As the protests in Baltimore unfolded, Prince sat at his keyboard at Paisley Park’s soundstage in Minnesota and started penning a peaceful protest song, which just hit the web this morning. Click play and ponder the lyrics below. Then get the backstory on the writing of “Baltimore” at MyFoxTwinCities.
BALTIMORE
lyrics by Prince
NPG RECORDS, copyright 2015
NOBODY GOT IN NOBODY’S WAY
SO EYE GUESS U COULD SAY
IT WAS A GOOD DAY
AT LEAST A LITTLE BETTER THAN THE DAY IN BALTIMORE
DOES ANYBODY HEAR US PRAY?
4 MICHAEL BROWN OR FREDDIE GRAY PEACE IS MORE THAN THE ABSENCE OF WAR
ABSENCE OF WAR
R WE GONNA C ANOTHER BLOODY DAY?
WE’RE TIRED OF CRYIN’ & PEOPLE DYIN’
LET’S TAKE ALL THE GUNS AWAY
ABSENCE OF WAR- U AND ME
MAYBE WE CAN FINALLY SAY
ENUFF IS ENUFF IT’S TIME 4 LOVE
IT’S TIME 2 HEAR,
IT’S TIME 2 HEAR
THE GUITAR PLAY! (guitar solo)
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In 2013, we featured Daniel Crawford, an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, playing “A Song of Our Warming Planet” on his cello. The song, produced in collaboration with geography professor Scott St. George, was created using a method called “data sonification,” which converts global temperature records into a series of musical notes. (More on that here.)
Now, two years later, we have a brand new video by Crawford and St. George. This one is a composition for a string quartet called “Planetary Bands, Warming World,” and it’s based on temperature data gathered over time by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. As Crawford explains in the video, “Each instrument represents a specific part of the Northern Hemisphere. The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic.” Each note’s pitch “is tuned to the average annual temperature in each region, so low notes represent cold years and high notes represent warm years.” As you listen, keep in mind one observation made by Prof. St. George says. “Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet.” The time period covered here moves from 1880 to present.
Like many people of my generation, I got my first electric guitar as a teenage birthday gift, took a few lessons and learned a few chords, and immediately started a band that bashed out angry punk rock at breakneck speeds. Some of my favorite bands made it seem accessible, and I didn’t have much patience for real musical training on the instrument anyway. Though I’d played brass and strings in school, the guitar had an entirely different mojo. It stood alone, even in a group—primal, wild, and uncomplicated; as Radiohead once observed, anyone can play it.
Well, anyone can play it badly. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the way I learned—it was great fun. But as my musical tastes broadened, so did my desire to play different styles, and years of playing with little formal training meant I had to un- and re-learn a lot of technique, no easy feat without access to a good teacher. Private instruction, however, can be costly and good teachers difficult to come by. Pre-Youtube, that is. These days, anyone can learn to play guitar, from scratch, the right (fun) way, and the wrong (also fun) way, with great teachers, innumerable online mini-tutorials, and some very thorough beginner lessons.
We’ve highlighted a few celebrity lessons here and there, and as far as they go, they’re great ways to pick up some tricks from your favorite musicians. But while people like Paul McCartney and Brian May don’t have a whole lot of time on their hands to make free guitar videos, a number of high quality teachers do, at least as promotional tools for paying gigs. At the top of the post, an instructor named Ravi presents the first ten lessons of his 21-day beginner course, offered on Truefire, an online guitar course service featuring for-pay lessons from such greats as Frank Vignola, David Grissom, and Dweezil Zappa.
This hour-long video functions in and of itself as a complete introductory course that’ll definitely get you started on the instrument. To further help you get the basics down, you can spend hours working through the other free videos here, a “quick start” series offered by Guitarlessons.com and taught by an instructor named Nate Savage. These short videos take you from rudiments like “How to Strum on a Guitar” and “8 Guitar Chords You Must Know” to the slightly more sophisticated but still beginner-worthy “Dominant 7th Blues Chords.” You’ll learn scales and power chords, the bricks and mortar of lead and rhythm playing. You’ll even get a corrective like “7 Mistakes Guitar Players Make,” if, like me, you learned a few things the wrong way, on purpose or otherwise.
