What is the Omicron Variant? How do vaccines work? And what about monoclonal antibody therapy? On this episode of StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a wide-ranging and quite informative conversation with George Yancopoulos, president of Regeneron, the company that created the monoclonal antibody therapy now being used in the fight against COVID-19. And there’s an interesting side note: During the 1970s, Tyson and Yancopoulos were high school classmates together at Bronx Science. They’ve both come a long way, and now they re-unite to explain the science behind the latest phase of the pandemic.
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Dirtiness has no description. It is a feeling. — music transcriber George Collier
You may be able to read music and play the clarinet, but it’s extremely unlikely you — or anyone — will be able to play along with Doreen Ketchens’ “dirty” solo on “The House of the Rising Sun,” above, despite an assist from Tom Pickles’ scrolling transcription.
It’s what Ketchens, a world renowned clarinetist and music educator, who has played for four US presidents and busks regularly in the French Quarter, would advise.
“You have to practice and be ready to perform at the drop of a hat” she told The Clarinet’s Ben Redwine, when he asked if she had any advice for young musicians hoping to make it professionally.
She’s also a strong advocate of listening robustly, not throwing in the towel when someone else gets the job instead of you, and letting your personality come through in your playing:
You don’t want to sound like you’re playing an etude book. This is for all types of music – even classical. You want to move the audience, you want to touch them.
Trained as a classical clarinetist, Ketchens cozied up to jazz shortly after she cozied up to the tuba player who would become her husband. “All of the sudden, jazz wasn’t so bad,” she says:
I started to listen to jazz so I could learn the tunes and fit in with his band. I started listening to Louis Armstrong. He is my biggest influence. Some people call me Mrs. Satchmo, I guess because that concept is in my head. I’ll hear something he plays, which I’ve heard thousands of times, and I’ll think, “What? How did he do that?” Then, I listened to the clarinetists who played with him: Edmund Hall, Buster Bailey, Barney Bigard. Those cats were awesome too! Edmund Hall had this thing he could do, where it sounds like he was playing two tones at the same time. People today might hum while they play to achieve something similar, but I don’t think that was what he was doing. Buster Bailey had a similar background to me, starting out with classical music, then learning jazz. Early on, I emulated Jerry Fuller, clarinetist with the Dukes of Dixieland. I would steal so many of his solos just so I could keep up with my husband’s band. Eventually, I realized what he was doing, and it translated into me being able to improvise. I’d start out transcribing solos, then playing by ear, copying what those clarinetists were doing. I don’t remember those solos now, but I’m sure that I still play snippets of them that creep into my improvisations.
However she got there, she possesses a singular ability to make her instrument growl and her command of 32nd notes makes us feel a little lightheaded.
Clarinetists abound in New Orleans, and they probably all cover “The House of the Rising Sun,” but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more exciting rendition than Ketchens’ on the corner of St. Peter and Royal, with husband Lawrence on tuba and daughter Dorian on drums. Here’s the full versions, sans transcription.
Find more astonishing, transcribed solos and a heaping helping of Jacob Collier on George Collier’s (no relation) YouTube Channel.
His transcriptions, and those of collaborator Tom Pickles, are available for free download here, unless the artist sells their own transcription, in which case he encourages you to support the artist with your purchase.
If you’re a music nerd who would like to discuss transcriptions, give feedback on others’ attempts, and upload your own, join his community on Discord.
Quentin Tarantino loves a cat-and-mouse scene, when forces of power and potential violence enter rooms, commandeer them, and play with their hapless victims. Think of Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules taking care of two hapless, out of their depth frat boy dope dealers—all the while helping himself to their Kahuna burger—in Pulp Fiction. Terrifying, hilarious, and electrifying: it has become one of his hallmarks. By the time of 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, he had perfected it so much that he devotes the film’s opening 20 minutes to one suspense-filled meeting between an unctuous Nazi and a French farmer, who is trying to hide a Jewish family under his floorboards.
Markus Madlangbayan (aka emotiondesigner) only has two film appreciation essays up on his Youtube site, and it’s a shame he didn’t do more. Here he takes us through Tarantino’s farmhouse scene, shot by shot, examining the director’s camera placement and composition, explaining his reasoning, and demonstrating why Quentin is a master of his craft.
