Watch Anthony Bourdain’s Free Show, Raw Craft Where He Visits Craftsmen Making Guitars, Tattoos, Motorcycles & More (RIP)
Why has food become such an object of interest in recent years? One possible explanation is that it represents one of the last pursuits still essentially untouchable by digital culture: for all you can write about and photograph food for the internet, you can’t actually experience it there. Food, in other words, means physicality, dexterity, sensibility, and hand-craftsmanship in a concrete, visceral way that, in the 21st, century, has come to seem increasingly scarce. But another, shorter explanation sums the phenomenon up, just as plausibly, in two words: Anthony Bourdain.
Ever since he first entered the public eye at the end of the 1990s, late chef-writer-traveler-television host taught a reading, and later viewing public to appreciate not just food but all that goes into food: the ingredients, sure, the intense training and labor, of course, but most of all the many and varied cultural factors that converge on a meal. Bourdain found robust cultures everywhere, those that developed cart-filled streets of cities across the world to the kitchens of the most unassuming-looking restaurants and everywhere in between. He deeply respected not just those dedicated to the making and serving of food, but those dedicated to crafts of all kinds.
Bourdain’s natural kinship with all craftsmen and craftswomen made him a natural choice to carry Raw Craft, a web series sponsored by the Balvenie, a popular-premium brand of Scotch whisky. In its fourteen episodes (each of which finds a way to feature a bottle of the Balvenie), Bourdain goes characteristically far and wide to visit the studios and workshops of real people making real suits, shoes, saxophones, drums, guitars, handprinted books, furniture, motorcycles, and “traditionally feminine objects.” That last may break somewhat from Bourdain’s swaggering, masculine-if-not-macho image, but as the series’ host he displays a good deal of enthusiasm for the subject of each episode, including the trip to the sponsor’s own distillery in Dufftown, Scotland.
Naturally, Bourdain can engage on a whole other level in the episodes about food and food-related objects, such as pastries and hot chocolate, kitchen knives, and, in the video at the top of the post, cast-iron skillets. Ever the participatory observer, he finishes that last by preparing steak au poivre with one of the workshop’s own skillets on the flame of its own skillet-forging furnace. He takes it a step further, or several, in the episode with Japanese tattoo artist Takashi where, despite “running out of room” on his own much-tattooed skin, he commissions one more: a magnificent blue chrysanthemum on his shoulder, drawn and inked with only the most time-honored tools and techniques.
We even, during one of Bourdain’s ink-receiving sessions with Takashi, glimpse a true craftsman-to-craftsman conversational exchange. Bourdain asks Takashi about something he’s seen all of the many times he’s been on the tattooing table: a junior artist will approach to watch and learn from the way a senior one works. Takashi, who had to go through a minor ordeal just to convince his own master to take him on as an apprentice, confirms both the universality and the importance of the practice: “If you stop learning, you are pretty much done, you know?” Bourdain, who could only have agreed with the sentiment, lived it to the very end. “I’d like it to last as long as I do,” he says of his Takashi tattoo — “Which ain’t that long,” he adds, “but long enough, I hope.” But surely no amount of time could ever satisfy a culinary, cultural, and intellectual appetite as prodigious as his.
You can watch the complete series of Raw Craft videos here.
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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.
Read More...The Plate Tectonic Evolution of the Earth Over 500 Million Years: Animated Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Million Years in the Future
Christopher R. Scotese, a geologist affiliated with Northwestern University, has created an animation showing “the plate tectonic evolution of the Earth from the time of Pangea, 240 million years ago, to the formation of Pangea Proxima, 250 million years in the future.” The blurb accompanying the video on Youtube adds:
The animation starts with the modern world then winds it way back to 240 million years ago (Triassic). The animation then reverses direction, allowing us to see how Pangea rifted apart to form the modern continents and ocean basins. When the animation arrives back at the present-day, it continues for another 250 million years until the formation of the next Pangea, “Pangea Proxima”.
According to an article published by NASA back in 2000, Scotese’s visualization of the future is something of an educated “guesstimate.” “We don’t really know the future, obviously,” he says. “All we can do is make predictions of how plate motions will continue, what new things might happen, and where it will all end up.” You can see his predictions play out above.
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!
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Read More...Nirvana Refuses to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ After the Crowd Hurls Sexist Insults at the Opening Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)
“Anger is an energy,” shouts John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, on Public Image Limited’s “Rise,” the 1986 single written in reaction to Apartheid South African and Northern Irish interrogation techniques. In typical fashion, Lydon succinctly sums up the motive force of punk, in a song, as he told MTV’s Kevin Seal, about “all kinds of torture,” which “doesn’t really achieve anything. Violence doesn’t really achieve anything.”
