A Beer Bottle Gets Turned Into a 19th Century Edison Cylinder and Plays Fine Music
The long and cozy relationship between alcohol and music is well-documented—in song. Did George Jones ever sing about anything else?
But until now there’s never been so literal a partnership as the one between Beck’s beer and the New Zealand pop band Ghost Wave.
This spring, the band won a contest at the heart of Beck’s advertising campaign, “Music Inspires Art.” The prize: a Ghost Wave label on beer bottles throughout New Zealand. Last month came a second prize. In the spirit of Thomas Edison’s famous recording cylinders, Beck’s produced an old-school recording of a Ghost Wave track directly onto a green glass bottle.
The audio quality is surprisingly good. You’ve probably heard the crackly recordings of Tchaikovsky’s voice recorded on an early Edison cylinder. You may have even heard the (much more recent) single that Suzanne Vega produced in cylinder format.
For the beer-bottle recording, Beck’s enlisted the help of Auckland-based special effects firm Gyros Constructivists to build an industrial strength record-cutting lathe. The technology used for earlier cylinders didn’t work because the Ghost Wave track, like most modern music, features so much bass that the cutting tool kept hopping out of the groove. The Gyros lathe used a hard drive recording head to cut into the glass.
The bottle track ultimately played on a reverse-engineered cylinder player, made with modern materials and fine-tuned with software to remove motor hum.
Edison invented the phonograph cylinder in 1877. In an early recording, he captured his own voice reciting a children’s nursery rhyme. Edison’s initial prototype used tinfoil wrapped around a hand-cranked cylinder, but that proved to be too delicate for everyday use. He changed the material to wax, which also wore out after repeated use, and eventually replaced that with plastic celluloid.
Now what would George Jones have said about that?
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Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Visit her website, , and follow her on Twitter, @mskaterix.
Read More...James Gandolfini Reads from Maurice Sendak’s Children’s Story “In The Night Kitchen”
Two weeks ago, we gave a brief, passing mention to a gem of a clip — James Gandolfini reading from Maurice Sendak’s controversial children’s book In The Night Kitchen (1970). Given the unfortunate and untimely demise of the actor, it seems worth putting this video directly into the spotlight for a moment. Gandolfini’s reading took place on September 15, 2008 at the 92nd St Y in New York City, at a celebration held on the occasion of Maurice Sendak’s 80th birthday. A fan of Sendak’s great children’s tales, Gandolfini also performed the voice of Carol in the 2009 film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are. Listen below.
An Animated “Speedrun” Through Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 gonzo journalism classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been called “the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page.” And indeed the book starts rollicking from the get-go. The opening lines read:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive.…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?
In 1998, Terry Gilliam had no problem adapting Fear and Loathing into a trippy, big screen film starring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro and Tobey Maguire. And now, 15 years later, 1A4STUDIO gives us this — a 60-second, animated “speedrun” through the entire narrative of Thompson’s adventure. For me, a highlight comes at the 20 second mark when the famous White Rabbit bathtub scene goes down. But, of course, don’t blink, or you’ll truly miss it.
via Devour
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Read More...Philosophy’s Power Couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Featured in 1967 TV Interview
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were twentieth-century philosophy’s power couple, in a time and place when public intellectuals were true celebrities. In the mid-sixties, they were not only fascinating writers in their own right, but also activists engaged in international struggle against what they defined as the globally injurious forces of capitalist imperialism and patriarchal oppression. In 1967, Sartre, along with Bertrand Russell and a handful of other influential thinkers, convened what became known as the “Russell Tribunal,” a private body investigating war crimes in Vietnam. De Beauvoir meanwhile had published a suite of memoirs and prize-winning novels, and her groundbreaking feminist study The Second Sex had been in publication a full twenty years.
