Flopping in 1982 but ultimately accruing more critical acclaim and cinephile esteem than perhaps any other science-fiction film, Blade Runner, starringHarrison Ford and Sean Young,has become the quintessential modern example of a work of art before its time. Director Ridley Scott, a true cinematic pragmatist, had his suspicions about the film’s box-office fate even during production: “The fact is, if you are ahead of your time, that’s as bad as being behind the times, nearly.” “You’ve still got the same problem. I’m all about trying to fix the problem.” He and his team decided they could fix one “problem” in particular: the film’s ambiguous ending, which apparently left cold those who saw it. So cast and crew went to Big Bear Lake, where they shot a new sequence of Ford and Young escaping into the mountains. “I didn’t know how long we’d have together,” says Ford’s protagonist Rick Decker, in the final words of his faux-hard boiled explanatory voice-over. “Who does?”
The tight shots inside Decker’s flying car, built to soar across a dark, dense, neon-lined post-Japanification Los Angeles but now cruising incongruously through a lush forest, came out okay. Alas, cloudy weather ruined all the wide-angle footage captured at greater distances. Scott remembered that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a couple years before, had opened with just the sort of overhead mountain driving imagery he needed.
This gave him an idea: Kubrick “must’ve done a blanket shoot of every peak in Montana for The Shining using the best helicopter crew. I’ll bet you he’s got weeks of helicopter footage.” He did indeed have plentiful outtakes and a willingness to hand them over, which meant the first version of Blade Runner in wide release ended with shots from the very same photography sessions that produced the beginning of The Shining. For all the ingenuity that went into it, this relatively happy ending still, in a sense, wound up on the cutting room floor. Excised along with that widely disliked voice-over as new cuts and releases restored the picture to its original form, it gave way to the originally scripted ending, with its much more suitable (and memorable) final line delivered by Edward James Olmos as Deckard’s colleague Gaff: “It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?”
Sean Goebel, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Hawaii, has made this beautiful and fascinating time-lapse film of the observatories on Mauna Kea shooting laser beams into the night sky over the Big Island of Hawaii.
The lasers are part of the observatories’ adaptive optics systems, which compensate for distortions in light traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere. “Just as waves of heat coming off pavement blur out the detail of faraway objects,” explains Goebel on his Web site, “winds in the atmosphere blur out fine detail in the stars/galaxies/whatever is being observed. This is the reason that stars twinkle. The laser is used to track this atmospheric turbulence, and one of the mirrors in the telescope bends hundreds of times per second in order to cancel out the blurring.”
Adaptive optics make use of a guide star in the area of the sky near the object being observed. As light arriving from the guide star shifts, electronic circuits in the system automatically compute the minute adjustments to the deformable telescope mirror that are needed to cancel out the distortion.
There are, however, places in the sky where a natural guide star doesn’t exist close enough to the object astronomers want to observe. To solve this problem, the scientists create artificial guide stars using laser beams. For example, several of the observatories on Mauna Kea shine sodium laser beams into the upper atmosphere, where they interact with a naturally occurring layer of sodium atoms. The excited atoms give off light, creating a point source for the adaptive optics system to focus on. The powerful lasers must be used very carefully, says Goebel:
A typical laser pointer that you might use to point at stuff/exercise your cat is about 5 mW. That’s five one-thousandths of a watt. Not a whole lot of power. And yet it’s enough to blind airplane pilots. The lasers on the telescopes are in the range of 15–40 watts. The FAA calls a no-fly zone over the area when a laser is in use, and two people have to stand around outside in the freezing temperatures and watch for airplanes. Each of them has a kill switch to turn off the laser in case an airplane comes near. Additionally, the telescope has to send its target list to Space Command ahead of time. Space Command then tells them not to use the laser at specific times, ostensibly to avoid blinding spy satellites. However, you could calculate the spy satellite orbits if you knew where they were at specific times, so Space Command also tells the telescope to not use the laser at random times when no satellites are overhead.