Most directors use a standard form of coverage to shoot dialog scenes—a master shot of the two actors speaking, and then a close up of each actor with a tighter “punch in” shot of a face to emphasize drama. But Tarantino rarely does that, finding more interesting solutions to show the power dynamics in play. Farmer LaPadite at first has the upper hand, bluffing his way successfully through Hans Landa’s interrogation. That is, until he doesn’t. Tarantino will move his camera in an arc, breaking the 180 rule, and switching the positions of the characters on screen, even though they haven’t moved from their seats. The director has literally turned the table on LaPadite, just as Landa has done.
Tarantino is also very parsimonious with his close-ups. He gives LaPadite one as we see him steel himself for the approaching Nazis. He gives Landa one when all the social niceties are over, and instead he reveals he has known all along that they are sitting right above a hiding space. And finally, Tarantino gives LaPadite (and the actor that plays him, Denis Ménochet) a tight close-up as dread and impending death pass over his face.
Essayist emotiondesigner doesn’t do this, but this scene is asking for comparison with the aforementioned scene from Pulp Fiction. In 1994, Tarantino was hot and full of energy, but it’s actually a very conventionally shot scene, filled with close-ups and wides, but not without its wit. Fifteen years later, this short film-within-a-film opening shows how far the director had come.
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.
“I am sixty-five years old,” said John Cleese as he began one year’s convocation address at my university, “which is nearly dead.” It got enough of a laugh that I’m not surprised to find, looking it up all these years later, that he seem to have deployed the line many times since. “I’m now incredibly old,” he said last year in a video urging compliance with coronavirus rules. “I’m nearly dead. I am 81 years of age.” Nevertheless, he remains decidedly non-dead (and indeed active on Twitter) today, though no doubt reality-based enough to accept that he’s no less mortal than his fellow Pythons Graham Chapman and Terry Jones, who’ve preceded him into the afterlife — if indeed there is an afterlife.
Many will find the evidence discussed here fairly persuasive, especially the documented “near-death experiences.” In these cases “we have heightened mental thoughts when your brain isn’t functioning; we have accurate perceptions from outside the body; we have meetings with deceased loved ones who you didn’t know had died; we have meetings with deceased loved ones whom you didn’t know, period; and we don’t have a good physical explanation for this.”
So says Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, one of the panel’s five distinguished non-Pythons. The others are Jim B. Tucker, the Division of Perceptual Studies director; Edward Kelly, one of its Professors of Research; Emily Williams Kelly, one of its Assistant Professors of Research; and UVA Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences Kim Penberthy. Their work suggests to them that, while near-death experiences may not reflect the detachment of soul from body, neither do they seem to be straightforward hallucinations. The trouble with mounting a rigorous investigation into such a rare phenomenon is the necessarily small number of cases. These researchers might thus consider taking on Cleese himself as a subject; after all, the man’s self-professed state of near-death has lasted more than fifteen years now.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
Children are the perfect audience for The Nutcracker.
(Well, children and the grandmothers who can’t wait for the toddler to start sitting still long enough to make the holiday-themed ballet an annual tradition…)
Maurice Sendak, the celebrated children’s book author and illustrator, agreed, but found the standard George Balanchine-choreographed version so treacly as to be unworthy of children, dubbing it the “most bland and banal of ballets.”
The 1983 production he collaborated on with Pacific Northwest Ballet artistic directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell did away with the notion that children should be “coddled and sweetened and sugarplummed and kept away from the dark aspects of life when there is no way of doing that.”
Tchaikovsky’s famous score remained in place, but Sendak and Stowell ducked the source material for, well, more source material. As per the New York City Ballet’s website, the Russian Imperial Ballet’s chief ballet master, Marius Petipa, commissioned Tchaikovsky to write music for an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ child-friendly story The Nutcracker of Nuremberg. But The Nutcracker of Nuremberg was inspired by the much darker E.T.A. Hoffman tale, 1816’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.”
The “weird, dark qualities” of the original were much more in keeping with Sendak’s self proclaimed “obsessive theme”: “Children surviving childhood.”
