Briefly noted: Give this wide-ranging interview with Tom Petty some time. Recorded in 2014, Petty talks with interviewer Jian Ghomeshi about his songwriting craft. The writing of songs, the rehearsal and recording process, the work in the studio, it all gets covered here. As he talks, one thing comes across: Whatever talents he had, Petty put in the hard work. He and the Heartbreakers mastered their instruments, kept getting better, and didn’t take short cuts, to the point where they could do magical things together in the recording studio.
Watch Part 1 above, and Part 2 below, where, at one point he says, “I’m doing the best I can. You can’t say I didn’t try really hard because I’m really trying hard to be good.” The value of trying–trying consistently–can never be understated.
Note: Some of the same themes get echoed in Tom Petty’s final interview, which he gave to the LA Times last week. You can stream it here.
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Common wisdom, and indelible memories of The Birds, warn that feeding seagulls, pigeons and other creatures who travel in flocks is a can of worms best left unopened.
This complimentary buffet proved such a hit, she hung up more.
Two years later, Barboni is serving a colony of over 200 hummingbirds from four 80-ounce feeders. Their metabolism requires them to consume 8 to 10 times their body weight on a daily basis.
Barboni’s service to her tiny jewel-toned friends extends well beyond the feeders. She’s diverted campus tree trimmers from interfering with them during nesting season, and given public talks on the habitat-destroying effects of climate change. She’s collaborating with another professor and UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer Nurit Katz to establish a special garden on campus for hummingbirds and their fellow pollinators.
The intimacy of this relationship is something she’s dreamed of since her birdwatching childhood in Switzerland where the only hummingbirds available for her viewing were the ones in books. Her dream came true when a fellowship took her from Princeton to Los Angeles, where hummingbirds live year-round.
Some longtime favorites now perch on their benefactor’s hand while feeding, or even permit themselves to be held and stroked. A few like to hang out inside the office, where the warm glow of Barboni’s computer monitor is a comforting presence on inclement days.
She’s bestowed names on at least 50: Squeak, Stardust, Tiny, Shy…
Above, Roland departs from his regularly scheduled programming and explores another facet of medieval life. Walking. That’s right, walking. It turns out that, as Boing Boing summarizes it, “before structured shoes became prevalent in the 16th century … people walked with a different gait, pushing onto the balls of our feet instead of rocking forward on our heels.” And that’s your lesson on medieval body mechanics for today…
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The music and the culture of hip-hop are inseparable from the Bronx, Queens, Harlem, and Brooklyn, NY. And now that the form is a global culture that exists in online spaces as much as it does where people meet and shake hands, its documentary history may be more valuable than ever. Hip-Hop began, unquestionably, as a regional phenomenon, and its formal qualities always bear the traces of its matrix, a confluence of African-American, Caribbean, and Latin American socio-cultural experiences and creative streams, meeting with new consumer audio technology and a drive toward countercultural experiments that took hold all over New York amidst the urban decay of the 70s.
Photo by Joe Conzo, Jr.
We know the story in broad strokes. Now we can immerse ourselves in the daily life, so to speak, of early hip hop, thanks to a partial digitization of Cornell University’s vast hip hop collection. The physical collection, housed in Ithaca New York, contains “hundreds of party and event flyers ca. 1977–1985; thousands of early vinyl recordings, cassettes and CDs; film and video; record label press packets and publicity; black books, photography, magazines, books, clothing, and more.”
Photo by Joe Conzo, Jr.
While this impressive trove of physical artifacts is open to the public, most of us won’t ever make the journey. But whether we’re fans, scholars, or curious onlookers, we can benefit from its curatorial largesse through online archives like that ofJoe Conzo, Jr., who “captured images of the South Bronx between 1977 and 1984, including early hip hop jams, street scenes, and Latin music performers and events.”
Photo by Joe Conzo, Jr.
While still in high school, Conzo became the official photographer for the early influential rap group the Cold Crush Brothers. The position gave him unique access to the “localized, grassroots culture about to explode into global awareness.” Cornell’s site remarks that “without Joe’s images, the world would have little idea of what the earliest era of hip hop looked like, when fabled DJ, MC, and b‑boy/girl battles took place in parks, school gymnasiums and neighborhood discos.”
