Sell & Spin: The History of Advertising, Narrated by Dick Cavett (1999)

in Business, Television | April 22nd, 2016

“According to a study published Monday by researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, humans experience the most intense feelings of happiness when pressing the ‘skip ad’ button before watching a video on the internet.” That comes from The Onion, whose satirical reporting hits the mark as usual. If we know one thing about advertising for sure, we know that we don’t like it — or at least we don’t like many of its current manifestations, so much so that we willingly engage in the arms race of downloading special programs to block them, which advertisers soon find a way to defeat, requiring us to find new evasive tactics, which forces advertises to cut another path to us, and so on.

How has it come to this? You can learn exactly how from Sell & Spin, the 1999 television documentary above. “From ancient phrases etched in stone to today’s cutting-edge multimedia commercials, selling has always meant grabbing attention,” says its narrator, the respected talk-show host Dick Cavett. “The point? Moving the product. The means? Tapping into desire — creating need.” From the first known advertisement, a wine shop’s sign from ancient Babylon, to the eve of the high-tech 21st century, Cavett and a host of advertising experts tell the story of not just how advertising became an industry in the first place, but how it became the huge, shape-shifting industry we regard today as both wildly creative yet somehow sinister.

Even the most ad-loathing viewer will recognize many of the iconic examples of this ultra-commercial art form of the thousands this documentary includes: Burma-Shave roadsigns, the smoke-blowing Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, the Volkswagen Beetle touting itself as a “lemon” on a whole magazine page, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”; mascots from Tony the Tiger to the Marlboro Man (a symbol of freedom, we hear, for postwar office workers shackled to their desks) to the Taco Bell chihuahua; and of course Coca-Cola’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” whose conception the final episode of Mad Men fictionalized by putting into the mind of its protagonist, 1960s Madison Avenue “creative” Don Draper.

That acclaimed recent television drama both glamorized and criticized the culture of the 20th-century advertising industry, which may have operated as cynically and opportunistically as the businesses it worked for, but which nevertheless crafted some of the most enduring words and images in our modern culture. But what of the “mad men” of today, charged with the thankless (if often remunerative) task of coming up with those videos we get such a kick out of clicking past? Sell & Spin shows us the very beginning of their work, taking place on a now-quaint-looking cyberspace that had only just moved beyond Burma Shave-simple banner ads.

“Nobody quite knows how to use it effectively,” says Jay Chiat of the internet toward the documentary’s end. As the co-founder of Los Angeles’ formidable Chiat/Day advertising industry, he knew the mechanics of the craft well indeed, more than thoroughly enough to recognize both the medium’s potential and the extent to which nobody had yet tapped it. How we all use the internet has changed dramatically since Chiat died in 2002, but his words still ring true. It’s still early days for internet advertising, and its maddest men (and women) — the ones who fully reject the old industry commandment to “irritate your way into peoples’ consciousness — have yet to arrive on the scene.

Sell & Spin will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Eisenhower Answers America: The First Political Advertisements on American TV (1952)

Before Mad Men: Familiar and Forgotten Ads from 1950s to 1980s Now Online

The Mad Men Reading List: 25 Revealing Books Read by the Characters on the Show

Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials

David Ogilvy’s 1982 Memo “How to Write” Offers 10 Pieces of Timeless Advice

A Gallery of Mad Magazine’s Rollicking Fake Advertisements from the 1960s

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Delight in Prince’s Extraordinarily Poignant Cover of Radiohead’s “Creep

in Music | April 22nd, 2016

Prince didn’t cover a song, he possessed it. He took over its limbs and made it do things it had never done before—dance wildly down the aisles, scream, shout, and fall to the ground. When he covered a song, it got religion the way people only do in the movies. And if you had the privilege to see it happen, you too became a believer in every word and note. As the producer Fafu, a onetime member of his army of players and techs, testified yesterday: “I never saw Prince make a mistake—in anything.” It may sound like a musician who fits that description would have to be some kind of robot; Prince was precisely the opposite, the apotheosis of what a human being could do with voice, guitar, and virtually every other instrument.

