A First Look at The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks, a Feature-Length Journey Into the Mind of the Famed Neurologist

in Animation, Film, Neuroscience | September 5th, 2018

“Every day a word sur­pris­es me,” famed neu­rol­o­gist Oliv­er Sacks once told Bill Hayes, with whom he spent the final six years of his life. The com­ment came “apro­pos of noth­ing oth­er than that a word had sud­den­ly popped into his head,” writes Hayes in a recent New York Times piece on Sacks’ love of lan­guage. “Often this hap­pened while swim­ming — ‘ideas and para­graphs’ would devel­op as he back­stroked, after which he’d rush to the dock or pool’s edge to get the words down on paper — as Dempsey Rice has cap­tured in an enchant­i­ng forth­com­ing film, The Ani­mat­ed Mind of Oliv­er Sacks.” You can get a glimpse of that film, and its por­tray­al of Sacks’ habit of get­ting ideas while swim­ming, in the trail­er above.

“In 1982 I wrote a sec­tion of A Leg to Stand On” — his mem­oir of his expe­ri­ence recov­er­ing from a moun­taineer­ing acci­dent that left him with­out aware­ness of his left leg — “by a lake.” We watch his ani­mat­ed form mak­ing its way across the water in cap and speedo, a wake of words trail­ing behind them.

After the swim, “drip­ping, I would write.” We then see James Sil­ber­man, then pres­i­dent and edi­tor at Sum­mit Books, read­ing Sacks’ hand­writ­ten, still-sog­gy man­u­script. The sog­gi­ness might be artis­tic license, but the hand­writ­ten-ness was­n’t: Sil­ber­man “wrote me back say­ing, did I think this was the 19th cen­tu­ry? No one has sent him a man­u­script for thir­ty years. And besides, this one looked like it had been dropped in the bath.”

So maybe the ani­ma­tors did­n’t get quite as cre­ative draw­ing those pages as it might seem, but they still must have had to get cre­ative indeed to keep up with Sacks him­self, a decade of whose con­ver­sa­tions with Rice pro­vide the film’s nar­ra­tion. “Oliv­er saw his patients as whole peo­ple, rather than iso­lat­ed dis­or­ders,” she says by way of explain­ing what made Sacks’ books, like Awak­en­ings, The Man Who Mis­took His Wife for a Hat, and many more besides, so res­o­nant with read­ers the world over. “He was­n’t afraid to open­ly inquire of the patient with autism or amne­sia, ‘What is it like to be you?’ ” The Ani­mat­ed Mind of Oliv­er Sacks fin­ished a suc­cess­ful Kick­starter cam­paign in July, but you can still donate and keep up with release details at its offi­cial site. As a view­ing expe­ri­ence, it should con­firm what read­ers have long sus­pect­ed: though they come for a look into the unusu­al minds of Oliv­er Sacks’ patients, they stay to inhab­it the even more unusu­al mind of Oliv­er Sacks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Fas­ci­nat­ing Case Study by Oliv­er Sacks Inspires a Short Ani­mat­ed Film, The Lost Mariner

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Oliv­er Sacks Con­tem­plates Mor­tal­i­ty (and His Ter­mi­nal Can­cer Diag­no­sis) in a Thought­ful, Poignant Let­ter

Oliv­er Sacks’ Final Inter­view: A First Look

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.

“The Long Tomorrow”: Discover Mœbius’ Hard-Boiled Detective Comic That Inspired Blade Runner (1975)

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Sci Fi | September 4th, 2018

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky may nev­er have made his film adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s Dune, but plen­ty came out of the attempt — includ­ing, one might well argue, Blade Run­ner. Mak­ing that still huge­ly influ­en­tial adap­ta­tion of Philip K. Dick­’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Rid­ley Scott and his col­lab­o­ra­tors looked to a few key visu­al sources, one of them a two-part short sto­ry in com­ic form called “The Long Tomor­row.”

Illus­trat­ed by none oth­er than French artist Mœbius, one of the rich­est visu­al imag­i­na­tions of our time, it tells the futur­is­tic hard-boiled sto­ry of a pri­vate detec­tive in a dense, ver­ti­cal under­ground city filled with androids, row­dy bars, assas­sins, and fly­ing cars. “I’m a con­fi­den­tial nose,” says the pro­tag­o­nist by way of intro­duc­tion. “My office is on the 97th lev­el. Club’s the name, Pete Club.”

Then comes the fate­ful piece of nar­ra­tion that begins any detec­tive sto­ry worth its salt: “It start­ed out a day like any oth­er day.” But by the end of that day, Club has tak­en a job from a clas­sic dame in need, fend­ed off both a four-armed thug and a hired assas­sin, slain an alien mon­ster with whom he finds him­self in bed, and recov­ered the pres­i­den­t’s miss­ing brain.

