The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way

in Food & Drink | January 7th, 2022

I am sure that many an Open Cul­ture read­er has a Bialet­ti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew lit­tle about its his­to­ry and appar­ent­ly even less about how to prop­er­ly use one. Cof­fee expert and author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee James Hoff­mann intro­duces us to the appli­ance we think we know in the above video.

Alfon­so Bialet­ti didn’t orig­i­nal­ly get into the cof­fee busi­ness. In 1919, the Bialet­ti com­pa­ny was an alu­minum man­u­fac­tur­er, with the Moka Express invent­ed some­where around 1933 by Lui­gi de Pon­ti, who worked for the com­pa­ny. Accord­ing to Decon­struct­ing Prod­uct Design by William Lid­well and Ger­ry Man­casa, the inspi­ra­tion came from Bialetti’s wife’s old-fash­ioned wash­ing machine: “a fire, a buck­et, and a lid with a tube com­ing out of it. The buck­et was filled with soapy water, sealed with the lid, and then brought to a boil over the fire, at which point the vapor­ized soapy water was pushed up through the tube and expelled on to the laun­dry.”

As Hoff­mann shows, ear­li­er cof­fee-mak­ers did use steam and a drip tech­nique, but the Moka Express was the first all-in-one mak­er that could sit on the stove top and do the work. All the user has to lis­ten for was the tell-tale gur­gle when it fin­ish­es brew­ing.

In 1945, Alfonso’s son Rena­to returned from a pris­on­er-of-war camp and took over the fam­i­ly busi­ness. He was instru­men­tal in focus­ing on the Moka Express and turn­ing it into an inter­na­tion­al cof­fee brand. He hired car­toon­ist Paul Cam­pani to design l’omino coi baf­fi, “the mus­ta­chioed lit­tle man” whose image is on the side of every Moka Express, and dur­ing the 1950s was in a series of humor­ous ani­mat­ed com­mer­cials. Bialet­ti was the pride of Italy, and for Ital­ian immi­grants liv­ing abroad, it was a trea­sured object in the kitchen.

Such was the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Rena­to Bialet­ti with the Moka Express that when he died in 2016, his ash­es were interred in a giant repli­ca pot. Hoff­mann details the fate of the com­pa­ny after­wards, how it has fared against com­peti­tors in Italy and out­side. Will it still be around in decades? Who knows. But it does make a great cup of cof­fee.

And he shows the cor­rect way to brew a cup with the Moka Express in this oth­er video. Here’s a few things I was doing wrong: not using hot water in the bot­tom to start; try­ing to pack in the ground cof­fee like I was mak­ing an espres­so. (Note: a Moka Express cof­fee is some­where between an espres­so and a pour-over.) Using too fine a grind; and not cool­ing the bot­tom as soon as it’s done work­ing its mag­ic. (All these tips I’m going to try tomor­row morn­ing.) Maybe you have been mak­ing your Bialet­ti cup the right way all along. Let me know in the com­ments. I’ll read them over a fresh­ly brewed cup.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

The Birth of Espres­so: How the Cof­fee Shots The Fuel Our Mod­ern Life Were Invent­ed

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

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.

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

in Animation, Art, Education, History | January 7th, 2022

Leonar­do da Vinci’s unfin­ished, five cen­tu­ry-old por­trait of a Flo­ren­tine silk merchant’s wife, Lisa del Gio­con­do (née Gher­ar­di­ni), is, quite pos­si­bly, the most famous paint­ing in the world.

And its sub­ject pos­sess­es the world’s most cap­ti­vat­ing smile, inspir­ing rhap­sodies and par­o­dies in seem­ing equal mea­sure. (Its Ital­ian title, La Gio­con­da, is a nod to the sitter’s mar­ried name, and depend­ing on whom you ask, trans­lates as “joy­ous,” “light heart­ed,” or  “mer­ry.”)

The Lou­vre, where the paint­ing has resided since 1804 (fol­low­ing stints in Fontainebleau, the Grand Palace of Ver­sailles, and Napoleon Bona­parte’s bed­room), reserves a spe­cial mail­box for paeans from Mona Lisa fans.

