Carl Sagan Tells Johnny Carson What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chauvinism in It” (1978)

in Film, Sci Fi, Science, Television | July 14th, 2021

Is Star Wars sci­ence fic­tion or fan­ta­sy? Dif­fer­ent fans make dif­fer­ent argu­ments, some even opt­ing for a third way, claim­ing that the ever-mul­ti­ply­ing sto­ries of its ever-expand­ing fic­tion­al uni­verse belong to nei­ther genre. Back in 1978, the year after the release of the orig­i­nal Star Wars film (which no one then called “A New Hope,” let alone “Episode Four”), the ques­tion was approached by no less a pop­u­lar sci­en­tif­ic per­son­al­i­ty than Carl Sagan. It hap­pened on nation­al tele­vi­sion, as the astronomer, cos­mol­o­gist, writer, and tele­vi­sion host in his own right sat oppo­site John­ny Car­son. “The eleven-year-old in me loved them,” Sagan says in the clip above of Star Wars, Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind, and oth­er then-recent space-themed block­busters. “But they could’ve made a bet­ter effort to do things right.”

Every­one remem­bers how Star Wars sets its stage: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” But right there, Sagan has a prob­lem. Despite its remote­ness from us, this galaxy hap­pens also to be pop­u­lat­ed by human beings, “the result of a unique evo­lu­tion­ary sequence, based upon so many indi­vid­u­al­ly unlike­ly, ran­dom events on the Earth.”

So Homo sapi­ens could­n’t have evolved on any oth­er plan­et, Car­son asks, let alone one in anoth­er galaxy? “It’s extreme­ly unlike­ly that there would be crea­tures as sim­i­lar to us as the dom­i­nant ones in Star Wars.” He goes on to make a more spe­cif­ic cri­tique, one pub­li­cized again in recent years as ahead of its time: “They’re all white.” That is, in the skins of most of the movie’s char­ac­ters, “not even the oth­er col­ors rep­re­sent­ed on the Earth are present, much less greens and blues and pur­ples and oranges.”

Car­son responds, as any­one would, by bring­ing up Star Wars’ can­ti­na scene, with its rogue’s gallery of var­i­ous­ly non-humanoid habitués. “But none of them seemed to be in charge of the galaxy,” Sagan points out. “Every­body in charge of the galaxy seemed to look like us. I thought there was a large amount of human chau­vin­ism in it.” That no medal is bestowed upon Chew­bac­ca, despite his hero­ics, Sagan declares an exam­ple of “anti-Wook­iee dis­crim­i­na­tion” — with tongue in cheek, grant­ed, but point­ing up how much more inter­est­ing sci­ence fic­tion could be if it relied a lit­tle less on human con­ven­tions and drew a lit­tle more from sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. Not that Star Wars is nec­es­sar­i­ly sci­ence fic­tion. “It was a shootout, was­n’t it?” Car­son asks. “A West­ern in out­er space.” John­ny nev­er did hes­i­tate to call ’em as he saw ’em.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fans Recon­struct Authen­tic Ver­sion of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in The­aters in 1977

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Carl Sagan on the Impor­tance of Choos­ing Wise­ly What You Read (Even If You Read a Book a Week)

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Andy Warhol’s Art Explained: What Makes His Iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans & Marilyn Monroe Diptych Art?

in Art | July 14th, 2021

Pop Art looks out into the world. It does­n’t look like a paint­ing of some­thing, it looks like the thing itself. — Artist Roy Licht­en­stein

By 2021, most of us accept that Andy Warhol’s Camp­bel­l’s Soup Cans are art, but there are some who are still not con­fi­dent as to why.

No shame in that.

Art His­to­ri­an Steven Zuck­er and the Khan Academy’s Sal Khan tack­le the ques­tion head on in the below video, con­clud­ing that the work is not only a reflec­tion of the time in which it was cre­at­ed, but that the enor­mi­ty of its impact was made pos­si­ble by that tim­ing.

Forty-five years before Warhol escort­ed those low­ly, instant­ly rec­og­niz­able soup cans from the super­mar­ket to the far lofti­er realm of muse­um and gallery, the art world was thrown into an uproar over Mar­cel Duchamp’s provoca­tive ready­made, Foun­tain, a pre­fab­ri­cat­ed uri­nal sub­mit­ted to the Soci­ety of Inde­pen­dent Artists inau­gur­al exhi­bi­tion as the work of the fic­ti­tious R. Mutt. The Tate Modern’s web­site sum­ma­rizes its impor­tance:

Foun­tain test­ed beliefs about art and the role of taste in the art world. Inter­viewed in 1964, Duchamp said he had cho­sen a uri­nal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked (although many at the time did find it aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing). He con­tin­ued: ‘I was draw­ing people’s atten­tion to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exact­ly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beau­ti­ful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don’t die in the field of art. The mirage is sol­id.’

Campbell’s soup cans pos­sess a sim­i­lar solid­i­ty.