The sto­ry was writ­ten writ­ten by Dan O’Ban­non, then known main­ly for the film Dark Star, a sci­ence-fic­tion com­e­dy he’d made with his Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia class­mate John Car­pen­ter. On the strength of that, Jodor­owsky had brought him onto Dune to work on its spe­cial effects, just as he’d brought Mœbius on to cre­ate its sto­ry­boards and con­cept art. With noth­ing to do before shoot­ing began — which it nev­er did — O’Ban­non first drew “The Long Tomor­row” him­self as a way of keep­ing busy. Mœbius took one look at it and imme­di­ate­ly saw its promise.

The French may have coined the term film noir, but this ear­ly work of future noir ben­e­fit­ed from hav­ing an Amer­i­can writer. “When Euro­peans try this kind of par­o­dy, it is nev­er entire­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry,” Mœbius writes in the intro­duc­tion to the book ver­sion of “The Long Tomor­row.” “The French are too French, the Ital­ians are too Ital­ian … so, under my nose was a pas­tiche that was more orig­i­nal than the orig­i­nals.” It also, with Mœbius’ art, laid the visu­al ground­work for gen­er­a­tions of sci-fi sto­ries to come.

“The way Neu­ro­mancer-the-nov­el ‘looks’ was influ­enced in large part by some of the art­work I saw in  Heavy Met­al,” said William Gib­son, refer­ring to the Eng­lish ver­sion of Métal hurlant, the mag­a­zine that pop­u­lar­ized Mœbius’ work. (O’Ban­non also worked on the ani­mat­ed Heavy Met­al anthol­o­gy film, released in 1981.) But per­haps Rid­ley Scott, who start­ed work­ing with the artist on 1979’s O’Ban­non-script­ed Alien, described the influ­ence of Mœbius’ art on our visions of the future best: “You see it every­where, it runs through so much you can’t get away from it.” In a cul­tur­al sense, all of us live in Pete Club’s city now.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

In Search of Mœbius: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to the Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book Fea­tures The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead & Rid­ley Scott (1982)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

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.

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

in Music, Television | September 4th, 2018

The bet­ter-safe-than-sor­ry approach to musi­cians pre­tend­ing to play on TV while view­ers hear a pre-record­ed track seems like the antithe­sis of rock and roll. Yet since the ear­li­est days of The Ed Sul­li­van Show, audi­ences have accept­ed the con­ven­tion with­out com­plaint. When the fak­ery unin­ten­tion­al­ly fails, reac­tions tend toward mock­ery, not out­rage. Crit­ics rail, the UK’s Musician’s Union has often balked, but bands and fans play along, every­one oper­at­ing under the pre­sump­tion that the banal cha­rade is harm­less.

Leave it to those spoil­sports Nir­vana to refuse this pleas­ant fic­tion on their Top of the Pops appear­ance in 1991.

Like Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts from Amer­i­can Band­stand to Soul Train, Britain’s Top of the Pops had a long tra­di­tion: “For over 40 years,” writes Rolling Stone, “every­one from the Rolling Stones to Madon­na to Bey­on­cé stopped by… to per­form their lat­est sin­gle as either a lip-sync or sing along with a pre­re­cord­ed back­ing track.” All musi­cians were expect­ed to mime play­ing their instru­ments, a com­i­cal sight, for instance, in appear­ances by The Smiths, in which view­ers hear John­ny Marr’s mul­ti­ple over­dubbed gui­tars but see him play­ing unac­com­pa­nied.

The Smiths approached their Top of the Pops appear­ances with tongue-in-cheek irrev­er­ence. At their 1983 debut per­for­mance, Mor­ris­sey mimed “This Charm­ing Man” using a fern as a micro­phone. Still, the band game­ly pre­tend­ed to play, like every­one else did. But when Nir­vana hit the TOTP stage, with Cobain singing to a back­ing track of “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” they wouldn’t observe any of the niceties. YouTube chan­nel That Time Punk Rocked writes:

Cobain opts for slow, exag­ger­at­ed strums dur­ing the few times he touch­es his gui­tar, sings an octave low­er (he lat­er con­firmed he was imi­tat­ing Mor­risey from The Smiths), and attempts to eat his micro­phone at one point. He also changes some of the lyrics, exchang­ing the open­ing line “load up on guns, bring your friends,” for “load up on drugs, kill your friends.” Dave Grohl hits cym­bals and skins at ran­dom, doing more danc­ing than drum­ming. Krist Novosel­ic even swings his bass above his head. And despite these ridicu­lous antics, the crowd goes absolute­ly insane.

Maybe the crowd went wild because of those ridicu­lous antics, or maybe no one even noticed, as when a crowd of thou­sands in Argenti­na hard­ly seemed to notice when Nir­vana open­ly mocked them after the audi­ence abused their open­ing act. This may be one bur­den of star­dom Cobain came to know too well—protests reg­is­ter as per­for­mance and stick­ing it the man onstage just makes the man more mon­ey. But the video remains “one of the great­est mid­dle fin­gers” to musi­cal mim­ing cap­tured on camera—recommended view­ing for every salty young band prepar­ing for their first TV gig.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nir­vana Plays an Angry Set & Refus­es to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it’ After the Crowd Hurls Sex­ist Insults at the Open­ing Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Two Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (Sep­tem­ber 26, 1991)

The First Live Per­for­mance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” (1991)

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

Classic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

in Books, Comedy, Design | September 3rd, 2018

Screen­writer Todd Alcott has been very busy since we intro­duced you to his hilar­i­ous Mid-Cen­tu­ry Pulp Fic­tion Cov­er project last month.