Ask a ran­dom per­son on the street how this com­par­a­tive­ly dinky oil on wood came to be so uni­ver­sal­ly cel­e­brat­ed, and they’ll log­i­cal­ly con­clude it’s got some­thing to do with that smile.

Those with a back­ground in visu­al art may also cite Renais­sance inno­va­tions in paint­ing tech­nique — atmos­pher­ic per­spec­tive and sfu­ma­to, both of which Leonar­do employed to mem­o­rable effect.

Those are good guess­es, but the real rea­son for the Mona Lisa’s endur­ing glob­al renown?

The pub­lic’s love of a good crime sto­ry.

As art his­to­ri­an Noah Char­ney, author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Steal­ing the World’s Most Famous Paint­ing, recounts in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above, La Gio­can­da owes her block­buster rep­u­ta­tion to a sticky-fin­gered Lou­vre employ­ee named Vin­cen­zo Perug­gia.

In 1911, Perug­gia, a painter whose day job involved build­ing crates for works in the Lou­vre’s col­lec­tion, hid in a cup­board for hours after clos­ing, then escaped via a back door, the unframed can­vas tucked beneath his arm.

The police papered the streets of Paris with the Mona Lisa’s like­ness on miss­ing fly­ers, and the press fanned inter­est in both the crime and the paint­ing. Read­ers devoured updates that iden­ti­fied poet Guil­laume Apol­li­naire and painter Pablo Picas­so as sus­pects, and steamy the­o­ries regard­ing the nature of the rela­tion­ship between Leonar­do and the lady in the por­trait.

As art crit­ic Lau­ra Cum­ming writes in The Guardian, “Mil­lions of peo­ple who might not have seen it, might nev­er even have heard of it, soon became experts on Leonar­do’s stolen paint­ing.”

For two years, its where­abouts remained unknown:

(Perug­gia) kept her in a cup­board, then under a stove in the kitchen, and final­ly in (a) false-bot­tomed trunk. For a while, he rather cock­i­ly propped her post­card on the man­tel­piece… But fair­ly soon he seems to have found her hard to look at, impos­si­ble to live with; there is evi­dence of repeat­ed attempts to sell her.

The thief even­tu­al­ly arranged to repa­tri­ate the pur­loined paint­ing to Italy, strik­ing a deal with Flo­ren­tine art deal­er Alfred Geri, who sum­moned the police as soon as he ver­i­fied the work’s authen­tic­i­ty.

The Mona Lisa was restored to the Lou­vre, where eager crowds clam­ored for a look at a new­ly mint­ed house­hold name they could all rec­og­nize by sight, as “news­pa­pers took the sto­ry for a vic­to­ry lap.”

Find a quiz and cus­tomiz­able les­son plan on the rea­sons behind the Mona Lisa’s fame here.

Hats off to ani­ma­tor Avi Ofer for his puck­ish sug­ges­tion that Leonar­do might have tak­en some flat­ter­ing lib­er­ties with Lisa del Gio­con­do’s appear­ance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renais­sance Man

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.

The Matrix Regurgitated — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #113

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi | January 7th, 2022

In light of the release of The Matrix Res­ur­rec­tions, we talk through the fran­chise as a whole. What made the first one remark­able, and does that a bar that any sequel can reach? We talk through the choic­es that fed into the new film, why peo­ple don’t seem to care about their matrix fam­i­lies, the end­less fight scenes, and more. Who will choose the blue pill?

This very spe­cial hol­i­day episode of Pret­ty Much Pop reunites the full sea­son one pan­el: Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Bri­an Hirt and Eri­ca Spyres, and fea­tures the pod­cast­ing debut of Mark’s son Abe Lin­sen­may­er.