The famil­iar label dates back to 1898 when a Campbell’s exec drew inspi­ra­tion from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty’s red and white foot­ball uni­forms.

A full page mag­a­zine ad from 1934 intro­duces Cream of Mush­room and Noo­dle with Chick­en (soon to become Chick­en Noo­dle) by remind­ing read­ers to “Look for the Red-and-White Label.”

By 1962, Campbell’s had giv­en con­sumers their pick of 32 fla­vors, and Warhol paint­ed all 32 of them. Not the con­tents. Just those uni­form cans.

Los Ange­les’ Ferus Gallery sold five of them before gal­lerist Irv­ing Blum real­ized that their impact was great­est when all 32 were dis­played togeth­er, to echo how con­sumers were used to see­ing the real thing.

Warhol had a per­son­al con­nec­tion to his sub­ject mat­ter, but it wasn’t like he set out to rep a life­long favorite. Rather, he was fol­low­ing up on a friend’s sug­ges­tion to paint some­thing every­one would would rec­og­nize, with or with­out pas­sion­ate feel­ings. (He seemed to be with­out:)

I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.

Warhol brought a suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial illus­tra­tor’s eye to his Campell’s Soup Cans, cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the public’s exist­ing knowl­edge. The col­ors, the cus­tom cur­sive logo over the sans serif fla­vor font, and the shape of the cans had couched them­selves in the ear­ly-60s Amer­i­can con­scious­ness.

As had indus­tri­al­iza­tion as the over­ar­ch­ing sys­tem by which most lives were ordered. The artist may not have offered overt com­ment on mass pro­duced items, con­ve­nience foods, or brand loy­al­ty. He just depend­ed on the pub­lic to be so inti­mate­ly acquaint­ed with them, they had fad­ed into the wall­pa­per of their dai­ly lives.

Nor was the pub­lic over­ly accus­tomed to every­day objects recon­cep­tu­al­ized as art. These days, we’re a bit blasé.

Warhol’s sub­ject mat­ter may have been pro­sa­ic, but his tim­ing, Khan and Zuck­er tell us, could not have been bet­ter.

As Campbell’s is to soup, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe is to celebri­ty — an endur­ing house­hold name. Her sexy, youth­ful image is imprint­ed on fans born decades after her death.

The most uni­ver­sal Mar­i­lyn is the one from the Nia­gara pub­lic­i­ty still, immor­tal­ized in acrylic and silkscreen in Warhol’s Mar­i­lyn Dip­tych. One of his most defin­ing works, it was pro­duced the same year as his soup cans (and Monroe’s sui­cide at the age of 36).

In con­sid­er­ing this work for his ongo­ing series, Great Art Explained, gal­lerist James Payne delves into Warhol’s fas­ci­na­tion with mul­ti­ples, celebri­ty, reli­gious iconog­ra­phy, machi­na­tion, and death, not­ing that “both Warhol and Mar­i­lyn under­stood trans­for­ma­tion”:

From ear­ly on in his career, Andy Warhol had an extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty of find­ing the sacred in the pro­fane.… He was a prod­uct of the East­ern Euro­pean immi­grant expe­ri­ence who him­self became an icon, a shy, gay, work­ing class man who became the court painter of the 1970s, an artist who embraced con­sumerism,  celebri­ty and the coun­ter­cul­ture and changed mod­ern art in the process.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fied: Four Videos Explain His Ground­break­ing Art and Its Cul­tur­al Impact

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decid­ed to Give Up Paint­ing & Man­age the Vel­vet Under­ground Instead (1966)

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the Andy Warhol Exhi­bi­tion at the Tate Mod­ern

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, the­ater­mak­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Releases a Super Creepy Version of “Creep”

in Music | July 14th, 2021

Like many bands with a killer, career-launch­ing debut sin­gle, Radio­head has had a long, love-hate rela­tion­ship with 1992’s “Creep”. There’s no way they would have become sta­di­um fillers with­out it, but they’re also under­stand­ably sick of it. Accord­ing to setlist.fm, they played it over 310 times between 1992 and 1998, and then they kind of dropped it from their gigs once they entered their Kid A phase. Only in 2016, dur­ing the Moon Shaped Pool tours did they add it back into the set.

But man, 2016 seems like a lonnnnnng time ago, doesn’t it? Everybody’s still fig­ur­ing out the future of live con­certs. Nobody is sure how far ahead is safe enough to announce tick­et sales. Will venues be open or shut again? Into the fray of uncer­tain­ty comes this odd­i­ty: a nine-plus minute ver­sion of “Creep” cred­it­ed to Thom Yorke. (“Thom Yorke should col­lab with Radio­head more often” says one wag in the YouTube com­ments). You want Creep, ya say? Well, here’s a LOT of it.