To restate what should be obvi­ous from the sec­ond, if not first glance, none of Alcott’s titles are real. His aes­thet­i­cal­ly con­vinc­ing mock-ups pay trib­ute to favorite songs by favorite artists: David Bowie, Talk­ing Heads, Joy Divi­sion, Elvis Costel­lo…

The start of the school year finds him in a Dylan mood, ren­der­ing some of his best known hits in a vari­ety of pulp genre for­mats:

Bob Dylan is the per­fect sub­ject for this project, because his work has always been all about quo­ta­tion and repur­pos­ing. From the very begin­ning, he took old songs, changed the lyrics and called them his own…. And it’s not just the melodies, he’s also not shy about lift­ing phras­es and whole lines from oth­er sources. One of the fun things about being a Bob Dylan fan is being able to spot the influ­ences. It’s not just lift­ing lines from clas­sic blues songs, where we don’t real­ly know who “wrote” the orig­i­nals, it’s real, iden­ti­fi­able, copy­right-pro­tect­ed mate­r­i­al. And you nev­er know where it’s going to come from, a book about the Yakuza from Japan, a cook­book, an old Time Mag­a­zine arti­cle, or 1940s noir pic­tures.

I was watch­ing a clas­sic Robert Mitchum noir, Out of the Past, and Mitchum is talk­ing to some­one, and they men­tion San Fran­cis­co, and Mitchum says “I always liked San Fran­cis­co, I was there for a par­ty once.” 

And I was like “Wait, what?” Because that’s a line from a real­ly obscure Dylan song, “Maybe Some­day,” off his album Knocked-Out Loaded. 

I was like “Wait, why did that line stick in Dylan’s mind? Why did he decide to quote that? Is it just the way Mitchum says it? What hap­pened there?” And sud­den­ly a song I had­n’t thought about much became a lot more inter­est­ing.

So for my Dylan cov­ers, I try to car­ry on that tra­di­tion of tak­ing quotes and repur­pos­ing them. So “Just Like a Woman” becomes a sto­ry in a sci­ence-fic­tion pulp, and “Like a Rolling Stone” becomes an expose on juve­nile delin­quen­cy, and “Rainy Day Women” becomes a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic adven­ture sto­ry. 

In a way, it’s what this project is all about, tak­ing dis­card­ed pieces of cul­ture and stick­ing them back togeth­er with new ref­er­ences to make them breathe again.

“Just Like a Woman”’s lyrics have nev­er sat par­tic­u­lar­ly well with fem­i­nists. (“There’s no more com­plete cat­a­logue of sex­ist slurs,” author Mar­i­on Meade wrote in The New York Times.)

I think it’s fair to say that Alcott’s bux­om flame-haired cyborg leans in to that crit­i­cism. The cov­er of this faux sci­ence fic­tion mag also harkens back to a time when the depic­tion of sexy female robots left some­thing to the imag­i­na­tion.

From a design stand­point, it’s a great illus­tra­tion of the heavy lift­ing a sin­gle well-cho­sen punc­tu­a­tion change can do.

The magazine’s title is an extra gift to Dylan fans.

The Blonde-on-Blonde Chron­i­cles con­tin­ue with Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Does it mat­ter that the breast-plat­ed, and for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es bot­tom­less war­riors are raven tressed?

Only if tongue’s not firm­ly in cheek.

The night­mare vision of Dylan’s sev­en-minute protest song “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” makes for a smooth tran­si­tion to a dis­as­ter nov­el of the 1970s.

In a 1963 radio inter­view with author Studs Terkel, Dylan assert­ed that the song wasn’t direct­ly relat­ed to the nuclear fears all-per­va­sive at the time:

It’s not the fall­out rain. It isn’t that at all. The hard rain’s gonna fall is in the last verse…That means all the lies, you know, that peo­ple get told on their radios and in news­pa­pers. All you have to think for a minute, you know. Try­ing to take people’s brains away, you know. Which maybe has been done already. I hate to think it’s been done. All the lies, which I con­sid­er poi­son.

This writer can think of anoth­er rea­son cit­i­zens might find them­selves fight­ing for their lives in a row­boat lev­el with the very tip­py top of the Empire State Build­ing. So, I sus­pect, can Alcott.

Or maybe we’re wrong and cli­mate change is noth­ing but fake news.

Alcott gets some mileage out of anoth­er rain-based lyric on Maggie’s Farm, a steamy rur­al romp whose creased cov­er is also part and par­cel of the genre.

