Actress Grace Kelly Reflects on the Life & Legacy of JFK in an Artfully Animated Video

in Animation, History | November 21st, 2013

On the eve of the 50th anniver­sary of the John F. Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion, Blank on Blank has released anoth­er one of its dis­tinc­tive ani­mat­ed videos. This one fea­tures Grace Kel­ly, the glam­orous Amer­i­can actress and Princess of Mona­co, con­tem­plat­ing her per­son­al encoun­ters with JFK, the heady days of Camelot, and the lega­cy of Amer­i­ca’s 35th pres­i­dent. When asked whether the pres­i­dent died in vain on that day in Dal­las, she offered these elo­quent words:

Well, it might not seem so today, but I, for one, can­not believe that a man of Mr. Kennedy’s stature and achieve­ments was put upon this earth for no oth­er pur­pose than to stop an assassin’s bul­let, or that the les­son will be whol­ly lost. It is only since the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry that the majesty of Abra­ham Lin­coln has been appre­ci­at­ed. I believe that God allows these cer­tain tragedies to hap­pen in order to empha­size the man and his achieve­ments and to inspire those who fol­low to have the strength and the will to accom­plish his unful­filled dreams.

This inter­view was record­ed on June 19, 1965, as part of an oral his­to­ry project designed to pre­serve the mem­o­ry of the late pres­i­dent. The project record­ed inter­views with peo­ple from all walks of life–from bus dri­vers to Leonard Bernstein–but, as David Ger­lach, founder of Blank on Blank explains to us, few peo­ple have heard these record­ings over the years. Now, how­ev­er, a Boston-based radio project has turned them into an hour­long radio doc­u­men­tary called We Knew JFK: Unheard Sto­ries, and it’s avail­able online here.

You can read a tran­script of the Grace Kel­ly inter­view cour­tesy of the John F. Kennedy Pres­i­den­tial Library & Muse­um.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut to John F. Kennedy: ‘On Occa­sion, I Write Pret­ty Well’

Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Inter­view Reborn as an Ani­mat­ed Car­toon

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing (Nixon v JFK)

Read Rejection Letters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut & Andy Warhol

in Art, Letters, Literature | November 21st, 2013

Every suc­cess­ful artist must mas­ter the art of accept­ing rejec­tion. “Fail bet­ter,” said Beck­ett in his grim euphemism for per­se­ver­ance. “I love my rejec­tion slips,” wrote Sylvia Plath in every hope­ful poet’s favorite quote. “They show me I try.” Plath—who also wrote “I am made, crude­ly, for success”—collected scores of rejec­tion let­ters, receiv­ing them even after the con­sid­er­able suc­cess of 1960’s The Colos­sus and Oth­er Poems. The 1962 let­ter above (click here to view in a larg­er for­mat), from The New York­er, doesn’t exact­ly reject a Plath sub­mis­sion, but it does rec­om­mend cut­ting the entire first sec­tion of “Amne­si­ac” and resub­mit­ting “the sec­ond sec­tion alone under that title.” “Per­haps we’re being dense,” demurs edi­tor Howard Moss.

The rejec­tion must have been all the more painful since Plath was under a con­tract with the mag­a­zine, which enti­tled her to “an annu­al sum for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing a ‘first read­ing’ plus sub­se­quent pub­lish­ing rights to her new poet­ry,” Plath schol­ars tell us. And yet “much to her dis­tress she main­ly received rejec­tions dur­ing Novem­ber and Decem­ber 1962.” The poem was even­tu­al­ly bro­ken in two, with the first half pub­lished as “Lyon­nesse,” but not by Plath her­self but by pub­lish­ers after her death. Hear Plath read the full poem as she intend­ed it in her edi­tion of Ariel, above.

Kurt Von­negut received an imper­son­al, and it would seem, long-over­due rejec­tion let­ter from edi­tor of The Atlantic Edward Weeks in 1949. Weeks writes breezi­ly that he found Vonnegut’s “sam­ples” dur­ing the “usu­al sum­mer house-clean­ing,” announc­ing its slush-pile sta­tus. Weeks does at least give the impres­sion that some­one, if not him, had read Vonnegut’s sub­mis­sions. The aspir­ing writer was 27 years old, strik­ing out “just a few years after sur­viv­ing the bomb­ing of Dres­den as a POW,” Let­ters of Note informs us, and still twen­ty years away from pub­lish­ing his ground­break­ing nov­el Slaugh­ter­house Five. Let­ters of Note also pro­vides us with the tran­script below for the bad­ly fad­ed type­script.