Of course mistakes are a necessary part of learning, and often the keys to innovation, so don’t be afraid to make ‘em. But with so much quality, free guitar instruction online, you can also learn techniques that will set you up for success in a variety of different styles. Above, you can watch JustinGuitar’s much-praised videos, which will give you a multipart introduction to playing blues guitar. The key, as with any skill, is practice.
And per the suggestion of our editor, we’re also giving a mention to Guitar Jamz, which features tons of instructional videos that will show you how to play classic songs. In fact, you can find a playlist of 182 easy acoustic songs for beginners right above.
As another, very patient instructor—the host of series “Metal Method”—explains, “learning guitar doesn’t need to be complicated. You don’t need to understand how an internal combustion engine works to drive a car, and you don’t need to understand complex music theory to become an incredible guitarist.” So get to work, guitarists out there, beginners and lifelong students. And please share with us your favorite free online guitar resources in the comments.
When studying history’s most famous creators, we must never forget that they always produced failures as well as successes, and often failures as impressive as their successes. Take Thomas Edison, widely regarded as the great American inventor for his work on the light bulb, the movie camera, and the phonograph. We all know about those achievements, all of which shaped technologies which went on to near-universal use, but have you heard of Edison’s still-pioneering but rather less well-known work in the field of talking dolls?
Many of us in the past few generations grew up with talking dolls of one kind or another. But had we been children in 1890, we might have grown up with the very first talking dolls, for which Edison designed an internal mechanism that played one of several wax cylinders pre-recorded with various child-oriented songs, prayers, and nursery rhymes. Or rather, we might have grown up with them if we came from wealthy families: they cost between $10 and $20 in 1890 dollars, or up to $526 in today’s dollars.
And even at that price, Edison’s talking dolls provided not just the lowest of lo-fi listening experiences, but resoundingly creepy ones at that. “The public reacted as one does when confronted with a grandmother’s massive doll collection: You averted your eyes in fear,” writes PBS’ Joshua Barajas. “After six weeks into production, the dolls were deemed too scary and pulled from the market, the New York Times reported.”
But now, thanks to optical audio-scanning technology unimaginable in Edison’s day, we can hear the dolls’ renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Hickory, Dickory, Dock,” and — most eerily of all — “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” just as the children of 1890 would have heard them. But even this seriously wrongheaded-seeming product paved the way for not just the less disturbing Furbys and Teddy Ruxpins of more recent childhoods, but, given its unprecedented use of auto recordings made for entertainment purposes, the entire record industry — and, of course, the minor but robust subgenre of talking-doll horror movies.
The Henson Rarities site on YouTube keeps giving and giving. Not only has it given us access to some of Jim Henson’s earliest (and delightfully violent) commercials, but it has discovered this: a pilot of The Orson Welles Show from 1979. The show was never aired, and you might be able to discern why from checking it out.
It’s the height of ‘70s excess with wide collars, polyester shirts, various forms of pre-show indulgences, and it’s all underlit like a nightclub, not a talk show set. Orson Welles doesn’t interview his first guest Burt Reynolds, but instead immediately throws the questions to the audience, turning the first half of the show into an ur-Actors Studio episode. (An eagle eyed YouTube commentator points out a young–but unverified–Joe Dante in the audience.) And the entire show has the feeling of very, very rough footage saved by editing and heaping on tablespoons of canned laughter.
Eventually Welles introduces “a little company of cloth headed comedians” that was already in its third season of the Muppet Show and about to premiere its first movie. (That first Muppet Movie, by the way, features Welles near the end as a movie executive.)
Welles, who calls himself a magician more often than a director in this episode, no doubt loves the magic behind the Muppets. Even when the lights are fully upon Henson and his frog puppet, we never question that Kermit is not real. In the 50th minute, Welles introduces both Henson (“picture Rasputin as an Eagle Scout” says the director) and Frank Oz (“A man who truly fits his name.”)
