Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists the Best and Worst Sci-Fi Movies: The Blob, Back to the Future, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More
Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist and his high public profile as a science communicator, it will hardly come as a surprise that he displays a certain sensitivity to cinematic departures from scientific fact. His personal low watermark on that rubric is the 1979 Disney production The Black Hole, which moves him to declare, “I don’t think they had a physicist in sight of any scene that was scripted, prepared, and filmed for this movie.”
As for Tyson’s “single favorite movie of all time,” that would be The Matrix, despite how the humans-as-batteries concept central to its plot violates the laws of thermodynamics. (Over time, that particular choice has been revealed as a typical example of meddling by studio executives, who thought audiences wouldn’t understand the original script’s concept of humans being used for decentralized computing.) The Matrix receives an S, Tyson’s highest grade, which beats out even the A he grants to Ridley Scott’s The Martian, from 2015, “the most scientifically accurate film I have ever witnessed” — except for the dust storm that strands its protagonist on Mars, whose low air density means we would feel even its highest winds as “a gentle breeze.”
You might expect Tyson to poke these sorts of holes in every sci-fi movie he sees, no matter how obviously schlocky. And indeed he does, though not without also showing a healthy respect for the fun of filmgoing. Even Michael Bay’s notoriously preposterous Armageddon, whose oil-drillers-defeat-an-asteroid conceit was mocked on set by star Ben Affleck, receives a gentleman’s C. While it “violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made,” Tyson explains (noting it’s since been outdone by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall), “I don’t care that it violated the law of physics, because it didn’t care.” For a more scientifically respectable alternative, consider Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, the lesser-known of 1998’s two Hollywood asteroid-disaster spectacles.
If you’re thinking of holding a Tyson-approved sci-fi film festival at home, you’ll also want to include The Quiet Earth, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Contact, and Gravity, not to mention the nineteen-fifties classics The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob. But whatever else you screen, the experience would be incomplete without 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s joint vision of man in space. “Am I on LSD, or is the movie on LSD?” he asks. “One of us is on LSD for the last twenty minutes of the film.” But “what matters is how much influence this film had on everything — on everything — and how much attention they gave to detail.” If you’ve ever seen 2001 before, go into it with an open mind — and bear in it the fact that, as Tyson underscores, it was all made a year before we reached the moon.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...David Bowie Performs an Ethereal Acoustic Version of “Heroes,” with a Bottle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keeping the Beat (1996)
NOTE: You can watch the video here.
Not long ago I stumbled upon this pretty wonderful video of David Bowie playing an acoustic version of “Heroes,” one of my favorite songs, and I thought I’d quickly share it today. Why wait?
Appearing at Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit concert in October 1996, Bowie gives us a stripped-down version of the moving song he co-wrote with Brian Eno in 1977. Flanked by Reeves Gabrels on guitar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass, Bowie strums his acoustic guitar. All the while, he taps his foot, letting a bottle cap, taped to his shoe, assist in creating a percussive beat. It’s all kept elegantly simple. Hope you enjoy.
Donations to The Bridge School, which helps children overcome severe speech and physical impairments through the use of technology, can be made here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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...How Do You Use AI in Your Daily Life? Share the Applications That Have Made a Big Difference
Image by Jernej Furman, via Wikimedia Commons
It would be difficult to imagine the last couple of years without artificial intelligence, even if you don’t use it. Can you recall the last day without some AI-related news item or social-media post — or indeed, a time when the hype didn’t slide into utopian or apocalyptic terms? “If I look five or ten years down the road, it seems like we will be in a world in which the use of AI tools will not just be normal,” writes Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous, offering a more sober take. “Facility with them will be expected, and that expectation will inform the social and professional norms we’ll all be subject to, whether we like it or not.”
To his audience of philosophy academics, Weinberg poses a question: are you using AI? And furthermore, “Is there a particular kind of task you think you’d like to learn how to use AI for, but don’t know how?” Here at Open Culture, we’d like to ask something similar of our readers. If you use AI in your daily life in meaningful ways, what do you use it for? We’ve previously featured applications like OpenAI’s text-generating ChatGPT and image-generating DALL‑E, both of which have astonished users with the rapidity of their evolution. Now, tools promising “the power of AI” proliferate daily across ever more diverse fields of human endeavor.
