Jim Henson’s Animated Film, Limbo, the Organized Mind, Presented by Johnny Carson (1974)

Not hav­ing grown up dur­ing the Mup­pets’ first and high­est wave of pop­u­lar­i­ty, I’ve always won­dered how some­thing like The Mup­pet Show could pos­si­bly have attained such main­stream cul­tur­al pri­ma­cy. A friend of mine who did spend his child­hood watch­ing pup­peteer Jim Hen­son’s array of crea­tures do their thing on nation­al tele­vi­sion offers a sim­ple expla­na­tion: “It was the sev­en­ties.” Though Hen­son began his pup­petry career twen­ty years before The Mup­pet Show’s 1974 pilot episode, his dis­tinc­tive­ly earnest yet pre­scient­ly post-psy­che­del­ic vision seemed made for that decade. Amer­i­ca respond­ed by ele­vat­ing his work into the zeit­geist, and not just the stuff prop­er­ly involv­ing Mup­pets. Above, you can watch a 1974 clip from The Tonight Show fea­tur­ing a short per­for­mance from Hen­son and fel­low Mup­peteer Dave Goelz called Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind.

Hen­son and Goelz treat John­ny Car­son and the Tonight Show audi­ence to a jour­ney through the brain, as an abstract­ed, hand-oper­at­ed face nar­rates the pas­sage through organ­ic struc­tures like his medul­la oblon­ga­ta, and cere­brum, and the seats of things less defin­able, like thoughts of his fam­i­ly, thoughts of his ene­mies, his “extra-spe­cial sec­tion of good thoughts,” his evil thoughts, and his fears. The score comes from elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tion pio­neer Ray­mond Scott, whose 1964 album Sooth­ing Sounds for Baby has won great respect among enthu­si­asts of ambi­ent music. Watch­ing Lim­bo, the Orga­nized Mind in 2012 brings one obvi­ous lament to mind: why don’t they make such delight­ful­ly eccen­tric and artis­tic tele­vi­sion any­more? But of course they do make it, in stranger and less pre­dictable ways than even Hen­son did, but main­ly in the count­less frag­ment­ed, com­par­a­tive­ly mar­gin­al venues of mod­ern media. Lim­bo aired on a show that half the peo­ple you knew would have seen. It was the sev­en­ties.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jim Henson’s Vio­lent Wilkins Cof­fee Com­mer­cials (1957–1961)

Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncov­ered by AT&T: Watch Online

Jim Hen­son’s Short, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Film (1965)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Three Public Service Announcements by Frank Zappa: Vote, Brush Your Teeth, and Don’t Do Speed

By the 1980s, Frank Zap­pa was enter­ing the third decade of his musi­cal career. An icon of the avant-garde music scene, Zap­pa had cul­tur­al cap­i­tal to spend. And spend he did. On one occa­sion in 1986, Zap­pa appeared on CNN’s Cross­fire, where he sparred with con­ser­v­a­tives look­ing to cen­sor rock lyrics. On oth­er occa­sions, he record­ed pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments (PSAs) that encour­aged a younger gen­er­a­tion to make bet­ter life deci­sions. The PSAs dealt with the mun­dane and the dead­ly seri­ous, and things that fell some­where in between. But they were always pre­sent­ed in Zap­pa’s own dis­tinc­tive way.

Above we start you off with Zap­pa’s “Reg­is­ter to Vote” PSAs from 1984. It’s worth recall­ing that the ’84 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion pit­ted the incum­bent Ronald Rea­gan against Wal­ter Mon­dale. That’s fol­lowed by Zap­pa (now reborn as “The Den­tal Floss Tycoon”) record­ing PSAs for the Amer­i­can Den­tal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1981. And final­ly we head back to the late 1960s, when Zap­pa cut announce­ments for The Do It Now Foun­da­tion, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to high­light­ing the dan­gers of amphet­a­mine abuse. At its height, the cam­paign aired on 1,500 radio sta­tions across the US and beyond.

Brush Your Teeth

Don’t Do Speed

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The Famous Intro to 20th Century Fox Films … As It Ought to Be

The world be an infi­nite­ly more cheer­ful place if every 20th Cen­tu­ry Fox Film start­ed like this, would­n’t it?