The Atlantic Month­ly

August 29, 1949

Dear Mr. Von­negut:

We have been car­ry­ing out our usu­al sum­mer house-clean­ing of the man­u­scripts on our anx­ious bench and in the file, and among them I find the three papers which you have shown me as sam­ples of your work. I am sin­cere­ly sor­ry that no one of them seems to us well adapt­ed to for our pur­pose. Both the account of the bomb­ing of Dres­den and your arti­cle, “What’s a Fair Price for Gold­en Eggs?” have drawn com­men­da­tion although nei­ther one is quite com­pelling enough for final accep­tance.

Our staff con­tin­ues ful­ly manned so I can­not hold out the hope of an edi­to­r­i­al assign­ment, but I shall be glad to know that you have found a promis­ing open­ing else­where.

Faith­ful­ly yours,

(Signed, ‘Edward Weeks’)

Of course visu­al artists are not immune. Andy Warhol received the above rejec­tion let­ter from New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art when he attempt­ed to donate a draw­ing in 1956. To its lat­er cha­grin, the muse­um wouldn’t let him give his work away:

Last week our Com­mit­tee on the Muse­um Col­lec­tions held its first meet­ing of the fall sea­son and had a chance to study your draw­ing enti­tled Shoe which you so gen­er­ous­ly offered as a gift to the Muse­um.

I regret that I must report to you that the Com­mit­tee decid­ed, after care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, that they ought not to accept it for our Col­lec­tion.

The Warhol rejec­tion cir­cu­lat­ed a few years ago after the MoMA tweet­ed Let­ters of Note’s post on it (read the full tran­script there). Its most galling fea­ture: a post­script that reads, with dis­mis­sive cour­tesy, “The draw­ing may be picked up from the muse­um at your con­ve­nience.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejec­tion Let­ter from Pub­lish­er (1912)

No Women Need Apply: A Dis­heart­en­ing 1938 Rejec­tion Let­ter from Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion

New York­er Car­toon Edi­tor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Suc­cess­ful New York­er Car­toon

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

A Young Björk Deconstructs (Physically & Theoretically) a Television in a Delightful Retro Video

in Media, Music, Television | November 21st, 2013

Björk’s first inter­na­tion­al hit, “Human Behav­iour” (1993) received scant radio play in North Amer­i­ca. Rather, the Ice­landic singer’s fame only grew as a result of MTV’s heavy rota­tion of the sur­re­al­ist music video that accom­pa­nied the song, direct­ed by Acad­e­my Award win­ner Michel Gondry. Despite the debt of celebri­ty she owed to tele­vi­sion, Björk was not always a fan.

In the undat­ed video above, Björk expounds on her Christ­mas­time TV-watch­ing habits.  Imme­di­ate­ly, the video takes an odd—or, I sup­pose, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly Björk-esque—turn when the young singer decides to take her TV apart:

But now I’m curi­ous. I’ve switched the TV off and now I want to see how it oper­ates. How it can make, put me into all those weird sit­u­a­tions. So… It’s about time.

The var­i­ous com­po­nents prove fas­ci­nat­ing, and Björk pro­ceeds to describe the television’s hard­ware in her whim­si­cal, oth­er­world­ly man­ner:

This is what it looks like. Look at this. This looks like a city. Like a lit­tle mod­el of a city. The hous­es, which are here, and streets. This is maybe an ele­va­tor to go up there. And here are all the wires. These wires, they real­ly take care of all the elec­trons when they come through there. They take care that they are pow­er­ful enough to get all the way through to here. I read that in a Dan­ish book. This morn­ing.