Another of Cornell’s collections, the Buddy Esquire Party and Event Flyer Archive, preserves over 500 such artifacts, the “largest known institutional collection of these scarce flyers, which have become increasingly valued for the details they provide about early hip hop culture.” Local, grassroots scenes like this one seem increasingly rare in a globalized, always-online 21st century. Archives like Cornell’s not only tell the story of such a culture, but in so doing they document a critical period in New York City, much like punk or jazz archives tell important histories of London, New York, D.C., Paris, New Orleans, etc.
The third digital collection hosted by Cornell, the Adler Hip Hop Archive, comes from journalist and Def Jam Recordings publicist Bill Adler. The materials here naturally skew toward the industry side of the culture, documenting its leap from the New York streets to “global awareness” and a spread to cities nationwide, through magazine photo spreads, ads, promotional pics, press clippings, and much more.
Some of these collections are easier to navigate than others—you’ll have to wade through many non-hip-hop photos in the huge Joe Conzo, Jr. archive, though most of them, like his Puerto Rican portraits and landscapes for example, are of interest in their own right. Conzo’s photo journalism of the Bronx in the late 70s and 80s has all the intimacy and candor of a family album or collection of yearbook pictures—charmingly awkward, exuberant, and a stark contrast to the high-profile glamour of commercial hip-hop eras to follow.
The core of Cornell’s collection came from author, curator, and former record executive Johan Kugelberg, who donated his collection in 1999 after publishing Born in the Bronx: A Visual History of the Early Days of Hip Hop with Joe Conzo, Jr. It has since expanded to 13 different collections from the archives of some of the culture’s earliest pioneers and documentarians. Hopefully many more of these will soon be digitized. But we might want to heed Jason Kottke’s warning in entering the three that have: “don’t click on any of those links if you’ve got pressing things to do.” You could easily get lost in this incredibly detailed treasury of hip-hop—and New York City—history.
Think of movie stars, and you’ll almost certainly think of Marilyn Monroe; think of jazz singers, and you’ll almost certainly think of Ella Fitzgerald. Their skills as performers, their inherent iconic qualities, the time of the mid-twentieth century in which they rose to fame, and other factors besides, have ensured that these two women still define the images of their respective crafts. But before their ascension to cultural immortality, the Angeleno Monroe and the New Yorker Fitzgerald’s paths crossed down here on Earth in 1955, and, when they did, the movie star played an integral role in breaking the jazz singer into the big time.
If you wanted to play to an influential crowd in Hollywood back in the 1950s, you had to play the Mocambo, the Sunset Strip nightclub frequented by the likes of Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner, Bob Hope, Sophia Loren, and Howard Hughes. But at the time, a singer of the reputedly scandalous new music known as jazz didn’t just waltz onto the stage of such a respectable venue, especially given the racial attitudes of the time. But as luck would have it, Fitzgerald found an advocate in Monroe, who, “tired of being cast as a helpless sex symbol, took a break from Los Angeles and headed to New York to find herself,” writes the Independent’s Ciar Byrne.
There Monroe “immersed herself in jazz,” recognizing in Fitzgerald “the creative genius she herself longed to possess.” Together with Fitzgerald’s manager, jazz impresario and Verve Records founder Norman Granz, Monroe pressured the glamorous Hollywood club to book Ella. “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt,” Fitzgerald said later, in 1972. “She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night.” He agreed, and true to her word, “Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”
Though Monroe’s efforts didn’t make Fitzgerald the first black performer to take the Mocambo’s stage — Herb Jeffries, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryant had played there in 1952 and 1953 — she did use it as a platform to ascend to unusually great career heights, comparable to the way Frank Sinatra launched his solo career there. The story has remained compelling enough for several retellings, including Bonnie Greer’s musical Marilyn and Ella and, more recently, through the hilarious unreliability of an episode of Drunk History. As real history would have it, Fitzgerald would go on to enjoy a much longer and more varied career than the tragic Monroe, but she did her own part to repay the favor by adding nuance to Monroe’s superficial public image: “She was an unusual woman — a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”
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.
Rock photography is an art form in itself, as demonstrated by books and exhibitions of some of its masters like Mick Rock, Jenny Lens, Pennie Smith, and so many others. But two years ago, the Smithsonian turned to the crowd, to the fan, to the amateur photographer, with a call to submit photos from over six decades of rock and roll that weren’t hanging on gallery walls, but sitting in a shoebox somewhere. From fans with instamatic cameras to amateurs covering concerts for their school paper, the Smithsonian wanted another angle on our cultural obsession.