Goebel captured the images for his time-lapse montage over a period of seven nights this past spring and summer. Conditions atop Mauna Kea, which rises to an altitude of over 13,000 feet above sea level, presented a challenge. Goebel had to contend with high winds, freezing temperatures and low oxygen. “Essentially everyone suffers from altitude sickness” on Mauna Kea, he says. “It’s not uncommon for tourists to step out of their vehicles and immediately pass out. Going from sea level to 14,000 feet in the span of a couple of hours will do that to you.”
For more on Goebel and his work, including technical specifications and examples of other work, visit his Web site.
“A Short History of the Highrise,” a four-part interactive New York Times “Op-Doc” reminds me of a pop-up book. The very first lever I pulled (actually it was a wooden bucket) added a couple of stories to a medieval tower! I even snagged a couple of complimentary factoids about the Tower of Babel! Bonus!
The kids are gonna love it!
There are doors to push, scenic postcards to flip, a little Roman guy to drag to the right… what a creative use of the Times’ massive photo morgue. Director Katerina Cizek skitters throughout history and all over the globe, swinging by ancient Rome, Montezuma’s Castle cliff dwelling, China’s Fujian province, 18th century Europe, and Jacob Riis’ New York. Apparently, vertical housing is nothing new.
( I did find myself wondering what director Cizek might be angling for at the Dakota. The storied apartment building was long ago dwarfed by taller additions to New York City’s urban landscape, but its multiple appearances in the series indicate that it’s still its most desirable. Mercifully, none of the interactive features involve John Lennon.)
Would that a similar restraint had been exercised with regard to narration. I would have gladly listened to Professor Miles Glendinning, the mass housing scholar who lends his expertise to the project’s subterranean level. Alas, the non-interactive portion is marred by a bizarre rhyme scheme meant to “evoke a storybook.” If so, it’s the sort of storybook no adult (with the possible exception of the singer Feist, who was hopefully paid for her participation) wants to read aloud. A sample:
Publicly sponsored housing isn’t everywhere the diet
Beyond Europe, North America and the Soviet Union, high rise development is rampantly private.
Seriously?
Given the level of discourse, I see no reason we were deprived of a rhyme for “phallic symbol.” Those animated buildings do reach for the sky.
If it all gets a bit much you can head straight for “Home.” The final installment jettisons the cutesy-bootsy rhymes in favor of a lovely tune by Patrick Watson, which makes a pleasant soundtrack to reader-supplied photos of their balconies. The images have been arranged thematically — pets, storms, night — and the cumulative effect is charming. Click “More readers’ stories of life in high-rises” to read the first-hand accounts that go with these views. If your perch is high enough, you can submit one of your own.
You can watch a video trailer for “A Short History of the Highrise” up top and Part 1 of Cizek’s film below that. But to get the full interactive experience you’ll want to head over to the New York Times web site.
The beauty of isolated tracks is that they allow us to hear an old piece of music in a completely new way. They give us a fresh perspective on something we thought we already knew. Today we bring you a series of isolated tracks showing how Led Zeppelin pieced together one of its classic early songs: “Ramble On.”
The song was written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and recorded in New York in the spring of 1969. Led Zeppelin was on its second tour of North America. Along the way, the band popped into various studios to lay down tracks forLed Zeppelin II. The remainder of the album was recorded in the same fashion, between shows in Europe. “We were touring a lot,” bassist John Paul Jones wrote in the liner notes to the Led Zeppelin boxed set. “Jimmy’s riffs were coming fast and furious. A lot of them came from onstage especially during the long improvised section of ‘Dazed and Confused.’ We’d remember the good stuff and dart into a studio along the way.”
John Paul Jones’s bass guitar:
“Ramble On” is an early example of the Zeppelin hallmark of using a wide dynamic range within a single song. As the band goes back and forth between soft and loud, acoustic and electric, bassist John Paul Jones lays down a crisp outline of the song’s structure.