The most puz­zling part of the video comes when Björk men­tions that her cav­a­lier approach to tele­vi­sion is rel­a­tive­ly new. Until recent­ly, she had been guard­ed about her view­ing habits:

I remem­ber being very scared because an Ice­landic poet told me that not like in cin­e­mas, where the thing that throws the pic­ture from it just sends light on the screen, but this is dif­fer­ent. This is mil­lions and mil­lions of lit­tle screens that send light, some sort of elec­tric light, I’m not real­ly sure… Your head is very busy all the time to cal­cu­late and put it all togeth­er into one pic­ture. And then because you’re so busy doing that, you don’t watch very care­ful­ly what the pro­gram you are watch­ing is real­ly about. So you become hyp­no­tized.

Thanks to the wis­dom con­tained with­in an unnamed Dan­ish book, how­ev­er, Björk has grown more at ease with the poten­tial of television’s being used for mind con­trol and hyp­no­sis. At the end of the clip, she offers a final pearl of wis­dom:

You should­n’t let poets lie to you.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Björk and Sir David Atten­bor­ough Team Up in a New Doc­u­men­tary About Music and Tech­nol­o­gy

Ice­land in the Mid­night Sun

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Two Viral Videos Push Against Stereotypical Messages Girls Get From the Media (Mildly NSFW)

in Comedy, Creativity, Current Affairs, Television | November 21st, 2013

The first of two videos cir­cu­lat­ing on the inter­net, “Girls Who Read” by UK poet and “Rogue Teacher” Mark Grist (above) hits back at the lad cul­ture that objec­ti­fies women accord­ing to cer­tain “bits” named above in some mild­ly NSFW lan­guage. In his video per­for­mance piece above, Grist, asked which bits he prefers by a lad in a pub, and faced with a loom­ing cadre of both male and female peers putting on the pres­sure, answers halt­ing­ly, “I like a girl… who … reads.” Then, his con­fi­dence up, he elab­o­rates:

I like a girl who reads,
Who needs the writ­ten word
And who uses the added vocab­u­lary
She gleans from nov­els and poet­ry
To hold live­ly con­ver­sa­tion
In a range of social sit­u­a­tions

The ide­al girl close to Grist’s heart “ties back her hair as she’s read­ing Jane Eyre” and “feeds her addic­tion for fic­tion with unusu­al poems and plays.” In his infec­tious slam cadences, Grist’s impas­sioned paean to female read­ers offers a charm­ing alter­na­tive to the lad­mag gaze, though one might argue that he still does a lit­tle bit of pro­ject­ing his fan­tasies onto an unsus­pect­ing lone female at the bar (who turns out to be not so alone). Maybe “Girl Who Reads” is a trope, like “Man­ic Pix­ie Dream Girl,” an ide­al­iza­tion that says more about Grist’s desires than about any par­tic­u­lar, actu­al girl, but it’s still a refresh­ing chal­lenge to the leer­ing of his pub­mates, one that com­mu­ni­cates to girls that there are men out there, even in the pubs, who val­ue women for their minds.

The video above, for a new line of toys called GoldiBlox, designed by Stan­ford-edu­cat­ed engi­neer Deb­bie Ster­ling, upends anoth­er ado­les­cent male cul­tur­al touchstone—this time a by-now clas­sic Amer­i­can one—the Beast­ie Boys glee­ful­ly misog­y­nis­tic anthem “Girls.” While the orig­i­nal still like­ly scores many a frat par­ty, it now must com­pete with the rewrite per­formed by “Raven.” The re-appro­pri­at­ed “Girls” plays over video of a trio of young girls, bored to death with stereo­typ­i­cal pink tea sets and the like, who build a com­pli­cat­ed Rube Gold­berg machine from Goldiblox, which resem­ble plas­tic tin­ker toys. I fore­see snip­pets of the updat­ed lyrics (below) mak­ing their way onto play­grounds around the coun­try. Hear the orig­i­nal Beast­ie Boys song, with lyrics, below.

Girls.
You think you know what we want, girls.
Pink and pret­ty it’s girls.
Just like the 50’s it’s girls.

You like to buy us pink toys
and every­thing else is for boys
and you can always get us dolls
and we’ll grow up like them… false.

It’s time to change.
We deserve to see a range.
‘Cause all our toys look just the same
and we would like to use our brains.

We are all more than princess maids.