Unsurprisingly, Prince’s all-powerful control over his musicianship extended to most other areas of his life. He “was hard on people,” Fafu remembered, “I don’t want to paint an ugly picture, but he was tough. You wanted to please daddy.” He was equally hard on people who disseminated his recordings and performances in unauthorized ways. But in at least one case, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke fought back, forcing Prince to unblock access to Youtube footage of his 2008 Coachella version of “Creep.” And wow, are we glad he did. See it above (especially poignant is his gospel delivery of the line, “you just want to have controoool.”), and be reborn.

Prince reminds us that every hard rock ballad since the early ‘80s owes him a royalty check, and that just one of his screams, one of his explosive guitar fills, even one of his pregnant pauses, had more power and beauty in it than some entire albums. Prince didn’t have to want to be special. He just was.

As I shared yesterday, he was without a doubt the most incredible live performer I have ever experienced, so much so that I generally prefer his live recordings—bootlegged or otherwise—to his studio stuff. Millions of people feel likewise, and thanks to one fan, we have the full audio of that headlining Coachella show. Hear it all here (and see the setlist further down)—the ridiculously catchy funk/soul hits, the between-song inspirational patter, the soaring, snarling guitar solos, and the covers: including “Creep,” “Come Together,” Sarah Mclachlan’s “Angel,” songs by Santana, The Time, Sheila E., and, no kidding, The B‑52’s “Rock Lobster.”

via Live for Music

Prince (RIP) Performs Early Hits in a 1982 Concert: “Controversy,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover” & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Prince Plays a Mind-Blowing Guitar Solo On “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

in Music | April 21st, 2016

Amidst all its other unsettling excesses, 2016 has become a year of collective mourning as musical icon after musical icon passes away. The names begin to sound like a list of battlefield casualties. Our latest loss was much more than a leader among men: he was royalty.

Prince’s death strikes me as a tragedy for so many reasons: he was too young, only 57. He was—as for nearly everyone of my generation—a fixture of my childhood, a figure of impossible cool; his loss feels deeply personal. Lastly, Prince seemed so above it all—above all of the ugly, petty crap the rest of us slog through every day, including death.

All pop stars seem like that to their fans.

But when it comes to Prince, it wasn’t just his forever young sexuality that made me think he’d never die, but the fact that he could do anything, and I mean anything at all as a musician. He seemed to have no limitations. Unlike many of this year’s lost stars, I was lucky enough to see him play. That show became the high watermark by which I’ve unfairly measured every other performer.

He played for three hours, then held an afterparty and played for two more. He tore through his catalog, then played everyone else. Members of his band left the stage one by one, and Prince continued, picking up instrument after instrument. The hugeness of the sound didn’t seem diminished one bit when he remained on stage alone with his guitar at three o’clock in the morning.

And that guitar, man.… Whether his trademark butterscotch Telecaster or series of unique, signature instruments—he played like no one else: he made the guitar cry, sing, howl, wail, and launch into outer space hysterics. His power and control were unmatched. Eric Clapton, when asked what it felt like to be the world’s greatest guitarist, supposedly said, “ask Prince.” Apocryphal or not, it’s believable. No guitarist can be anything but blown away by Prince’s prowess. Witness his solo at the end of the 2004 all-star Rock and Roll Hall of Fame George Harrison tribute performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (top), widely cited as one one of the best guitar moments caught on tape, and as evidence for why Prince belongs in the top ten of world’s greatest players. He’s accompanied on the stage by Tom Petty (RIP), Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison.

I don’t think there’s any hyperbole in saying that Prince may have been the greatest stage performer of the past forty years, as a total package: showman, songwriter, and musician. And though he dominated center stage, he wasn’t too proud to play the sideman. Check him out above, for example, backing Lenny Kravitz on “American Woman.” But when it came time for Prince to take a solo (see him tear it up at around 4:50), it was like everyone else had left the stage.

Rest In Peace, Prince. As a guitarist, singer, and general explosion of purple amazingness, he was in a class all his own.

