerce Stores 
• Sat­is­fac­tion Guar­an­teed: Devel­op Cus­tomer Loy­al­ty Online

In total, this pro­gram “includes over 190 hours of instruc­tion and prac­tice-based assess­ments, which sim­u­late real-world dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce sce­nar­ios that are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place.” Along the way, stu­dents will learn how to use tools and plat­forms like Can­va, Con­stant Con­tact, Google Ads, Google Ana­lyt­ics, Hoot­suite, Hub­Spot, Mailchimp, Shopi­fy, and Twit­ter. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

If you don’t want to pay, you can audit each course for free, with­out ulti­mate­ly receiv­ing the cer­tifi­cate.

Explore the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Google Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate: 8 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

Quentin Tarantino Names His 20 Favorite Movies, Covering Two Decades

in Film | May 12th, 2022

Quentin Taran­ti­no’s film­mak­ing career began thir­ty years ago — at least if you place its start­ing point at his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in 1992. But even then he had been work­ing toward auteur­hood for quite some time, a peri­od char­ac­ter­ized by projects like My Best Friend’s Birth­day, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Through­out the three decades since he hit it big, there can be no doubt that Taran­ti­no has con­sis­tent­ly made just the films he him­self has most want­ed to see. But he’s also remained a suf­fi­cient­ly hon­est cinephile to admit that oth­er direc­tors have made films he would have want­ed to make: Fukasaku Kin­ji, for instance, whose Bat­tle Royale he prais­es in just such per­son­al terms in the video above.

In six min­utes Taran­ti­no runs down the list of his twen­ty favorite movies between 1992, when he became a direc­tor, and 2009. After giv­ing pride of place to Bat­tle Royale — a Japan­ese comedic thriller of high-school ultra­vi­o­lence that set off a wave of trans­gres­sive thrill through a world­wide “cult” audi­ence — he presents his choic­es in alpha­bet­i­cal rather than pref­er­en­tial order. The com­plete list runs as fol­lows:

• Fukasaku Kin­ji, Bat­tle Royale
• Woody Allen, Any­thing Else (“the Jason Big­gs one”)
• Miike Takashi, Audi­tion
• Tsui Hark, The Blade
• Paul Thomas Ander­son, Boo­gie Nights
• Richard Lin­klater, Dazed and Con­fused (“the great­est hang­out movie ever made”)
• Lars von Tri­er, Dogville
• David Finch­er, Fight Club
• F. Gary Gray, Fri­day
• Bong Joon-ho, The Host
• Michael Mann, The Insid­er
• Park Chan-wook, Joint Secu­ri­ty Area
• Sofia Cop­po­la, Lost in Trans­la­tion
• The Wachowskis, The Matrix (though its sequels “ruined the mythol­o­gy for me”)
• Bong Joon-ho, Mem­o­ries of Mur­der
• Stan­ley Tong, Police Sto­ry 3/Super­cop (con­tains “the great­est stunts ever filmed in any movie”)
• Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead
• Jan de Bont, Speed (there have been “few exhil­a­ra­tion movies quite like it”)
• Trey Park­er and Matt Stone, Team Amer­i­ca: World Police
• M. Night Shya­malan, Unbreak­able

Taran­ti­no may refer to Shya­malan as “M. Night Shamala­mad­ing­dong,” but he clear­ly has a good deal of respect for the man’s films. And he seems to have even more for Bruce Willis’ work in Unbreak­able, which con­tains his “best per­for­mance on film” — bet­ter, evi­dent­ly, than the not-incon­sid­er­able one he gave in a nine­teen-nineties hit called Pulp Fic­tion.

It comes as no sur­prise that Taran­ti­no names movies by his peers in the “Indiewood” gen­er­a­tion like Ander­son, Lin­klater, and Cop­po­la. But watched thir­teen years lat­er, this video also sug­gests a cer­tain cin­e­mat­ic pre­science on his part. Speed, for exam­ple, once seemed like a brain-dead block­buster but now stands as a clas­sic of Los Ange­les cin­e­ma. And we’d do well to remem­ber how far ahead of his peers Taran­ti­no was in his con­scious­ness of Asian cin­e­ma. That we all watch films from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea today owes some­thing to Taran­ti­no’s advo­ca­cy. More than a decade before Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site dom­i­nat­ed the Acad­e­my Awards, Taran­ti­no gave him alone not one but two entries on this top-twen­ty list — which sure­ly makes up for his obvi­ous­ly hav­ing for­got­ten Bong’s name.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film

in Art, Film | May 12th, 2022

“The prob­lem of woman is the most mar­velous and dis­turb­ing prob­lem in all the world,” — Andre Bre­ton, 1929 Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo.