Websites Mashable and Dangerous Minds present a selection of photos from the book, such as a shot of Sly Stone at the height of his powers (and belt buckle size), a pic of the Talking Heads on stage in Berkeley, 1977; a dark and mysterious glimpse of Bonnie Raitt, circa 1974; and a shot of Cream playing the Chicago Coliseum taken from the side of the stage, with Ginger Baker’s head a complete blur. Also find Joni Mitchell at Kleinhans Music Hall. And The Ramones in Tempe, Arizona, circa 1978.
Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theatre, by Barry Schneier/Smithsonian Books
It’s a reminder of how unpretentious these live shows could be, happening in a world with the simplest of lighting rigs and decades from the big screen projections even up-and-coming bands now indulge in. For the most part, this was an intimate contract between the artist and the audience, all crammed into small clubs with smoke, sweat, heat, and, most importantly, electricity in the air.
The new book also features tales from the people who took the photos, along with some more professional photos to “flesh out this overview of rock and roll,” according to the introduction by organizer Bill Bentley. He adds: “The results, spanning six decades, aim for neither encyclopedic authority nor comprehensive finality, but rather an index of supreme influence.”
The Ramones in Tempe, Arizona, by Dorian Boese/Smithsonian Books
That supreme influence continues to be felt, for sure. Although the submission window is now closed, the Smithsonian’s website allows you to look through the hundreds of submissions to the project.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the 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.
40 years ago, David Bowie recorded “Heroes,” a song that tells the story of two lovers who embrace in a kiss by the Berlin Wall. How the song was recorded gets wonderfully retold by producer Tony Visconti, in a post/video we featured in January 2016. Don’t miss it.
Above, you can watch Depeche Mode’s new cover of “Heroes,” recorded to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the song’s official release (September 23, 1977). “ ‘Heroes’ is the most special song to me at the moment,” Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan told NME. “Bowie is the one artist who I’ve stuck with since I was in my early teens. His albums are always my go-to on tour and covering ‘Heroes’ is paying homage to Bowie.”
In another interview with Rolling Stone, Gahan talked more about the experience of recording this song: “I was so moved, I barely held it together, to be honest.” Watching the performance, I got a few goosebumps, I have to admit.
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Even if you’ve spent each and every day since you first saw Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner waiting for a sequel, you still might not be fully prepared for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 when it opens in theaters this Friday. The 1981 original took place in the Los Angeles of the then-far-flung future of 2019, meaning that 30 years have elapsed in the Blade Runner universe between its first feature film and its second. Much has taken place over those three decades, some of it portrayed by the three official short prequels released to the internet over the past month. Today we present them all in chronological order to catch you up with what happened after Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner Rick Deckard picked up that origami unicorn and left the building.
In 2020, the year after Blade Runner, the artificial-being-making Tyrell Corporation introduces a new model of replicant, with a longer lifespan, called the Nexus 8S. Two years later comes “the Blackout,” an electromagnetic pulse attack that destroys all technology within its reach. You can see it happen in Blade Runner Black Out 2022, the short at the top of the post directed by respected Japanese animator Shinichiro Watanabe (and featuring a score by Flying Lotus as well as a reprisal of the role of the quasi-Esperanto-speaking police officer Gaff by Edward James Olmos).
Replicants having taken the blame for the Blackout, their production gets legally prohibited until the efforts of an organization called the Wallace Corporation get the ban overturned in 2030. The man at the top of the Wallace Corporation, a certain Niander Wallace, first appears in 2036: Nexus Dawn (middle video), directed by Ridley Scott’s son Luke.
In that prequel we see Wallace, who rose to prominence on his company’s solution to global food shortages, submitting for approval his latest replicant, the Nexus 9 (although his negotiation strategy leaves little room for compromise). The younger Scott’s 2048: Nowhere to Run(below), which introduces a new and imposing replicant character by the name of Sapper Morton, takes place just a year before the sequel, by which time, according to the timeline unveiled at this past summer’s Comic-Con, “life on Earth has reached its limit and society divides between replicant and human.” Enter Ryan Gosling’s K, one of a new generation of replicant- hunters, who goes out in search of a predecessor who went missing some 30 years ago. All of this, of course, still leaves questions unanswered. Chiefly: will Blade Runner 2049 deliver what we’ve been waiting even more than three deacades for?