David Bowie (RIP) Sings “Changes” in His Last Live Performance, 2006

The Memorial Service & Celebration of “Lemmy” Kilmister, Motörhead Frontman, is Now Streaming Live

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Call Me Burroughs: Hear William S. Burroughs Read from Naked Lunch & The Soft Machine in His First Spoken Word Album (1965)

in Literature | April 21st, 2016

Image by Christiaan Tonnis, via Wikimedia Commons

Where did you first hear the voice of William S. Burroughs? Weary yet vigorous, flat yet powerful, wry yet haunting, it has, to a good-sized segment of several generations now, defined a cadence for the counterculture. Many of those enthusiasts (most of whom would have come to know the grand old man of the Beat Generation’s postmodernist wing through his writing, like the novels Naked Lunch and Junky) had their first genuine Burroughs listening experience through the record album Call Me Burroughs, first released in 1965, and more recently re-issued by Superior Viaduct.

In these sessions, recorded in the basement of The English Bookshop in Paris, Burroughs reads from Naked Lunch as well as Nova Express, the third book in the “Nova Trilogy” that the author considered a “mathematical continuation” of his best-known work. Both emerged as the fruits of the “cut-up” technique of literary composition Burroughs developed with artist Brion Gysin, creating new texts out of decontextualized and reassembled pieces of existing text found in the mass media.

“Burroughs believed that language and image were viral and that the mass-dissemination of information was part of an arch-conspiracy that restricted the full potential of the human mind,” writes Glenn O’Brian at Electronic Beats. “With cut-up, Burroughs found a means of escape; an antidote to the sickness of ‘control’ messages that mutated their original content. If mass media already functioned as an enormous barrage of cut-up material, the cut-up method was a way for the artist to fight back using its same tactics.”

Call Me Burroughs, which at one point became a deep-out-of-print collector’s item, has now come available free on Spotify. (You can download its free software here.) You can also stream it on Youtube. Counterculture chronicler Barry Miles notes that the Beatles all had copies (and Paul McCartney, particularly impressed with it, went on to hire its producer himself), and “art dealer Robert Fraser bought ten copies to give to friends such as Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithful and Keith Richards’ dealer had copies, as did numerous painters and writers.” So whatever inspiration you draw from this “talisman of cool in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s,” as Greil Marcus once called it, you’ll certainly join a long line of distinguished listeners.

Call Me Burroughs will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

via Electronic Beats

How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

William S. Burroughs Teaches a Free Course on Creative Reading and Writing (1979)

William S. Burroughs Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Becoming Bilingual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

in Education, Language Lessons, Neuroscience | April 21st, 2016

From the time my daughter was born, my wife and I took her out to restaurants—not to annoy the other diners, mind you, she was usually very well behaved—but to expose her palate to as much variety as possible and socialize her early to new and unfamiliar environments. At one establishment, during her second year, another toddler her age approached us, her mother trailing behind. “Can we say hi?” the mother asked. We said, “of course.” “What languages does your child speak?” the woman politely inquired.

We looked at each other, a little chagrined. Parents of young children often play subtle games of one-upsmanship, whether they mean to or not, and most parents fret over whether they’re offering their kids the richest learning experiences they can.

At that moment we felt slightly inadequate. “She just knows the one language,” we mumbled, turning back to our menus after a few more pleasantries. I may have studied Latin for several years, learned to read a little French and Italian and speak enough Spanish for some halting small talk, but for all intents and purposes, we’re a monolingual household.

And according to current research on infant brain development, this may put our poor preschooler at a disadvantage to children who can greet her in two or more tongues. That’s not only because those children will grow up able to easily conduct business across countries and continents, but also because, Big Think reports, “a new study shows that babies raised in bilingual environments develop more cognitive skills like decision-making and problem-solving—before they can even speak.” The brains of bilingual (and trilingual, etc.) people “look and act differently,” the TED-Ed video at the top of the post claims, than those of the monolingual. (The New York Times puts things more bluntly: “Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter.”)

Is this really so? Princeton University neuroscientist Sam Wang explains why it may be in the short Big Think video further up. Wang and other researchers have acquired their findings by conducting research on some of the most adorable scientific subjects ever. One study, conducted at the University of Washington, tested 16 babies—half from only English-speaking families and half from English- and Spanish-speaking households. As you can see in the video clip above, the tots were monitored via a magnetoencephalographic helmet designed specially for babies, as they listened to sounds specific to one or both languages.