Thom Yorke takes his vocals, stretch­es them out until they’re cor­rupt­ed dig­i­tal­ly, and fills the airy gaps with acoustic gui­tar, adding twice as many bars as the orig­i­nal. As NPR said, Yorke’s vocals sound like a “rant from a man who’s lost his mind to old age and iso­la­tion.” (Hence the “Very 2021 Remix” title). It was about 30 years ago, we have to add, though we hate to admit it. Elec­tron­ic bur­bles and bass throbs enter halfway through and fur­ther dis­turb the already dis­turb­ing.

Yorke cre­at­ed the mix for fash­ion design­er Jun Taka­hashi, whose ani­mat­ed art­work runs in a loop for the video. The song accom­pa­nies Takahashi’s UNDERWORLD Fall 2021 col­lec­tion run­way show.

As Pitch­fork points out, Yorke has con­tributed music to fash­ion shows before:

n 2016, he con­tributed an orig­i­nal song called “Coloured Can­dy” to Rag & Bone’s 2017 Spring/Summer show­case. Years pri­or, he con­tributed the songs “Stuck Togeth­er” and “Twist” for anoth­er one of the fash­ion label’s shows.

Yorke, by the way, hasn’t been lay­ing low dur­ing the plague year. In May of this year he debuted a new side band called The Smile at Glas­ton­bury, called out the John­son gov­ern­ment as “spine­less” regard­ing their response to COVID and the live music scene, and shared a 30-minute mix of new music on BBC Radio 6. What comes next? Stay tuned.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

Radio­head Bal­lets: Watch Bal­lets Chore­o­graphed Cre­ative­ly to the Music of Radio­head

Thom Yorke’s Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track on Radiohead’s 1992 Clas­sic, ‘Creep’

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

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.

An Introduction to Nicolas Bourbaki, One of the Most Influential Mathematicians of All Time … Who Never Actually Lived

in Animation, Math, TED Talks | July 13th, 2021

In 20th-cen­tu­ry math­e­mat­ics, the renowned name of Nico­las Bour­ba­ki stands alone in its class — the class, that is, of renowned math­e­mat­i­cal names that don’t actu­al­ly belong to real peo­ple. Bour­ba­ki refers not to a math­e­mati­cian, but to math­e­mati­cians; a whole secret soci­ety of them, in fact, who made their name by col­lec­tive­ly com­pos­ing Ele­ments of Math­e­mat­ic. Not, mind you, Ele­ments of Math­e­mat­ics: “Bourbaki’s Ele­ments of Math­e­mat­ic — a series of text­books and pro­gram­mat­ic writ­ings first appear­ing in 1939—pointedly omit­ted the ‘s’ from the end of ‘Math­e­mat­ics,’ ” writes JSTOR Dai­ly’s Michael Barany, “as a way of insist­ing on the fun­da­men­tal uni­ty and coher­ence of a dizzy­ing­ly var­ie­gat­ed field.”

That’s mere­ly the tip of Bour­bak­i’s ice­berg of eccen­tric­i­ties. Formed in 1934 “by alum­ni of the École nor­male supérieure, a sto­ried train­ing ground for French aca­d­e­m­ic and polit­i­cal elites,” this group of high-pow­ered math­e­mat­i­cal minds set about rec­ti­fy­ing their coun­try’s loss of near­ly an entire gen­er­a­tion of math­e­mati­cians in the First World War. (While Ger­many had kept its bright­est stu­dents and sci­en­tists out of bat­tle, the French com­mit­ment to égal­ité could per­mit no such favoritism.) It was the press­ing need for revised and updat­ed text­books that spurred the mem­bers of Bour­ba­ki to their col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly pseu­do­ny­mous, indi­vid­u­al­ly anony­mous work.

“Yet instead of writ­ing text­books,” explains Quan­ta’s Kevin Hart­nett, “they end­ed up cre­at­ing some­thing com­plete­ly nov­el: free-stand­ing books that explained advanced math­e­mat­ics with­out ref­er­ence to any out­side sources.” The most dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of this already unusu­al project “was the writ­ing style: rig­or­ous, for­mal and stripped to the log­i­cal studs. The books spelled out math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­rems from the ground up with­out skip­ping any steps — exhibit­ing an unusu­al degree of thor­ough­ness among math­e­mati­cians.”  Not that Bour­ba­ki lacked play­ful­ness: “In fan­ci­ful and pun-filled nar­ra­tives shared among one anoth­er and allud­ed to in out­ward-fac­ing writ­ing,” adds Barany, “Bourbaki’s col­lab­o­ra­tors embed­ded him in an elab­o­rate math­e­mat­i­cal-polit­i­cal uni­verse filled with the abstruse ter­mi­nol­o­gy and con­cepts of mod­ern the­o­ries.”