Sendak wanted the ballet to focus more intently on Clara, the young girl who receives the Nutcracker as a Christmas present in Act I:
It’s about her victory over her fear and her growing feelings for the prince… She is overwhelmed with growing up and has no knowledge of what this means. I think the ballet is all about a strong emotional sense of something happening to her, which is bewildering.
Balanchine must have felt differently. He benched Clara in Act II, letting the adult Sugarplum Fairy take centerstage, to guide the children through a passive tour of the Land of Sweets.
It’s all very, very pretty and very, very beautiful… I always hated the Sugarplum Fairy. I always wanted to whack her.
“Like what kids really want is a candy kingdom. That shortchanges children’s feelings about life,” echoes Stowell, who revived the Sendak commission, featuring the illustrator’s sets and costumes every winter for 3 decades.
In lieu of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Sendak and Stowell introduced a dazzling caged peacock — a fan favorite played by the same dancer who plays Clara’s mother in Act I.
The threats, in the form of eccentric uncle Drosselmeier, a ferocious tiger, and a massive rat puppet with an impressive, pulsing tail, have a Freudian edge.
The painted backdrops, growing Christmas tree, and Nutcracker toy look as if they emerged from one of Sendak’s books. (He followed up the ballet by illustrating a new translation of the Hoffman original.)
The Sendak-designed costumes are more understated, thought Pacific Northwest Ballet costumer Mark Zappone, who described working with Sendak as “an incredible joy and pleasure” and recalled the funny ongoing battle with the Act II Moors costumes to Seattle Met:
Maurice’s design had the women in quite billowy pants. So we ripped them out of the box, threw them on the girls upstairs in the studios, and Kent started rehearsing the Moors. And one by one, the girls got their legs stuck in those pants and—boom—hit the floor, all six of them. It was like, “Oh my God, what are we going to do about that one?” They ended up, for years, twisting the legs in their costumes and making a little tuck here and there. It was a rite of passage; if you were going to do the Moors, don’t forget to twist your pants around so you won’t get stuck in them.
Rent a filmed version of Maurice Sendak’s The Nutcracker on Amazon Prime. (Look for a Wild Thing cameo in the boating scene with Clara and her Prince.)
Bing Crosby died in October of 1977, but that didn’t stop him from appearing in living rooms all over America for Christmas. He’d already completed the shoot for his final CBS television special Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, along with such collaborators as Ron Moody, Stanley Baxter, the Trinity Boys Choir, Twiggy, and a young fellow by the name of David Bowie. Of course, Bowie had long since achieved his own dream of fame, at least to the younger generation; it was viewers who’d grown up listening to Crosby who needed an introduction. And they received a memorable one indeed, in the form of the Bowie-Crosby duet “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy,” previously featured here on Open Culture.
This year you can watch Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas in its hourlong entirety, which includes performances of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “Side by Side by Side” (from the late Stephen Sondheim’s Company), a (perhaps embellished) musical delineation of the extended Crosby family, and a session of literary reminiscence with none other than Charles Dickens.
The setup for all this is that Crosby, his wife, and children have all been brought to England by the invitation of the previously unknown Sir Percival Crosby, who desires to extend a hand to his “poor American relations” — and who happens to live next door to Bowie, that most English of all 1970s rock stars.
The search for Sir Crosby proceeds merrily, at one point prompting his famous relative to chat with Twiggy about the nature of love and loneliness, emotions “just as painful and just as beautiful as they ever were. Whether you’re a novelist, poet, or even a songwriter, it’s all in the way you sing.” These reflections lead into a stark music video for the title track of Bowie’s “ ‘Heroes’ ”, which had come out just weeks before (coincidentally, on the very day of Crosby’s death). Though a somewhat incongruous addition to such an old-fashioned production, it does vividly reflect a certain changing of the transatlantic pop-cultural guard.
In their scene together, Crosby and Bowie do exude an undeniable mutual respect, the younger man admitting even to have tried his hand at the older man’s signature holiday song, “White Christmas.” Having set off the 1940s Christmas-music boom by recording it 35 years before, Crosby sings it one last time himself to close out this special. Before doing so, he describes the Christmas season as “a time to look back with gratitude at being able to come this far, and a time to look ahead with hope and optimism.” Like all the elements of Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas not involving David Bowie, these words were nothing new even then, but somehow they still manage to stoke our Christmas spirit all these decades later.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
Sadek Waff, creator of thrillingly precise “murmurations” such as the one above, is also inspired by street dance — particularly the popping hip hop moves known as Tutting and ToyMan.