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.
The chief difficulty for anyone wanting to make an assault on our municipal theatre… is that there can be no question of revealing a mystery. He cannot just point a stumpy finger at the theatre’s ongoings and say, “You may have thought this amounted to something, but let me tell you, it’s a sheer scandal; what you see before you proves your absolute bankruptcy; it’s your own stupidity, your mental laziness and your degeneracy that are being publically exposed.” No, the poor man can’t say that, for it’s no surprise to you; you’ve known it all along; nothing can be done about it.
–Berthold Brecht, “A Reckoning”
Have you ever felt like Network’s Howard Beale? Ranting to anyone who’ll listen about how mad as hell you are? “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.”
Or maybe agreed with the weary cynicism of his boss, Max Schumacher? “All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.”
Faced with the cruel, stupid theater of mass politics and culture, we begin to feel a blanket of overwhelming futility descend. All of the possible moves have been made and absorbed into the programming—including the outraged critic pointing his finger at the stage.
Avant-garde artists since the late 19th century have correctly sized up this depressing reality. But rather than seize up in fits of rage or succumb to cynicism, they made new forms of theater: Jarry, Dada, Debord, Artaud, Brecht—all had designs to disrupt the oppressive banality of modern stage- and state-craft with mockery, sadism, and shock.
Their 80s New Wave antics seemed like a juvenile art-school prank. Behind it lay theoretical sophistication and serious political intent. “When we first started Devo,” says Mark Mothersbaugh in the “California Inspires Me” video above, “we were artists who were working in a number of different media. We were around for the shootings at Kent State. And it affected us. We were thinking, like, ‘What are we observing?’ And we decided we weren’t observing evolution, we were observing de-evolution.”
Wondering how to change things, the band looked to Madison Avenue for inspiration—intent on taking the techniques of mass persuasion to subvert the enchantments of mass persuasion, “reporting the good news of De-Evolution” in a joyous theater of mockery. The philosophy itself evolved over time, first taking shape in 1970 when Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale met at Kent State. Casale had already coined the term “De-Evolution”; Mothersbaugh introduced him to its mascot, Jocko-Homo, the 1924 creation of anti-evolution fundamentalist pamphleteer B.H. Shadduck.
Fascinated by Shadduck’s bizarre, proto-Jack Chick, illustrated freak-outs, Mothersbaugh and his bandmates adopted the character for the first single from their 1978 debut album (top). Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! announced their carnivalesque gospel of human stupidity. Devo proved nothing we didn’t already know. Instead, they showed us the elevation of idiocy to the status of a civil religion. (Later in the 80s, they would expressly parody the national religion with their Evangelical satire DOVE.)
The theater of Devo was weirdly compelling then and is wierdly compelling now, since the banality and casual violence of late-capitalism that threatened to swallow up everything in the twentieth century has, if anything, only become more bloated and grotesque. “As far as Devo was concerned,” writes Ray Padgett at The New Yorker, “Devo wasn’t a band at all but, rather, an art project… inspired by the Dadaists and the Italian Futurists, Devo’s members were also creating satirical visual art, writing treatises, and filming short videos.”
One of those videos, “In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution,” featured their “first ever cover”—Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man”—before they re-invented (or “corrected,” as they put it), the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” They would screen the 9‑minute film, with its footage of two men in monkey masks spanking a housewife, before gigs.
The concepts are aggressively wink-nudge adolescent, reflecting not only Devo’s take on the regressive state of the culture, but also Casale’s belief that “high-school kids know everything already.” But amidst the synths and shiny suits, we still hear Howard Beale’s cri de coeur, “I’m a human being dammit! My life has value!” Only in Devo’s hands it turns to dark comedy—as in the title of a song from their 2010 comeback record Something for Everybody, taken from words printed on the back of a hunter’s safety vest that call back to the band’s beginnings at Kent State: “Don’t Shoot, I’m a Man.”
Buddhist thought and culture has long found a comfortable home among hippies, beatniks, New Age believers, artists, occultists and mystics. Recently, many of its tenets and practices have become widely popular among very different demographics of scientists, skeptics, and atheist communities. It may seem odd that an increasingly secularizing West would widely embrace an ancient Eastern religion. But even the Dalai Lama has pointed out that Buddhism’s essential doctrines align uncannily with the findings of modern science
The Pali Canon, the earliest collection of Buddhist texts, contains much that agrees with the scientific method. In the Kalama Sutta, for example, we find instructions for how to shape views and beliefs that accord with the methods espoused by the Royal Society many hundreds of years later.