The show peters out with a magic trick, an appearance by Angie Dickinson (more tricks!) and a final Welles monolog, who reads Jenny Kissed Me by James Leigh Hunt. Like the poem, there’s a shadow of maudlin mortality hanging over all of Welles’ lines throughout the show. Six years later Welles would pass away with his final movie unfinished, still waiting for the cash that he hoped programs like The Orson Welles Show would bring.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Above, Le Musée National du Moyen-Âge (otherwise known as The National Museum of the Middle Ages) and The University of Geneva recreate fight scenes from the 15th century, demonstrating the movements and techniques of combatants who clanked around in full suits of armor. If you’re like me, you’re watching with surprise — surprised by their agility and dexterity. Wasn’t quite expecting that!
If you don’t read French, it’s worth noting that the video starts with a demonstration of mobility, then explores medieval fighting techniques, from stabbing an opponent right between the eyes, to striking a mortal blow on the ground. The video was brought to the web by Le Figaro.
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James Joyce’s final and most difficult novel Finnegans Wake unlocks a lot of its secrets when read aloud, preferably in an Irish accent. In this way, Joyce’s multilayered wordplay makes sense aurally even if all the meaning might not be apparent on paper. (His brother, Stanislaus, called it “the work of a psychopath.”)
An audiobook version would be good—-and there is one by Patrick Healy from 1992 (listen online) —but one with music would be much better. This month, Waywords and Meansigns, a project co-founded by Derek Pyle, has released its version of the novel with each of its 17 chapters performed by a different group of musicians and readers. The full text is represented here in a staggering 30+ hours. (You can read along here.)
“Our hope was to create a version of Joyce’s book that would be accessible to newcomers, but still feel fresh and exciting for devoted students and scholars,” says Pyle.
As with all compilation albums, some tracks are better than others. Mariana Lanari & Sjoerd Leijten’s opening chapter chops and cuts various voices together with a hypnotic electronic backing, recreating the confusion of those opening pages and the barrage of influences and voices. They also perform the final chapter. (Lanari is part of the RongWrong Finnegans Wake Reading Group in Amsterdam.) Peter Quadrino, Jake Reading & Evan James take on Book 3, Chapter 3, with a mix of faux-Tom Waits and Martin Denny providing the backdrop. (Quadrino is leader of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, Texas) The jazzier the backdrop, by the by, does reveal Joyce’s connection to the Beat poets. Other tracks are dry and more straight-forward: face it, not everybody has the most beautiful reading voice. It is definitely a labor of love, and reveals how many FW reading groups there are around the globe.
Other artists involved in the project include saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, and painter Robert Amos, whose work you can find at the James Joyce Bistro in Victoria, British Columbia.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
A decade ago, I voluntarily watched a Powerpoint presentation. That may sound unremarkable, but under normal circumstances I go to almost any length to avoid Powerpoint presentations. I throw my lot in with The Visual Display of Quantitative Informationauthor Edward Tufte, known for his indictment of the “Powerpoint cognitive style” that “routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.” But this particular Powerpoint presentation didn’t happen under normal circumstances: it came from none other than artist, writer, and former Talking Head David Byrne.
Byrne may have done a number of such presentations under the banner of “I Love Powerpoint,” but he and Tufte regard that omnipresent Microsoft slideshow application more similarly than you might think. “Having never used the program before, I found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software,” Byrne wrote of his user experience in Wired. “On top of that, PowerPoint makes hilariously bad-looking visuals.” And yet, “although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent.”
The fruits of Byrne’s experimentation, apart from those talks in the 2000s, include the book Envisioning Epistemological Emotional Information, a collection of his Powerpoint “pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the ‘medium.’ ” You can find more information on davidbyrne.com’s art page, which documents the host of non-musical projects Byrne has pulled off in his post-Heads career, including whimsical urban bike racks installed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The short Wall Street Journal video at the top of the post documents the project, which fits right in the wheelhouse of a such a design-minded, New York-based, bicycle-loving kind of guy.
Byrne, as his musical output might have you expect, tends to stray from too-established forms whenever possible. Just above, we have one example of his works in the form of the corporate sign, each image of which shows the name of a big, bland company when viewed from one angle, and a world like “TRUST,” “GRACE,” or “COURAGE” when viewed from another. “Multinational tombstones nestled in the (landscaped) pastoral glade,” Byrne’s site calls these enhanced photographs taken in North Carolina’s office park-intensive Research Triangle. “A utopian vision in the American countryside.”