Some angry energy creates, and some does nothing but destroy. A few years later, Nirvana brought the angry energy of punk back into mainstream consciousness, with a frontman who spoke out frequently against sexism and sexist violence. In 1992, the band—already a global phenomenon after the release of Nevermind and the explosive success of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—performed a particularly pissed-off-yet-creative live set. They did so in reaction to a wave of abuse hurled at their opening act by a crowd of 50,000 in Buenos Aires.
“We brought this all-girl band over from Portland called Calamity Jane,” Kurt Cobain later remembered. “During their entire set, the whole audience… was throwing money and everything out of their pockets, mud and rocks, just pelting them. Eventually the girls stormed off crying. It was terrible, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once.”
Enraged, Cobain threatened to cancel, but was talked out of it by bassist Krist Novaselic. Instead, the band took the stage and “openly mocked the audience,” writes Alex Young at Consequence of Sound, “by playing mostly rarities and the backend of Nevermind.” Cobain at least managed to turn the ugly moment into a positive experience for his band.
We ended up having fun, laughing at them (the audience). Before every song, I’d play the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and then stop. They didn’t realize that we were protesting against what they’d done. We played for about forty minutes, and most of the songs were off Incesticide, so they didn’t recognize anything. We wound up playing the secret noise song (‘Endless, Nameless’) that’s at the end of Nevermind, and because we were so in a rage and were just so pissed off about this whole situation, that song and whole set were one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.
The whole show was captured on film by a professional crew, and you can watch it above to see what the experience was like for the audience. The opening track, “Nobody Knows I’m New Wave,” is “one of only a handful of Nirvana songs,” notes Young, “never to be released. Nirvana archivists theorize the impromptu jam was made up on the spot.”
You’ll also see from the tracklist below that Cobain “was misremembering or embellishing a bit here and there,” writes Dangerous Minds. “While they did unearth a handful of rarities from their odds-n-ends collection Insesticide… as well as ‘All Apologies’ (it later turned up on In Utero)… they also played most of Nevermind.” Nonetheless, we can see the show, with its abrasive opening jam (“I promise to shit on your head”) as an attempt to both alienate obnoxious fans and turn rage into a creative force.
Setlist:
Nobody Knows I’m New Wave
Aneurysm
Breed
Drain You
Beeswax
Spank Thru
School
Come as You Are
Lithium
Lounge Act
Sliver
About a Girl
Polly
Jam
In Bloom
Territorial Pissings
Been a Son
On a Plain
Negative Creep
BlewEncore:
All Apologies
Endless, Nameless
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Steve Martin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Einstein & Picasso in a Smart Comedy Routine
Back in 2002, Stanford University mathematics professor Robert Osserman chatted with comedian and banjo player extraordinaire Steve Martin in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. The event was called “Funny Numbers” and it was intended to deliver an off-kilter discussion on math. Boy did it deliver.
The first half of the discussion was loose and relaxed. Martin talked about his writing, banjos and his childhood interest in math. “In high school, I used to be able to make magic squares,” said Martin. “I like anything kind of ‘jumbly.’ I like anagrams. What else do I like? I like sex.”
Then Robin Williams, that manic ball of energy, showed up. As you can see from the five videos throughout this post, the night quickly spiraled into comic madness.
They riffed on the Osbournes, Henry Kissinger, number theory, and physics. “Schrödinger, pick up your cat,” barks Williams at the end of a particularly inspired tear. “He’s alive. He’s dead. What a pet!”
When Martin and Williams read passages from Martin’s hit play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile Williams read his part at different points as if he were Marlon Brando, Peter Lorre and Elmer Fudd. At another time, Williams and Martin riffed on the number zero. Williams, for once acting as the straight man, asked Osserman, “I have one quick question, up to the Crusades, the number zero didn’t exist, right? In Western civilization.” To which Martin bellowed, “That is a lie! How dare you imply that the number zero…oh, I think he’s right.”
The videos are weirdly glitchy, though the audio is just fine. And the comedy is completely hilarious and surprisingly thought provoking.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in September, 2015.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Read More...A Deep Study of Terence Malick’s Filmography
Yesterday we featured the Directors Series, the ever-expanding collection of video essays that seeks out the essence of the auteurs of our time by closely examining their entire filmographies. So far, the series’ creator Cameron Beyl has taken on the work of Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Christopher Nolan — all titans of cinema, and with the exception of the last, all American. Given that apparent cultural inclination, Beyl’s choice of a subject for the just-begun current chapter of the Directors Series follows naturally: that uncompromising American transcendentalist of the silver screen, Terrence Malick.