For many of us, AI has thus far amounted to little more than a technology with which to amuse ourselves, albeit a very impressive one. I myself have laughed as hard at AI-generated stories as I have at anything else over the past year or two, though much depends on the thought I put into the prompts. But I’ve also heard the occasional story of genuine benefit that an AI tool has brought to someone’s personal or professional life, whether by clearly explaining a long-misunderstood concept, filling the gaps in a child’s education, or helping to determine what kind of care to seek for a medical problem.
If you have any such experiences yourself, please do leave a comment on this post telling us about them — and don’t forget to mention what variety of AI you’re using. Open Culture readers may well be getting real mileage out of AI “for summarizing complex academic texts, translating historical documents, or exploring philosophy, literature, and science more deeply”; for generating “poetry, music composition, or visual art in the vein of historical and avant-garde styles”; or for “practice with foreign languages, whether through translation, conversation, or grammar correction.” At least, that’s what ChatGPT thinks. Look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of Saturday Night Live’s Iconic Studio
To help celebrate SNL’s 50th anniversary, Architectural Digest has released a new video featuring Heidi Gardner, Chloe Fineman, and Ego Nwodim giving a tour of the Saturday Night Live set. The show has been broadcasting live from Studio 8H, located at 30 Rockefeller, since SNL first premiered in 1975. In this 22-minute tour, you’ll visit Studio 8H itself, the Makeup Lab, the wardrobe and hair stations, the dressing rooms, and the NBC Page Desk, all while meeting some of the crew that makes the show run behind the scenes. Enjoy!
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...
The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes
Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place is simply too big to comprehend on one visit, or indeed on ten visits. To grow so vast has taken eight centuries, a process explained in under three minutes by the official video animated above. First constructed around the turn of the thirteenth century as a defensive fortress, it was converted into a royal residence a century and a half later. It gained its first modern wing in 1559, under Henri II; later, his widow Catherine de’ Medici commissioned the Tuileries palace and gardens, which Henri IV had joined up to the Louvre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.
In the seventeen-tens, Louis XVI completed the Cour Carrée, the Louvre’s main courtyard, before decamping to Versailles. It was only during the French Revolution, toward the end of that century, that the National Assembly declared it a museum.
The project of uniting it into an architectural whole continued under Napoleon I and III, the latter of whom finally completed it (and in the process doubled its size). The Tuileries Palace was torched during the unpleasantness over the Paris Commune, but the rest of the Louvre survived. Since then, its most notable alteration has been the addition of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid in 1989.
The pyramid may still have an air of controversy these three and a half decades later, but you can hardly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Carrée’s years as a parking lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the countless features that make the Louvre an architectural palimpsest of French history practically as compelling as the collection of art it contains. (Francophones can learn much more about it from the longer-form documentaries posted by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre Histoire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French institutions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, however, I plan to go nowhere else.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Hear the Jazz-Funk Musical Adaptation of Dune by David Matthews (1977)
Even if you’ve never read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you may well have encountered its adaptations to a variety of other media: comic books, video games, board games, television series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 version and Denis Villeneuve’s two-parter earlier this decade. But before any of those came Dune, the jazz-funk album by keyboardist and bandleader David Matthews. Released in 1977 on the popular jazz label CTI Records, it devotes its entire first side to a 20-minute suite ostensibly inspired by Herbert’s novel, consisting of the pieces “Arrakis,” “Sandworms,” “Song of the Bene Gesserit,” and “Muad’dib.”
You’ll notice that the typography on the cover of Matthews’ Dune seems awfully reminiscent of Star Wars, a film that had come out the very same year. It’s not exactly false advertising, since the album closes with versions of both Star Wars’ main theme and Princess Leia’s theme, supplemented by the theme from Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and even David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” According to jazz historian Doug Payne, the concept was the idea of CTI founder Creed Taylor.