Some arti­cles we con­sid­ered includ­ed:

• “ ‘The Matrix Res­ur­rec­tions’ Is a Cru­cial Keanu Reeves Movie” by Alex Pap­pade­mas
• “The Sub­ver­sive Play­ful­ness of the ‘The Matrix’” by Bri­an Phillips
• “Zion Is Inside The Matrix: How Res­ur­rec­tions Hon­ors Warped Fan The­o­ry” by Craig Elvy
• “The Matrix And Gen­der Iden­ti­ty: The Trans Nar­ra­tive Behind The Wachowskis’ Sci-Fi Clas­sic” by Sarah El-Mah­moud
• “The Matrix 4’s Video Game Reboot Scene Reveals the Orig­i­nal Films’ True Mean­ing” by Theo Kogod
• “Why The Matrix Nev­er Stopped Being Rel­e­vant” by Emi­ly Van­Der­W­erff

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Hear Debussy Play Debussy’s Most Famous Piece, “Clair de lune” (1913)

in Music | January 6th, 2022

Claude Debussy died in 1918, at the age of 55: still quite young for a com­pos­er, and still quite ear­ly in the his­to­ry of sound record­ing. This means that, a lit­tle over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we have a great many record­ings of Debussy’s music, but pre­cious few record­ings of Debussy’s music played by the man him­self. Once he accom­pa­nied opera singer Mary Gar­den in the per­for­mance of three mélodies from Ari­ettes oubliées, his cycle based on the poet­ry of Paul Ver­laine. Those record­ings were made in 1904, and sound it. But in his final years, Debussy also pre­served his play­ing with an out­ward­ly more prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy that nev­er­the­less sounds much more pleas­ing today: the piano roll.

Designed to be fed into and auto­mat­i­cal­ly repro­duced by spe­cial­ly engi­neered instru­ments, the piano roll — an ear­ly form of the music media we’ve enjoyed over the past few gen­er­a­tions — was com­mer­cial­ly pio­neered by the Amer­i­can com­pa­ny M. Welte & Sons. “It is impos­si­ble to attain a greater per­fec­tion of repro­duc­tion than that of the Welte appa­ra­tus,” Debussy once wrote to Edwin Welte, co-inven­tor of the fam­i­ly com­pa­ny’s Welte-Mignon Repro­duc­ing Piano.

The four­teen pieces Debussy record­ed for Welte include the Sym­bol­ist- and Impres­sion­ist-inspired “La soirée dans Grenade,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, as well as his most beloved and wide­ly heard work, “Clair de lune.”

Imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able in iso­la­tion, the also Ver­laine-based “Clair de lune” con­sti­tutes one of the four move­ments of the Suite berga­masque. The entire piece was first pub­lished in 1905, but Debussy had actu­al­ly begun its com­po­si­tion fif­teen years before that. The still-fre­quent use of the third move­ment in pop­u­lar cul­ture has, at this point, made it dif­fi­cult to hear the essen­tial qual­i­ties of the piece itself; under such cir­cum­stances, who bet­ter to bring those qual­i­ties out than the com­pos­er him­self? The video at the top of the post presents a repro­duc­tion of “Clair de lune” from the piano roll that Debussy made 109 years ago, the next best thing to hav­ing him at the piano. Enthu­si­asts won­der what Debussy would have writ­ten had he lived longer; hear­ing this, they may also won­der what he would have record­ed had he stuck around for the hi-fi age.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Debussy’s “Clair de lune”: The Clas­si­cal Music Visu­al­iza­tion with 21 Mil­lion Views

A Dancer Pays a Grav­i­ty-Defy­ing Trib­ute to Claude Debussy

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1913

Rach­mani­noff Plays Rach­mani­noff: Three Famous Pieces, 1919–1929

Hear Rav­el Play Rav­el in 1922

Gersh­win Plays Gersh­win: Hear the Orig­i­nal Record­ing of Rhap­sody in Blue, with the Com­pos­er Him­self at the Piano (1924)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

This Is What It Sounds Like When a Harpist Plays “Amazing Grace” and a String Suddenly Breaks

in Random | January 6th, 2022

Lisa War­ren was peace­ful­ly play­ing “Amaz­ing Grace” on her harp, when sud­den­ly the c string broke and–as she says–“scared the day­lights out of me.” Harp play­ing, it’s not for the faint of heart…