Who’s that young punk on the cov­er of Like a Rolling Stone? Beats me, but the girl’s a dead ringer for Warhol super­star, Edie Sedg­wick, the pur­port­ed inspi­ra­tion for the song that shares the novel’s name. Ms. Sedgwick’s real life fig­ure was much less volup­tuous, but if the genre cov­ers that sparked this project demon­strate any­thing, it’s that sex sells.

Visions of Johan­na is pos­i­tive­ly under­stat­ed in com­par­i­son. While many pulp authors toiled in obscu­ri­ty, let us pre­tend that Nobel Prize win­ner and (faux) pulp-nov­el­ist Dylan wouldn’t have. Espe­cial­ly if he had a series like the pseu­do­ny­mous Brett Halliday’s pop­u­lar Mike Shayne mys­ter­ies. At that lev­el, the cov­er wouldn’t real­ly need quotes.

Though what harm would there be? There’s plen­ty of neg­a­tive space here. Read­ers, which line would you splash across the cov­er if you were this prankster, Alcott?

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so qui­et?

We sit here strand­ed, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

And Louise holds a hand­ful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it

Lights flick­er from the oppo­site loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The coun­try music sta­tion plays soft

But there’s noth­ing, real­ly noth­ing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined

And these visions of Johan­na that con­quer my mind

In the emp­ty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain

And the all-night girls they whis­per of escapades out on the “D” train

We can hear the night watch­man click his flash­light

Ask him­self if it’s him or them that’s real­ly insane

Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near

She’s del­i­cate and seems like the mir­ror

But she just makes it all too con­cise and too clear

That Johanna’s not here

The ghost of ’lec­tric­i­ty howls in the bones of her face

Where these visions of Johan­na have now tak­en my place

Now, lit­tle boy lost, he takes him­self so seri­ous­ly

He brags of his mis­ery, he likes to live dan­ger­ous­ly

And when bring­ing her name up

He speaks of a farewell kiss to me

He’s sure got a lot­ta gall to be so use­less and all

Mut­ter­ing small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall

How can I explain?

Oh, it’s so hard to get on

And these visions of Johan­na, they kept me up past the dawn

Inside the muse­ums, Infin­i­ty goes up on tri­al

Voic­es echo this is what sal­va­tion must be like after a while

But Mona Lisa mus­ta had the high­way blues

You can tell by the way she smiles

See the prim­i­tive wall­flower freeze

When the jel­ly-faced women all sneeze

Hear the one with the mus­tache say, “Jeeze

I can’t find my knees”

Oh, jew­els and binoc­u­lars hang from the head of the mule

But these visions of Johan­na, they make it all seem so cru­el

The ped­dler now speaks to the count­ess who’s pre­tend­ing to care for him

Sayin’, “Name me some­one that’s not a par­a­site and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

But like Louise always says

“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”

As she, her­self, pre­pares for him

And Madon­na, she still has not showed

We see this emp­ty cage now cor­rode

Where her cape of the stage once had flowed

The fid­dler, he now steps to the road

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed

On the back of the fish truck that loads

While my con­science explodes

The har­mon­i­cas play the skele­ton keys and the rain

And these visions of Johan­na are now all that remain

You can see more of Todd Alcott’s Mid-Cen­tu­ry Pulp Fic­tion Cov­er project, and pick up archival qual­i­ty prints from his Etsy shop.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Bob Dylan Pota­to Chips, Any­one?: What They’re Snack­ing on in Chi­na

Bob Dylan Hates Me: An Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day - no rela­tion to Brett — is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

MIT Students Solve the Spaghetti Breaking Mystery That Stumped Richard Feynman

in Food & Drink, Physics | September 3rd, 2018

Even thir­ty years after his death, Richard Feyn­man remains one of the most beloved minds in physics in part because of how much atten­tion he paid to things oth­er than physics: draw­ing and paint­ing, crack­ing safes, play­ing the bon­gos, break­ing spaghet­ti. But a physics enthu­si­ast might object, and rea­son­ably so, that all those activ­i­ties actu­al­ly have a great deal to do with physics, giv­en the phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na they all demon­strate and on which they all depend. In recent years, con­sid­er­able sci­en­tif­ic atten­tion has even gone toward spaghet­ti-break­ing, inspir­ing as it did Feyn­man — and com­put­er sci­en­tist Dan­ny Hillis, who hap­pened to be in the kitchen with him — to pose a long-unan­swer­able ques­tion: How come it always breaks into a mil­lion pieces when you snap it?

Maybe spaghet­ti does­n’t always break into a mil­lion pieces, exact­ly, but it nev­er breaks in two. Dis­cov­er­ing the secret to a clean two-part break did require a mil­lion of some­thing: a mil­lion frames per sec­ond, specif­i­cal­ly, shot by a cam­era aimed at a pur­pose-built spaghet­ti-break­ing device. The results of the research, a project of stu­dents Ronald Heiss­er and Vishal Patil dur­ing their time at MIT, came out in a paper co-authored by MIT’s Nor­bert Stoop and Uni­ver­sité Aix Mar­seille’s Emmanuel Viller­maux, just pub­lished in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. The team found, writes MIT News’ Jen­nifer Chu, “that if a stick [of spaghet­ti] is twist­ed past a cer­tain crit­i­cal degree, then slow­ly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.”