However witty, amusing, and even frivolous it may look on its face, Byrne’s infrastructural, corporate, and Powerpoint-ified art also accomplishes what all the best art must: making us see things differently. He may not have made me love Powerpoint, but I’ve never quite looked at any slideshow created in the program in quite the same way since — not that anyone else has since created one that I could sit through wholly without objection. Still, all the best art also gives us something to aspire to.
You don’t rile up as many people as Michael Moore has without mastering the art of button pushing. Clint Eastwood threatened to kill him (allegedly). Christopher Hitchens, echoing the sentiments of many Iraq war supporters, called his work “dishonest and demagogic.” And the State Department—opponents of both socialized healthcare and the Cuban government—attempted to discredit Moore with lies about his film Sicko. Those are some powerful enemies, especially for a “comedian and a populist” whose only weapons are cameras, microphones, and bestselling topical rants. On the other hand, Moore inspires millions of regular folks. As far back as 2004, a profile in TheNew Yorker described the simultaneously angry and jovial documentarian as “a political hero” to millions who “revere” him.
How does a documentary filmmaker create such passion? Moore, writes The New Yorker, intentionally provokes; but he is also “exquisitely sensitive to his audience’s mood and response. The harshness of his comedy, the proportion of comedy to political anger, the flattery or mockery of the audience, the number and type of swearwords he uses….” All carefully controlled. And all of it adds up to something more than documentary. Moore treats the term almost as a pejorative, as he told an audience in his keynote speech at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival’s Doc Conference. Typical documentarians, Moore said, “sound like a scold. Like you’re Mother Superior with a wooden ruler in your hand.”
Some critics of Moore make this very charge against him. Nonetheless, his ability to move people, both in theaters and live audiences, to tears, peals of laughter, and fits of rage, speaks of much more than humorless moralism. Documentarians, Moore says in the 13-point “manifesto” of his speech, should aspire to more. Hence his first rule, which he derives partly from Fight Club. Below it, see abridgments of the other twelve guidelines, and read Moore’s speech in its entirety at Indiewire. If he repeats himself, and he does, a lot, I suppose it’s because he feels the point is important enough to drive home many times:
1. The first rule of documentaries is: Don’t make a documentary — make a MOVIE.
…the audience, the people who’ve worked hard all week — it’s Friday night, and they want to go to the movies. They want the lights to go down and be taken somewhere. They don’t care whether you make them cry, whether you make them laugh, whether you even challenge them to think — but damn it, they don’t want to be lectured, they don’t want to see our invisible wagging finger popping out of the screen. They want to be entertained.
2. Don’t tell me shit I already know.
Oh, I see — you made the movie because there are so many people who DON’T know about genetically modified foods. And you’re right. There are. And they just can’t wait to give up their Saturday to learn about it
3. The modern documentary sadly has morphed into what looks like a college lecture, the college lecture mode of telling a story.
That has to stop. We have to invent a different way, a different kind of model.
4. I don’t like Castor Oil…. Too many of your documentaries feel like medicine.
The people don’t want medicine. If they need medicine, they go to the doctor. They don’t want medicine in the movie theaters. They want Goobers, they want popcorn, and they want to see a great movie.
5. The Left is boring.
…we’ve lost our sense of humor and we need to be less boring. We used to be funny. The Left was funny in the 60s, and then we got really too damn serious. I don’t think it did us any good.
6. Why don’t more of your films go after the real villains — and I mean the REAL villains?
Why aren’t you naming names? Why don’t we have more documentaries that are going after corporations by name? Why don’t we have more documentaries going after the Koch Brothers and naming them by name?
7. I think it’s important to make your films personal.
I don’t mean to put yourself necessarily in the film or in front of the camera. Some of you, the camera does not like you. Do not go in front of the camera. And I would count myself as one of those. … But people want to hear the voice of a person. The vast majority of these documentary films that have had the most success are the ones with a personal voice.
8. Point your cameras at the cameras.
Show the people why the mainstream media isn’t telling them what is going on.
9. Books and TV have nonfiction figured out. People love to watch Stewart and Colbert. Why don’t you make films that come from that same spirit?