You can get an ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to Bour­ba­ki, which sur­vives even today as a still-pres­ti­gious and at least nom­i­nal­ly secret math­e­mat­i­cal soci­ety, in the TED-Ed les­son above. In the decades after the group’s found­ing, writes les­son author Pratik Aghor, “Bour­rbak­i’s pub­li­ca­tions became stan­dard ref­er­ences, and the group’s mem­bers took their prank as seri­ous­ly as their work.” Their com­mit­ment to the front was total: “they sent telegrams in Bour­bak­i’s name, announced his daugh­ter’s wed­ding, and pub­licly insult­ed any­one who doubt­ed his exis­tence. In 1968, when they could no longer main­tain the ruse, the group end­ed their joke the only way they could: they print­ed Bour­bak­i’s obit­u­ary, com­plete with math­e­mat­i­cal puns.” And if you laugh at the math­e­mat­i­cal pun with which Aghor ends the les­son, you may car­ry a bit of Bour­bak­i’s spir­it with­in your­self as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Beau­ty of Ein­stein & Newton’s Great Equa­tions

The Math­e­mat­ics Behind Origa­mi, the Ancient Japan­ese Art of Paper Fold­ing

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night

Can You Solve These Ani­mat­ed Brain Teasers from TED-Ed?

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

Why the World’s Best Math­e­mati­cians Are Hoard­ing Japan­ese Chalk

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch Blondie Perform a Classic Concert During The Breakout Year: “Dreamin,” “One Way Or Another,” “Heart of Glass” & More (1979)

in Music | July 13th, 2021

When Blondie took the stage at Con­ven­tion Hall in Asbury Park, NJ in 1979, the audi­ence knew the band as a vehi­cle for for­mer Play­boy bun­ny-turned-punk-singer Deb­bie Har­ry. “Deb­bie put on that sexy per­sona with kind of a wink, say­ing ‘This is what you want from me, I’ll kind of give it to you, but I’m also going to give you what I want to give you,’’” says biog­ra­ph­er Cathay Che. “The Blondie char­ac­ter,” as Har­ry called her onstage per­sona, “embod­ied female sex­u­al­i­ty as part threat, part unat­tain­able goal, part par­o­dy,” as Ann Pow­ers writes at The New York Times.

Cast in the role of sex­u­al­ized object since her ear­ly teen years, she had also per­formed in bands since the late 60s, and had sur­vived sex­u­al assault and a near abduc­tion in New York City in the 70s. She was a world-weary per­former in con­trol of her image, but the char­ac­ter drew so much focus from Blondie the band that oth­er mem­bers got a bit defen­sive. “I remem­ber the tour Blondie was doing in April 1978,” punk pho­tog­ra­ph­er There­sa Kereakes writes:

All the posters, t‑shirts, and but­tons you saw were black with hot pink writ­ing that pro­claimed: BLONDIE IS A GROUP! Excla­ma­tion point. No one knew dur­ing that tour in April 1978 — not the band, not their fans, and prob­a­bly not their hope­ful record com­pa­ny — that the record Blondie would release in just six months would be the one to break them into the stratos­phere. They went from Plas­tic Let­ters to Par­al­lel Lines and from the DIY scene to the big time.

Blondie was most def­i­nite­ly a group. By 1979, they had grown into a for­mi­da­ble six-piece, adding gui­tarist Frank Infante and bassist Nigel Har­ri­son to the orig­i­nal line­up of Har­ry, Chris Stein, Jim­my Destri, and Clem Burke. On the cusp of major main­stream suc­cess, they had also hit a peak in terms of musi­cian­ship and song­writ­ing — pow­er­house drum­mer Burke hold­ing the machin­ery togeth­er while each mem­ber played a vital part.

The focus on Har­ry didn’t only detract from her male band mem­bers. “Ms. Har­ry must have felt a bit like… the object of some­one else’s prof­itable fan­ta­sy” at times,” writes Pow­ers, trapped in the role of punk-rock Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. As key­board play­er Destri put it, “no one real­ly paid atten­tion to Debbie’s singing style and how great a writer she was, because they couldn’t get past the image,”

They would pay atten­tion after Par­al­lel Lines and fol­low-ups Eat to the Beat and Autoamer­i­can. Songs like “Dream­ing,” revamped dis­co hit “Heart of Glass,” and dance­floor clas­sics “Call Me” and “Rap­ture” made Har­ry an inter­na­tion­al super­star and left the rest of the band dis­en­chant­ed. Before law­suits and long­stand­ing resent­ments broke them up, Blondie was an incred­i­ble live band. See them prove it in the full show at the top, the first set of the night. They played a sec­ond, dupli­cate set lat­er, adding Marc Bolan’s “Bang a Gong” at the end of the night. See them tear through it just above and see a full setlist with time­stamps on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Learned to Deal With Super­fi­cial, Demean­ing Inter­view­ers

Watch Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Per­form “Rain­bow Con­nec­tion” with Ker­mit the Frog on The Mup­pet Show (1981)

Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vin­tage Clips

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

A Billion Years of Tectonic-Plate Movement in 40 Seconds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

in History, Science | July 12th, 2021

We all remem­ber learn­ing about tec­ton­ic plates in our school sci­ence class­es. Or at least we do if we went to school in the 1960s or lat­er, that being when the the­o­ry of plate tec­ton­ics — which holds, broad­ly speak­ing, that the Earth­’s sur­face com­pris­es slow­ly mov­ing slabs of rock — gained wide accep­tance. But most every­one alive today will have been taught about Pangea. An impli­ca­tion of Alfred Wegen­er’s the­o­ry of “con­ti­nen­tal drift,” first pro­posed in the 1910s, that the sin­gle gigan­tic land­mass once dom­i­nat­ed the plan­et.