As for why spaghet­ti breaks into so many pieces with­out the twist, a ques­tion tak­en on by the Smarter Every Day video just above, French sci­en­tists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch won the Ig Nobel Prize by fig­ur­ing that out in 2005: “When a stick is bent even­ly from both ends, it will break near the cen­ter, where it is most curved. This ini­tial break trig­gers a ‘snap-back’ effect and a bend­ing wave, or vibra­tion, that fur­ther frac­tures the stick.” If you twist the stick first, “the snap-back, in which the stick will spring back in the oppo­site direc­tion from which it was bent, is weak­ened in the pres­ence of twist. And, the twist-back, where the stick will essen­tial­ly unwind to its orig­i­nal straight­ened con­fig­u­ra­tion, releas­es ener­gy from the rod, pre­vent­ing addi­tion­al frac­tures.”

So now we know. But the fruits of what might strike some as an obses­sive and point­less quest could well fur­ther the sci­ence of frac­tur­ing, which Patil describes to the Wash­ing­ton Post as an out­ward­ly “chaot­ic and ran­dom” process. This research could lead, as Chu writes, to a bet­ter “under­stand­ing of crack for­ma­tion and how to con­trol frac­tures in oth­er rod-like mate­ri­als such as mul­ti­fiber struc­tures, engi­neered nan­otubes, or even micro­tubules in cells.” That’s all a long way from the kitchen, cer­tain­ly, but even the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary advance­ments of knowl­edge grow out of sim­ple curios­i­ty, an impulse felt even in the most mun­dane or friv­o­lous sit­u­a­tions. Richard Feyn­man under­stood that bet­ter than most, hence sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of sci­en­tists’ desire to pick up what­ev­er piqued his inter­est — even bro­ken bits of Bar­il­la No. 5.

via MIT News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

The Draw­ings & Paint­ings of Richard Feyn­man: Art Express­es a Dra­mat­ic “Feel­ing of Awe”

Learn How Richard Feyn­man Cracked the Safes with Atom­ic Secrets at Los Alam­os

Richard Feyn­man on the Bon­gos

What Ignit­ed Richard Feynman’s Love of Sci­ence Revealed in an Ani­mat­ed Video

A Free Course from MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once

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.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Earliest Notebooks Now Digitized and Made Free Online: Explore His Ingenious Drawings, Diagrams, Mirror Writing & More

in Art, History, Science | August 31st, 2018

Do a search on the word “poly­math” and you will see an image or ref­er­ence to Leonar­do da Vin­ci in near­ly every result. Many his­tor­i­cal figures—not all of them world famous, not all Euro­peans, men, or from the Ital­ian Renaissance—fit the descrip­tion. But few such record­ed indi­vid­u­als were as fever­ish­ly active, rest­less­ly inven­tive, and aston­ish­ing­ly pro­lif­ic as Leonar­do, who left rid­dles enough for schol­ars to solve for many life­times.

Leonar­do him­self, though world-renowned for his tal­ents in the fine arts, spent more of his time con­ceiv­ing sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies and engi­neer­ing projects. “When he wrote in the ear­ly 1480s to Ludovi­co Sforza, then ruler of Milan, to offer him his ser­vices,” remarks Cather­ine Yvard, Spe­cial Col­lec­tions cura­tor at the Vic­to­ria and Albert Nation­al Art Library, “he adver­tised him­self as a mil­i­tary engi­neer, only briefly men­tion­ing his artis­tic skills at the end of the list.”

But since so few of his projects were, or could be, real­ized in his life­time, we can only expe­ri­ence them through his most­ly inac­ces­si­ble, and gen­er­al­ly inde­ci­pher­able, note­books, which he began keep­ing after the Duke accept­ed his appli­ca­tion. “None of Leonardo’s pre­de­ces­sors, con­tem­po­raries or suc­ces­sors used paper quite like he did,” notes the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um site, “a sin­gle sheet con­tains an unpre­dictable pat­tern of ideas and inventions—the work­ings of both a design­er and a sci­en­tist.”

Part of the dif­fi­cul­ty of piec­ing his lega­cy togeth­er stems from the fact that his hun­dreds of pages of notes have been dis­trib­uted across sev­er­al insti­tu­tions and pri­vate col­lec­tions, not all of them acces­si­ble to researchers. But ambi­tious dig­i­ti­za­tion projects are eras­ing those bar­ri­ers. We recent­ly fea­tured one, a joint effort of the British Library and Microsoft that brought 570 pages from the Codex Arun­del col­lec­tion to the web. As The Art News­pa­per reports, the Vic­to­ria and Albert has now launched a sim­i­lar endeav­or, dig­i­tiz­ing the Codex Forster note­books, so named because they came from the pri­vate col­lec­tion of John Forster in 1876.