Taylor had originally hired Matthews as CTI’s chief arranger, the latter’s years of experience as James Brown’s musical director having promised the potential to imbue the label’s releases with disco appeal. In addition to Matthews on the keyboards, Dune also features heavy-hitting session players from the late-seventies jazz world like Randy Brecker, Steve Gadd, Grover Washington, Jr., Hiram Bullock, and David Sanborn. Fans of obscurantist hip-hop may also recognize Matthews’ “Space Oddity” cover as a sample source for MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes.”
Much like Bob James, his fellow mastermind of disco-inflected jazz, Matthews has created a body of work that lives on a hip-hop goldmine: his other samplers include Method Man, Redman, and The Notorious B.I.G. But it was in Japan that he found his most enthusiastic listenership. After leaving CTI in 1978, Payne writes, “Matthews went onto record a slew of records for mostly Japanese labels under a variety of guises including Japan’s number one selling jazz group, the Manhattan Jazz Quintet.” If you visit Japan, you may well hear Matthews’ music playing in a local jazz bar.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Why Are the Names of British Towns & Cities So Hard to Pronounce?: A Humorous But Informative Primer
When they make their first transoceanic voyage, more than a few Americans choose to go to England, on the assumption that, whatever culture shock they might experience, at least none of the difficulties will be linguistic. Only when it’s too late do they discover the true meaning of the old line about being separated by a common language. Take place names, not just in England but even more so across the whole of Great Britain. How would you pronounce, for instance, Beaulieu, Rampisham, Mousehole, Towcester, Gotham, Quernmore, Alnwick, or Frome?
There’s a good chance that you got most of those wrong, even if you’re not American. But as explained in the Map Men video above, bona fide Brits also have trouble with some of them: a few years ago, the deceptively straightforward-looking Frome came out on top of a domestic survey of the most mispronounced names. If you’re keen on making your experience in Great Britain somewhat less embarrassing, whatever your nationality, the Map Men have put together a humorous guide to the rules of “proper” place-name pronunciation — such as they exist — as well as an explanation of the historical factors that originally made it so counterintuitive.
The evolution of the English language itself has something to do with it, involving as it does “a base of Germanic Anglo-Saxon,” a “healthy dash of Old Norse,” a “huge dollop of Norman French,” and “just a fairly detectable hint of Celtic.” British place names reflect its history of settlement and invasion, the oldest of them being Celtic in origin (the dreaded Frome, for example), followed by Latin, then Germanic Anglo-Saxon (resulting in cities with names like Norwich, whose silent W I never seem to pronounce silently enough to satisfy an Englishman), then Norse.
After centuries and centuries of subsequent shifts in pronunciation without corresponding changes in spelling, you arrive in a country “littered with phonetic booby traps.” It could all seem like a reflection of the characteristic British anti-logic diagnosed, not without a note of pride, by George Orwell. But traveling Americans gassed up on their perceptions of their own relative practicality should take a long, hard look at a map of the United States some time. Having grown up in Washington State, I ask this: who among you dares to pronounce the names of towns like Marysville, Puyallup, Yakima, or Sequim?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981)
Though he never said so directly, we might expect that Situationist Guy Debord would have included Saturday Night Live in what he called the “Spectacle”—the mass media presentation of a totalizing reality, “the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise.” The slickness of TV, even live comedy TV, masks carefully orchestrated maneuvers on the part of its creators and advertisers. In Debord’s analysis, nothing is exempted from the spectacle’s consolidation of power; it co-opts everything for its purposes. Even seeming contradictions within the spectacle—the skewering of political figures, for example, to their seeming displeasure—serve the purposes of power: The spectacle, wrote Debord, “is the opposite of dialogue.”
So I wonder, what he might have made of the appearance of cult writer and Beat pioneer William S. Burroughs on the comedy show in 1981? Was Burroughs—a mastermind of the counterculture—co-opted by the powers that be? The author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night also appeared in a Nike ad and several films and music videos, becoming a “presence in American pop culture,” writes R.U. Sirius in Everybody Must Get Stoned.
David Seed notes that Burroughs “is remembered by many members of the intelligentsia and glitterati as dinner partner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger,” though he had “been a model for the political and social left.” Had he been neutered by the 80s, his outrageously anarchist sentiments turned to radical kitsch?