It also makes good sense to focus on Malick now, given that he’s spent the past few years in a period of surprising late-career productivity. After establishing the filmmaker’s identity and main themes as well as giving a sketch of his colorful (and often only sparsely documented) life, Beyl uses his first episode on Malick to get into his “crimes of passion” movies, his 1973 debut Badlands and its 1978 follow-up Days of Heaven.
The latter seems to have solidified in the cinematic consciousness many of the basic elements of Malick’s style, including hushed yet often grandly philosophical narration; a worshipful, even religious view of the natural world; and a relentless expansion of his own visual language. But though the film won Malick a Best Director award at Cannes, he didn’t make another movie for twenty years.
After returning to filmmaking in 1998 with the James Jones-adapting World War II picture The Thin Red Line, Malick appeared to pick up right where he left off: The New World, his interpretation of John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas, came in 2005, followed by 2011’s Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life. That film, deeply personal in its depiction of an American childhood in the 1940s and even more deeply personal in its zoom out to the cosmic scale, reveals as much about Malick’s obsessions as anything he’s done. Yet the startlingly many pictures he has directed since — the improvised romantic drama To the Wonder, the Los Angeles odyssey Knight of Cups, the history-of-the-universe documentary Voyage of Time, the experimental musical Song to Song, and his upcoming return to WWII Radegund — tell us, as Beyl will show, that his cinematic explorations have many more awe-inspiring places still to take us.
Watch Part 1 of the Malick study above. Find future parts on the Directors Series Vimeo page.
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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.
Read More...Ozzy Osbourne’s Guitarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sabbath on a Hello Kitty Guitar
When Sanrio—that megalithic maker of kawaii icon Hello Kitty—partnered with guitar companies to make pastel-colored six-strings bearing the mouthless kitten’s face, many a big-time musician found the ostensibly kid’s‑oriented instruments irresistible. Hello Kitty guitars were “possibly the apex of Sanrio’s cross-media synergy-blitz,” wrote David McNamee in a cranky 2009 piece at The Guardian, “that has seen them slap the cold, vacant stare of their brand-leading cash cow… on to every conceivable kind of consumer merchandise including vibrators (sorry, massagers), assault rifles, tampons, condoms, urinal cakes, cars, computers, booze and pet costumes.”
The chirpy Lisa Loeb took to Hello Kitty guitars as part of a personal brand makeover, which doesn’t much surprise since she eventually moved to writing children’s music. But “a scan of YouTube,” McNamee goes on, “reveals that Hello Kitty’s core audience is actually balding, middle-aged men, shredding out covers of Yngwie Malmsteen and Rush.”
I’m not sure how accurate this statement is in market research terms, but I can testify to knowing at least two middle-aged men who swear by pink Hello Kitty Stratocasters.
Go ahead, laugh it up, but you probably wouldn’t do so in front of certain Sanrio shredders, like former Ozzy Osbourne and current Black Label Society guitarist Zakk Wylde, who has made a side gig—as we noted in yesterday’s post—playing covers of heavy rock tunes on tiny, cutesy Hello Kitty acoustic guitars. See for yourself in his Hello Kitty take on Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B.” at the top and a version of his own original “Autumn Changes” further up. Would you laugh at seriously versatile Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 and his Hello Kitty guitar? Maybe, but reserve your judgment until after you’ve seen him start his “new career” in Hello Kitty guitar marketing above.
Rising to the challenge, Mark Tremonti and Eric Friedman decided to take on Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” on a Hello Kitty guitar and ukulele, “refusing to skip the track’s various solos,” points out Loudwire. It’s ”a true jam on truly crappy instruments that the boys somehow made work.” What, exactly, is the appeal of these Hello Kitty sessions to people who aren’t, presumably, the usual Hello Kitty tween demographic?
Maybe it’s just some good clean fun from people who might seem to take themselves a little too seriously sometimes. When rock stars show a sense of humor, it makes them more relatable, right? Hey, even the Beatles made their bones with musical comedy, so why shouldn’t Evanescence’s Amy Lee give us a moving, candlelit rendition of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” as played on a Hello Kitty keyboard?