This col­lec­tion includes some of Leonardo’s ear­li­est note­books. Codex Forster I, now online, con­tains the ear­li­est note­book the V&A holds, dat­ing from about 1487, and the lat­est, from 1505. “Writ­ten in Leonardo’s famous ‘mir­ror-writ­ing,’” the V&A notes, “the sub­jects explored with­in range from hydraulic engi­neer­ing to a trea­tise on mea­sur­ing solids.” Forster II and III should come online soon. “We are plan­ning to make these two oth­er vol­umes also ful­ly acces­si­ble online in 2019 to cel­e­brate the 500th anniver­sary of Leonardo’s death,” says Yvard.

The most inno­v­a­tive aspect of this par­tic­u­lar project is the use of IIIF (Inter­na­tion­al Image Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Frame­work), a tech­nol­o­gy that “has enabled us to present the codex in a new way,” remarks Kati Price, V&A’s head of dig­i­tal media. “We’ve used deep-zoom func­tion­al­i­ty… to present some of the most spec­tac­u­lar and detailed items in our col­lec­tion.” Schol­ars and laypeo­ple alike can take a very close-up look at the many schemat­ics and tech­ni­cal dia­grams in the note­books and see Leonardo’s mind and hand at work.

But while all of us can mar­vel at the sight of his engi­neer­ing genius, when it comes to read­ing his hand­writ­ing, we’ll have to rely on experts. Let’s hope the muse­um will some­day sup­ply trans­la­tions for non­spe­cial­ists. In the mean­time, explore the dig­i­tized man­u­scripts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

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

Don’t Call 911 If You See a Coyote, Unless It’s Carrying ACME-Branded Products: The Office of Sheriff, Monroe County, New York

in Random | August 31st, 2018

Some­one in the Office of Sher­iff, in Mon­roe Coun­ty, New York, has a good sense of humor. And if you’re from the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies gen­er­a­tion, you will get a good laugh.

In oth­er news, Warn­er Bros. just announced that it’s devel­op­ing an ani­mat­ed Wile E. Coy­ote movie, some 70 years after he first appeared on the screen. Appro­pri­ate­ly the film is called, Coy­ote vs. Acme. Some­how that pum­meled coy­ote man­ages to endure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kill the Wab­bit!: How the 1957 Bugs Bun­ny Car­toon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Inspired Today’s Opera Singers to First Get Into Opera

The Strange Day When Bugs Bun­ny Saved the Life of Mel Blanc

The Evo­lu­tion of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bun­ny, Daffy Duck & Oth­er Looney Tunes Leg­ends: A Video Essay

The Last Great Moment of Elvis Presley’s Musical Career: Watch His Extraordinary Performance of “Unchained Melody” (1977)

in Music | August 30th, 2018

As the “King” of Amer­i­can pop cul­ture in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, Elvis embod­ied so many of his country’s con­tra­dic­tions. Revival­ist of the “love and theft” of black Amer­i­can music and per­for­mance; hum­ble, small town mama’s boy and duti­ful sol­dier who built a cult of mod­ern celebri­ty and a gar­ish tem­ple to con­spic­u­ous excess; self-appoint­ed cru­sad­er who railed against “the drug cul­ture” while his “legal” addic­tion to opi­ates and amphet­a­mines laid waste to his career and health.

Maybe in these con­flicts between humil­i­ty and fame-seek­ing, all-Amer­i­can whole­some­ness and trans­gres­sive seduc­tion, play­act­ing law­less­ness and mor­al­iz­ing law and order, his legions of fans saw their own split selves. His hip-shak­ing con­fi­dence seemed par­tic­u­lar­ly suit­ed to both inflam­ing and sooth­ing anx­i­eties and safe­ly chan­nel­ing pent-up pas­sions. Cer­tain incon­sis­ten­cies in his per­sona did not seem to trou­ble him over­much.

But he was not a well man in the last sev­er­al years of his short life and his tenure in the glit­ter­ing faux-palaces of Las Vegas dra­mat­i­cal­ly has­tened the decline. While the real­i­ty of Elvis in Vegas was tacky and sad, the mythos of Elvis in Vegas made it “cool for fad­ing super­star per­form­ers to find a sec­ond (or even third) act of their career in Vegas,” writes Mike Sager at Bill­board. “Elvis paved the way for the likes of Brit­ney Spears,” whose big Amer­i­can rise and fall resem­bles his in many ways.

Elvis’ own attempt at a third (or fourth) act is pre­dictably trag­ic. Exploita­tive man­ag­er Colonel Tom Park­er pushed him out on tour in 1977, notes Andy Greene at Rolling Stone, “despite his hor­rid shape.” Park­er “arranged a cam­era crew to film the June 19th show in Oma­ha” in order to “get more prod­uct in to the stores”—perhaps sens­ing that Pres­ley did not have much fur­ther to go. The cam­eras kept rolling in stops through­out the Mid­west.