In the interviews above with Sartre and de Beauvoir, the “free and intimate couple,” a model of existentialist free love, receives reverential treatment from the CBC. The journalists describe Sartre as “the most famous and controversial writer of his time…. An ally of students and international revolutionaries [and] a very public figure.” Sartre’s Paris apartment, an “austere room,” represents “a kind of universal conscience.” There are long, lingering shots of the writer at work, presumably on his Flaubert study, ten years in the making at this point. Sartre becomes passionate when the interviewers ask him about the dangers of the Vietnam War. He responds:
There is nothing glorious about a superpower attacking a small nation which cannot fight on even terms, and yet resists fiercely, refusing to yield…. My perspective is sociopolitical as well as moral. The Vietnam war is the very symbol of imperialism, the fruit of today’s monopolistic capitalism.
For Sartre, philosophy and politics are inseparable. “The war in Vietnam,” he says, ”disputes my work, and my work disputes the war.”
When the scene shifts to the separate home of de Beauvoir, nicknamed “Castor” (the beaver), the camera lingers over her collection of knick-knacks. Her home is “like a museum of her own life… filled with reminiscences of Cuba, Africa, Japan, Spain, China, Mexico.” She discusses her time spent with Fidel Castro at his country home (“He fishes with his gun, shooting at trout”), and talks about her memoirs. “I am attached to my past,” she says, “but I don’t shun the present and future. Artifacts and souvenirs are meant to preserve the present. To buy a souvenir is therefore an investment in the future.”
Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship is storied and complex. In his lengthy 2005 expose for The New Yorker, Louis Menand describes it thus:
Their liaison was part of the mystique of existentialism, and it was extensively documented and coolly defended in Beauvoir’s four volumes of memoirs, all of them extremely popular in France…. Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in varnishing the facts out of respect for bourgeois notions of decency. Disrespect for bourgeois notions of decency was precisely the point.
Their sexual rebellion seems novel for the times, but the way they construed their open relationship also relied on Romantic clichés and the medieval formula of courtly love. As Sartre would say of their romantic “pact”: “What we have is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” His Aristotelian argument, Menand writes, “worked as well on her as a diamond ring.” The couple’s egalitarian sexual politics often seem at odds with their practice, in Menard’s estimation, in which Sartre seemed to gain the upper hand and both wielded power over their conquests.
While speculations on their arrangement may seem prurient, the two documented their own dalliances obsessively in their work—both fictional and non—referring to their entourage of admirers and lovers as “the family.” They adopted young women, frequently students, as protégées, and seduced both women and men in what their former lover Bianca Bienenfeld, in her memoir A Disgraceful Affair, would call “acting out a commonplace version of ‘Dangerous Liaisons.’”
Author Hazel Rowley, who also wrote on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, documented their 51-year partnership in her book Tete-a-Tete, a biography written in cooperation with de Beauvoir’s adopted daughter (and possible lover) Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir and contested by Sartre’s adoptee, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre. Like all radical figures, Sartre and de Beauvoir need to be accepted as warts-and-all human beings. Their influential work is not negated by their contradictory lives, but the personal and political do make for a strange blend in the case of these intellectual revolutionaries.
Related Content:
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Late James Gandolfini, Star of The Sopranos, Appears on Inside the Actors Studio (2004)
We often write about the current “golden age” of highly crafted, thematically layered, tonally varied television drama, especially its well-known recent high water marks in series like The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But if you believe many television critics, this long and captivating wave first rose back in 1999 with David Chase’s ultramodern mob show The Sopranos. Nothing onscreen drove its six seasons quite so dynamically as the starring performance from James Gandolfini as put-upon mafia boss Tony Soprano. The actor’s sudden passing yesterday will surely prompt countless Sopranos fans to watch the entire series again, and as many soon-to-be Sopranos fans to finally catch up with the television masterpiece they’d missed. Before you launch into either of those extended viewing sessions, though (or their nine-minute compression), consider watching Gandolfini’s 2004 appearance on Inside the Actors Studio at the top of the post (with Spanish subtitles).