The nature lover and founder of the dance troupe Géométrie Variable uses both to excellent effect, channeling a starling flock’s hive mind with human dancers, whose lower halves remain firmly rooted. It’s all about the hands and arms, punctuated with the occasional neck flex.
There is magic everywhere, the key is knowing how to look and listen in silence. Like a cloud of birds forming waves in the sky, each individual has their own identity but also has an irreplaceable place in the whole.
To achieve these kaleidoscopic murmurations, Waff’s dancers drill for hours, counting aloud in unison, refining their gestures to the point where the individual is subsumed by the group.
The use of mirrors can heighten the illusion:
The reflection brings a symmetrical dimension, like a calm body of water contemplating the spectacle from another point of view, adding an additional dimension, an extension of the image.
The larger the group, the more dazzling the effect, though a video featuring a smaller than usual group of dancers — 20 in total — is helpful for isolating the components Waff brings to bear in his avian-inspired work.
We’re particularly enthralled by the murmuration Waff created for the 2020 Paralympic Games’ closing ceremony in Tokyo, using both professionals and amateurs in matching black COVID-precaution masks to embody the event’s themes of “harmonious cacophony” and “moving forward.” (Notice that the front row of dancers are wheelchair users.)
What does it take to be an artist? In the short film above by Jakub Blank, artist Bill Blaine meditates on the question as he strolls around his home and studio and talks about his work. Blaine has aged into the realization that making art is what fulfills him, even though it probably won’t bring him immortal fame. “I’ve thought about this,” he says. “I would probably be a happier person if I were painting all the time.” Bloated egos belong to the young, and Blaine is glad to put the “absurd” ambitions of youth behind him. “In the old days,” he muses, “your ego was so big, that you wanted to be better than everybody else, you wanted to be on the cutting edge of things… at least with old age, you don’t have a lot of that.”
And yet, though he seems to have everything an artist could want in the material sense – a palatial estate with its own well-appointed studio – a melancholy feeling of defeat hangs over the artist. Sadness remains in his ready smile as he gently interrogates himself, “So then, why the hell aren’t you painting all the time?” Blaine chuckles as he contemplates seeing a therapist, an idea he doesn’t seem to take particularly seriously. Aside from a few outliers, maybe the psychiatric profession hasn’t taken the creative impulse particularly seriously either. One psychoanalyst who did, Otto Rank, wrote in Art and Artist of the importance of creativity to all human development and activity.
“The human urge to create,” Rank argued, “does not find expression in works of art alone. It also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture.” Everything we do, from baking bread to writing symphonies, is a creative act, in that we take raw materials and make things that didn’t exist before. In Western culture, however, the role of the artist has been distorted. Artists are elevated to the status of genius, or relegated to mediocrities, at best, disposable deadbeats, at worst. Blaine surely deserves his lot of happiness from his work. Has he been undermined by self-doubt?
His vulnerability and the sharp candor of his observations leave us with a portrait of a man almost in agony over the knowledge, he says – again using the accusatory second person – that “you’re not going to be the next Picasso or the next Frank Stella or whatever else.” There’s more to the negative comparisons than wounded vanity. He should feel free to do what he likes, but he lacks what made these artists great, he says:
You have to be obsessive, you really do. Compulsive. And I’m not enough, unfortunately. Had a certain amount of talent, just didn’t have the obsession apparently. I think that’s what great artists have. They can’t let it go. And eventually, whatever they do, that’s their art, that’s who they are.
Blaine contrasts greatness with the work of unserious “dilettantes” who may approximate abstract expressionist or other styles, but whose work fails to manifest the personality of the artist. “You can see through it,” says Blaine, wincing. Shot in his “home and studio in Mount Dora, Florida,” notes Aeon, the film is “full of his original paintings and photographs. Blaine offers his unguarded thoughts on a range of topics related to the generative process.”
Artists are rarely their own best critics, and Blaine’s assessments of his work can seem withering when voiced over Blank’s slideshow presentations. But as he opens up about his creative process, and his perception of himself as “too bourgeois” to really make it, he may reveal much more about the struggles that all artists — or all creative people — face than he realizes.
