A quick note: Nature announced yesterday that it will make all of its articles free to view, read, and annotate online. That applies to the historic science journal (launched in 1869) and to 48 other scientific journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Other titles include Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics.
All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded… The content-sharing policy … marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.
But wait, there are a few more caveats. The archives will be made available to subscribers (e.g., researchers at universities) as well as 100 media outlets and blogs, and they can then share the articles (as read-only PDFs) with the rest of the world. This is all part of a one-year experiment.
Opening with maximum fanfare and pomp, and closing with the sound of dive bombers, “In the Flesh?,” the first track on Pink Floyd’s magnum opus The Wall announces that the two-disc concept album will be big, bombastic, and important. All that it is, but it’s also somber, groovy, even sometimes delicate, harnessing the band’s full range of strengths—David Gilmour’s minimalist funk rhythms and soaring, complex blues leads, Nick Mason’s timpani-like drum fills and thumping disco beats, and Richard Wright’s moody keyboard soundscapes. Under it all, the propulsive throb of Roger Waters’ bass—and presiding over it his jaded, nostalgic vision of personal and social alienation.
Expertly blending personal narrative with trenchant, if at times not particularly subtle, social critique, Waters’ rock opera—and it is, primarily, his—debuted just over 35 years ago on November 30, 1979. The project grew out of a collection of demos Waters wrote and recorded on his own. He presented the almost-fully formed album (minus the few collaborations with Gilmour like “Comfortably Numb”) to the band and producer Bob Ezrin, who described it as “Roger’s own project and not a group effort.” That may be so in its composition, but the final recording is a glorious group effort indeed, showcasing each member’s particular musical personality, as well as those of a host of guest musicians. The legendary stage show drew together an even larger pool of talent, such as political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, whose animations were projected on a giant cardboard wall that slowly came down over the course of the concert.
At the top of the page, see the band play the entirety of the album at Earl’s Court in London, and just above, watch a “lost” documentary compiled from behind-the-scenes footage of that show, the last of thirty the band performed on The Wall tour, which began in Los Angeles. We get interviews with the band and crew, Waters at sound check, and “the frenetic operation of the entire load-in process.” Architect Mark Fisher describes the planning and creation of the stage show—a year in the making—from the wall itself to the huge inflatable characters made from Scarfe’s animations. It’s a fascinating look at the very first show of its kind, a huge multimedia extravaganza that blew audiences away and raised the bar for every arena rock tour that followed.
The film version of The Wall, which debuted almost three years later in 1982, was also decidedly a collaborative affair. Just above, a documentary called “The Other Side of The Wall” introduces us to “four very different talents”: Waters, Scarfe, director Alan Parker, and star Bob Geldof. (Album producer Ezrin doesn’t get a mention, though he claims to have written the film’s script.) Giving us a look at “how the final brick in The Wall fell into place,” the short film begins with Waters’ inspiration for the concept album; he tells us in his own words how it grew from his frustrations with the stadium touring for Animals. Parker discusses his artistic intention to not make “a concept movie” (though the movie seems to be exactly that), and Scarfe talks about his designs for the album and film, which Parker describes as “weird” and “psychopathic.”
The final piece of behind-the-scenes making of The Wall we bring you is the BBC Radio interview, above, that Waters’ gave in 1979. He talks about the album’s genesis, and breaks down the meaning of each song at length. Waters’ relationship with The Wall defined the rest of his career after he left Pink Floyd in 1986. In fact, since 2010, he’s been touring his version of the stage show, and has produced a documentary of its revival. But long before the current incarnation of the enduringly classic album and live spectacle, he brought a revival of The Wall to Berlin in 1990 to commemorate the fall of that city’s literal wall eight months earlier. See the full concert video of that show below. Featuring an array of guest musicians, the show approximates the musical intensity of the original 1980 tour—but nothing, of course, can substitute for the incredible energy of the original four members of the band playing together. The vision may have been all Waters, but the execution of The Wall needed Pink Floyd for its success.
Gentle reader, if you feel your knee jerking at Thug Notes, may I suggest taking a moment to gaze beyond the gold bling and du-rag favored by its fictitious host, literature lover Sparky Sweets, PhD.
A poor choice of metaphor, given the fictitious Dr. Sweets’ soft spot for baby felines. It’s not something he talks about on the show, but he frequently tweets photos of himself in their oh-so-cuddly company, tagging them #kittentherapy.