John Bonham’s drums:
The pitter-patter drumbeat by John Bonham during the quiet parts of “Ramble On” has sparked considerable debate among drummers. Some have theorized that Bonham was hitting the sole of his shoe with drum sticks. Others say it was a plastic garbage can lid. According to Chris Welch and Geoff Nicholls in John Bonham: A Thunder of Drums, Bonzo used his bare hands to tap out those 16th notes on an empty guitar case.
Robert Plant’s main vocals:
The lyrics of “Ramble On” reflect Robert Plant’s fascination with characters and events in The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien: “ ‘Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor/I met a girl so fair./But Gollum and the evil one crept up/And slipped away with her.” Led Zeppelin would include more references to Tolkien later, in songs like “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Stairway to Heaven.”
Jimmy Page’s electric rhythm guitar:
Jimmy Page’s explosive electric guitar playing kicks in at about the 1:14 mark. The exact guitar used by Page on the recording is a matter of controversy. He reportedly switched to his trademark Gibson Les Paul while recording Led Zeppelin II, but this track may have been played on the thinner-sounding Fender Telecaster he had been using since his days with the Yardbirds.
Jimmy Page’s electric lead guitar:
Like all the band’s albums, Led Zeppelin II was produced by Page. Although he eventually became known for building up complex layers of guitar tracks, Page kept the lead guitar overdubs for “Ramble On” fairly simple.
Robert Plant’s backup vocals:
Plant’s supplementary vocals begin at about the 1:14 mark. Plant would later say that the recording of the second album was when he began to feel sure of himself within the band. “Led Zeppelin II was very virile,” Plant told Nigel Williamson, author of The Rough Guide to Led Zeppelin. “That was the album that was going to dictate whether or not we had the staying power and the capacity to stimulate.”
This morning, the Nobel Prize in Economic Science went to three American professors — Eugene F. Fama (U. Chicago), Lars Peter Hansen (U. Chicago) and Robert J. Shiller (Yale) — “for their empirical analysis of asset prices.” In his own way, each economist has demonstrated that “stock and bond prices move unpredictably in the short term but with greater predictability over longer periods,” and that markets are “moved by a mix of rational calculus and human behavior,” writes The New York Times.
Of the three economists, Robert Shiller is perhaps the most household name. In March 2000, Shiller published Irrational Exuberance, a book that warned that the long-running bull market was a bubble, that stock prices were being driven by human psychology, not real values. Weeks later, the market cracked and people began to pay attention to what Shiller had to say. Fast forward a few years, and Shiller released a second edition of the same book, this time arguing that the housing market was the latest and greatest bubble. We all know how that prediction played out.
Shiller’s thinking about the financial markets isn’t a mystery. It’s all on display in his Yale course simply called Financial Markets. Available for free on YouTube, iTunes Video, and Yale’s web site, the 23 lecture-course provides an introduction to “behavioral finance principles” necessary to understand the functioning of the securities, insurance, and banking industries. Recorded in 2011, the course is otherwise listed in the Economics section of our collection of 1200 Free Online Courses. You can watch all of the lectures above, starting with Lecture 1. By following these links, you can find the course syllabus, an outline of the weekly sessions, and a book list.
Personal Note: About 10 years ago, I worked with Prof. Shiller on developing an online course. Two things I recall about him. First, he struck me as being a very down-to-earth and unassuming guy. A pleasure to work with. Second, we had some time to kill one day, and so I asked him (circa 2005) whether it was crazy to buy a house. I mean, I had the guru sitting in front of me, in a chatty mood. What did I get? Bupkis: “You know, it just depends…” It wasn’t a bullish sign. So I took it to mean “Stay on the sidelines, kid.” In 2007, it seemed like sound advice.