See all of these videos and more—including Bumblefoot’s soulful Hello Kitty metal classics covers and a potty-mouthed Mike Portnoy bashing away on a Hello Kitty drumkit—at Loudwire’s YouTube channel.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...“The Directors Series” Presents Free Immersive Studies of Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson & Christopher Nolan
Humorist and movie critic Joe Queenan once stood outside a theater after a screening of Jurassic Park and asked each exiting viewer if they knew who directed the film they’d just seen. Only five out of the ten who talked to him, he reported, could name Steven Spielberg. (Not just one but two of those who couldn’t said, inexplicably, that the Michael Crichton adaptation had been directed by Stephen King.)
Queenan pulled this stunt as an informal test of “auteur theory,” which holds that the director, despite the inherently collaborative nature of the medium, is ultimately the “author” of a motion picture. But what does it say about auteur theory that half of his sample of viewers couldn’t come up with the name of quite possibly the most famous filmmaker alive? Does the identity of a film’s director matter as much as those of us who subscribe to auteur theory believe it does?
As for the case for the auteur, if you’ve got fifteen hours or so to spare, you can watch it made in depth by the Directors Series. These multi-part video essays by writer-director Cameron Beyl examine what makes an auteur an auteur not just one filmography, but one film at a time.
Beyl launched the series with the ideal selection of Stanley Kubrick, an almost Platonic ideal of the modern auteur, whose career-long jumping from subject to subject and even genre to genre reveals all the more clearly the elements of his bold cinematic signature.
Then came series-within-the-series on directors from the generation after Kubrick: David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and Christopher Nolan. Though all alive and vey much still active, they’ve all forged the kind of strong styles that inspire worshipful retrospectives at cinematheques the world over. Even the kind of moviegoer who thinks Stephen King directed Jurassic Park surely senses, on some level, the common sensibility shared by films as outwardly different as Fight Club and Gone Girl, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, Raising Arizona and Fargo, Memento and Interstellar.
In the Directors Series, Beyl reveals the techniques these filmmakers use to make their body of work a unified cinematic project, and so rise to the status of true auteurs. Try to replicate Queenan’s experiment today, and you may well find that many, if not most, of the viewers who’ve just seen one of their movies won’t know the director’s name. That, of course, doesn’t mean that they didn’t enjoy or appreciate the director’s art — but it also doesn’t mean that, equipped with the kind of insight provided by the Directors Series, you won’t enjoy and appreciate it even more.
Follow these links for more on each series: Stanley Kubrick (3 hours), David Fincher (3.5 hours), Paul Thomas Anderson (2.5 hours), the Coen Brothers (4 hours), and Christopher Nolan (3.5 hours).
The first video from each series appears on the page above.
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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.
Read More...David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Marianne Faithfull in His Very Last Performance As Ziggy Stardust (1973)
Here’s a wonderfully weird performance by David Bowie, dressed in drag for his last appearance as Ziggy Stardust, and Marianne Faithfull as a wayward nun, singing the mawkish Sonny & Cher tune, “I Got You Babe.”
The duet was recorded for American television on October 19, 1973 at the Marquee Club in London. The producer Burt Sugarman had approached Bowie about appearing on his late-night NBC program The Midnight Special. According to the Ziggy Stardust Companion, Bowie agreed to appear on the show after being granted complete artistic control for a one-hour special. He put together a cabaret-style show featuring himself and a couple of acts from the 1960s, performing on a futuristic set. Bowie called it “The 1980 Floor Show,” as a pun on the title of his song “1984,” which was played during the opening title sequence.
Filming took place over two days. The audiences were composed of Bowie fan club members and other special guests. Due to the cramped quarters in the nightclub, the camera crew wasn’t able to cover more than two angles at any moment, so Bowie and the others had to play the same songs over and over. On the day “I Got You Babe” was filmed, the musicians and crew worked for ten straight hours.
Faithfull was invited to appear on the show as one of the back-up acts, along with The Troggs and the “flamenco rock” group Carmen. At the very end of the evening, Bowie and Faithfull appeared onstage together–he in a red PVC outfit with black ostrich plumes (he called it his “Angel of Death” costume) and she in a nun’s habit that was, by more than one account, open in the back. “This isn’t anything serious,” Bowie reportedly told the audience. “It’s just a bit of fun. We’ve hardly even rehearsed it.”
