Mark Mothersbaugh’s studio is located in a cylindrical structure painted bright green — it looks more like a festive auto part than an office building. It’s a fitting place for the iconoclast musician. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods obsessively watching the early years of MTV, Mark Mothersbaugh was the mastermind behind the band Devo. They skewered American conformity by dressing alike in shiny uniforms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.
In the years since, Mothersbaugh has segued into a successful career as a Hollywood composer, spinning scores for 21 Jump Street and The Royal Tenenbaums among others.
In the video above, you can see Mothersbaugh hang out in his studio filled with synthesizers of various makes and vintages, including Bob Moog’s own personal Memorymoog. Watching Mothersbaugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watching a precocious child talk about his toys. He just has an infectious energy that is a lot of fun to watch.
Probably the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds backward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” backwards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?
Below you can see Mothersbaugh in action with Devo, performing live in Japan during the band’s heyday in 1979.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2015.
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to produce AI-generated content that is superficially good and surprisingly similar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resembling celebrities (commonly known as Deepfakes) or, as in the case of the Infinite Conversation, speech.
This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice. Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom. This changes our relationship with the media we consume online and raises questions about the importance of authoritative sources, breach of trust and gullibility.
Will this technology lead to a massive proliferation of sub-optimal-quality content? Should we simply distrust anything we see online? As new tools are developed to help identify generated content, I recommend maintaining a skeptical stance, particularly when the source/channel of information doesn’t seem reliable and when the claims seem preposterous or outrageous.
Ultimately, I don’t see this as a technical problem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to educate the coming generations about the new paradigm while focusing on forming compassionate individuals who would not misuse these awesome powers.
As an AI optimist, I remain hopeful that we will be able to regulate ourselves, and that we will take experiments such as the Infinite Conversation for what they are: a playful way to help us imagine what our favorite people would do, if we had unlimited access to their minds. Art and Philosophy, here exemplified by Bavarian director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, can guide us while navigating these treacherous waters.
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After trying for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show finally landed an interview with Bruce Springsteen–an interview that lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes and covered a tremendous amount of ground. Along the way, Springsteen talked about his song-writing process and the origins of his classic songs, and then performed some acoustic versions, alternating between guitar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stirring performances of “Thunder Road,” “The Rising,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”
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You may never have tried psychedelic substances. You may never have had an interest in trying psychedelic substances. But if you’re reading this, you do have a mind, and you’ve almost certainly felt some curiosity about how that mind works. As any engineer knows, one of the shortest routes to understanding how a machine works is to disrupt its normal operations. Psychedelics do just that for your brain, shifting your consciousness into a new perspective that can offer insights into your very perceptions of reality. Or at least they do it in the view of Michael Pollan, Sam Harris, Jacob Silva, Ben Goertzel, and Matthew Johnson.
The more familiar you are with current psychedelics research, the more of those names you’ll know. Pollan, who made his name writing about food, stars in the Big Think video above about the scientific renaissance of mind-altering drugs. “The brain is a hierarchical system, and the default mode network appears to be at the top,” he explains. That network is “the orchestra conductor or corporate executive. You take that out of the picture, and suddenly you have this uprising from other parts of the brain and you have networks that don’t ordinarily communicate with one another suddenly striking up conversations.”
Psychedelic substances do this, meaning that when they’re in use, “you might have the visual cortex talking to the auditory system, and suddenly you’re seeing music.” Any music-lover would feel at least some desire for the same experience. And even those without any interest in music would surely like to enjoy for themselves what Sam Harris describes feeling during one of his own psychedelic experiences: “There was a whole veneer of fear, frankly, that I didn’t know was there that got stripped away,” leaving a “naked awareness of the present moment.”
This may sound similar to the kind of state commonly ascribed to intensive meditation, and indeed, Harris — himself a practitioner and advocate of meditative practice — acknowledges it as another path to the same destination. But for some people, Harris says, “taking a drug is the only way they’re going to notice that it’s possible to have a very different experience of the world.” Even if we’re not so “lumpen and un-inquisitive,” we still may not have seriously considered the range of benefits psychedelics could offer humanity. “Many of the disorders that psychedelics appear to treat well are manifestations of a stuck brain,” Pollan says, “a mind that’s telling itself destructive stories like, ‘I can’t get through the day without a cigarette,’ ‘I’m unworthy of love,’ ‘My work is shit.’ ”
The United States was actually conducting research into psychedelic drugs up until the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s administration made them illegal due to their potential to sap the will of the men who were supposed to fight the Vietnam War. (“He may well have been right,” Pollan acknowledges.) But now our society has found itself in a “mental health crisis,” as Johnson, a psychedelic-substance researcher at Johns Hopkins, puts it in the brief explainer just above, we’ll have to explore all possible avenues — even previously closed ones — in order to change our minds.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The making of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploited a few years later by This Is Spinal Tap. Their fall into fractiousness and bloat began when Roger Waters firmly established himself as captain on 1977’s Animals, his tribute album for George Orwell. Stage shows became even more grandiose, leading keyboardist Richard Wright to worry they were “in danger of becoming slaves to our equipment.” Certain moments during the 1977 In the Flesh tour in support of the album seem right out of a Christopher Guest brainstorm.