Girls to build the space­ship,
Girls to code the new app,
Girls to grow up know­ing
they can engi­neer that.



Girls.

That’s all we real­ly need is Girls.
To bring us up to speed it’s Girls.
Our oppor­tu­ni­ty is Girls.
Don’t under­es­ti­mate Girls.

As with all kids adver­tis­ing, this is aimed as much at parents—who remem­ber the Beast­ie Boys’ song—as their kids, who could­n’t pos­si­bly. And unlike Grist’s video, which only sells, per­haps, him­self, the Goldiblox video aims to get kids hooked on plas­tic toys as much as any of the ads for prod­ucts it dis­places. Nonethe­less, I’ll play it for my daugh­ter in a few years, because lines like “we are all more than princess maids” con­sti­tute the per­fect retort to the seem­ing­ly end­less cul­tur­al slot­ting of girls into ridicu­lous­ly sub­servient and fan­ta­sy roles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing!” OMG, Seri­ous­ly?! The Botched Video by the EU

Christo­pher Hitchens Cre­ates a Read­ing List for Eight-Year-Old Girl

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Gives Teenage Girls Endear­ing Advice About Boys (And Much More)

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

The 10 Hidden Cuts in Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s Famous “One-Shot” Feature Film

in Film | November 21st, 2013

Among his many accom­plish­ments at the inter­sec­tion of show­man­ship and pure cin­e­ma, Alfred Hitch­cock man­aged, in 1948, to make a fea­ture film with­out any cuts — or rather, more impres­sive­ly, he made a fea­ture film peo­ple believed had no cuts. Though cinephiles will know sev­er­al fine exam­ples of no-cut or few-cut movies from recent years (I’ve enjoyed Mike Fig­gis’ four-screen Time Code since it came out in the nineties, and I often rec­om­mend Il-gon Song’s more recent but rar­er one-cut Magi­cians), they’ll also know that, due to phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions in the film tech­nol­o­gy of Hitch­cock­’s day, nobody — not even Hitch­cock — could pos­si­bly have made a film longer than ten min­utes out of a sin­gle, unbro­ken shot.

So how did Rope, one of Hitch­cock­’s less­er-cel­e­brat­ed but still thor­ough­ly fas­ci­nat­ing projects, con­vinc­ing­ly fake its own form? Edi­tor Vashi Nedo­man­sky shows us in the three-minute video above. “On fur­ther exam­i­na­tion,” Nedo­man­sky writes on his blog, “Hitchcock’s gem actu­al­ly con­tains ten edits. Five of them are hid­den as the cam­era lens is filled by fore­ground objects. The oth­er five edits are reg­u­lar hard cuts that not many peo­ple either real­ize or acknowl­edge.”

Nofilm­school offers a post that goes into greater depth on Rope and edit­ing: “Even though there is edit­ing, it’s often described as a film that plays out in real time. Why? Prob­a­bly because it’s such an immer­sive piece of film­mak­ing; the hid­den edits and use of hand­held cam­eras fol­low and track its char­ac­ters, allow­ing audi­ences to expe­ri­ence and react to each sit­u­a­tion at the same moment the actors do — right in the thick of the action.” You can find a more the­o­ret­i­cal take from Peter J. Del­lo­lio at Flick­head, who describes Rope as a pic­ture explor­ing “some of the fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cin­e­mat­ic abstrac­tion of time and space by using the mobile cam­era as an agent that gives plas­tic real­i­ty to sub­jec­tive mate­r­i­al” whose “syn­the­sis of real time and filmic space forces the view­er to absorb nar­ra­tive infor­ma­tion on mul­ti­ple, often dis­taste­ful­ly iron­ic lev­els.” For a dif­fer­ent fram­ing, pre­sen­ta­tion, and analy­sis of Rope’s cuts, see also the short video essay “Skip­ping Rope.” Hitch­cock may not have had the abil­i­ty to real­ly make the movie in one shot, but he cer­tain­ly had the abil­i­ty to keep us all tak­ing about it these 65 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Watch Leonardo da Vinci’s Musical Invention, the Viola Organista, Being Played for the Very First Time