Ambition is not unknown in the New York City of the 2020s, but the New York City of the 1920s seems to have consisted of nothing but. Back then, where else would anyone dare to propose the tallest building in the world — much less end up with the job twelve days ahead of schedule and $9 million under budget? The construction of the Empire State Building began in January of 1930, just three months after the Wall Street Crash that began the Great Depression. Though economic conditions kept the project from attaining profitability until the 1950s (and stuck it with the nickname “Empty State Building”), it nevertheless stood in symbolic defiance of those hard times — and, ultimately, came to stand for New York and indeed the United Sates of America itself.
You can see footage of the Empire State Building’s construction in the compilation above, which gathers clips from contemporary newsreels and other sources and presents them in “restored, enhanced and colorized” form.
These images showcase the history-making skyscraper’s technical innovations as well as its marshaling of labor at an immense scale: at the height of construction, more than 3,500 workers were involved. That most of them were recent immigrants from countries like Ireland and Italy reflects the popular image of early 20th-century America as a “land of opportunity”; the sheer scale of the skyscraper they built reflects the previously unimaginable works made possible by America’s resources.
The Empire State Building set records, and over the 90 years since its opening has remained a difficult achievement to surpass. Only in 1970 did it lose its title of the tallest building in New York City, to Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center — and then regained it in 2001 after the latter’s collapse. Today, one can easily point to much taller and more technologically advanced skyscrapers all around the world, but how many of them are as beloved or rich with associations? Back in 1931, architecture critic Douglas Haskell described the Empire State Building as “caught between metal and stone, between the idea of ‘monumental mass’ and that of airy volume, between handicraft and machine design, and in the swing from what was essentially handicraft to what will be essentially industrial methods of fabrication” — as good an explanation as any of why they don’t build ’em like this anymore.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to Christmastime eighty years ago, and imagine which holiday songs would have been in the air — or rather, which ones wouldn’t have been. You certainly wouldn’t have heard the likes of “Jingle Bell Rock” or “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” rock-and-roll itself not yet having emerged in the form we know today. Even the thoroughly un-rocking “Silver Bells” wouldn’t be recorded until 1951, for the now-forgotten Bob Hope film The Lemon Drop Kid. What of children’s favorites like “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “Frosty the Snowman”? None were popular until Gene Autry laid them down in 1947, 1949, and 1950, respectively.
Even “The Christmas Song,” whose most beloved version was recorded by Nat King Cole, wasn’t written until 1945 (as was “Let It Snow”). The year before that brought “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”; the year before that, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” That was recorded first and most definitively by Bing Crosby, the singer most closely identified with the 1940s Christmas-music boom. That boom began, as the Cheddar Explains video at the top of the post tells it, with Crosby’s Christmas Day 1941 rendition of “White Christmas,” just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“It’s no coincidence that the boom in Christmas tunes came during World War II, when tens of thousands of American soldiers were abroad defending their country, no doubt longing for the simple warmth of home,” writes The Atlantic’s Eric Harvey. “Irving Berlin invested ‘White Christmas’ with the sort of meterological longing that comes from living in Southern California, but troops picked up on the sentiment, making the song a classic in this regard.” This also happened to be the zenith of the golden age of radio (a compilation of whose Christmas broadcasts we featured last year here on Open Culture). “By the 1940s, radios were a default presence in most American homes. And by the late 1940s television was growing out of radio, and through the 1950s the pair set holiday living rooms around the country aglow with musical performances.”
That most popular Christmas songs still come from the 1940s and 50s (a Spotify playlist of which you can find here) has given rise to theories of a Baby-Boomer conspiracy to preserve their own childhoods at all costs to the culture. But then, as Christopher Ingraham writes in The Washington Post, “the postwar era really was an exceptional time in American history: jobs were plentiful, the economy was booming, and America’s influence on the world stage was at its peak.” Thus “what we now think of as the holiday aesthetic isn’t just about a particular time of the year — it’s also very much about a particular time of American history.” This aligns with the perception that Christmas has turned from a religious holiday into an American one. But take it from me, an American living in Korea: even on the other side of the world, you can’t escape its songs.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.
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