Lead author of the study Naja Ferjan Ramirez writes, “results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function.” Her co-author Patricia Kuhl elaborates:

Babies raised listening to two languages seem to stay ‘open’ to the sounds of novel languages longer than their monolingual peers, which is a good and highly adaptive thing for their brains to do.

The University of Washington researchers are but one team among several dozen who have drawn these kinds of conclusions about the benefits of growing up bilingual. Both The New York Times and The New Yorker survey and link to much of this research. The New Yorker also profiles a skeptical study by psychologist Angela de Bruin that undercuts some of the enthusiasm and possible overstatement of the benefits of bilingualism; and yet her research doesn’t deny that they exist. Whatever their degree, the question might arise for anxious parents like myself: Is there anything we can do to help our monolingual children catch up?

Never fear, they can still profit from exposure to other languages, though you may not speak them fluently at home. Big Think offers a couple pointers for raising a bilingual child, even if you’re not bilingual yourself.

Lots of foreign words make their way into English. You can point out foreign foods every time you have them, or watch a bilingual show with your child. As long as you expose them to the foreign words in a consistent way with the same context, they’ll reap the benefits.

Try using a Language Exchange community, where you and your child can speak another language with native speakers together. You’ll both reap the benefits with constant practice.

Every little bit of exposure helps, and no amount of language training will ever do any harm. “Basically,” writes Big Think, “there is no downside to being bilingual.” The earlier we start, the better, but there’s no reason not to engage with other languages at any age. We can help you do that here with our expansive collection of lessons in 48 languages. And to learn even more about bilingualism and its prevalence amidst rapidly changing demographics in the U.S. and around the world, see the University of Illinois Spanish linguistics professor Kim Potowski’s TEDx talk below, “No Child Left Monolingual.”

via Big Think

Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons

200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mistakes, Just Chances to Improvise

in Life, Music | April 21st, 2016

One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”).

As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics) there was no advice more freeing. It was the opposite of what I thought I knew: mistakes were shameful, the sign of an amateur or of the lack of practice. But the more art I made, the more I referenced Eno’s idea, and the more I read and listened, the more I realized it wasn’t just Eno. The Beatles left in an alarm clock meant for the musicians on “A Day in the Life” and the sound of empty booze bottles vibrating on a speaker was left in at the end of “Long Long Long” (along with tons more). The Beastie Boys left in a jumping needle intended for a smooth scratch on “The Sounds of Science.” Radiohead left in Jonny Greenwood’s warm-up chord that became essential to “Creep.” (There’s a whole Reddit thread devoted to these mistakes if you choose to go down the rabbit hole.)

But those examples relate to the recording process of rock music. What about jazz? Surely there’s “wrong” notes when it comes to playing, especially if you’re not the soloist.

In this very short video based around an interview with pianist Herbie Hancock, the master improvisor Miles Davis honored Hancock’s mistake as a hidden intention by playing along with it. It’s both a surprising look into the arcane world of jazz improvisation and a revealing anecdote of Davis, usually known as a difficult collaborator.

“It taught me a very big lesson not only about music,” says Hancock, “but about life.”

h/t Jason W‑R

Watch Animated Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” & Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

Herbie Hancock Presents the Prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard University: Watch Online

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Vintage Sherlock Holmes Radio Drama, Starring John Gielgud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richardson

in Literature, Radio | April 20th, 2016

Can there ever be such a thing as too much Sherlock Holmes? Since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of the character in 1887, he’s never gone out of style; there are often several adaptations of Sherlock Holmes—in film, television, and otherwise—running simultaneously, and I never hear anyone complain about Holmes overload. In fact, Holmes holds the Guinness World Record for the most-portrayed literary character ever, with over 70 actors (but alas, no actresses, yet) playing the brilliant detective in 254 screen adaptations. And that’s not even to mention the thousands of detectives and detective-like characters inspired by Holmes, or his many cameo appearances in other fictional universes.