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

A Harp Played with a Heavy Dis­tor­tion Ped­al

Pink Floyd Songs Played Splen­did­ly on a Harp Gui­tar: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here” & More

Visu­al­iz­ing Bach: Alexan­der Chen’s Impos­si­ble Harp

Hear the First Song Record­ed on the Yazh, a 2,000 Year-Old Indi­an Instru­ment

Watch Nirvana Perform as an Opening Band, Two Years Before Their Breakout Album Nevermind (1989)

in Music | January 6th, 2022

The sto­ry of Nir­vana’s first album, first sin­gle, and first video launch­ing the band to instant mega-star­dom, and the sto­ry of their trag­ic crash back down to Earth, have been told too many times to count. Less well known are the years of the band’s ear­ly ascent through the local Pacif­ic North­west scene, open­ing for then-big­ger acts like TAD (who got swept up, then left behind in grunge’s first wave). Nir­vana first formed in 1987 in Aberdeen, WA and played as a few iter­a­tions with names like Fecal Mat­ter and Skid Row, always as a three-piece with Kurt Cobain out front and Krist Novosel­ic on bass.

As they ironed out their image (avoid­ing a law­suit from the Jer­sey hair met­al band), Nir­vana also moved through a cou­ple dif­fer­ent drum­mers behind the kit before luck­ing into Dave Grohl. “Aaron Bur­ck­hard was Nir­vana’s first drum­mer,” writes the Muse­um of Pop Cul­ture, “but he and the band ulti­mate­ly part­ed ways. While the band searched for a replace­ment, Dale Crover helped Nir­vana with their first demo and Dave Fos­ter hon­ored their live book­ings. Chad Chan­ning offi­cial­ly joined Nir­vana in 1988, and the band began work on their debut album Bleach, which was offi­cial­ly released in June of 1989 fol­lowed by a short Amer­i­can tour and a lengthy UK tour.” Just above, you can see them open for TAD on Decem­ber 1, 1989 at Fahren­heit, Issy-les-Moulin­eaux, France.

Signed to Seat­tle indie label Sub Pop at the time, the band was eager for suc­cess but had­n’t quite nailed down their sound. When Nev­er­mind pro­duc­er Butch Vig heard Bleach the fol­low­ing year, after Sub Pop recruit­ed him to work with the band, he “thought it was pret­ty one-dimen­sion­al,” he writes, “except that one song, ‘About a Girl.’ ” Cobain would only say he want­ed the band to sound like “Black Sab­bath.” The label’s Jonathan Pone­man assured Vig that Nir­vana “would be as big as The Bea­t­les,” but that would­n’t hap­pen until Chan­ning left, or felt pushed out. As Vig remem­bers, there was con­sid­er­able “ten­sion between Kurt and Chad” dur­ing their first ses­sions in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin in 1990. “Kurt would some­times go behind the drums and show Chad how to play.” Of course, that’s some­thing the moody Cobain was also known to do to Chan­ning’s replace­ment.

Musi­cal ten­sion did not result in long-term hard feel­ings, Chan­ning says. “I found out what a real­ly nice guy Dave is.” For his part, Grohl has pushed for recog­ni­tion of Chan­ning’s con­tri­bu­tions, object­ing to his exclu­sion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. “Grohl took steps to rec­ti­fy the injus­tice,” notes Far Out Mag­a­zine. “With Chan­ning in atten­dance, Grohl pub­licly applaud­ed and thanked Chan­ning for his vital con­tri­bu­tions to the band, and more crit­i­cal­ly, not­ed that some of Nir­vana’s most icon­ic drum riffs from the peri­od were, in fact, Chan­ning’s.” Hear some of the evi­dence above in a setlist that includes sev­er­al tracks from Bleach, includ­ing “About a Girl,” and “Pol­ly” from the upcom­ing Nev­er­mind. And stick around for TAD, for­got­ten stal­warts of the Seat­tle scene.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Record­ing Secrets of Nirvana’s Nev­er­mind Revealed by Pro­duc­er Butch Vig