“I warn you, I refuse to be an object.” — Leono­ra Car­ring­ton

Fash­ion mod­el, writer, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lee Miller had many lives. Dis­cov­ered by Condé Nast in New York (when he pulled her out of the path of traf­fic), she became a famous face of Vogue in the 1920s, then launched her own pho­to­graph­ic career, for which she has been just­ly cel­e­brat­ed: both for her work in the fash­ion world and on the bat­tle­fields (and Hitler’s tub!) in World War II. One of Miller’s achieve­ments often gets left out in men­tions of her life, the Sur­re­al­ist work she cre­at­ed as an artist in the 1930s.

Hailed as a “leg­endary beau­ty,” writes the Nation­al Gal­leries of Scot­land, Miller stud­ied act­ing, dance, and exper­i­men­tal the­ater. “She learned pho­tog­ra­phy first through being a sub­ject for the most impor­tant fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers of her day, includ­ing Nick­o­las Muray, Arnold Gen­the and Edward Ste­ichen.” Her appren­tice­ship and affair with Man Ray is, of course, well-known. But rather than call­ing Miller an active par­tic­i­pant in his art and her own (she co-cre­at­ed the “solar­iza­tion” process he used, for exam­ple) she’s most­ly referred to only as his muse, lover, and favorite sub­ject.

“Sur­re­al­ism had a very high pro­por­tion of women mem­bers who were at the heart of the move­ment, but who often get cast as ‘muse of’ or ‘wife of,’ ” says Susan­na Greeves, cura­tor of an all-women Sur­re­al­ist exhib­it in South Lon­don. The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of women Sur­re­al­ists is not a his­tor­i­cal over­sight, many crit­ics and schol­ars con­tend, but a cen­tral fea­ture of the move­ment itself. When British Sur­re­al­ist Eileen Agar said in a 1990 inter­view, “In those days, men thought of women sim­ply as mus­es,” she was too polite by half.

Despite their rad­i­cal pol­i­tics, male Sur­re­al­ists per­fect­ed turn­ing women into dis­fig­ured objects. “While Dalí used the female fig­ure in opti­cal puz­zles, Magritte paint­ed porni­fied faces with breasts for eyes, and Ernst sim­ply decap­i­tat­ed them,” Izabel­la Scott writes at Art­sy. Sur­re­al­ist artist René Crev­el wrote in 1934, “the Noble Man­nequin is so per­fect. She does not always both­er to take her head, arms and legs with her.” Edgar Allan Poe’s love for “beau­ti­ful dead girls” esca­lat­ed into dis­mem­ber­ment.

Dalí employed no lyri­cal obfus­ca­tion in his thoughts on the place of women in the move­ment. He called his con­tem­po­rary, Argentine/Italian artist Leonor Fini (who nev­er con­sid­ered her­self a Sur­re­al­ist), “bet­ter than most, per­haps.” Then he felt com­pelled to add, “but tal­ent is in the balls.”

When writ­ing her dis­ser­ta­tion on Sur­re­al­ism in the 1970s at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Glo­ria Feman Oren­stein found that all of the women had been total­ly left out of the record. So she found them — track­ing down and becom­ing “a close friend to many influ­en­tial female sur­re­al­ists,” notes Aeon, “includ­ing Leono­ra Car­ring­ton and Meret Elis­a­beth Oppeneim” (anoth­er Man Ray mod­el and the only Sur­re­al­ist of any gen­der to have actu­al train­ing and expe­ri­ence in psy­cho­analy­sis).

Through her research, Oren­stein “became the aca­d­e­m­ic voice of fem­i­nist sur­re­al­ism,” recov­er­ing the work of artists who had always been part of the move­ment, but who had been shoul­dered aside by male con­tem­po­raries, lovers, and hus­bands who did not see them on equal terms. In the short film above, Glo­ri­a’s Call, L.A.-based artist Cheri Gaulke “man­i­fests Oren­stein’s jour­ney into the sur­re­al with col­lage-like ani­ma­tions.” It was a quest that took her around the world, from Paris to Sami­land, and it began in Mex­i­co City, where she met the great Leono­ra Car­ring­ton.

See how Oren­stein not only redis­cov­ered the women of Sur­re­al­ism, but helped recov­er the essen­tial roots of Sur­re­al­ism in Latin Amer­i­ca, also erased by the art his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship of her time. And learn more about the artists she befriend­ed and brought to light at Art­space and in Pene­lope Rose­mon­t’s 1998 book, Sur­re­al­ist Women: An Inter­na­tion­al Anthol­o­gy.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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