Gandolfini’s conversation with host James Lipton covers his Italian family, his early work on the stage, his first turn as a mobster in True Romance (which included an appearance in what Lipton calls the most violent scene Quentin Tarantino ever wrote), which other big star’s father his own father bought tires from, the praise Roger Ebert gave him, how he sees point of view as central to the craft of acting, and how Tony Soprano first entered his life. Lipton asks Gandolfini what he saw in the character that he felt he could play. “It’s a man in struggle,” the actor replies. “He doesn’t have a religion. He doesn’t believe in the government. He doesn’t believe in anything except his code of honor, and his code of honor’s all going to shit. He has nothing left, so he’s looking around — that searching I think a lot of America does half the time.” Just above, you can watch one of many intense moments in the life of Tony Soprano, this one a domestic one-on-one with his wife Carmela, played by the also-acclaimed Edie Falco.
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James Gandolfini Reads from Maurice Sendak’s Story Book “In The Night Kitchen”
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.
Read More...Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter
“Everybody dreams. Everybody travels, sometimes into countries where strange beauty, wisdom, adventure, love expects him.” These words, a tad floaty and dreamlike themselves, open 1947’s Dreams That Money Can Buy. “This is a story of dreams mixed with reality,” the narrator intones. He can say that again. Directed by Hans Richter, painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, “film-experimenter,” and energetic member of the Dada movement, the picture takes a storyline that seems mundanely realistic — impecunious poet finds apartment, then must figure out how to pay the rent — and bends it into all manner of surreal shapes. And I do, literally, mean surreal, since several of the scenes come from the minds of noted avant-garde and surrealist artists, including, besides Richter himself, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger.
Joe, the film’s protagonist, finds he has a sort of superpower: by looking into the eyes of another, he can see the contents of their mind. He promptly sets up a sort of consultation business where he examines the unconscious thoughts of a client: say, an unambitious banker whose wife lives “like a double-entry column: no virtues, no vices.” He then uses the abstract materials of their thoughts to come up with a self-contained, somewhat less abstract dream for them to dream: in the banker’s case, a dream called “Desire,” which takes the form of a short film by Dadaist painter-sculptor-graphic artist-poet Max Ernst. For Joe’s other, differently neurotic customers, Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Calder, and Léger come up with suitable formally and aesthetically distinct dreams. While all these artists imbue Dreams That Money Can Buy with their own inimitable sensibilities (or nonsense abilities, as the case may be), I feel as though certain modern filmmakers would have the time of their lives remaking it. Michel Gondry comes to mind.
Dreams That Money Can Buy will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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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.
Read More...“Performance Philosopher” Jason Silva Introduces Mind-Altering New Video Series, “Shots of Awe”
Remember that 1996 documentary The Cruise, chronicle of New City Tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who compressed encyclopedias full of references into a manic spitfire style? Well, “performance philosopher” Jason Silva’s monologues are a bit like Levitch’s, with a lot less Woody Allen and a lot more of Richard Linklater’s animated headtrip Waking Life.
Silva’s got a new webseries out called “Shots of Awe,” which he describes as “freestyle philosophy videos [that] celebrate existential jazz, big questions, technology and science.” These short videos are indeed “shots,” with each one coming in at under three minutes. The short above, “Awe,” defines the term as “an experience of such perpetual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it.”
While the English prof. in me winces at the use of “literally” here (“mental model” is a metaphor, after all), the video’s machine-gun editing and Silva’s “contrast between banality and wonder” have me convinced he’s onto something. Check out the series’ trailer here and see two additional episodes, “Singularity” (below) and “Mortality.” The series is hosted on Discovery’s TestTube network and follows up Silva’s Espresso video series.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An Animated History of the Tulip
When you think of tulips, you think of Holland and likely the great tulip bubble of 1637. But the history of the tulip didn’t start there. It started in the Himalayas and then Turkey, where the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent first cultivated and obsessed over these flowers in the early sixteenth century. Like so many other things, the Ottomans eventually brought tulips to Europe. By the 1550s, they popped up in Vienna. Next Leiden University in the Netherlands. Fast forward a few more decades, and Holland found itself engulfed in tulip mania, the first recorded speculative bubble in history. Above, you can watch the history of the tulip unfold in a short animation. It was created by Stephane Kaas for the Tulip Museum in Amsterdam.