One night in Frankfurt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost completely obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Comfortably Numb. Fans threw bottles. Crowds felt further alienated when Waters started wearing headphones onstage, trying to sync the music and visuals. During a five-night run at London’s Wembley Empire Pool, “officials from the Greater London Council descended on the venue to check that the band’s inflatable pig had been equipped with a safety line” (due to a minor panic caused by an earlier escaped pig). “Roger Waters oversaw the inspection, barking orders to the pig’s operators… “ ‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’ ”
Moments like these could have added levity to Alan Parker’s 1982 film of The Wall, starring Bob Geldof as the main character, disaffected rock star Pink. Waters hated the movie at the time, though later said, “I’ve actually grown quite fond of it, though I very much regret there’s no humour in it, but that’s my fault. I don’t think I was in a particularly jolly state.” A prisoner of his own success, Waters resented inebriated fans who were (understandably) distracted by stage shows that threatened to overwhelm the music. Seeing fans singing along in the front row instead of listening intently sent him into a rage, leading to the infamous spitting incident, as recalled by touring guitarist Snowy White: “It was a funny gig. It was a really weird vibe… to look across the stage and see Roger spitting at this guy at the front… It was a very strange gig. Not very good vibes.”
This is still only backstory for the album and tour to come — the making of which you can learn all about in the three-part Vinyl Rewind video series here. Waters based the jaded Pink on himself and former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett, who did not return from his own onstage meltdown. Waters found himself wishing he could build a wall between himself and the fans. The band liked his demo ideas and voted to move forward with the project. Then things really went sour. Pink Floyd began to fall apart during the recording sessions. As engineer James Guthrie remembers, at the start, “they were still playing together, rather than one guy at a time, which is the way we ended up recording in France.” Fractures between Waters and Richard Wright would eventually lead to Wright’s firing from the band.
Most of the personal disputes were already established before The Wall. Certainly Roger’s relationship with Rick, but things did deteriorate further on that level during the making of the album. There were some very difficult moments, but I don’t think there was ever a question of Roger not finishing the album. He’s a very strong person. Not easily deterred from his path. If everyone else had walked out, he would still have finished it.
Waters would have toured the album by himself as well — as he did after he left the band following 1983’s The Final Cut, a Pink Floyd album in name only. As it was, The Wall tour ended up sending the band into debt. Only Richard Wright made a profit, playing with the band as a salaried musician. For all the stage mishaps and interpersonal feuds — despite it all — Pink Floyd did what they set out to do. “We knew when we were making it,” says David Gilmour, in recollections mellowed by time and age, “that it was a good record.” It still stands, some forty-three years later, as one of the greats. Learn how it earned the distinction, and what that greatness cost the band that made it.
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Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker convene an emergency podcast recording to react to this mind-bending, possibly immoral HBO comedy docuseries, wherein Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult personal confrontations, but this plan goes off the rails after 1.5 episodes out of the six that made up its first season.
This series builds upon Fielder’s previous show where he comedically tried to help businesses, Nathan for You, whose ground-breaking finale (“Finding Frances”) discovered The Rehearsal‘s format. Is Nathan himself the main butt of the joke, or is he punching down? Are there better ways to show the failings of reality TV? How does this kind of embarrassment humor differ from Borat and its ilk? Maybe the show is not as much about these people going through their rehearsals as an examination of the process of rehearsing itself that Fielder has devised.
Feel free to listen to us to find out what it’s all about, but you will be best served by watching this indescribable show yourself before experiencing this episode.
A few relevant articles also considering the show include:
Søren Kierkegaard died in 1855, but if he’d glimpsed our modern-day landscape of dating apps, he probably would’ve understood it. “People who otherwise pride themselves on their lack of prejudice will apply terrifyingly strict criteria to their choice of partner,” says Alain de Botton in the animated School of Life video above. “They want someone with just a certain sort of face or income or sense of humor. They think of themselves as kind and tolerant, but when it comes to love, they have all the broad-mindedness of a believer in ‘a caste system whereby men are inhumanly separated through the distinctions of earthly life.’ ”
Kierkegaard noticed these human tendencies even in his day, and to his mind, they had nothing at all to do with love — true Christian love, that is, which he spent a good bit of his philosophical career trying to elucidate. He insisted, de Botton explains, “that most of us have no idea what love is, even though we refer to the term incessantly.”