Why wouldn’t you want the same huge audience they have? Why is it that the American audience says, I love nonfiction books and I love nonfiction TV — but there’s no way you’re dragging me into a nonfiction movie! Yet, they want the truth AND they want to be entertained. Yes, repeat after me, they want to be entertained!
10. As much as possible, try to film only the people who disagree with you.
That is what is really interesting. We learn so much more by you training your camera on the guy from Exxon or General Motors and getting him to just blab on.
11. The audience is part of the film.
While you are filming a scene for your documentary, are you getting mad at what you are seeing? Are you crying? Are you cracking up so much that you are afraid that the microphone is going to pick it up? If that is happening while you are filming it, then there is a very good chance that’s how the audience is going to respond, too. Trust that. You are the audience, too.
12. Less is more. You already know that one.
Edit. Cut. Make it shorter. Say it with fewer words. Fewer scenes. Don’t think your shit smells like perfume. It doesn’t.
13. Finally… Sound is more important than picture.
Pay your sound woman or sound man the same as you pay the DP, especially now with documentaries. Sound carries the story. It’s true in a fiction film, too.
So there you have it aspiring filmmakers. Should you to wish to galvanize, polarize, move, and inspire your audience as you tell them the truth (as you see it), you’d do well to take a few pointers from Michael Moore. Political differences—and homicidal urges—aside, even particularly right-leaning documentary directors might consider taking a few pages from Moore’s playbook. A few media personalities, it seems, already have, at least when it comes to defining their purpose. One last time, with feeling, for the TL;DR crowd: “Yes, repeat after me, [audiences] want to be entertained! If you can’t accept that you are an entertainer with your truth, then please get out of the business.”
Every ten years, film journal Sight and Sound conducts a worldwide survey of film critics to decide which films are considered the best ever made. Started in 1952, the poll is now widely regarded as the most important and respected out there.
And the critical consensus for a long time was that the masterpiece Citizen Kane by Orson Welles (born 100 years ago today, by the way) is the best of the best. The film topped the list for five decades from 1962 until 2002. Then in 2012, perhaps out of Kane fatigue, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo muscled its way to the top.
That’s what the critics think. But what about the filmmakers?
Beginning in 1992, Sight and Sound started to poll famed directors about their opinions. People like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh and Michael Mann. So what is the best movie ever made according to 358 directors polled in 2012? Kane? Vertigo? Perhaps Jean Renoir’s brilliant Rules of the Game, the only movie to appear in the top ten for all seven critics polls? No.
It’s a surprising, an enlightened, choice. Ozu’s work is miles away from the flash of Kane and the psychosexual weirdness of Vertigo. Tokyo Story is a gentle, nuanced portrait of a family whose bonds are slowly, inexorably being frayed by the demands of modernization. The movie’s emotional power is restrained and cumulative; by the final credits you’ll be overwhelmed both with a Buddhist sense of the impermanence of all things and a strong urge to call your mother.
But perhaps the reason filmmakers picked Tokyo Story of all the other cinematic masterpieces out there is because of Ozu’s unique approach to film. Since the days of D. W. Griffith, almost every filmmaker under the sun, even cinematic rebels like Jean-Luc Godard, followed some basic conventions of the form like continuity editing, the 180-degree rule and matching eyelines. Ozu discarded all of that. Instead, he constructed a highly idiosyncratic cinematic language revolving around match cuts and rigorously composed shots. His film form was radical but his stories were universal. That is the paradox of Ozu. You can see the trailer of the movie above.
Citizen Kane does make number two on the list but the film is tied with another formally rigorous masterpiece – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Next on the list is perhaps the best movie ever about making a movie – Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. And Ozu’s film might be number one, but Francis Ford Coppola is the only filmmaker to have two movies on the list – The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. And that’s no mean feat.
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.
From Oscar Boyson comes “A Short History of the World’s Most Important Art Exhibition,” the first of a series of films that will take us inside the Venice Biennale, the prestigious art exhibition that dates back to 1895.
Produced by Artsy and UBS, the short film “pulls back the curtain on the event’s reach, extending beyond art and into politics and history at large,” and helps “us navigate the cultural influence of this somewhat enigmatic, 120-year-old tradition. For a longer look at Italy’s most important art fair, you can watch The Vice Guide to the Venice Biennale.
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