This is something you can do at home. Everyone, please draw pictures —Toshio Suzuki
There’s no shortage of online tutorials for fans who want to draw Totoro, the enigmatic title character of Studio Ghibli’s 1988 animated feature, My Neighbor Totoro:
This is Totoro as Zen practice, offered as a gift to cooped-up Japanese children, whose schools, like so many worldwide, were abruptly shuttered in an effort to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The Beastie Boys are still the only group to have their music videos receive a Criterion Collection release, having delivered a steady stream of hilarious and fun promo spots since “She’s on It” in 1985. As the documentary Beastie Boys Story recently dropped on AppleTV, the remaining B‑Boys and their record label remastered 36 of their videos, now re-uploaded to YouTube in HD. And now’s as good a time as any to restock and rethink their impact on the art form of music video.
The first videos are silly, cartoonish slapstick, with a fratboy sense of humor that played better then than now, especially with several references to faux-aphrodesiac Spanish Fly. But the sped up action and costume changes placed them in a lineage usually associated with British acts like The Beatles and Madness.
The Beasties always poked fun at themselves, which other American acts rarely did, especially in the very macho worlds of hip-hop and metal. Even in their final videos they were slapping on wigs and fake mustaches.
But if the Beastie Boys really had one main legacy it was the use of the fish-eye lens. Used first in the “Hold It Now Hit It” video (an afternoon’s filming intercut with shots from their Dionysian first world tour), it would return for 1989’s “Shake Your Rump”, where the group have learned exactly how to work its distorting powers (MCA’s fingers feel like they’re going to reach through the screen). This style reaches its apex in “So What’cha Want” where the distortion is matched with a slowed motion (the band miming to a sped up version, then the video slowed to the correct speed). The music’s THC-laced grind is matched with decayed visuals. Rap videos ever since have used the immediacy of the direct-to-camera performance, and directors like Hype Williams made a career of turning a fisheye lens onto performers like Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliot, with even more surreal results.
But the Beastie Boys really flourished when they teamed up with director Spike Jonze, who directed the Beastie Boys Story and would direct six of their videos. A rising photographer and director connected with the skateboarding scene, his first collaboration with the group was 1992’s “Time for Living,” a punk rock non-single from Check Your Head. But things really took off with “Sabotage,” one of the band’s best videos, a parody of 1970s cop shows. Watching the Beasties and their friends play dress-up, run rampant through the streets of Los Angeles, jump across rooftops, and toss a dummy off a bridge is like the platonic ideal of a home movie made with your best friends. Absolutely silly and hilarious, but life-affirming at the same time, a distillation of what made the band great.
You probably have your own favorites too, as there’s so many: the Godzilla tribute of “Intergalactic,” the parody of Diabolik for “Body Movin’ “, the psychedelic paint explosion of “Shadrach,” the homage to Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii with “Gratitude”, the celebrity lovefest of “Make Some Noise”, and the years-before-their-time ‘70s disco-and-polyester indulgence of “Hey Ladies” where Jean Cocteau and Dolemite share a cokespoon-ful of influences.
The playlist also features a number of non-album tracks done for the hell of it, some real rarities even for the fan. Good God y’all.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
David Lynch began his artistic career as a painter. Before long his paintings became animations, of a kind, as exemplified by 1967’s Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) and 1968’s The Alphabet. By 1977, when the years-in-the-making Eraserhead finally saw the light of day, Lynch’s transformation into a live-action filmmaker must have seemed complete. But his imagination has never accepted confinement to one medium: even while working on ever higher-profile projects — The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks — he continued to paint, to draw, to take photographs. Lynch’s completely static comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World was a compelling fixture in the LA Reader during the 1980s, but apart from the online series Dumbland and the Interpol collaboration I Touch a Red Button Man, little Lynchian in the way of animation has appeared over the past few decades.
This past Monday, however, Lynch announced the release of one such rarity free to watch on Youtube. Like I Touch a Red Button Man,Fire (Pozar) is a joint effort between filmmaker and musician, in this case composer Marek Zebrowski. “The whole point of our experiment was that I would say nothing about my intentions and Marek would interpret the visuals in his own way,” said Lynch in a USC School of Music interview.
As collaborators, Lynch and Zebrowski go back to Inland Empire, the 2006 feature Lynch shot partially in Poland. This necessitated a translator, and the Polish-American Zebrowski stepped up to the job. In 2007 the two continued down that cultural avenue, recording an album called Polish Night Music. Fire (Pozar)‘s bilingual title also honors Zebrowski’s ancestral homeland, though the film itself may lack any direct reference to Poland — or to any real place, for that matter.