He (or perhaps head writer / producer Jared Bauer) also turns to Twitter to disseminate quotes by the likes of Cervantes (“Diligence is the mother of good fortune”) and Orwell (“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does”).
Thug Notes’ tagline “classic literature, original gangsta” may be its punchline, but the humor of incongruity is not its sole aim.
Comedian Greg Edwards, who plays Sparky Sweets, told The New York Times that the project is “trivializing academia’s attempt at making literature exclusionary by showing that even highbrow academic concepts can be communicated in a clear and open fashion.”
Amen. As Sparky Sweets observes following Simon’s murder in the Lord of the Flies above, “Whoo, this $hit (is) gettin’ real!”
Is there an equal or greater danger that a reluctant student might be prodded in a positive direction by Sparky’s zesty, insightful take on their assigned reading?
Resoundingly, yes.
Thug Notes’ discussion of racism as portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird is not the longest I’ve ever heard, but it is the most straightforward and bracing. It got my blood going! I’m inspired to drag my dog eared paperback copy out and give it another read! (Maybe I’ll have a Scotch and play some classical music. Sparky does that too.)
I’m hoping the kids at the high school a couple of blocks away — who, for the record, look and sound far more like Sparky than they do me — will be encouraged to supplement their reading of this book, and others, with Thug Notes.
As an out-of-character Greg Edwards, bearing as much resemblance to Sparky Sweets as Stephen Colbert does to his most famous creation, told interviewer Tavis Smiley:
We don’t want to stop kids from reading the book. We just want to open up doors. Maybe teachers can use it. It’s hard being a teacher nowadays. You’re underpaid, you’re overworked, the classrooms are full, the kids are crazy, so throw this on and maybe it’ll spark one kid’s attention.
As of this writing, Thug Notes has tackled dozens of titles (you can watch them all here, or right below), a heaping helping of banned books, and four of Shakespeare’s plays (above).
New titles will be added every other Tuesday. I can’t wait.
Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market.
Leonardo Da Vinci was, however, no ordinary person. And his to-do lists were anything but dull.
Da Vinci would carry around a notebook, where he would write and draw anything that moved him. “It is useful,” Leonardo once wrote, to “constantly observe, note, and consider.” Buried in one of these books, dating back to around the 1490s, is a to-do list. And what a to-do list.
NPR’s Robert Krulwich had it directly translated. And while all of the list might not be immediately clear, remember that Da Vinci never intended for it to be read by web surfers 500 years in the future.
[Calculate] the measurement of Milan and Suburbs
[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio
[Discover] the measurement of Corte Vecchio (the courtyard in the duke’s palace).
[Discover] the measurement of the castello (the duke’s palace itself)
Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion.
Get the Brera Friar (at the Benedictine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Ponderibus (a medieval text on mechanics)
[Talk to] Giannino, the Bombardier, re. the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes (no one really knows what Da Vinci meant by this)
Ask Benedetto Potinari (A Florentine Merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders
Draw Milan
Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night.
[Examine] the Crossbow of Mastro Giannetto
Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner
[Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the mathematic.
You can just feel Da Vinci’s voracious curiosity and intellectual restlessness. Note how many of the entries are about getting an expert to teach him something, be it mathematics, physics or astronomy. Also who casually lists “draw Milan” as an ambition?
Later to-do lists, dating around 1510, seemed to focus on Da Vinci’s growing fascination with anatomy. In a notebook filled with beautifully rendered drawings of bones and viscera, he rattles off more tasks that need to get done. Thingslike get a skull, describe the jaw of a crocodile and tongue of a woodpecker, assess a corpse using his finger as a unit of measurement.
On that same page, he lists what he considers to be important qualities of an anatomical draughtsman. A firm command of perspective and a knowledge of the inner workings of the body are key. So is having a strong stomach.
You can see a page of Da Vinci’s notebook above but be warned. Even if you are conversant in 16th century Italian, Da Vinci wrote everything in mirror script.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
There’s never been a bad time to revisit Blade Runner, but now, with all the news about the in-development Blade Runner 2 breaking even as you read this, it seems like an especially appropriate time to go deeper into Ridley Scott’s piece of groundbreaking, Philip K. Dick-adapting cyberpunk cinema. Whatever you think of the prospect of a sequel, if you call yourself a Blade Runner fan, you’ll never turn down a chance for another look behind the scenes of the original.