Comments sections may quibble and snipe, but it seems to me that we’ll never run out of opportunities to make more Sherlock Holmes films, television shows, video games, fully immersive holographic virtual reality simulations…. But there’s one medium that seems to have slowed when it comes to adapting Holmes—and everything else literary: Radio. (Though several podcasts have picked up the slack.) And as much as we love to see the arch looks on Holmes actors’ faces as they astonish and perplex their various Watsons—radio is a medium well suited to the dialogue-driven drama of Conan Doyle’s stories. One classic demonstration of this is a series of Holmes radio plays that ran from 1939 to 1947 and starred for a time perhaps the quintessential screen interpreters of Holmes and Watson, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as it was called, took a lighthearted approach to the characters and, as one reviewer puts it, could feel “quite rushed,” with the actors given little time to rehearse. Although the original series has many merits, in the ‘50s, NBC decided to improve upon it, taking the radio transcriptions of the Conan Doyle stories and re-recording them with new actors. Which actors? In many episodes, two of the finest British stage actors of their generation: Sir John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson. And in one episode, an adaptation of “The Final Problem,” the producers found to play their Professor Moriarty an actor whose voice dominated some of the most popular radio broadcasts of the age: Orson Welles.

You can listen to “The Final Problem” with Gielgud, Richardson, and Welles at the top of the post; hear all of the 1950’s New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes episodes (125 in all) just above, and download them at the Internet Archive. And, further up, hear thirty-two broadcasts of the original New Adventures starring Rathbone and Bruce. Like all commercial media then and now, each episode features its share of… well, commercials. But they also feature some very fine voice acting and excellent music and sound design. Most importantly, they feature the genius of Sherlock Holmes, who will live forever, it seems, in our imaginative media, whatever form it happens to take.

These fine recordings will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece

Arthur Conan Doyle Discusses Sherlock Holmes and Psychics in a Rare Filmed Interview (1927)

Sherlock Holmes Is Now in the Public Domain, Declares US Judge

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Rufus Wainwright Sing Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Album Featuring Florence Welch, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner & More

in Literature, Music | April 20th, 2016

How to classify the singing-songwriting of Rufus Wainwright? Pop? Folk? Surely we’ll have to throw a “neo-” or two in there. And we can’t ignore the importance of all things operatic to the work of this musician who grows more sui generis with every album he puts out — and indeed, with every stage production he puts on. His interest in opera dates back to his youth, and as early as his self-titled 2001 debut we can hear its direct influence in a song like “Barcelona,” whose lyrics borrow from Verdi’s Macbeth. Verdi, of course, was also working with some pretty rich inspirational material himself, and Wainwright has found an occasion to pay more direct tribute to William Shakespeare this April 22nd, on almost the 400th anniversary of that most influential English playwright’s death.

On that date, he’ll release Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, an album that finds him, in the words of NPR’s Stephen Thompson, “tackling the Bard’s work in a grandly sweeping collection of recordings” featuring the talents of “an assortment of singers and actors to perform these 16 tracks, many of which pair rich orchestral pieces with dramatic readings by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, and even William Shatner.” Yes, Wainwright has somehow managed to bring Star Wars and Star Trek together — and in the least likely of all possible contexts, one in which we also hear Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska, Florence of Florence + the Machine, Wainwright’s sister Martha, and a fair bit of German.

Fans of both the ambitious and nearly uncategorizable singer, fans of the (if you believe Harold Bloom) humanity-inventing dramatist, and many in-between will find in Take All My Loves many more feats of musical craftsmanship, literary creativity, and sheer cleverness. And they don’t have to wait until the actual anniversary (or in any case the day before) to do it. You can hear “A Woman’s Face Reprise” (based on Sonnet 20, for those playing the Shakespeare-scholarship home game) at the top of the post; “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (Sonnet 29) below that; and for a limited time, the entire album available to stream free from NPR, which gives everyone a chance to hear what one of our age’s most interesting bards has done in partnership with the Bard himself.

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

The Late, Great Alan Rickman Reads Shakespeare, Proust & Thomas Hardy

A Survey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course)

What Shakespeare Sounded Like to Shakespeare: Reconstructing the Bard’s Original Pronunciation

Such Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn’s Musical Tribute to Shakespeare (1957)

Lou Reeds Sings “Blue Christmas” with Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright & Friends

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Short Animated History of Zero (0): How It Started in India, Then Made Its Journey to the West

in Math | April 20th, 2016

Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Yes, I’m taking about Zero (0), a number that seems so essential to our system of numbers, and yet it hasn’t always enjoyed such a privileged place. Far from it.