Despite its renown, how­ev­er, Pangea makes only a brief appear­ance in the ani­ma­tion of Earth­’s his­to­ry above. Geo­log­i­cal sci­en­tists now cat­e­go­rize it as just one of sev­er­al “super­con­ti­nents” that plate tec­ton­ics has gath­ered togeth­er and bro­ken up over hun­dreds and hun­dreds of mil­len­nia. Oth­ers include Kenor­land, in exis­tence about 2.6 bil­lion years ago, and Rodinia, 900 mil­lion years ago; Pangea, the most recent of the bunch, came apart around 175 mil­lion years ago. You can see the process in action in the video, which com­press­es a bil­lion years of geo­log­i­cal his­to­ry into a mere 40 sec­onds.

At the speed of 25 mil­lion years per sec­ond, and with out­lines drawn in, the move­ment of Earth­’s tec­ton­ic plates becomes clear­ly under­stand­able — more so, per­haps, than you found it back in school. “On a human timescale, things move in cen­time­ters per year, but as we can see from the ani­ma­tion, the con­ti­nents have been every­where in time,” as Michael Tet­ley, co-author of the paper “Extend­ing full-plate tec­ton­ic mod­els into deep time,” put it to Euronews. Antarc­ti­ca, which “we see as a cold, icy inhos­pitable place today, actu­al­ly was once quite a nice hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion at the equa­tor.”

Cli­mate-change trends sug­gest that we could be vaca­tion­ing in Antarc­ti­ca again before long — a trou­bling devel­op­ment in oth­er ways, of course, not least because it under­scores the imper­ma­nence of Earth­’s cur­rent arrange­ment, the one we know so well. “Our plan­et is unique in the way that it hosts life,” says Diet­mar Müller, anoth­er of the paper’s authors. “But this is only pos­si­ble because geo­log­i­cal process­es, like plate tec­ton­ics, pro­vide a plan­e­tary life-sup­port sys­tem.” Earth won’t always look like it does today, in oth­er words, but it’s thanks to the fact that it does­n’t look like it did a bil­lion years ago that we hap­pen to be here, able to study it at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

A Map Shows Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

What Earth Will Look Like 100 Mil­lion Years from 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 or on Face­book.

Hear Louis Armstrong’s Last Reel-to-Reel Tape, Made Hours Before His Death (1971)

in Music | July 12th, 2021

When Louis Arm­strong first record­ed “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!”, in 1963, he “found the song trite and life­less,” says his biog­ra­ph­er Lau­rence Bergreen, a sur­pris­ing fact since it became one of his sig­na­ture tunes. “Arm­strong had trans­formed the song, infus­ing it with irre­press­ible spir­it and swing,” Marc Sil­ver writes at NPR. He did so all the way to the end of his life, play­ing “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!” after accept­ing an award at the Nation­al Press Club in one of his final per­for­mances on Jan­u­ary 29, 1971. “He sang in a voice more grav­el­ly than ever” and per­formed despite the fact that he “was under doctor’s orders not to break out his trum­pet” after a heart attack that near­ly felled the jazz giant. He died five months lat­er on the morn­ing of July 6th.

Arm­strong spent July 5th, 1971, his final night, at home, relax­ing and record­ing reel-to-reel tapes in his den at his home in Coro­na, Queens. Trans­fer­ring his music to tape and mak­ing cov­ers with his own col­lage art had been a decades-long hob­by for Arm­strong, a life­long archivist and mem­oirist. “

It appears,” the Louis Arm­strong House notes, “his [tape] num­ber­ing sys­tem got well into the 400s.” In 2009, Arm­strong House Archivist Ricky Ric­car­di ran across an odd­i­ty, an unnum­bered tape with no art on the cov­er. The only iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion came from a note on the box in Arm­strong’s wife’s Lucille’s hand­writ­ing, “Last Tape record­ed by Pops. 7/5/71.”

As Ric­car­di explains in a post here (from a longer series on the last two years of Arm­strong tapes), it would take five more years before he dis­cov­ered the con­tents of the final Arm­strong tape — an audio doc­u­ment of the LPs Satch­mo lis­tened to just hours before his death.