He was an absolute mess. He was only 42, but years of pre­scrip­tion drug abuse and hor­ri­fy­ing dietary habits had left him bloat­ed, depressed and near death. He had an enlarged heart, an enlarged intes­tine, hyper­ten­sion and incred­i­bly painful bow­el prob­lems. He was bare­ly sleep­ing and should have prob­a­bly been in the hos­pi­tal, but he was still a huge draw on the con­cert cir­cuit and the mon­ey was too good to turn down.

It is ugly to dwell on this peri­od, except that some­how those final con­certs pro­duced the extra­or­di­nar­i­ly poignant footage of “Unchained Melody” at the top in Rapid City, South Dako­ta. “With­out a doubt,” writes Greene, “it’s the last great moment of his career.” He digs deep, his voice is clear and strong. The jar­ring con­trast between how good he sounds and how ter­ri­ble he looks under­lines and bolds the lines—“time can do so much…”

At the last tour stop in Indi­anapo­lis, he bare­ly pulled off a ren­di­tion of “Are You Lone­some Tonight,” above. The song starts off real­ly strong but soon devolves into Elvis mut­ter­ing gib­ber­ish, sweat­ing, and gig­gling to him­self. This is hard to watch and it’s no won­der the tour footage, aired once on CBS, “has yet to resur­face in any offi­cial capac­i­ty. This isn’t the Elvis that his estate wants the fans to remem­ber.” Sure­ly those fans them­selves pre­fer the kitschy fan­ta­sy. Less than two months lat­er, he was gone.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch John­ny Cash’s Poignant Final Inter­view & His Last Per­for­mance: “Death, Where Is Thy Sting?” (2003)

Watch George Harrison’s Final Inter­view and Per­for­mance (1997)

Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Per­for­mance (1975): “Imag­ine,” “Stand By Me” & More

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

John Turturro Introduces America to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Internet

in Film, History, Web/Tech | August 30th, 2018

There are only two kinds of sto­ry, holds a quote often attrib­uted to Leo Tol­stoy: a man goes on a jour­ney, or a stranger comes to town. When it set about pro­duc­ing A Begin­ner’s Guide to the Inter­net, a “com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice video” geared to view­ers unfa­mil­iar with the World Wide Web, inter­net por­tal com­pa­ny Lycos went with the lat­ter. That stranger, a his­to­ry teacher and aspir­ing come­di­an named Sam Levin, comes to a town named Tick Neck, Penn­syl­va­nia, his car hav­ing bro­ken down ear­ly in a cross-coun­try dri­ve to a gig in Las Vegas. In order to update his manager/sister on the sit­u­a­tion, he stops into the rur­al ham­let’s only din­er and orders “cof­fee, half reg­u­lar and half decaf — and the tele­phone book.”

Sam does­n’t make a call; instead he unplugs the din­er’s phone, con­nects the line to his com­put­er, looks up his inter­net ser­vice provider’s local num­ber, and (after the req­ui­site modem sounds) gets on the infor­ma­tion super­high­way. Today we know few activ­i­ties as mun­dane as going online at a cof­fee shop, but the towns­peo­ple, inno­cent even of e‑mail, are trans­fixed. Sam shows a cou­ple of kids how to search for infor­ma­tion on haunt­ed hous­es and col­lege schol­ar­ships, and soon the stu­dents become the teach­ers, demon­strat­ing online games to friends, chat rooms to a cranky old-timer (“I don’t like this word net­work at all. Net­work of what? Spies, prob­a­bly”) and even state gov­ern­ment feed­back forms to the may­or of Tick Neck (who describes her­self as “not much with a key­board”).

Though at times it feels like the 1950s, the year was 1999, per­haps the last moment before Amer­i­ca’s com­plete inter­net sat­u­ra­tion — before social media, before stream­ing video, before blogs, before almost every­thing pop­u­lar online today. “The video for Inter­net ‘new­bies’ star­ring John Tur­tur­ro was made avail­able for free rental on the com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice shelf of over 4,000 Block­buster Video stores, West Coast Video stores, pub­lic school libraries and class­rooms across the Unit­ed States,” says a con­tem­po­rary arti­cle at Newenglandfilm.com. “The pro­duc­tion was fund­ed by Lycos who has insti­tut­ed a cam­paign to bet­ter edu­cate the pub­lic about the World Wide Web.”

Those of us on the Web in the 1990s will remem­ber Lycos, which ran one of the pop­u­lar search engines before the age of Google. Launched in 1994 as a research project at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty in Pitts­burgh (which might explain A Begin­ner’s Guide to the Inter­net’s set­ting), Lycos was in 1999 the most vis­it­ed online des­ti­na­tion in the world, and the next year Span­ish telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny Tele­fóni­ca acquired it for a cool $12.5 bil­lion. Tur­tur­ro, not to be out­done, had in 1998 ascend­ed to a high lev­el of the coun­ter­cul­tur­al zeit­geist with his role in the Coen broth­ers’ The Big Lebows­ki, the pur­ple-clad bowler Jesus Quin­tana — very much not a stranger any­one would want going online with their kids, but Tur­tur­ro has always had a for­mi­da­ble range.