Whether in Europe of the nineteenth century or most anywhere in the world today, we believe in romantic love, which involves “the veneration and worship of one very special person with whose soul and body we hope to unite our own.” But this, Kierkegaard argued, results in “a narrow and impoverished sense of love should actually be.”
The version of Christian love for which Kierkegaard advocated “commands us to love everyone, starting, most arduously, with all those who we by instinct consider to be unworthy of love.” In this conception, those we believe are “mistaken, ugly, irritating, venal, wrong-headed, or ridiculous” are exactly the people to whom we should “extend our compassion,” identifying and understanding the difficulties that made them what they are and offering our kindness and forgiveness accordingly. The ultimate goal, according to Kierkegaard, is to “love everyone without exception,” which may well sound like an unreasonable demand. But how much less reasonable is it than the checklists with which so many of us screen our potential matches?
To delve deeper, read Kierkegaard’s book, Works of Love.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
In the story of World War II we all know, a handful of murderous villains and flawed yet capable defenders of democracy drive the narrative. The authors of a Kings College London project argue that this conventional history shows “a preoccupation with the culpability of statesmen.…. Above all else, the debate about war in 1939 revolves around personalities.” But there is another way to see the causes of war: through the escalating arms race of the 1930s, despite the global push for disarmament following World War I’s devastation.
The leaders of Germany, Italy and Japan wanted war, yet their ability to wage it, and the ways in which that war played out, came down to logistical contests between war machines. “First in Berlin, then in Rome and finally in Tokyo,” writes historian Joseph Maiolo, “the ebb and flow of arms competition compelled leaders to make now-or-never decisions about war.” Such decisions produced a wealth of unintended consequences, and led to catastrophic losses of life. Air, sea, and land power created at an unheard-of industrial scale turned war into an assembly line-like process that “would see humans as no more than pieces of a larger military-industrial machine,” as theorist of war Manuel De Landa writes.
Thus, we see the enormity of the casualties of WWII. Millions of soldiers were fed to the front lines in “the need to prepare for future total wars that would demand sweeping mobilization,” writes Maiolo. Wars for global supremacy demanded all of the state’s capital, especially its human resources. The animated map above tells that story in raw numbers: “WWII Every Day with Army Sizes.” Beginning with Germany’s declaration of war on Poland on September 1st, 1939, the map covers the entirety of the war, showing numbers — sometimes in the tens of millions — fluctuating wildly along the front lines of every theater.
1939 may be the only logical starting point for this presentation. Yet when it comes to understanding why World War II claimed more lives than any other war in history, the explanation must begin several years earlier with arms dealers and generals seeking bigger and bigger budgets for more sophisticated weaponry. As technical problems increased so too did the human costs, until the struggle for global supremacy during WWII became a proliferating race toward mutually assured destruction after the war’s end.
In literature, graphic descriptions of menace and dismemberment by monsters are as old as Beowulf and much, much older still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th century novel The Castle of Otranto inspired the gothic romance novel that horror-qua-horror came into fashion. Without Walpole, and better-known gothic innovators like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, we’d likely never have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King. But nowadays when we think of horror, we usually think of film—and all of its various contemporary subgenres, including creepy psychological twists on good-old-fashion monster movies, like The Babadook.
But from whence came the horror film? Was it 1931, a banner horror year in which audiences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula? Certainly classic films by masters of the genre, but they did not originate the horror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s terrifying silent Nosferatu from 1922 (and the real life horror of its deceased director’s missing head).
And what about German expressionism? “A case can be made,” argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “was the first true horror film”—a “subjective psychological fantasy” in which “unspeakable horror becomes possible.” Perhaps. But even before Weine’s still-effectively-disorienting cinematic work disturbed audiences worldwide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 version of The Golem, a character, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopian, that served as “one of the most significant ancestors to the cinematic Frankenstein of James Whale and Boris Karloff.“ Even earlier, in 1910, Thomas Edison produced an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s monster story.
So how far back do we have to go to find the first horror movie? Almost as far back as the very origins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French special-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle, or the Manor of the Devil). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fantasy A Trip to the Moon—and for the tribute paid to him in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his innovative methods to tell a story, writes Maurice Babbis at Emerson University journal Latent Image, of “a large bat that flies into a room and transforms into Mephistopheles. He then stands over a cauldron and conjures up a girl along with some phantoms and skeletons and witches, but then one of them pulls out a crucifix and the demon disappears.” Not much of a story, granted, and it’s not particularly scary, but it is an excellent example of a technique Méliès supposedly discovered that very year. According to Earlycinema.com,
In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene — objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.
Thus was born The Haunted Castle, technically the first horror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers.