The Midnight Special appearance marked a momentary reunion of Bowie’s band, The Spiders from Mars, which had dissolved three months earlier, after Bowie’s surprise announcement that he was retiring. The lineup included Mick Ronson on lead guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, Mike Garson on piano, Mark Carr Pritchard on rhythm guitar and Aynsley Dunbar on drums. Backing vocals were provided by The Astronettes: Ava Cherry, Jason Guess and Geoffrey Maccormack. As the final performance of “The 1980 Floor Show,” Bowie’s duet with Faithfull turned out to be the very last appearance of Ziggy Stardust.
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!
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site back in March, 2013.
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Read More...The 100 Best One-Hit Wonder Songs: A Streamable Playlist Curated by Consequence of Sound
So Consequence of Sound has posted a list of The 100 Best One-Hit Wonder Songs, and before we dive in, we should point out that they’ve really tried to do their best in the face of history. I’m sure there are those out there who have been outraged some way or another at the arbitrary nature of the “one-hit wonder” designation over the years. I know I have thrown a fit to see Madness’ “Our House” called a one-hit-wonder in the States without mentioning their 30 or so Top 40 hits in the UK.
If American chart success is a judge, the CoS writers says, Beck would be a one-hit-wonder along with Radiohead. No, what we’re really gunning for are artists who really only have one bona fide hit to their name, and afterwards pretty much disappeared into the ether.
The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese” is definitely one of those. Released in a flood of new wave/post-punk fervor, it’s a catchy earworm that would both define the band and then entrap them. They never had another hit and ironically had chosen this as their second single, worried that they might become a one-hit-wonder. Whoops!
And while the ‘70s and ‘80s are seen as the height of the one-hit-wonder, the 1990s sure are worth reconsidering. We didn’t know it then, but the music industry was just about to collapse with the arrival of Napster and the Internet, and the rise of electronica brought with it a cornucopia of one-off downtempo/triphop tracks, college-rock/post-grunge anthems, and this single from Toronto’s finest, Len:
(Ah, 1999. Just before the world imploded.)
You can listen to Consequence of Sound’s list on Spotify, if you so choose:
So what happened to the one-hit-wonder? YouTube. Where else can you find novelty hits, parody songs, and pop cultural touchstones these days? The major labels certainly aren’t releasing them. That might be good for users, but it’s gonna be hell for pop historians attempting to assemble a comparable list in the future.
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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.
Read More...Discover the BlipBlox, a Kids’ Toy and Fully-Functional Synthesizer That Will Teach Toddlers to Play Electronic Music
A series of videos has been going around showing Zakk Wylde, former guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, playing classic rock and metal songs on diminutive Hello Kitty guitars. They’re funny: seeing the burly, bearded legend rock out on a kid’s guitar; but they’re also pretty impressive, when he wrings real grit and feeling from these unlikely instruments.
I imagine it won’t be long before we’ll see a similar stunt with someone like Moby, for example, ripping out danceable grooves on the Blipblox, a kids’ toy that is also a fully-functioning synthesizer (“actually, it’s both”!).
While the Blipblox may look like one of thousands of noisy console-like toddler toys, it’s one that won’t tempt parents to do what many parents do (be honest)—pull out the batteries and hide them where they can’t ever be found.
Apologies to Hello Kitty guitars, but by comparison with most instruments made for kids, the Blipblox is seriously sophisticated. “What sets this apart from other toys,” writes Mixmag, “is that it uses ‘a proprietary algorithm that synthesizes completely unique waveforms’ allowing users to create their own soundwave. The features include one low pass filter, two envelope generators, eight oscillator modulation schemes, two LFOs and MIDI, plus more.”
If those specs sound like an alien language to you, they won’t make any more sense to your 3‑year-old, and they don’t need to. “The blipblox was made to have fun without fully understanding how it works,” says the toy synthesizer’s creator in an introductory video above. Turn it on and start hitting buttons, twisting dials, and pushing the two joystick-like controllers back and forth, and beats, bleeps, bloops, blurps, and other synth‑y sounds spill out, at various tempos and pitches.
As kids (or parents who hijack the device) gain more control, they can start refining their technique and create original compositions, as you can see happening in the “studio sessions” video above. Then they can output their sounds to mom and dad’s home studio, or wherever—Blipblox is ready, as its Indiegogo campaign promises, for “a pro studio setup.” Or just lots of entertaining goofing around.
The Blipblox is a brilliant invention and has already won a 2018 award for “Best Teaching Tool for Pre-School Students” and made an appearance at the very grown-up 2018 NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) convention—see below. Priced at $159, the Blipblox ships this summer. Sign up at Indiegogo for “early bird perks.”
via Mixmag
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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