in History, Music | November 20th, 2013

Just yes­ter­day, we made ref­er­ence to Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s con­tri­bu­tion to ear­ly con­cepts of mechan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion. But if that sub­set of his achieve­ments does­n’t inter­est you, may we sug­gest you look into his oth­er work in paint­ing, sculp­ture, archi­tec­ture, math­e­mat­ics, engi­neer­ing, anato­my, geol­o­gy, car­tog­ra­phy, botany, and let­ters? Then again, you might find this a par­tic­u­lar­ly oppor­tune time to learn more about Leonar­do da Vin­ci the musi­cian. As the arche­typ­al exam­ple of the poly­math­ic, intel­lec­tu­al­ly omniv­o­rous “Renais­sance man,” he not only attained mas­tery of a wide range of dis­ci­plines, but did his most impres­sive work in the spaces between them. Giv­en the volu­mi­nous­ness of his out­put (not to men­tion the tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions of fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Europe), many of his mul­ti­ple domain-span­ning ideas and inven­tions nev­er became a real­i­ty dur­ing his life­time. How­ev­er, just this year, 494 years after Leonar­do’s death, we now have the chance to see, and more impor­tant­ly hear, one of them: the vio­la organ­ista, an elab­o­rate musi­cal instru­ment that had pre­vi­ous­ly only exist­ed in his note­books.

We owe this thrill not just to Leonar­do him­self, who left behind detailed plans for the (to him, pure­ly the­o­ret­i­cal) con­struc­tion of such devices as this behind, but to a report­ed 5000 hours of phys­i­cal effort by Pol­ish con­cert pianist Sla­womir Zubrzy­c­ki, who actu­al­ly put the thing togeth­er. You can read more at the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald, whose arti­cle (on “Leonar­do Da Vin­ci’s wacky piano”) quotes Zubrzy­c­ki: “This instru­ment has the char­ac­ter­is­tics of three we know: the harp­si­chord, the organ and the vio­la da gam­ba,” and play­ing it, which involves hit­ting keys con­nect­ed to “spin­ning wheels wrapped in horse-tail hair,” and turn­ing those wheels by pump­ing a ped­al below the key­board, pro­duces excit­ing unusu­al waves of cel­lo-like sounds. You can watch ten min­utes of Zubrzy­c­ki debut­ing the instru­ment at Krakow’s Acad­e­my of Music above. Depend­ing upon your incli­na­tion toward music, very old tech­nol­o­gy, or very old music tech­nol­o­gy, you may also want to glance at the relat­ed Metafil­ter debate about what place the vio­la organ­ista could have in music today.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Thelonious Monk Bombs in Paris in 1954, Then Makes a Triumphant Return in 1969

in Music | November 20th, 2013

Thelo­nious Monk’s pop­u­lar image as the hippest of the hip in mid-cen­tu­ry bebop is well-deserved, but his career tra­jec­to­ry was not with­out its lame notes, includ­ing the loss of his cabaret license for sev­er­al years after a 1951 drug bust in New York with Bud Pow­ell. The inci­dent forced him to leave the haven of the Minton’s Play­house after-hours jam ses­sion scene and strike out for new venues and new out­lets, such as record­ing the sem­i­nal two-vol­ume Genius of Mod­ern Music in 1952, which fea­tured some of the ear­li­est, most bois­ter­ous ver­sions of Monk com­po­si­tions like soon-to-be stan­dard “Well, You Needn’t.” In 1954, Monk arrived in Paris where he per­formed at the Salle Pleyel to an audi­ence that most­ly didn’t know him. Patrick Jaren­wat­tananon at NPR describes the night:

[H]e had almost no pub­lic pro­file in France apart from the most hard­core of mod­ern jazz fans; he was ner­vous and prob­a­bly drunk; and he fol­lowed an enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar Dix­ieland band on stage. Crit­ics in atten­dance panned him, con­fused by his unique dis­so­nances and agi­tat­ed stage behav­ior. The gig was, as biog­ra­ph­er Robin Kel­ley described it, a dis­as­ter.