Hence our offering today of BBC critic Mark Kermode’s documentary above, On the Edge of Blade Runner, and, via Flavorwire, a selection of original storyboards from the film. Few science-fiction movies hold up so well aesthetically after 32 years, but only because few science-fction movies had so much sheer work put into their design — we are still, I imagine, assured a steady stream of production materials to gaze upon for a long time to come.
In recent years, for instance, Sean Young, who played the replicant Rachel, released her Polaroid photos from the film’s set. And if you missed it the first time around, you’ll want to circle back to our post featuring a freely readable online version of Blade Runner Sketchbook, a collection of over 100 production drawings and pieces of artwork that originally came out alongside the film. (See it above.)
And whatever direction Blade Runner 2 takes, promising or less so, we’ll all hear a lot about it in the coming months. So to balance out the coming wave of promotion for the second one, why not watch a little of the promotion of the first one in the form of the convention reel below (produced not least to counter all the bad press the production had drawn at the time), which contains interviews with some of those responsible for Blade Runner’s most enduring qualities: Ridley Scott, “visual futurist” Syd Mead, and visual effects designer Douglas Trumbull. If all three of those guys work on the sequel, well, maybe I’ll start getting excited.
On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks took her fateful bus ride in Montgomery, Alabama.
As the story is often told, Parks was a diminutive African-American seamstress who was weary from a long day of work at a downtown department store. Her feet ached, so when the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white man who had just gotten on the bus, Parks refused, accidently setting into motion a series of events that led to the modern Civil Rights Movement.
The problem with the story, told in that way, is that it is grossly misleading.
Besides being a seamstress, Parks was a political organizer and activist, a member of the Montgomery Voters League and secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. And while it’s true that Parks didn’t know when she boarded the bus that day that she would commit an act of civil disobedience, when the moment arose she knew what she was doing, and why. As Parks later wrote in her autobiography:
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
Parks was not the first black person to be arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up a seat on Montgomery’s racially segregated buses. There was a growing sense in the African-American community that the time was ripe for change. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
The Women’s Political Council in Montgomery was already laying the groundwork for a boycott of the city bus system when it learned of Parks’ arrest. Given the respect and support Parks had within the community, the group decided it was an opportune moment to take action. A one-day boycott was held on the day of Parks’s trial (she was convicted of violating Chapter 6, Section 11 of the Montgomery City Code and ordered to pay a $10 fine plus $4 in court costs) and a longer one was launched shortly afterward, crippling the finances of the company that ran the bus system, which typically derived over 75 percent of its fare revenue from African-American passengers. That boycott lasted more than a year, until late December of 1956, when the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in Browder, et al v. Gayle that the segregation of Montgomery’s bus system was unconstitutional.
The documents shown here were submitted as evidence in Browder v. Gayle. The arrest report (above) states that Parks was sitting in the white section of the bus. Actually, she had complied with the law when she first entered, sitting down behind the first 10 seats which were permanently reserved for whites. (See the chart below; the front of the bus is at the top of the chart, with the driver’s seat designated by an “X.”) Under Montgomery law, the bus driver had the discretion to move blacks farther back when the white section filled up. Black people paid the same fare as whites, but were often ordered to exit the bus after paying the fare and re-enter through the back door. In standing-room-only conditions, they were not allowed even to stand next to white people.
At rush hour on Dec. 1, 1955, the bus was filling up as Parks and three other African-Americans sat in the first row behind the white section. When a white man entered the bus, the driver James F. Blake ordered Parks and the other three to leave their seats and move back, where they would all have to stand. After hesitating, the others got up but Parks stayed seated. In The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis reconstructs the scene:
Blake wanted the seats. “I had police powers — any driver did.” The bus was crowded and the tension heightened as Blake walked back to her. Refusing to assume a deferential position, Parks looked him straight in the eye.
Blake asked, “Are you going to stand up?”
Parks replied, “No.” She then told him she was not going to move “because I got on first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.”
A friend recently told me about a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris he attended in a state of, er, expanded perception. The vivid sci-fi trip he’d expected turned into the most harrowing emotional experience of his life.2001: A Space Odyssey has proven a reliable favorite of the consciousness-altering crowd since it came out in 1968, almost to the point where you’d think Kubrick made the film just for them. But Tarkovsky’s 1972 story of a sentient planet and the hallucinations with which it tempts and torments a nearby space station has an entirely different existential conception of mankind’s venture into the unknown realms of space and time. Whatever your own state of mind, you can watch Solaris free online. (Watch below and make sure click “cc” at the bottom of the videos to launch the subtitles.) If you don’t feel sure about taking the plunge, have a look first at the updated trailer above.