“Final­ly,” Ric­car­di writes, “around 11 a.m. on an ear­ly Feb­ru­ary day [in 2013], I was ready. I explained to my vol­un­teer, Har­vey Fish­er, what was about to hap­pen. I went into the stacks, grabbed the tape, sat at the tape deck and loaded the tape onto the hub. I hit ‘Play’ and held my breath as it start­ed spin­ning.” What came out was “Lis­ten to the Mock­ing­bird” from Armstrong’s 1952 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gor­don Jenk­ins, Satch­mo in Style.

“I felt tears in my eyes while dub­bing it,” Ric­car­di writes. After record­ing this song, Arm­strong flipped the record over, record­ed the sec­ond side, then went on to record the entire 2‑LP set of Satch­mo at Sym­pho­ny Hall, “prob­a­bly with fond mem­o­ries of the musi­cians and friends on that album who were no longer liv­ing.” Final­ly, Arm­strong put on his first, 1956 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ella Fitzger­ald, an album, writer and musi­cian Tom Maxwell argues, that made a “cul­tur­al leap [in] the mid­dle of that tumul­tuous cen­tu­ry, that two black per­form­ers could be con­sid­ered the best inter­preters of white show tunes, and that the extem­po­ra­ne­ous heart of jazz could ele­vate the whole to icon­ic sta­tus, deseg­re­gat­ing Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture in just eleven songs.”

After the final song, “Louis left his den and head­ed down the hall­way to his bed­room,” Ric­car­di writes, where, Lucille says, he “was feel­ing frisky and tried to ini­ti­ate ‘the vonce.’ She declined, fear­ing for his health. He went to sleep. About 5:30 in the morn­ing of July 6, Louis Arm­strong passed away in his sleep…. Can you think of a bet­ter way to go out?” It was a peace­ful end to a hard life lived in devo­tion to spread­ing his musi­cal joy. You can hear a playlist com­piled by Ric­car­di of most of the music from Armstrong’s 1969–1971 tapes above. It starts with “Hel­lo Dol­ly!” and ends with the last song on Ella and Louis, and on Armstrong’s final reel-to-reel tape, the last song he ever heard: “April in Paris.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

When Louis Arm­strong Stopped a Civ­il War in The Con­go (1960)

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

Hunter Thompson Explains What Gonzo Journalism Is, and How He Writes It (1975)

in Writing | July 9th, 2021

There’ve been any num­ber of aspir­ing “gonzo jour­nal­ists” over the past half-cen­tu­ry, but there was only one Hunter S. Thomp­son. Hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed with his work in the ear­ly 1970s, this sense of gonzo made it into the Ran­dom House Dic­tio­nary with­in his life­time. “Filled with bizarre or sub­jec­tive ideas, com­men­tary, or the like,” says its first def­i­n­i­tions. And its sec­ond: “Crazy; eccen­tric.” Thomp­son seems to have approved, see­ing as he kept a copy of this very edi­tion, put on dis­play at the Owl Farm Pri­vate Muse­um (run by the Gonzo Foun­da­tion) after his death in 2005. Thir­ty years ear­li­er, he had the ques­tion put to him in the inter­view above: “What is gonzo jour­nal­ism?”

“That word has real­ly plagued me,” Thomp­son says. But he also cred­its it with putting dis­tance between him­self and the recent­ly ascen­dant “New Jour­nal­ists” like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Did­ion: “I was­n’t sure I was doing that, but I was sure I was­n’t doing what we call straight jour­nal­ism.” Indeed, few pieces could have seemed less “straight” than “The Ken­tucky Der­by Is Deca­dent and Depraved,” first pub­lished in Scan­lan’s Month­ly in 1970. Assem­bled in des­per­a­tion out of pages pulled straight from Thomp­son’s note­book and illus­trat­ed by Ralph Stead­man (the begin­ning of a long and fruit­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion), the piece struck some read­ers as a rev­e­la­tion. A friend of Thomp­son’s declared it “pure gonzo” — an uncon­ven­tion­al name for an uncon­ven­tion­al form.

“Christ,” Thomp­son remem­bers think­ing, “if I made a break­through, we’ve got to call it some­thing.” Why not use a label with at least one instance of prece­dent? (It also appealed, he admits, to his inner “word freak.”) As for the sub­stance of gonzo, he attrib­ut­es to it “a mix­ture of humor and a high, stomp­ing style, a bit more active than your nor­mal jour­nal­ism” — as well as what­ev­er gets him past his innate hatred of writ­ing. “All I can real­ly get off on,” he says, is “when I can let my mind run. I start to laugh. I under­stand that Dick­ens used to laugh at his type­writer. I don’t laugh at my type­writer until I hit one of those what I con­sid­er pure gonzo break­throughs. Then it’s worth it.”