To make mat­ters worse, Jaren­wat­tananon writes, Monk—used to rhythm play­ers like Art Blakey and Al McKibbon—was appar­ent­ly “assigned a local rhythm sec­tion which was prob­a­bly unfa­mil­iar with his music.” You can hear Monk above from a record­ing he made dur­ing that trip, with­out said rhythm sec­tion, play­ing “Round About Mid­night” in his expres­sive­ly per­cus­sive piano style. Monk’s style, famous­ly described by Philip Larkin as a “faux-naif ele­phant dance,” was rapid­ly devel­op­ing as he came into his own as a band­leader and com­pos­er.  But although per­haps a per­son­al mile­stone (Monk met life­long friend, patron, and devo­tee Pan­non­i­ca de Koenigswarter that night), the Paris gig of 1954 was a bust that haunt­ed the inno­v­a­tive pianist.

And so it was that fif­teen years lat­er, Monk returned to the Salle Pleyel with his own quar­tet. This time, Jaren­wat­tananon tells us, he arrived as an “inter­na­tion­al star.” The con­cert was tele­vised, and, on Novem­ber 26th, it will be released as an audio record­ing and DVD sim­ply called Paris 1969 (see Monk’s quar­tet play “I Mean You” in an excerpt above). For a short time, you can pre­view and pre-order indi­vid­ual tracks from the record­ing or lis­ten to the whole con­cert straight through at NPR’s site. It’s a mel­low­er Monk than his mid-fifties incar­na­tion, with­out a doubt, not the “tap-danc­ing, elbows-on-the-piano Monk of yore,” writes Jaren­wat­tananon: “But it’s Monk doing Monk, swing­ing intense­ly through severe rhyth­mic crevass­es” and gen­er­al­ly exud­ing the con­fi­dence and panache of his hero Duke Elling­ton.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Advice From the Mas­ter: Thelo­nious Monk Scrib­bles a List of Tips for Play­ing a Gig

Thelo­nious Monk: Straight No Chas­er

Andy Warhol Cre­ates Album Cov­ers for Jazz Leg­ends Thelo­nious Monk, Count Basie & Ken­ny Bur­rell

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

Mark Twain’s Viciously Funny Marginalia Took Aim at Some Literary Greats

in Comedy, Literature | November 20th, 2013

Hem­ing­way once said that “all mod­ern Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck­le­ber­ry Finn.” Twain, how­ev­er, was not only a mas­ter of sub­tle­ty and humor in fic­tion, but also a pierc­ing­ly fun­ny and some­times scathing essay­ist whose pen ranged from pol­i­tics to lit­er­ary crit­i­cism. Despite pub­lish­ing many bit­ing essays, many of Twain’s best barbs nev­er reached their tar­gets. Instead they remained with­in the mar­gin­a­lia of his books. In a series of doc­u­ments made pub­lic by the New York Times, Twain’s ire at slop­py writ­ing makes itself known. Some com­ments, like this one regard­ing his friend, Rud­yard Kipling, are fair­ly innocu­ous:

While Kipling got off light­ly, John Dryden’s trans­la­tion of Plutarch’s Lives seems to have hit a nerve, caus­ing Twain to change the inscrip­tion to “trans­lat­ed from the Greek into rot­ten Eng­lish by John Dry­den; the whole care­ful­ly revised and cor­rect­ed by an ass.” (Up top)

Notes in the mar­gins of Lan­don D. Melville’s Sarato­ga in 1901 show that it fared no bet­ter. Twain, it appears, renamed the vol­ume, dub­bing it “Sarato­ga in 1891, or The Drool­ings of An Idiot.”

He also deemed some of the writ­ings to be the “Wail­ings of an Idiot.”

And, just so there was­n’t any ambi­gu­i­ty about what he thought, Twain labeled Melville a “lit­tle mind­ed per­son.”

For more of Mark Twain’s jot­tings, head over to the New York Times’ doc­u­ment archive and The Mark Twain House & Muse­um.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Plays With Elec­tric­i­ty in Niko­la Tesla’s Lab (Pho­to, 1894)

Mark Twain Drafts the Ulti­mate Let­ter of Com­plaint (1905)

Mark Twain Cap­tured on Film by Thomas Edi­son in 1909. It’s the Only Known Footage of the Author

Long Live Glitch! The Art & Code from the Game Now Released into the Public Domain

in Technology, Video Games | November 19th, 2013

Back in 2009, a start­up called Tiny Speck (whose co-founder Stew­art But­ter­field also co-found­ed Flickr) launched a mul­ti­play­er online video game called Glitch, which won praise for its cre­ative visu­al style. Although more than 150,000 peo­ple played the game, Glitch nev­er quite found its foot­ing in the mar­ket. And, in 2012, it was shut down. But, now Glitch ris­es from the ash­es and lives again.