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

Nir­vana Refus­es to Fake It on Top of the Pops, Gives a Big “Mid­dle Fin­ger” to the Tra­di­tion of Bands Mim­ing on TV (1991)

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

Animals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

in Biology | January 5th, 2022

Every pet own­er knows that ani­mals love to play, but laugh­ter seems reserved for humans, a few apes, and maybe a few birds good at mim­ic­k­ing humans and apes. As it turns out, accord­ing to a new arti­cle pub­lished in the jour­nal Bioa­coustics, laugh­ter has been “doc­u­ment­ed in at least 65 species,” Jes­si­ca Wolf writes at UCLA News­room. “That list includes a vari­ety of pri­mates, domes­tic cows and dogs, fox­es, seals, and mon­goos­es, as well as three bird species, includ­ing para­keets and Aus­tralian mag­pies.” This is a far cry from just a few years ago when apes and rats were the “only known ani­mals to get the gig­gles,” as Liz Lan­g­ley wrote at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2015.

Yes, rats laugh. How do sci­en­tists know this? They tick­le them, of course, as you can see in the video just above. (Rat tick­ling, it turns out, is good for the ani­mals’ well being.) The pur­pose of this exper­i­ment was to bet­ter under­stand human touch — and tick­ling, says study author Michael Brecht, “is one of the most poor­ly under­stood forms of touch.”

Laugh­ter, on the oth­er hand, seems some­what bet­ter under­stood, even among species sep­a­rat­ed from us by tens of mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion. In their recent arti­cle, UCLA pri­ma­tol­o­gist Sasha Win­kler and UCLA pro­fes­sor of com­mu­ni­ca­tion Greg Bryant describe how “play vocal­iza­tions” sig­nal non-aggres­sion dur­ing rough­hous­ing. As Win­kler puts it:

When we laugh, we are often pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion to oth­ers that we are hav­ing fun and also invit­ing oth­ers to join. Some schol­ars have sug­gest­ed that this kind of vocal behav­ior is shared across many ani­mals who play, and as such, laugh­ter is our human ver­sion of an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly old vocal play sig­nal.

Gen­er­al­ly, humans are unlike­ly to rec­og­nize ani­mal laugh­ter as such or even per­ceive it at all. “Our review indi­cates that vocal play sig­nals are usu­al­ly incon­spic­u­ous,” the authors write. Rats, for exam­ple, make “ultra­son­ic vocal­iza­tions” beyond the range of human hear­ing. The play vocal­iza­tions of chim­panzees, on the oth­er hand, are much more sim­i­lar to human laugh­ter, “although there are some dif­fer­ences,” Win­kler notes in an inter­view. “Like, they vocal­ize in both the in-breath and out breath.”

Why study ani­mal laugh­ter? Beyond the inher­ent inter­est of the top­ic — an espe­cial­ly joy­ful one for sci­en­tif­ic researchers — there’s the seri­ous busi­ness of under­stand­ing how “human social com­plex­i­ty allowed laugh­ter to evolve from a play-spe­cif­ic vocal­iza­tion into a sophis­ti­cat­ed prag­mat­ic sig­nal,” as Win­kler and Bryant write. We use laugh­ter to sig­nal all kinds of inten­tions, not all of them play­ful. But no mat­ter how many uses humans find for the vocal sig­nal, we can see in this new review arti­cle how deeply non-aggres­sive play is embed­ded through­out the ani­mal world and in our evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry. Read “Play vocal­i­sa­tions and human laugh­ter: a com­par­a­tive review” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eye of the Pan­golin: The Search for an Ani­mal on the Edge 

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Down­load Ani­mals and Ethics 101: Think­ing Crit­i­cal­ly About Ani­mal Rights (Free)

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

75 Post-Punk and Hardcore Concerts from the 1980s Have Been Digitized & Put Online: Fugazi, GWAR, Lemonheads, Dain Bramage (with Dave Grohl) & More

in Music | January 4th, 2022

Between 1985 and 1988, a teenag­er by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attend­ing punk and post-punk shows around the Wash­ing­ton, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video cam­era he’d bring to the show and let roll, doc­u­ment­ing entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glo­ry. Just a kid try­ing to doc­u­ment a great night out. Habibion might not have known at the time what an impor­tant time cap­sule he was cre­at­ing, but these 60 or so tapes have now been dig­i­tized and uploaded to YouTube, thanks to Roswell Films and the DC Pub­lic Library’s Punk Archive.