In this short animation, Britain’s venerable Royal Institution traces the history of zero, a number that emerged in seventh century India, before making its way to China and Islamic countries, and finally penetrating Western cultures in the 13th century. Only later did it become the cornerstone of calculus and the language of computing.

India, we owe you thanks.

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A Huge Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music (1920–2007) Featuring John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart & More

in Music | April 19th, 2016

Image by Emily, via Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve taken any introductory course or even read any introductory books on music, you’ll almost certainly have heard it described as “organized sound.” Fair enough, but then what do you call disorganized sound? Why, noise of course. And all this makes perfect sense until your first encounter with the seemingly paradoxical but robust and ever-expanding tradition of noise music.

“Modern ‘noise music’ finds its roots in early electronic and industrial musics,” says Static Signals, which used to review a lot of the stuff. “Where composers began expanding their vocabulary of sound and instrumentation is where the concept of ‘noise’ begins: what sounds can produce music and which are purely static or noise? For some, music’s outer boundary is defined by western European classical instruments designed hundreds of years ago and the sounds, pitches, rhythms they can (classically) produce. For others, no sound, rhythm, tone, or pitch is off limits; music can be made by anything that can vibrate air.”

The development of electronic musical instruments — and indeed, any kind of sound-manipulating electronic device — came as a great boon to this exploration of the borderlands between organized and disorganized sound. You can hear the effects of that sort of technology and much else besides in An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, a seven-part anthology released by formidable Belgian experimental music label Sub Rosa, all of it available on Spotify (whose software you can download here if you need it). The first two volumes are embedded above; all seven volumes can be streamed via the links below. If you dig the collection, we’d encourage you to purchase your own copy and support Sub Rosa’s project.

An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #1 (Spotify playlist) features John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, DJ Spooky, and Sonic Youth (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #2 (Spotify playlist) features Captain Beefheart, Percy Grainger, Sun Ra, and (Eraserhead’s sound genius) Alan R. Splet (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #3 (Spotify playlist) features Faust, Merzbow, and Carsten Nicolai with Alva Noto (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #4 (Spotify playlist) features Gyorgy Ligeti, Steve Reich, and the Loop Orchestra (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #5 (Spotify playlist) features Pere Ubu, Dub Taylor, and Li Chin Sung aka Dickson Dee (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #6 (Spotify playlist) features Sachiko M, Pain Jerk, Henry Cowell, and Ultraphonist (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #7 (Spotify playlist) features Tziga Vertov, Cabaret Voltaire, Novi_sad — and, to end the anthology, a piece both anonymous and untitled (Buy on Amazon)

To the noise music-uninitiated — and probably even to a few of the initiated — some of the tracks here will sound like music, and some certainly won’t. But most of them fall fascinatingly in-between the two states, ideally expanding the listener’s conception of the sonic territory music can explore. Some musical experiments, just like scientific experiments, point in more fruitful directions than others, but each one sheds a little new light on the musical enterprise itself. And “the noise,” to take the words straight from Sub Rosa themselves, “goes on…”

via Ubuweb

The Avant-Garde Project: An Archive of Music by 200 Cutting-Edge Composers, Including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Cage & More

The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive

Hear the Experimental Music of the Dada Movement: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Century Ago

Hear Albums from Brian Eno’s 1970s Label, Obscure Records

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Mr. Rogers Introduces Kids to Experimental Electronic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson (1968)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Animation

in Animation, History | April 19th, 2016

From the makers of Titanic: Honor and Glory–a PC video game that lets you sail aboard a fully detailed re-creation of the RMS Titanic–comes an animation that lets you watch the sinking of the Titanic in real time. According to the web site Titanic Facts, the ship sank in two hours and 40 minutes in 1912. And that’s precisely how long things take to unfold in the video above. The animation narrates the events in a fairly straightforward way–nothing like the dramatic scenes painted in James Cameron’s 1997 fictionalized film. But it’s still worth the watch.

In the Relateds below, you can check out two related clips — a vintage clip showing footage of the actual Titanic in 1911, and another animated reenactment of the Titanic sinking, this one created by Cameron himself.

via coudal.com

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How the Titanic Sank: James Cameron’s New CGI Animation

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Animation

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