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Who killed Marion Crane? If you’ve watched Psycho, the best-known film by British master of cinematic suspense Alfred Hitchcock, you have the answer. And given that the picture came out in 1960, even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know the answer anyway. But today’s Hitchcock-loving cinéastes and enthusiasts of design have another important question to consider: who directed Marion Crane getting killed? We previously featured something of a master class in editing from Hitchcock himself in which he explains the mechanics of cutting together the “shower scene” of the unsuspecting secretary’s death. But that part of the process obviously began with all its components — Janet Leigh, the raised knife, the curtain pulled off of its rings, the chocolate syrup circling the drain — already captured on celluloid. To know the origins of this most famous sequence in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and one of the most famous sequences in 20th century cinema, you have to begin with its storyboards, straight from the hand of graphic-design legend Saul Bass, who also put together the film’s title sequence.
“After Hitchcock’s death, Bass asserted that he had directed the scene at Hitchcock’s invitation — a claim definitively contradicted by both Janet Leigh and Assistant Director Hilton Green,” writes Catholic University of America English professor Glen Johnson on the companion page to his Hitchcock course. “Bass’s partisans have subsequently held that Hitchcock merely mechanically filmed shots already laid out by Bass. Comparing the storyboards to the filmed scene shows that to be untrue. On the other hand, the most crucial elements of the scene, such as the drain-eye matchcut and the tracking shot that follows it, are in the storyboards. That proves nothing about the author of the scene, however, since Bass drew the storyboards after extensive discussions with Hitchcock about the design of the scene.” Though it appears that no single creator “made” the shower scene — or made any given element of most motion pictures — its place in the enduring legacy of mid-20th-century culture goes undisputed. Below, you can watch this so often quoted, imitated, and parodied sequence play out in another form, combining storyboards, clips, and making-of dramatization, in last year’s feature film Hitchcock:
Jack Kerouac wants you to turn writing into “free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline, other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement….” Think you can do that? Find out by following Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” He published this document in Black Mountain Review in 1957 and wrote it in response to a request from Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs that he explain his method for writing The Subterraneansin three days time.
And for a theory of Kerouac’s not quite theory, visit the site of Marissa M. Juarez, professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Juarez raises some salient points about why Kerouac’s “Essentials” bemuse the English teacher: His method “discourages revision… chastises grammatical correctness, and encourages writerly flexibility.” Read Kerouac’s full “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” here or below. [Note: If you see what looks like typos, they are not errors. They are part of Kerouac’s original, spontaneous text.]
SET-UP: The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.
PROCEDURE: Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.
METHOD: No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)– “measured pauses which are the essentials of
our speech”– “divisions of the sounds we hear”- “time and how to note it down.” (William Carlos Williams)
SCOPING: Not “selectivity” of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought,
swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)- Blow as deep as you want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
LAG IN PROCEDURE: No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
TIMING: Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time-Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue-no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).
CENTER OF INTEREST: Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way- “good”-or “bad”-always honest (“ludi- crous”), spontaneous, “confessionals’ interesting, because not “crafted.” Craft is craft.
STRUCTURE OF WORK: Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, “different” themes give illusion of “new” life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed “beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating “ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle-Night is The End.
MENTAL STATE: If possible write “without consciousness” in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later “trance writing”) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typingcramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “beclouding of consciousness.” Come from within, out-to relaxed and said.
Oh, and for authenticity’s sake, you should try Kerouac’s “Essentials” on a typewriter. It’s all he had when he wrote The Subterraneans. No grammar robots to distract him.