Lynch is credited with having “written, drawn, and directed” the short (its animator, Noriko Miyakawa, was an editor on 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return), and on the visual level it plays out like a journey through what will feel, to many of us, like the familiar realm of the Lynchian imagination. The titular fire — or rather, pozar — starts early on. Then we’re transported to a silhouette landscape that brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s description of one of Lynch’s painting’s, “the sort of diagnostic House-Tree-Person drawing that gets a patient institutionalized in a hurry.” But there are no people here, or at least no whole people: the first even faintly humanoid figure to emerge brings to mind the menacing baby in Eraserhead, and by the end the scene will have been overtaken by creatures neither properly animal nor man. Zebrowski’s score gets thoroughly enough into this stark but frenetic spirit to make Lynch fans believe that further collaborations must surely be on the way.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Imagine Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter in his robot voice, saying, as he once said to his friend Boris Venzen, “Our music is good if blacks and whites can dance to it at the same time.” This statement is the essence of Kraftwerk. Despite their early 70s avant-garde phase and their famously satiric Teutonic look, the robotic German techno pioneers settled early on their “practice of fusing European electronic music with black American rhythms, forging an aesthetic that reached critical mass with the release of Trans Europe Express.”
So writes John Morrison at The Wire, in an essay that explores this fusion in some depth. Morrison also quotes former Kraftwerk percussionist Karl Bartos on the band’s debt to black music: “We were all fans of American music: soul, the Tamla/Motown thing, and of course, James Brown. We always tried to make an American rhythm feel, with a European approach to harmony and melody.” The experimental method emerges even in their earliest work, in which they begin working with the “’Bo Diddley’ beat… that dominated rock ‘n’ roll in the 50s and early 60s,” Morrison notes.
Black DJs in the states picked up on what the Germans were doing, and started playing Kraftwerk—along with Gary Numan, Yello Magic Orchestra, and New Order—in the discos. Meanwhile, Kraftwerk started incorporating early American house music with their 1981 album Computer World. The response to Kraftwerk in black clubs was huge, and they became even more famous after Afrika Bambaataa sampled “Trans Europe Express” in his 1981 track, “Planet Rock,” a song that had a seismic impact on electronic dance music around the world.
Kraftwerk’s most singular impact in the U.S. happened in the city of Detroit. As Morrison writes:
[Kraftwerk]’s influence took a particularly strong hold in Detroit with Urban radio DJs Like Electrifying Mojo introducing the European electronic sound to the generation of black youth that went on to create techno. In recent years, several clips have been uploaded of The Scene (and its spin-off The New Dance Show), a Soul Train-style dance show that aired from 1975–87 on Detroit’s WGPR TV 62. In these videos, black youth from Detroit can be seen dancing to Kraftwerk and a variety of progressive electronic dance music, giving us a glimpse into Detroit’s scene at the time.
If you ever needed to know how to dance to Kraftwerk, writes Dangerous Minds of the exuberant Soul Train-like dance line above, “this is how it’s done”—or at least, how it was done in Detroit in the late 80s on The New Dance Show. From the early 80s on, Morrison writes, “Kraftwerk became increasingly aware of the black music scene,” and legendary Detroit techno DJs like Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson became increasingly aware of Kraftwerk, a situation cultural scholar Paul Gilroy might fold into his concept of “the Black Atlantic,” but which could also be called something like The Trans Düsseldorf-Detroit Afrofuturist Techno Express.
[T]he first time I heard ‘Robots’ I just froze. My jaw dropped. It just sounded so new and fresh. I mean, I had already been doing electronic music at the time, but the results weren’t so pristine—the sound of computers talking to each other. This sounded like the future, and it was fascinating, because I had just started learning about sequencers and drum programs. In my mind, Kraftwerk were, like, consultants to Roland and Korg and stuff because they had these sounds before any of the machines even appeared on the market.
I mean, there were other funky electronic bands around—Tangerine Dream and Gary Numan and all that—but none were as funky as Kraftwerk. I mean, you could actually play the stuff on black radio, and that wasn’t a small feat. You could go to an all black club in Detroit and when they put on ‘Pocket Calculator’, everybody just went totally crazy.