Piet Mondrian’s New York City I was recently discovered to have been hanging upside-down on display for the past 75 years, which made for a cultural story practically designed to go viral. Unsurprisingly, some of those keeping it in circulation have read it as proof positive of the fraudulence of “modern art.” How good could Mondrian be, after all, if nobody else over the past three-quarters of a century could tell that his painting wasn’t right-side-up? That isn’t a cogent criticism, of course: New York City I dates from 1941, by which time Mondrian’s work had long since become austere even by the standards of abstract art, employing only lines and blocks of color.
“The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicolored lines thickening at the bottom, suggesting an extremely simplified version of a skyline,” writes the Guardian’s Philip Oltermann.
But “the similarly named and same-sized oil painting, New York City, which is on display in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, has the thickening of lines at the top,” and “a photograph of Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after the artist’s death and published in American lifestyle magazine Town and Country in June 1944, also shows the same picture sitting on an easel the other way up.” It was just such clues that Susanne Meyer-Büser, curator of the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia, put together to diagnose its current mis-orientation.
Regardless, New York City I will remain as it is. The eight-decade-old strips of painted tape with which Mondrian assembled its black, yellow, red, and blue grid “are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” said Meyer-Büser. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction.” The artist’s signature would normally be a distraction in an inverted work, but since he didn’t consider this particular work finished, he never actually signed it — and if he had, of course, it would have been hung correctly in the first place. In any case, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine having a rich aesthetic experience with an upside-down Mondrian; could we say the same about, for instance, an upside-down Last Supper?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Oh to go behind the scenes at a world class museum, to discover treasures that the public never sees.
Among the most compelling — and unexpected — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are a pair of crumbing scrapbooks, their pages thick with yellowing obituaries and death notices for a wide array of late 19th and early 20th-century painters, sculptors, and photographers.
Others, like Francis Davis Millet, who served as a Union Army drummer boy during the Civil War and perished on the Titanic, were much admired in their day, but have largely faded from memory.
The vast majority are requiems of a sort for those who toiled in obscurity. They may not have received much attention in life, but the circumstances of their deaths by suicide, murder, or bizarre accident had the whiff of the penny dreadful, a quality that could move a lot of newspapers. The deceased’s addresses were published, along with their names. Any tragic detail was sure to be heightened for effect, the tawdrier the better.
As the Met’s Managing Archivist, Jim Moske, who unearthed the scrapbooks four years ago while prowling for historic material for the museum’s 150th anniversary celebration, writes in Lit Hub:
Typical of the era’s crass tabloid journalism, they were crafted to wring maximum drama out of misfortune, and to excite and fix the attention of readers susceptible to raw emotional appeal and voyeurism. Their authors drew upon and reinforced stereotypes of artists as indigent, debauched, obsessed with greatness, eccentric, or suffering from mental illness.
It took Moske a fair amount of digging to identify the creator of these scrapbooks, one Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly.
D’Hervilly spent a decade working in various administrative capacities before being promoted to Assistant Curator of Paintings. A dedicated employee and talented artist himself, D’Hervilly put his calligraphic skills to work crafting illuminated manuscript-style keepsakes for the families of recently deceased trustees and locker room signs.
In a recent lecture hosted by the Victorian Society of New York, Moske noted that D’Hervilly understood that the museum could use newspapers for self-documentation as well promotion.
To that end, the Met maintained accounts with a number of clippings bureaus, media monitoring services whose young female workers pored over hundreds of daily newspapers in search of target phrases and names.
Think of them as an analog, paid precursor to Google Alerts.
Many of the clippings in the scrapbook bear the initials “D’H” or D’Hervilly’s surname, scrawled in the same blue crayon the National Press Intelligence Company and other clippings bureaus used to underline the target phrase.
Moske theorizes that D’Hervilly may have been using the Met’s account to pursue a personal interest in collecting these types of notices:
Newly promoted to curate masterpiece paintings, had he given up for good his own artistic ambition? Was the composition of these morbid tomes a veiled acknowledgement of the passing away of his creative aspiration? Did he identify with the hundreds of uncelebrated artists whose fates the news clippings recorded in grim detail? Perhaps, instead, his intent was more mundane, and compiling them was an expedient for collecting useful biographical data as he catalogued pictures in the Met collection that were made by recently deceased artists.
Many of the hundreds of clippings he preserved appear to be the only traces remaining of these artists’ creative existence on this earth.
After D’Hervilly suffered a fatal heart attack while getting ready to leave for work on the morning April 7, 1919, his colleagues took over his pet project, adding to the scrapbooks for another next ten years.
In researching the scrapbooks’ author’s life, Moske was able to truffle up scant evidence of D’Hervilly’s extracurricular creative output — just one painting in a catalogue of an 1887 National Academy of Design exhibition — but a 1919 clipping, dutifully pasted (posthumously, of course) into one of the scrapbooks, identified the longtime Met employee as a “SLAVE OF DUTY AT ART MUSEUM”, who never took time off for holidays or even luncheon, preferring to eat at his desk.
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