Reworking Stanislaw Lem’s original novel toward his own artistic ends, Tarkovsky realized his vision of the future with a number of unusual techniques. Viewers often take special, bemused notice of the scene above, a five-minute drive down an urban highway which comes just before the protagonist, psychologist Kris Kelvin, departs for his space mission. (Tarkovsky liked to say he put it there to discourage impatient filmgoers.) The clip includes commentary from film scholars Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie. As Johnson explains, “Tarkovsky knew that in order to situate the story in a foreign place and a distant time, both to fulfill genre requirements and deflect potential censors, he needed to contrast his nostalgia for nature and the past with a city of the future.” And so, unable to build such a thing on his limited budget, Tarkovsky went to Tokyo: “The Japanese road signs, the foreign cars, long tunnels, and multi-lane highways with winding bridges and overpasses might have represented a city of the future for early-1970s Soviet audiences used to simple two-lane roads and domestic tin-box cars, if they were lucky enough to have a car at all.”
Petrie references an entry from Tarkovsky’s diaries “where he worries that if the Japanese visa doesn’t come through in time, they will miss the end of the exhibition” — probably Osaka’s thoroughly future-oriented Expo ’70 World’s Fair. (Incidentally, next time you swing by Osaka, I do recommend taking a walk around the still-fascinating Expo ’70 grounds.) Tarkovsky did end up missing the Osaka exhibition, and so he shot in Tokyo instead. At Tarkovsky fan site nostalghia.com, Yuji Kikutake has gone through modern-day Tokyo and found the surviving landmarks of the Akasaka and Iikura neighborhoods over which the sequence passes — revealing the future, in other words, of the city of the future. Whatever you think of the resulting five minutes, the fact that Tarkovsky managed to go shoot them and that the officials in charge funded it demonstrates, as Petrie puts it, not just “the ingenuity of filmmakers trying to penetrate the Iron Curtain,” but “the high esteem in which [Tarkovsky] was held by the same film-industry bureaucrats who made his life miserable by cutting his budgets and trying to censor his films.”
The Beatles’ sojourn in India can seem like a bit of a stunt, as much a rock n’ roll cliché as Led Zeppelin’s trashed hotel rooms or Fleetwood Mac’s coke binges. Easily parodied in, for example, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the band’s turn Eastward looks in hindsight like faddish spiritual tourism. That impression may not be so far off. As one writer puts it:
By the late 1960s, The Beatles had engineered another pop culture revolution (at least in Europe and North America) by wearing Indian-style clothing, spouting religious and philosophical aphorisms that seemed to borrow from ‘Eastern’ thought, and later even visiting India for a highly-publicized training session to learn Transcendental Meditation with the fraudulent ‘mystic’ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
But while for John, Paul, and Ringo, “interest in Indian/Hindu culture was rather fleeting and temporal […] for George, India completely overhauled and changed his life permanently.” As Harrison himself would later recount of his first journey in 1966, “it was the first feeling I’d ever had of being liberated from being a Beatle or a number.” The rest of the band wouldn’t make the trip until two years later.
Harrison had principally embarked to study sitar under Ravi Shankar and learn yoga, but this was also a period of self-discovery and escape from, as he says, the “mania.” Traveling, as he always did, with a camera, he documented his journey. His pictures are far from ordinary tourist images.
While he describes in writing the “mixture of unbelievable things” he saw, he just as often turned the camera on himself, his photographic introspection made even more pronounced by his use of a fisheye lens.
Interestingly, in his recollection of the trip, Harrison references the surreal cult, sci-fi show The Prisoner as a prime illustration of life as “a number.” One of the show’s most memorable devices involves a huge, mysterious white bubble that captures or kills anyone trying to escape the sinister organization that holds the main character captive. In Harrison’s photos, the bubble becomes a paradoxical representation of his way out of fame’s fishbowl, of the prison of Beatlemania and an identity that felt contrived and alienating.
Behind his steady, serious gaze open up vistas that presage the breadth and depth of his immersion in Indian spiritual practices. Whatever one thinks of his conversion, there’s no doubt it was sincere, and lifelong. Not long after this first trip, at the age of 24, he wrote to his mother, “I want to be self-realized. I want to find God. I’m not interested in material things, this world, fame.” Harrison expressed the very same mystical aspirations in his final, 1997 interview, still playing and singing with his mentor Ravi Shankar.