When it opened in 1977, Star Wars revived the old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure film. Within a few years, National Public Radio made a bet that it could do the same for the radio drama. Though still well within living memory, the “golden age of radio” in America had ended decades earlier, and with it the shows that once filled the airwaves with stories of every kind. Radio dramas seemed extinct, but then, before George Lucas’ space opera turned blockbuster, so had movie serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. The episodic nature of such source material resonated with the similarly episodic nature of classic radio drama, and that must have brought within the realm of possibility a bold and near-scandalous proposition: to re-make Star Wars for NPR.
The idea came from a student at the University of California, who suggested it to USC School of the Performing arts dean and radio-drama enthusiast Richard Toscan. There could have been no institution better-placed to take on such a project. Since Toscan had already produced dramas on the school’s NPR-affiliated radio station KUSC, he made an ideal collaborator in the network’s effort to breathe new life into its dramatic programming. And as Lucas’ alma mater, USC inspired in him a certain generosity: Lucas sold KUSC Star Wars’ radio rights, along with use of the film’s music and sound effects, for one dollar. Founded just a decade earlier, NPR still lacked the experience and resources to handle such an ambitious project itself, and so entered into a co-production deal with the BBC, which had never let radio drama go into eclipse.
When the Star Wars radio drama was first broadcast in the spring of 1981, fans of the movie would have heard a mixture of the familiar (including the voices of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker and Anthony Daniels as C‑3PO) and the unfamiliar. With science-fiction novelist Brian Daley brought on to add or restore scenes to the script of the original dialogue-light feature film, the story stretches out to thirteen episodes for a total runtime of six hours. The series thus stands as an early example of the expansion of the Star Wars universe that, in all kinds of media, has continued apace ever since. An Empire Strikes Back radio drama followed in 1983, with Return of the Jedi following, after prolonged development challenges, in 1996.
You can hear all fourteen hours of these original Star Wars trilogy radio dramas at the Internet Archive (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), or on a Youtube playlist with fan edits combining the originally discrete episodes into continuous listening experiences. NPR’s gamble on adapting a Hollywood hit paid off: the first Star Wars radio drama drew 750,000 new listeners, many from the youthful demographic the network had hoped to capture. It was the biggest science-fiction event on American radio since Orson Welles scared the country with his adaptation of H.G. Welles’ The War of the Worlds more than 40 years earlier — a broadcast produced by John Houseman, who in his capacity as USC’s artistic directory in the 1970s, encouraged Toscan to bring radio drama back. In recent years, NPR’s audience has continued to age while the Star Wars franchise has in theaters, on television and elsewhere, gone from strength to strength. Has the time come for radio to use the Force once again?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
A quick heads up. The Prince Estate has released Prince and the Revolution: Live, a historic concert captured at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY on March 30, 1985. Streaming to support the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization, the video revisits the Purple Rain tour, when Prince was at the height of his powers. You can find the 20-song setlist right below. Enjoy the free fundraising stream while it lasts.
In 2016, King Crimson performed “Heroes” at the Admiralspalast in Berlin, just after David Bowie’s death, and nearly forty years after the song was written and recorded next to the Berlin Wall. It was “a celebration, a remembrancing and an homage,” gentleman guitarist Robert Fripp wrote in a statement. The following year, they released the live version on an EP called Heroes, in honor of the classic Bowie album’s 40th anniversary.
King Crimson sounds absolutely amazing in the concert recording. Yet it’s Fripp’s keening guitar line—part violin, part theremin—that most calls out to us, a gorgeously heavenly wail. Like many Bowie songs, the writing and recording of “Heroes” produced many a fascinating story. Fripp’s contribution, as a legendary character and prog-rock genius, is no exception.
Fripp’s angelic tone on “Heroes,” as Tony Visconti tells it above (at 2:15), came about mostly by happy accident. Visconti explains more fully in a Sound Opinions interview:
Fripp was available only one weekend. So he came to Berlin, brought his guitar, no amplifier. He recorded his guitar in the studio. We had to play the track very very loud because he was relying on the feedback from the studio monitors. So it was deafening working with him.
Whereas everyone thinks it’s an ebow, this magical guitar gadget called an ebow. In fact it wasn’t an ebow, it was just the feedback–Fripp playing this “dah uhhhh dahh uhhh” that beautiful motif. And Fripp recorded a second time without hearing the first one. It was a little bit more cohesive, but still quite wasn’t right, and he said, “Let me do it again. Just give me another track. I’ll do it again.” And we silenced the first two tracks and he did a third pass, which was really great. He nailed it. And then I had the bright idea: I said, “Look let me just hear what it sounds like with the other two tracks. You never know.”