Or maybe Burroughs disrupted the spectacle, his droning, monotonous delivery giving viewers of SNL exactly the opposite of what they were trained to expect. The appearance was his widest exposure to date (immediately afterward, he moved from New York to Lawrence, Kansas). One of the show’s writers convinced producer Dick Ebersol to put Burroughs on. In rehearsal, writes Burroughs’ biographer Ted Morgan, Ebersol “found Burroughs ‘boring and dreadful,’ and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half minutes. The writers, however, conspired to let his performance stand as it was, and on November 7, he kicked off the show sitting behind a desk, the lighting giving his face a sepulchral gauntness.”
In the grainy video above, Burroughs reads from Naked Lunch and cut-up novel Nova Express, bringing the sadistic Dr. Benway into America’s living rooms, as the audience laughs nervously. Sound effects of bombs and strains of the national anthem play behind him as he reads. It stands as perhaps one of the strangest moments in live television. “Burroughs had positioned himself as the Great Outsider,” writes Morgan, “but on the night of November 7 he had reached the position where the actress Lauren Hutton could introduce him to an audience of 100 million viewers as America’s greatest living writer.” I’m sure Burroughs got a kick out of the description. In any case, the clip shows us a SNL of bygone days that occasionally disrupted the usual state of programming, as when it had punk band Fear on the show.
Perhaps Burroughs’ commercial appearances also show us how the counterculture gets co-opted and repackaged for middle-class tastes. Then again, one of the great ironies of Burroughs’ life is that he both began and ended it as “a true member of the midwestern tax-paying middle class.” The following year in Lawrence, Kansas, he “caught up on his correspondence.” One student in Montreal wrote, imagining him in “a male whorehouse in Tangier.” Burroughs replied, “No… I live in a small house on a tree-lined street in Lawrence, Kansas, with my beloved cat Ruski. My hobbies are hunting, fishing, and pistol practice.” Did Burroughs, who spent his life destroying mass culture with cut-ups and curses, sell out—as he once accused Truman Capote of doing—by becoming a celebrity?
Perhaps we should let him answer the charge. In answer to a fan from England who called him “God,” Burroughs wrote, “You got me wrong, Raymond, I am but a humble practitioner of the scrivener’s trade. God? Not me. I don’t have the qualifications. Old Sarge told me years ago: ‘Don’t be a volunteer, kid.’ God is always trying to foist his lousy job not someone else. You gotta be crazy to take it. Just a Tech Sergeant in the Shakespeare Squadron.” Burroughs may have used his celebrity status to his literary advantage, and used it to pay the bills and work with artists he admired and vice-versa, but he never saw himself as more than a writer (and perhaps lay magician), and he abjured the hero worship that made him a cult figure.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Read More...Watch the Historic First Episode of Saturday Night Live with Host George Carlin (1975)
50 years of Saturday Night Live. It all started here with this first episode, aired on October 11, 1975. George Carlin hosted the show. Billy Preston and Janis Ian served up the music. Jim Henson staged an elaborate puppet show. And “the Not Ready for Prime Time Players” (Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda, Jane, Chevy, Garrett, Laraine and the rest) provided the comedy, performing the first of 10,000 sketches that have since aired over SNL’s long history. SNL added the complete episode to its YouTube channel, and you can now watch how it all began. Enjoy!
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Read More...
Inside SNL: Al Franken Reveals How Saturday Night Live Is Crafted Every Week
As Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary, Al Franken takes you inside the making of an SNL episode. He should know a thing or two about the subject. Part of the original SNL writing team, Franken spent 15 years writing and performing for the show. (Anyone remember Stuart Smalley giving a motivational pep talk to Michael Jordan?) On his podcast, Franken walks you through what a typical week on Saturday Night Live looks like. The week begins with the kickoff meeting on Monday, then moves mid-week to the writing and selection of sketches, and ends with dress rehearsals, the live show, and after-party on Saturday. Above, Franken also talks about the role of the host and which ones excelled, and which ones flopped. If you would enjoy knowing how the SNL sausage gets made, the 60-minute conversation is well worth your while.
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