Pub­lished three years ear­li­er, Thomp­son’s best-known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas marked the cul­mi­na­tion of a par­tic­u­lar writ­ing project: “to elim­i­nate the steps, or the blocks, between the writer and the page. That’s why I always get the fastest and newest type­writer. If they make one that costs twelve mil­lion dol­lars, I’ll write a bad check and get it for a while.” Reg­u­lat­ing this sig­na­ture gonzo direct­ness is a rig­or­ous styl­is­tic dis­ci­pline. “That’s the one book of mine that I’ve even read,” Thomp­son says, thanks to the “four or five rewrites” he per­formed on the man­u­script. “There’s not a word in there — I mean, there might be fif­teen or twen­ty, but that’s about all — that don’t have to be there.”

Inter­view­ing Thomp­son is vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Har­ri­son Sal­is­bury, the New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief in the 1940s and 50s. He also wrote many books includ­ing The Shook-Up Gen­er­a­tion, a 1958 study of juve­nile delin­quen­cy (and a vol­ume found in Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe’s per­son­al library) that could have primed his inter­est in Thomp­son’s debut Hel­l’s Angels when it came out a decade lat­er. Appear though he may to be the kind of estab­lish­ment fig­ure who’d have lit­tle enthu­si­asm for gonzo jour­nal­ism, Sal­is­bury’s ques­tions sug­gest a thor­ough knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of Thomp­son’s work, right down to the “ten­sion” that dri­ves it. “It could be drug-induced, or adren­a­line-induced, or time-induced,” Thomp­son says of that ten­sion. “I’ve been told by at least one or two con­fi­dent spe­cial­ists that the kind of ten­sion I main­tain can­not be done for any length of time with­out… I’ll either melt or explode, one of the two.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 9 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

How Hunter S. Thomp­son Gave Birth to Gonzo Jour­nal­ism: Short Film Revis­its Thompson’s Sem­i­nal 1970 Piece on the Ken­tucky Der­by

“Gonzo” Defined by Hunter S. Thompson’s Per­son­al Copy of the Ran­dom House Dic­tio­nary

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Hunter S. Thomp­son Talks with Kei­th Richards in a Very Mem­o­rable and Mum­ble-Filled Inter­view (1993)

A Young Hunter S. Thomp­son Appears on the Clas­sic TV Game Show, To Tell the Truth (1967)

Read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as It Was Orig­i­nal­ly Pub­lished in Rolling Stone (1971)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Leon Theremin Advertises the First Commercial Production Run of His Revolutionary Electronic Instrument (1930)

in History, Music | July 9th, 2021

“The theremin specif­i­cal­ly, and Leon Therem­in’s work in gen­er­al is the biggest, fat­test, most impor­tant cor­ner­stone of the whole elec­tron­ic music medi­um. That’s were it all began.” — Robert Moog

In the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the theremin — patent­ed by its name­sake inven­tor Leon Theremin (Lev Sergeye­vich Ter­men) in 1928 — became some­thing of a nov­el­ty, its sound asso­ci­at­ed with sci-fi and hor­ror movies. This is unfor­tu­nate giv­en its pedi­gree as the first elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ment, and the only musi­cal instru­ment one plays with­out touch­ing. Such facts alone were not enough to sell the theremin to its first poten­tial play­ers and lis­ten­ers. The inven­tor and his pro­tege Clara Rock­more real­ized they had proved the theremin was not only suit­able for seri­ous music but for the most beloved and well-known of com­po­si­tions, a strat­e­gy not unlike the Moog synthesizer’s pop­u­lar­iza­tion on Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach.

Pho­to by Sci­ence Muse­um Group
© The Board of Trustees of the Sci­ence Muse­um, shared under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Non­Com­mer­cial-Share­Alike 4.0 License

For Theremin and Rock­more, demon­strat­ing the new instru­ment meant more than mak­ing records. When he arrived in the Unit­ed States in 1928, the inven­tor had just wrapped a long Euro­pean tour. He showed off his new musi­cal device in the U.S. at the New York Phil­har­mon­ic. “At first, Therem­in’s instru­ments were lim­it­ed to just a few that the inven­tor him­self per­son­al­ly made,” notes RCATheremin.

He then “trained a small group of musi­cians in the art of play­ing them.” The sound began to catch on with such pop­u­lar musi­cians as croon­er Rudy Val­lée, “who devel­oped such a fond­ness for the theremin,” writes Theremin play­er Char­lie Drap­er, “that he com­mis­sioned his own cus­tom instru­ment from Leon Theremin, and fea­tured it in per­for­mances of his orches­tra, The Con­necti­cut Yan­kees.”

Pho­to by Sci­ence Muse­um Group
© The Board of Trustees of the Sci­ence Muse­um, shared under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Non­Com­mer­cial-Share­Alike 4.0 License

In the same year that Val­lée and Charles Hen­der­son released their pop­u­lar song “Deep Night,” Theremin grant­ed pro­duc­tion rights to the instru­ment to RCA, and the com­pa­ny pro­duced a lim­it­ed test run of 500 machines. As RCATheremin points out, these were hard­ly acces­si­ble to the aver­age per­son:

Fac­to­ry-made RCA Theremins were first demon­strat­ed in music stores in sev­er­al major U.S. cities on Octo­ber 14, 1929 and were mar­ket­ed pri­mar­i­ly in 1929 and 1930. Theremins were lux­u­ry items, priced at $175.00, not includ­ing vac­u­um tubes and RCA’s rec­om­mend­ed Mod­el 106 Elec­tro­dy­nam­ic Loud­speak­er, which brought the total cost of buy­ing a com­plete theremin out­fit up to about $232.00. This trans­lates to about $3,217 in today’s cur­ren­cy.