We played it, all three tracks together, and you know, I must reiterate Fripp did not hear the other two tracks when he was doing the third one so he had no way of being in sync. But he was strangely in sync. And all his little out-of-tune wiggles suddenly worked with the other previously recorded guitars. It seemed to tune up. It got a quality that none of us anticipated. It was this dreamy, wailing quality, almost crying sound in the background. And we were just flabbergasted.
It was a typically Eno-Visconti way to find a new sound. That sound, Visconti says above, is all over the track. For this reason, Fripp has been engaged in legal battles with David Bowie’s estate over his credit, insisting that he should have “featured player” status, a legal designation that would give him greater rights to remuneration. Always a shame when wrangling over money comes between the creators of great music, but in this case, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti both support Fripp’s claims, and so perhaps would Bowie if he were here.
Whatever it takes to be a “featured player,” Fripp sailed over the threshold on “Heroes.” He demonstrates it again in the King Crimson tribute, making one guitar sound like three onstage, and in the video above, which he released with his wife Toyah for VE Day. The backing track is from the Berlin performance at the top, with dubbed vocals by Toyah and guitar, of course, by Fripp, playing the same Gibson Les Paul he flew into the studio with in 1977, and looking just as singularly unimpressed by the proceedings.
Is news entertainment? To what extent has local news consumption decreased given the alternatives? Deion is an on-air reporter for NBC Montana who was recently memified for fleeing amusingly from some bison. He joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss what we might be missing out on, the uses and abuses of news coverage, reality vs. media portrayals, and the current status of “trusted news reporter” in our collective consciousness.
The Deutsches Uhrensmuseum introduces the French-made Peter Pan clock above as follows:
Even as early as 1930, people were trying to find a way to replace the unpleasant sound of the alarm clock. The inventor of this gramophone alarm clock had a brilliant idea. The gramophone works like the standard alarm clock of those days; however, instead of a bell, the gramophone motor switches on when the alarm goes off and your favourite record begins to play to the lively crackling sound of a typical gramophone. The motor plays this side of the record twice in succession. The opened lid of the box serves as a resonator. Even the name is what dreams are made of: Peter Pan Alarm Clock. Who would not want to be a child again and fly off to Never Never Land?
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Characters in Haruki Murakami’s books see emotions in colors and hear them in sounds—the sounds, specifically, of The Beatles, Shostakovich, Sarah Vaughan, and thousands more folk, pop, rock, classical, and jazz artists in the novelist’s immense record collection. We must occasionally suspend some disbelief as readers, not only in the fantastic elements in Murakami’s work, but in characters who seem to know almost as much as the author does about music, who are always ready with references to deep cuts. Murakami “is not (quite) a musician,” writes Dre Dimura at Flypaper, “but he has a greater command of music as an art form than most musicians I know, myself included. How is that possible?”
Dimura’s explanation touches on aspects of Murakami’s life we’ve covered before at Open Culture: his longstanding passion for jazz, and time spent as the owner of a jazz bar before he became a novelist; his penchant for listening to music in his study for hours and hours on end as he undertakes his marathon writing sessions.
Four decades after his jazz club days, Murakami again became a DJ in 2018 when he took to the airwaves to play several 55-minute sets called Murakami Radio on Tokyo FM. Now, amidst the uncertainty and anxiety of COVID-19 lockdowns, he will again play records for his fans in Japan on a show this Friday called Stay Home Special. “I’m hoping that the power of music can do a little to blow away some of the corona-virus related blues that have been piling up.”
Murakami isn’t being Pollyannish about the “power of music.” The phrase may be cliché, but fans know from reading his books how music plays a significant role in even the most mundane of social interactions, the kind we’d come to take for granted before the virus spread around the world. The author offers music as a friendly overture. In a characteristic image, he wrote before his first radio broadcast in 2018:
It has been my hobby to collect records and CDs since my childhood, and thanks to that, my house is inundated with such things. However, I have often felt a sense of guilt toward the world while listening to such amazing music and having a good time alone. I thought it may be good to share such good times with other people while chatting over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.
Though he’s been characterized as a novelist of isolation, and is “regarded as a recluse in Japan,” Murakami sees the need to make deep connections these days. And he recognizes music’s power to create shared emotional spaces, the kind of thing it seems so hard to find in our new fragmented, quarantined lives.