His­to­ry has­n’t record­ed how many new­bies A Begin­ner’s Guide to the Inter­net helped to start surf­ing the Web, but the video remains a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­fact of atti­tudes to the inter­net dur­ing its first peri­od of enor­mous growth. “My fam­i­ly does­n’t own a com­put­er,” the young boy tells Sam, “and my dad does­n’t like ’em. He says facts are facts.” (That last sen­tence, innocu­ous at the time, does take on a new res­o­nance today.) The boy’s teenage sis­ter excit­ed­ly describes the inter­net as “like going to the library, depart­ment store, and post office, all at the same time.” Enter­ing his cred­it card num­ber to buy an auto-repair man­u­al for the skep­ti­cal mechan­ic, Sam says (with a strange defen­sive­ness) that “it’s com­plete­ly pri­vate. I’ve done it before and it’s not a prob­lem.” As with any stranger of leg­end who comes to town, Sam leaves Tick Neck a changed place — though not near­ly as much as the Tick Necks of the world have since been changed by the inter­net itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

In 1999, David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good and Bad of the Inter­net

What’s the Inter­net? That’s So 1994…

John Tur­tur­ro Reads Ita­lo Calvino’s Fairy Tale, “The False Grand­moth­er,” in a Short Ani­mat­ed Film

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.

David Lynch Muses About the Magic of Cinema & Meditation in a New Abstract Short Film

in Film | August 30th, 2018

One of the won­der­ful things about David Lynch is that, despite inter­views, sev­er­al doc­u­men­taries on his cre­ative process, plen­ty of behind-the-scenes footage of him direct­ing, and the release of a whole memoir/biography told both sub­jec­tive­ly *and* objectively…despite all that, the man is still an enig­ma. Even when he returned 25 years lat­er to famil­iar ground with the third sea­son of Twin Peaks, there was no sign of self-par­o­dy, and he deliv­ered some of the most bril­liant work of his career. How the hell does he do it?

That being said, if you have read his book Catch­ing the Big Fish or have heard him in inter­views, this short film direct­ed by his son Austin Lynch and Case Sim­mons, and pre­sent­ed by Stel­la McCart­ney, might not be any­thing new. If you are just now dis­cov­er­ing Lynch, then this is a quick primer on his cre­ative process and his devo­tion to Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion as a way to dive into that cre­ativ­i­ty and, even­tu­al­ly, bring peace to the world.

Austin Lynch is one of three Lynch chil­dren to work in enter­tain­ment. The eldest Jen­nifer Lynch direct­ed Box­ing Hele­na and wrote the Twin Peaks spin-off book The Secret Diary of Lau­ra Palmer. Riley Lynch is a musi­cian and appeared in two episodes of the recent Twin Peaks.

Giv­en the pedi­gree, Lynch and Sim­mons man­age to hon­or David Lynch with­out copy­ing his style. The short abstract pro­file also fea­tures very short cameos by Stel­la McCart­ney, Børns, Lola Kirk, and sev­er­al oth­ers.

The direc­tor appears here and there dur­ing the nine min­utes, back­lit by sub­tle col­ored lights in a pri­vate screen­ing room, watch­ing a movie. What movie? It doesn’t mat­ter.

“It’s so mag­i­cal, I don’t know why, to go into a the­ater and have the lights go down,” Lynch says. “It’s very qui­et and then the cur­tains start to open. And then you go into a world.”

The direc­tors link this to a famil­iar Lynch tale of the begin­ning of his film career, when Lynch was paint­ing at the begin­ning of his art school years and the can­vas start­ed to move and make sounds. No mat­ter how many times Lynch tells this sto­ry, there’s some­thing so odd about it. Is he talk­ing in metaphor? Did he hal­lu­ci­nate? Did he get vis­it­ed by a force beyond this real­i­ty? Are his great­est Lynchi­an moments his way of try­ing to make sense of that one episode?

He also talks about the cir­cle that goes from the film to the audi­ence and back, a feed­back loop that musi­cians also talk about, and is the rea­son Lynch still loves the cin­e­ma as an event space. Per­for­mance spaces fig­ure promi­nent­ly in his works, whether it’s the Club Silen­cio in Mul­hol­land Dr., the Lady in the Radi­a­tor in Eraser­head, or the var­i­ous lodges and per­for­mance areas in Twin Peaks. (It’s also why he despis­es watch­ing films on iPhones, apart from the size.)

Lynch explains here how he became a film­mak­er through study­ing med­i­ta­tion, how it saved him from anger and despair, and how these tech­niques led to land­ing big­ger cre­ative fish from “the ocean of solu­tions” and expand­ing artis­tic intu­ition.

Is Lynch enlight­ened? No, but he’s clos­er than most of us:

“Every day for me gets bet­ter and bet­ter,” he con­cludes. “And I believe that enliven­ing uni­ty in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say peace to all of you.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

Hear David Lynch Read from His New Mem­oir Room to Dream, and Browse His New Online T‑Shirt Store

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.