The pro­hib­i­tive price of the RCA Theremin would doom the design when the stock mar­ket crashed lat­er that year. Oth­er fac­tors con­tributed to its demise, such as a “sig­nif­i­cant mis­cal­cu­la­tion on the part of RCA,” who encour­aged “the per­cep­tion that the theremin was easy to play.” Adver­tis­ing copy claimed it involved “noth­ing more com­pli­cat­ed than wav­ing one’s hands in the air!”

As mas­ter­ful play­ers, Theremin and Rock­more might have made it look easy, but as with any musi­cal instru­ment, true skill on the there­in requires tal­ent and prac­tice. To adver­tise the new com­mer­cial design by RCA, Theremin him­self appeared in “the rel­a­tive­ly new medi­um of sound film” in 1930, play­ing Hen­der­son and Val­lée’s “Deep Night” (top). Drap­er and pianist Paul Jack­son recre­ate the moment just above, on a ful­ly restored RCA theremin nick­named “Elec­tra.”

Only around 136 of the RCA theremins sur­vive, some of them made by Theremin him­self and oth­ers by dif­fer­ent engi­neers. They are now among the rarest elec­tric devices of any kind. See one of them, ser­i­al num­ber 100023, fur­ther up, a res­i­dent of the Nation­al Sci­ence and Media Muse­um in Brad­ford, UK, and learn much more about the rare RCA Theremins here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

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

Eastern Philosophy Explained: From the Buddha to Confucius and Haiku to the Tea Ceremony

in Philosophy, Religion | July 9th, 2021

There was a time, not so long ago in human his­to­ry, when prac­ti­cal­ly no West­ern­ers looked to the East for wis­dom. But from our per­spec­tive today, this kind of philo­soph­i­cal seek­ing has been going on long enough to feel nat­ur­al. When times get try­ing, you might turn to the Bud­dha, Lao Tzu, or even Con­fu­cius for wis­dom as soon as you would to any oth­er fig­ure, no mat­ter your cul­ture of ori­gin. And here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, intro­duc­tions to their thought lie clos­er than ever to hand: on The School of Life’s “East­ern phi­los­o­phy” Youtube playlist, you’ll find primers on these influ­en­tial sages and oth­ers besides, all play­ful­ly ani­mat­ed and nar­rat­ed by Alain de Bot­ton.

De Bot­ton him­self has writ­ten on many sub­jects, but has found some of his great­est suc­cess in one par­tic­u­lar area: pre­sent­ing the work of writ­ers and thinkers from bygone eras in a man­ner help­ful to mod­ern-day audi­ences. That his best-known books include The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy and How Proust Can Change Your Life sug­gests a per­son­al incli­na­tion toward the West­ern, but through­out sub­se­quent projects his purview has widened.

With the School of Life’s Youtube chan­nel he’s cast an espe­cial­ly wide cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al net, which has pulled in not just the ideas of Pla­to, Kant, and Fou­cault but the prin­ci­ples of rock appre­ci­a­tion, kintsu­gi, and wu wei as well.

Who among us could­n’t stand to cul­ti­vate a lit­tle more appre­ci­a­tion for rocks, or indeed for the oth­er seem­ing­ly mun­dane ele­ments of the world we pass our days ignor­ing? And sure­ly we could all use a bit of the world­view behind kintsu­gi, the art of repair­ing bro­ken pot­tery in such a way as to bril­liant­ly high­light the cracks rather than hide them, or wu wei, a kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty of being com­pa­ra­ble to slight drunk­en­ness.

If these con­cepts appeal to you, you can go slight­ly deep­er with the School of Life’s intro­duc­tions to such his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages as Zen poet Mat­suo Bashō, acknowl­edged as the mas­ter of haiku, and Sen no Rikyū, who devel­oped the Japan­ese “way of tea.” These would once have seemed unlike­ly sub­jects to inter­est peo­ple from the oth­er side of the world; but as the pop­u­lar­i­ty of these videos under­scores, that era has passed. And as the School of Life expands, might it not find an even more robust audi­ence of East­ern­ers get­ting into West­ern phi­los­o­phy?

Watch nine videos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

In Basho’s Foot­steps: Hik­ing the Nar­row Road to the Deep North Three Cen­turies Lat­er

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Kintsu­gi, the Japan­ese Art of Repair­ing Bro­ken Pot­tery and Find­ing Beau­ty in Imper­fec­tion

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.