“Please keep in mind that I was a teenag­er when I shot these shows,” Habibion writes, “and had zero pro­fi­cien­cy with the equip­ment. And, as you might imag­ine, nobody was doing any­thing with the lights or the sound to make things any bet­ter. What you get here is what was record­ed on my Beta­max and prob­a­bly best appre­ci­at­ed with a bit of gen­eros­i­ty as a view­er.”

High­lights include the above full con­cert by Fugazi on Decem­ber 28, 1987, a year before their first e.p. and play­ing songs that would turn up on their 1990’s clas­sic debut Repeater; Descen­dents in 1987 at the height of their career; The Lemon­heads when they were a punk band and not a pow­er pop group; the insane and hilar­i­ous GWAR from 1988, the year of their debut; and anoth­er home­town punk band, Dain Bra­m­age, which fea­tured Dave Grohl on drums, long before he played with Nir­vana and the Foo Fight­ers (see below).

Habibion went on to his own musi­cal career: first as the front­man for post-hard­core band Edsel, and cur­rent­ly as part of the band SAVAK.

Habibion’s tape archive makes one won­der: who else is out there sit­ting on a trove of his­toric record­ings? And where is that person’s equiv­a­lent of the DC Library? Who would help fund such a project? And who would see the worth of such record­ings? Not only are Habibion’s tapes about the bands them­selves, but they tell a sep­a­rate his­to­ry of music venues come and gone, of a time and place that will nev­er come again. Watch the shows here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

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.

400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | January 4th, 2022

A cen­tu­ry ago, the Unit­ed States was deep into the Jazz Age. No writer is more close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with that heady era than F. Scott Fitzger­ald, who (in addi­tion to coin­ing the verb to cock­tail) took it upon him­self to pop­u­lar­ize its name. In 1922 he even titled a short sto­ry col­lec­tion Tales from the Jazz Age, which entered the pub­lic domain not long ago. You may be more famil­iar with anoth­er work of Fitzger­ald’s that fol­lowed Tales from the Jazz Age into free­dom just last year: a nov­el called The Great Gats­by. But only this year have the actu­al sounds of the Jazz Age come into the pub­lic domain as well, thanks to the Music Mod­ern­iza­tion Act passed by U.S. Con­gress in 2018.

“Accord­ing to the act, all sound record­ings pri­or to 1923 will have their copy­rights expire in the US on Jan­u­ary 1, 2022,” says the Pub­lic Domain Review. This straight­ens out a tan­gled legal frame­work that pre­vi­ous­ly would­n’t have allowed the release of pre-1923 sound record­ings until the dis­tant year of 2067.

And so all of us now have free use of every sound record­ing from a more than 60-year peri­od  that “com­pris­es a rich and var­ied playlist: exper­i­men­tal first dab­blings, vaude­ville, Broad­way hits, rag­time, and the begin­nings of pop­u­lar jazz. Includ­ed will be the works of Scott Joplin, Thomas Edison’s exper­i­ments, the emo­tive war­blings of Adeli­na Pat­ti and the first record­ing of Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.”

If you’d like to have a lis­ten to all this, the Pub­lic Domain Review rec­om­mends start­ing with its own audio col­lec­tion, a search for all pre-1923 record­ings on Inter­net Archive, and two projects from the Library of Con­gress: the Nation­al Juke­box and the Cit­i­zen DJ project, the lat­ter of which “has plans to do some­thing spe­cial with the pre-1923 record­ings once they enter the pub­lic domain.” You might also have a look at the Asso­ci­a­tion for Record­ed Sound Col­lec­tions’ list of ten notable pre-1923 record­ings, which high­lights such pro­to-jazz records as “Crazy Blues” and “Dix­ieland Jass Band One-Step” (along with the whol­ly non-jazz work of Enri­co Caru­so and Pablo Casals).