The government shutdown and the raising of the debt ceiling — such things are not usually grist for our cultural mill. But all of that changes when a cultural theorist pins the blame for Washington’s dysfunction on the acolytes of a pseudo-philosopher. Writing in The Guardian last Friday, in simple, straightforward prose, Slovenia’s favorite theorist Slavoj Žižek asks and answers a question in the title of his op-ed: “Who is responsible for the US shutdown? The same idiots responsible for the 2008 meltdown”. And who are those “idiots,” you might wonder? Let me spare you the suspense and jump you down to the last two paragraphs of his piece:
One of the weird consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival of the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can get to an ideologist of the “greed is good” radical capitalism. The sales of her opus Atlas Shrugged exploded. According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the creative capitalists themselves going on strike – is coming to pass in the form of a populist right. However, this misreads the situation: what is effectively taking place today is almost the exact opposite. Most of the bailout money is going precisely to the Randian “titans”, the bankers who failed in their “creative” schemes and thereby brought about the financial meltdown. It is not the “creative geniuses” who are now helping ordinary people, it is the ordinary people who are helping the failed “creative geniuses”.
John Galt, the central character in Atlas Shrugged, is not named until near the end of the novel. Before his identity is revealed, the question is repeatedly asked, “Who is John Galt”. Now we know precisely who he is: John Galt is the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, and for the ongoing federal government shutdown in the US.
We’re not saying it’s the most trenchant analysis, but we do like to take note of intellectual dustups. Speaking of, did you miss the Chomsky-Žižek spat from the summer? It went four rounds. Round 1. Round 2. Round 3. Round 4. And ended in a draw.
Two weeks ago we posted CDZA’s “Journey of the Guitar Solo,” an entertaining tour of 50 years of rock and roll guitar playing. Now we’re back with the group’s follow-up, a fast and fun introduction to drums. New York-based drummer Allan Mednard takes us on a quick tour of the instrument, demonstrating the basic differences between jazz and rock drumming and showing how they have evolved over time. CDZA, short for Collective Cadenza, is an experimental music video project of a group of highly skilled musicians in New York. For more examples of their work, visit the CDZA Web site.
In late September, the US military declared the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay over. “At its peak,” writes Charlie Savage in The New York Times, “106 of the 166 prisoners … were listed as participants” in the strike. That number has now dropped to 19, they say, and they’re all being given “the appropriate level of care.” What exactly does that mean? You can get an idea from this animated video created by The Guardian. In 6 minutes, you’ll get introduced to the world of people who have spent years in prison. They’ve never been charged with a crime nor given access to the legal system. Despite being cleared for release, many remain stuck in limbo year after year. When they lose hope and go on hunger strike, they have tubes and food crammed down their noses. Poignant as it may be, the colorful animation may dull your reaction to what’s actually happening in Guantánamo. Perhaps it’s better to look at these color photos to fully appreciate the Kafkaesque system the government has put in place.
What living director has drawn the descriptor “surreal” more often than David Lynch? If you’ve seen, or rather experienced, a few of his films — particularly Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire, or even the first half of his television series Twin Peaks — you know he’s earned it. Like any surrealist worth his salt, Lynch creates his own version of reality, with its own set of often unfathomable and inexplicably but emotionally and psychologically resonant qualities. In 1987, the year after his breakthrough Blue Velvet opened in theaters, the BBC apparently thought him enough of an authority on the matter of cinematic surrealism to enlist him to present an episode of Arena on the subject.
And so we’ve highlighted, just above in two parts, the fruit of their collaboration, with apologies for the straight-from-the-VHS quality of the video. (I just think of the slight muddledness as adding another welcome layer of unreality to the proceedings.)
Lynch’s duties on the broadcast include providing facts about the films and filmmakers excerpted throughout to tell the history of surrealist film. (He also provides several choice opinions, as when he calls Philadelphia “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.”) We see bits and pieces of pictures like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 Un Chien Andalou (above), Jean Cocteau’s 1932 Blood of a Poet, Fernand Léger’s 1947 The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, and Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée. Not only does Lynch contextualize them, he discusses their influence on his own work. Casual filmgoers who’ve caught a Lynch movie or two and taken them as the imaginings of an entertaining weirdo will, after watching this episode, come to understand how long a tradition they fit into — and they’ll no doubt want to see not just more of Lynch’s work, but his sources of inspiration as well. (They may, however, after hearing all he has to say here, still regard him as a weirdo.)
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