Nobody can write a book. That is, nobody can write a book at a stroke — unless aided by aggressively mind-invigorating substances, and even then they seldom pull it off. As professional writers know all too well, composing just one passable chapter at a sitting demands a Stakhanovite fortitude (or more commonly, a threateningly close deadline). Books are written less one chapter at a time than one section at a time, less one section at a time than one paragraph at a time, less one paragraph at a time than one sentence at a time, and less one sentence at a time than one word at a time. Graham Greene wrote his formidable body of work, more than 50 books, including novels, poetry and short fiction collections, memoirs, and children’s stories, 500 words at a time.
In one of his most beloved novels, 1951’s The End of the Affair, Greene has his writer protagonist Maurice Bendrix describe a working method much like his own:
Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical, and when my quota of work is done I break off, even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning’s work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page is marked the figure — 83,764.
In his youth, Bendrix notes, “not even a love affair would alter my schedule,” nor could one interrupt the nightly phase of his process: “However late I might be in getting to bed — as long as I slept in my own bed — I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it.”
Much of a novelist’s writing, he believes, “takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.” Greene, too, set enough store by the unconscious to keep a dream journal. A few year after The End of the Affair, writesThe New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova, “he faced a creative ‘blockage,’ as he called it, that prevented him from seeing the development of a story or even, at times, its start. The dream journal proved to be his savior.”
All of us who write, whatever we write, can learn from Greene’s methods; Michael Korda got to witness them first-hand. In the summer of 1950 he was invited by his uncle, the film producer Alexander Korda, to come along on a French-Riviera cruise with a variety of major industry figures, Greene included. By that point Greene had already written a fair few screenplays, including adaptations of his own novels Brighton Rock and The Third Man. But each morning on the yacht he worked on a more personal project, as the sixteen-year-old Korda watched:
An early riser, he appeared on deck at first light, found a seat in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather notebook and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked as if he were attempting to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, Graham wrote, over the next hour or so, exactly five hundred words. He counted each word according to some arcane system of his own, and then screwed the cap back onto his pen, stood up and stretched, and, turning to me, said, “That’s it, then. Shall we have breakfast?” I did not, of course, know that he was completing The End of the Affair.
This working ritual, a Korda describes it, suits the sensibilities of the writer, a convert to Catholicism who dealt with themes of religious practice in his work:
Greene’s self-discipline was such that, no matter what, he always stopped at five hundred words, even if it left him in the middle of a sentence. It was as if he brought to writing the precision of a watchmaker, or perhaps it was that in a life full of moral uncertainties and confusion he simply needed one area in which the rules, even if self-imposed, were absolute. Whatever else was going on, his daily writing, like a religious devotion, was sacred and complete. Once the daily penance of five hundred words was achieved, he put the notebook away and didn’t think about it again until the next morning.
Just as Greene’s adherence to Catholicism lost some of its rigor in his later years (he claimed to have been converted by arguments, then forgotten the arguments), his daily word count decreased. “In the old days, at the beginning of a book, I’d set myself 500 words a day, but now I’d put the mark to about 300 words,” a 66-year-old Greene told the New York Times in 1971. But such are the wages of the novelist’s art, in which Greene felt a demand to “know — even if I’m not writing it — where my character’s sitting, what his movements are. It’s this focusing, even though it’s not focusing on the page, that strains my eyes, as though I were watching something too close.”
Greene wasn’t alone in writing a certain number of words each day. According to a post at Word Counter, Ernest Hemingway got started on his own 500 daily words at first light. Ian McEwan says he aims “for about six hundred words a day and hope for at least a thousand when I’m on a roll.” For the more prolific J.G. Ballard, a thousand was the minimum, “even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re professional. There’s no other way.” The near-inhumanly prolific Stephen King doubles that: “I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words,” he says in his memoir On Writing. “On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon.”
John Updike, no slouch when it came to productivity, recommended writing for a length of time rather than to a number of words. “Even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say — or more — a day to write,” he says in an interview clip previously featured here on Open Culture. “Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.” At The Guardian, novelist Neil Griffiths discusses his apostasy from the thousand-words-a-day method: “I’m writing a novel — an artistic enterprise, one hopes — but I was measuring my working day by a number.” Switching to the “finish the bit you’re working on” method, he writes, means he doesn’t have “half an eye on what is going to happen in the next bit because without it I’ll never make the day’s 1000. My sole concern is the words before me, however many or few they are, and getting them right before moving on.” And so, it seems, those of us trying to get our life’s work written have two options: do what Graham Greene did, or do the opposite.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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