Yes­ter­day Tiny Speck made this announce­ment:

The entire library of art assets from the game, has been made freely avail­able, ded­i­cat­ed to the pub­lic domain.… All of it can be down­loaded and used by any­one, for any pur­pose. (But: use it for good.)

Tiny Speck … has relin­quished its own­er­ship of copy­right over these 10,000+ assets in the hopes that they help oth­ers in their cre­ative endeav­ours and build on Glitch’s lega­cy of sim­ple fun, cre­ativ­i­ty and an appre­ci­a­tion for the pre­pos­ter­ous. Go and make beau­ti­ful things.

Accord­ing to Tiny Speck, this release “is intend­ed pri­mar­i­ly for devel­op­ers and those with the tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty to take advan­tage of the struc­tured assets.”

Now, assum­ing you have some tech chops, here are some help­ful links that will get you start­ed:

• This pub­lic domain release page con­tains links to the GitHub repos­i­to­ries as well as direct down­load links for devel­op­ers.
• The Glitch archive site offers a “com­pre­hen­sive Ency­clo­pe­dia of the game world, play­er archives and snap­shots from the game, and more.”
• Above you can watch the videos 17 Fun Things To Do in Glitch in 124 Sec­onds. This, com­bined with the Glitch Beta Trail­er, will give you a good overview of the game’s visu­al style.

Long live Glitch!

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Computing in a Short Animated Video

in Technology | November 19th, 2013

Just the oth­er day, I did the unthink­able: I actu­al­ly watched a pre-video adver­tise­ment. The spot, for a major bank, spent its first few min­utes explain­ing the mechan­ics of cred­it rat­ing. Promis­ing use­ful knowl­edge, this bank received my atten­tion in return — for about two thirds of the com­mer­cial, any­way. The video above, com­mis­sioned by a com­pa­ny called Data­bar­racks, does much the same by offer­ing an expla­na­tion of “cloud com­put­ing,” a con­cept you’ve sure­ly heard much thrown around over the past sev­er­al years. Sweet­en­ing the deal, it uses for its visu­als a drawn-as-you-watch style of edu­ca­tion­al ani­ma­tion you may have encoun­tered here before, and it employs as its nar­ra­tor writer, come­di­an, and man-about-inter­net Stephen Fry, from whom I’ve always enjoyed a good expla­na­tion. “Today,” he begins, “we are in the mid­dle of a rev­o­lu­tion in busi­ness com­put­ing.”

In ser­vice of this the­sis, he then goes back to 2700 BC, when the Sume­ri­ans invent­ed the aba­cus, con­tin­u­ing on through Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s plans for a mechan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tor, Charles Bab­bage’s dif­fer­ence engine, Alan Tur­ing and Tom­my Flow­ers’ for­ward-look­ing sep­a­ra­tion of hard­ware from soft­ware, and Tim Bern­ers-Lee’s real­iza­tion that com­put­ers could oper­ate on some­thing like a neur­al net­work — some­thing like this very World Wide Web. We then see and hear an anal­o­gy made between com­put­ing and elec­tric­i­ty. Where once firms want­i­ng to use elec­tric­i­ty had to build and main­tain their own bur­den­some pow­er plants, now they have elec­tric­i­ty as a util­i­ty, pay­ing only for what they need at the time. And while firms have main­ly, up to this point, pur­chased and oper­at­ed their own stores of com­put­ing pow­er, doing it cloud-style will free them all to pay for that, too, as a util­i­ty. A bold pitch, per­haps, but every­thing sounds rea­son­able — inevitable, even — com­ing from Stephen Fry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Hosts “The Sci­ence of Opera,” a Dis­cus­sion of How Music Moves Us Phys­i­cal­ly to Tears

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.