Accord­ing to Alex­is Rossi at the Inter­net Archive Blog, the sound record­ings just lib­er­at­ed by the Music Mod­ern­iza­tion act come to about 400,000 in total. Among them you’ll find “ear­ly jazz clas­sics like ‘Don’t Care Blues’ by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, ‘Ory’s Cre­ole Trom­bone’ by Kid Ory’s Sun­shine Orches­tra, and ‘Jazz­in’ Babies Blues’ by Ethel Waters.” Rossi also high­lights the nov­el­ty songs such as Bil­ly Mur­ray’s 1914 ren­di­tion of “Fido is a Hot Dog Now,” “which seems to be about a dog who is def­i­nite­ly going to hell.” The Jazz Age soon to come would exhib­it a more rau­cous but also more refined sen­si­bil­i­ty: as Fitzger­ald wrote in 1931, with the era he defined (and that defined him) already past, “It was an age of mir­a­cles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Ris­es, Win­nie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Come­dies & More

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

How the Inter­net Archive Has Dig­i­tized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M. Records: See the Painstak­ing Process Up-Close

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

In 1953, a Telephone-Company Executive Predicts the Rise of Modern Smartphones and Video Calls

in History, Technology | January 3rd, 2022

We live in the age of the smart­phone, which took more than a few of us by sur­prise. But in all human his­to­ry, not a sin­gle piece of tech­nol­o­gy has actu­al­ly come out of nowhere. Long before smart­phones came on the mar­ket in the 2000s, those close to the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­try had a sense of what form its most wide­ly used device would even­tu­al­ly take. “Here is my prophe­cy: In its final devel­op­ment, the tele­phone will be car­ried about by the indi­vid­ual, per­haps as we car­ry a watch today,” said Pacif­ic Tele­phone and Tele­graph Com­pa­ny direc­tor Mark R. Sul­li­van in 1953. “It prob­a­bly will require no dial or equiv­a­lent and I think the users will be able to see each oth­er, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actu­al­ly trans­late from one lan­guage to anoth­er?”

Sul­li­van’s pre­scient-sound­ing words sur­vive in the clip­ping of the Asso­ci­at­ed Press arti­cle seen at the top of the post. It’s worth remem­ber­ing that the speech in ques­tion dates from a time when the rotary phone was the most advanced per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion device in Amer­i­can house­holds.

Just three years ear­li­er, writes KQED’s Rae Alexan­dra, Sul­li­van “appeared in the San Fran­cis­co Exam­in­er talk­ing about the lat­est inno­va­tions in tele­phone tech­nol­o­gy. The advance­ment he was most proud of was a new device about the size of a small type­writer that auto­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lat­ed how long people’s phone calls were.” How­ev­er log­i­cal, pock­et tele­phones with video-call­ing and trans­la­tion capa­bil­i­ties would then have struck many as the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion.

Though born before the time of house­hold elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, Sul­li­van him­self lived just long enough to see the debut of the first com­mer­cial cell­phone  “The Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X was def­i­nite­ly not watch-sized and cost a whop­ping $3,995 in 1983 (about $11,000 today),” writes Alexan­dra, “but Sul­li­van might have seen this devel­op­ment as a step towards his long-ago vision — a sign that every one of his 1953 pre­dic­tions would even­tu­al­ly come to fruition.” As print­ed in the Taco­ma News Tri­bune, the AP arti­cle con­vey­ing those pre­dic­tions to the pub­lic appeared under the head­line “There’ll Be No Escape in Future from Tele­phones,” which sounds even more chill­ing today — in that very future — than it did near­ly 70 years ago. But then, even the visions of actu­al sci­ence fic­tion are sel­dom whol­ly untrou­bled.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.