Swedish animator Erik Wernquist calls his short science fiction film, Wanderers, a speculative look at “humanity’s future expansion into the Solar System,” a “glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds,” and “how it might appear to us if we were there.” The locations shown in Wanderers are all “digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data.” And Wernquist has a big still-image gallery where he walks you through his creative work. The voice accompanying the film is none other than Carl Sagan’s, taken from an audio recording of his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Astute sci-fi fans will also notice the influences of Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson and the master of space art Chesley Bonestell.
Opening with a childhood story from his life, the documentary above, Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity, tells us that the philosopher/journalist/novelist’s first love was “the howling and the tumult of the wind.” It’s a beautiful image for a writer who confronted the pain, joy, and confusion of human existence without the ready-made props of religious belief, nationalist allegiance, or ideological conformity. Camus’ “madness of sincerity” produced enduring work like The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, The First Man, and The Fall and won him a Nobel Prize in 1957.
His conviction also cost him friendships as he turned away from mass movements and pursued his own path. It was a cost he was prepared to bear. As he would write in The Fall in 1956, “How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for the truth at all costs is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing can withstand.”
After the wind, of course, Camus had many more loves, and many lovers. A few of them appear above, along with Camus’ daughter Catherine and son Jean to discuss the great themes of his work in three chapters: the Absurd, Revolt, and Happiness. With discussion and excerpts—read by narrator Brian Cox—from Camus’ work, the documentary traces his life from birth and a difficult childhood in French Algeria, to his daily editorials for Combat during the French Resistance, his turn against Communism and decision to live in near-exile in the ‘50s, and his premature death in a car accident in 1960 at the age of 47. All in all, the documentary leaves us with the impression of Camus as a magnetic individual, and a deeply principled one, who held true to the words quoted from his Nobel acceptance speech early in the film about the writer’s task, which is always, he said, “rooted in two commitments… the refusal to lie about what one knows, and resistance to oppression.”
The Darwinian theory of evolution is an amazing scientific idea that seems, at least to a layperson like me, to meet all the criteria for what scientists like Ian Glynn praise highly as “elegance”—all of them perhaps except one: Simplicity. Evolutionary theory may seem on its face to be a fairly simple explanation of the facts—all life begins as single-celled organisms, then changes and adapts in response to its environment, branching and developing into millions of species over billions of years. But the journey Darwin took to arrive at this idea was hardly straightforward and it certainly didn’t arrive in one eureka moment of enlightenment.
The process for him took over two decades, represented by the hundreds of pages of notes he left behind, all of which will be freely available online at the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History in 2015. This means 30,000 digitized documents, like the naturalist’s first “Tree of Life” at the top of the page, from a July 1837 notebook entry, and Transmutation Notebook D above, the first notebook in which Darwin began working on the theory of natural selection.
The Museum has currently announced that it is a little over the halfway point, with just over 16,000 digitized documents that cover, they write, “the 25-year period in which Darwin became convinced of evolution; discovered natural selection; developed explanations of adaptation, speciation, and a branching tree of life and wrote the Origin [of Species].” Director of the project David Kohn describes that latter famous work as “the mature fruit of a prolonged process of scientific exploration and creativity that began toward the end of his Beagle voyage… and that continued to expand in range and deepen in conceptual rigor through numerous well-marked stages.”
Now historians of science can trace those stages as though they were a fossil record, starting with that famous H.M.S. Beagle voyage, in which the young Darwin sailed from South America to the Pacific Islands—stopping at numerous sites, including the Galapagos Islands of course, and collecting samples and making observations. The journey produced a lively account, 1839’s Voyage of the Beagle, prelude to the fully developed theory presented 20 years later in On the Origin of Species. Looking into the Beagle voyage section, you’ll find hundreds of pages of notes, like that above on Galapagos mockingbirds. Darwin’s handwriting will present a challenge, which is why, Hyperallergic tells us, the project is “adding transcriptions and a scholarly structure to its high-resolution images.”
Hyperallergic also sums up the remaining contents of the huge archive, which in addition to the Beagle material will feature everything “from the rest of his life, which he spent defending his work.” This means “scribblings in books he studied, abstracts, his own book drafts, articles and their revisions, journals he read, and his notebooks on transmutation.” You’ll also find “some charming oddities” like drawings by the scientist’s children (above) on the back of original Origin manuscript pages. Learn much more about the archive, and Darwin’s lifelong work, at the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin Manuscript Project site.
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