Robert Wright—bestselling author and visiting professor of religion and psychology at Princeton and Penn—goes even further, showing in his book Why Buddhism is True how Buddhist insights into impermanence, delusion, ignorance, and unhappiness align with contemporary findings of neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
The core of Buddhism is generally contained in the so-called “Four Noble Truths,” and Wright explains in his lecture above how these teachings sum up the problem we all face, beginning with the first truth of dukkha. Often translated as “suffering,” the word might better be thought of as meaning “unsatisfactoriness,” as Wright illustrates with a reference to the Rolling Stones. Jagger’s “can’t get no satisfaction,” he says, captures “a lot of the spirit of what is called the First Noble Truth,” which, along with the Second, constitutes “the Buddha’s diagnosis of the human predicament.” Not only can we not get what we want, but even when we do, it hardly ever makes us happy for very long.
Rather than impute our misery to the displeasure of the gods, the Buddha, Wright tells Lion’s Roar, “says the reason we suffer, the reason we’re not enduringly satisfied, is that we don’t see the world clearly. That’s also the reason we sometimes fall short of moral goodness and treat other human beings badly.” Desperate to hold on to what we think will satisfy us, we become consumed by craving, as the Second Noble Truth explains, constantly clinging to pleasure and fleeing from pain. Just above, Wright explains how these two claims compare with the theories of evolutionary psychology. His course also explores how meditation releases us from craving and breaks the vicious cycle of desire and aversion.
Overall, the issues Wright addresses are laid out in his course description:
Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people?
As to the last question, Wright is not alone among scientifically-minded people in answering with a resounding yes. Rather than relying on the beneficence of a supernatural savior, Buddhism offers a course of treatment—the “Noble Eightfold Path”—to combat our disposition toward illusory thinking. We are shaped by evolution, Wright says, to deceive ourselves. The Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness, and the ethics of compassion and nonharming, are “in some sense, a rebellion against natural selection.”
When the news broke last week of the death of game-show host Monty Hall, even those of us who couldn’t quite put a face to the name felt the ring of recognition from the name itself. Hall became famous on the long-running game show Let’s Make a Deal, whose best-known segment “Big Deal of the Day” had him commanding his players to choose one of three numbered doors, each of which concealed a prize of unknown desirability. It put not just phrases like “door number three” into the English lexicon but contributed to the world of stumpers the Monty Hall Problem, the brain-teaser based on the much-contested probability behind which door a contestant should choose.
“Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats,” went the question, setting up a Let’s Make a Deal-like scenario. “You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, ‘Do you want to pick door No. 2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?” Yes, replied the unhesitating Savant and her Guinness World Record-setting IQ, you should switch. “The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance.”
This logic, which you can see broken down by University of California, Berkeley statistics professor Lisa Goldberg in the Numberphile video at the top of the post, drew about 10,000 letters of disagreement in total, many from academics at respectable institutions. Michael Shermer received a similarly vehement response when he addressed the issue in Scientific American eighteen years later. “At the beginning of the game you have a 1/3rd chance of picking the car and a 2/3rds chance of picking a goat,” he explained. “Switching doors is bad only if you initially chose the car, which happens only 1/3rd of the time. Switching doors is good if you initially chose a goat, which happens 2/3rds of the time.” Thus the odds of winning by switching becomes two out of three, double those of not switching.
Useful advice, presuming you’d prefer a Bricklin SV‑1 or an Opel Manta to a goat, and that the host opens one of the unselected doors every time without fail, which Hall didn’t actually do. When he did open it, he later explained, the contestants made the same assumption many of Savant and Shermer’s complainants did: “They’d think the odds on their door had now gone up to 1 in 2, so they hated to give up the door no matter how much money I offered. By opening that door we were applying pressure.” Ultimately, “if the host is required to open a door all the time and offer you a switch, then you should take the switch. But if he has the choice whether to allow a switch or not, beware. Caveat emptor. It all depends on his mood” — a rare consideration in anything related to mathematics, but when dealing with the Monty Hall problem, one ignores at one’s peril the words of Monty Hall.
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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