via Mental Floss
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Read More...See Stevie Wonder Play “Superstition” and Banter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973
In 1969, Sesame Street debuted and introduced America’s children—growing up in the midst of intense disputes over integration—to its urban sensibilities and multicultural cast, all driven by the latest in childhood development research and Jim Henson wizardry. Despite the racially fractious times of its origin, the show was a success (although the state of Mississippi briefly banned it in 1970), and its list of celebrity guests from every conceivable domain reflected the diversity of its cast and hipness of its tone. With certain exceptions (particularly in later permutations), it’s always been a show that knew how to gauge the tenor of the times and appeal broadly to both children and their weary, captive guardians.
Being one of those weary captives, I can’t say enough how grateful I’ve been when a recognizable face interrupts Elmo’s babbling to sing a song or do a little comedy bit, winking at the parents all the while. These moments are fewer and farther between in the later ages of the show, but in the seventies, Sesame Street had musical routines worthy of Saturday Night Live. Take, for example, the 1973 appearance of Stevie Wonder on the show. While I was born too late to catch this when it aired, there’s no doubt that the child me would find Wonder and his band as funky as the grown-up parent does. Check them out above doing “Superstition.”
Like most musical artists who visit the show, Stevie also cooked something especially for the kids. In the clip above, watch him do a little number called “123 Sesame Street.” Wonder breaks out the talk box, a favorite gadget of his (he turned Frampton on to it). The band gets so into it, you’d think this was a cut off their latest album, and the kids (the show never used child actors) rock out like only seventies kids can. The show’s original theme song had its charm, but why the producers didn’t immediately change it to this is beyond me. I’d pay vintage vinyl prices to get it on record.
Finally, in our last clip from Stevie’s wonderful guest spot, he takes a break from full-on funk and roll to give Grover a little scat lesson and show off his pipes. The great Frank Oz as the voice of Grover is, as always, a perfect comic foil.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch the Earliest Known Footage of Louis Armstrong Performing Live in Concert (Copenhagen, 1933)
In October of 1933, Louis Armstrong and his “Harlem Hot Band” arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark for a series of eight shows at the Lyric Park theater. Thousands of fans mobbed the railway station, breaking through police barricades and climbing on top of train cars just to get a glimpse of the great jazz trumpeter as he stepped from his train.
Nowadays the Copenhagen visit is remembered because it was the first time Armstrong was ever filmed in concert. The Danish director Holger Madsen recruited Armstrong to appear in his feature film København, Kalundborg Og -?. Armstrong had made a cameo appearance in a 1931 film called Ex Flame, and on a sound stage the following year in two short films–a Paramount Pictures featurette and a Betty Boop cartoon–but the Copenhagen footage is the earliest of Armstrong playing live with his band.
The performance was filmed on October 21, 1933 at the Lyric Park. There was no audience in the theater during the filming. The shots of people applauding were made at a different time and spliced into the scene. Armstrong and his band play three songs: “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Dinah” and “Tiger Rag.” The nine-man band includes Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, Charles D. Johnson on trumpet, Peter DuCongé on clarinet and alto saxophone, Henry Tyree on alto saxophone, Fletcher Allen on tenor saxophone, Lionel Guimarez on trombone, Justo Baretto on piano, German Arango on bass and Oliver Tines on drums.
Armstrong is brilliant in the film. His exuberant showmanship and virtuosity are striking, and his unmistakable genius for phrasing–the way his trumpet and voice sound like two sides of the same distinctive instrument–remind us of why many people still consider Armstrong the greatest jazz musician of all time.
Related content:
Louis Armstrong and His All Stars Live in Belgium, 1959: The Full Show
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