Find us on Face­book and Twit­ter, and don’t for­get to check out our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Online Movies.

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Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)

Steven Pinker is an exper­i­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist and one of the world’s fore­most writ­ers on lan­guage, mind, and human nature. Cur­rent­ly at Har­vard, Pinker has also taught at Stan­ford and MIT, and his research on visu­al cog­ni­tion and the psy­chol­o­gy of lan­guage has won prizes from the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion of Great Britain, the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Soci­ety, and the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion.

This video (find part 1 above, part 2 below, and the tran­script here) is tak­en from a talk giv­en on Sep­tem­ber 10, 2008 at War­wick­’s Book­store in La Jol­la, Cal­i­for­nia. Here, we find Pinker talk­ing about his then new book, The Stuff of Thought: Lan­guage as a Win­dow into Human Nature, and doing what he does best: com­bin­ing psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science with lin­guis­tics. The result is as enter­tain­ing (and not safe for work) as it is insight­ful.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

2009 Kate Bush Documentary Dubs Her “Queen of British Pop”

Find­ing this short doc­u­men­tary on “Queen of British Pop” Kate Bush was a treat for me, I must con­fess, not least because of the always enter­tain­ing pres­ence of John Lydon (John­ny Rot­ten from the Sex Pis­tols). Hav­ing nur­tured a deep love for Bush’s music in my youth as a sort of guilty plea­sure, it’s only in my adult­hood that I decid­ed it’s ok to say, dammit, I think Kate Bush is just absolute­ly bril­liant and I don’t care who knows it. It’s prob­a­bly the case that with age, all guilty plea­sures just become plea­sures (or should, any­way). Alright, she may have sin­gle-hand­ed­ly inspired every melo­dra­mat­ic 80s teenag­er in a the­ater club to put on gauzy, home­made dress­es and twirl around war­bling and swoon­ing, but what, I ask, is wrong with that? There are worse things birthed by pop trends, that’s for sure, and it’s arguable, real­ly, how much of Bush’s music can be called “pop,” any­way, since she includes so many British and inter­na­tion­al folk influ­ences in her reper­toire.  And yes, it’s true, some peo­ple, like Lydon’s moth­er (whom he quotes above), think her singing sounds less pop star and more like “a bag of cats”–a reac­tion that seems to thrill him–but she cer­tain­ly made an impres­sion on David Gilmour, who passed her demo on to EMI and helped launch her career. In addi­tion to Lydon, Kate Bush: Queen of British Pop includes inter­views with Lily Allen, her ear­ly pro­duc­ers, and her broth­er, John Carder Bush, dis­cussing her song­writ­ing process as a young teenag­er.

It wasn’t long after her ear­li­est writ­ing efforts that Bush was signed to EMI at the age of 16 and set about record­ing her first album The Kick Inside. While she’s typ­i­cal­ly remem­bered for hits from her 1985 Hounds of Love—includ­ing “Cloud­bust­ing” and “Run­ning up that Hill” (and their incor­po­ra­tion into sev­er­al dance­floor hits of the 90s)—Bush’s first sin­gle “Wuther­ing Heights,” released when she was just nine­teen, hit num­ber one on the UK and Aus­tralian charts in 1978. Bush insist­ed that this be the first sin­gle from her album, despite the fact that, well, it’s an incred­i­bly bizarre song for a pop release, in its arrange­ment and its sub­ject matter—Emily Bronte’s 1847 goth­ic nov­el. But it works in a way that only Bush could get away with (cov­ers of the song are gen­er­al­ly ris­i­ble and uncon­vinc­ing). She some­how man­ages to per­fect­ly encap­su­late the novel’s chill and its poignan­cy, alter­nate­ly plead­ing and threat­en­ing in the voice of Cathy’s ghost, implor­ing the haunt­ed Heath­cliff to let her in again. (For a tru­ly haunt­ing expe­ri­ence, see this video of the track slowed down to an ethe­re­al 36-minute crawl). No one else could pull off this almost-pre­ten­tious bal­ance between the sub­lime and the ridicu­lous, com­bined with her inter­pre­tive dance and rolling eyes, with­out get­ting labeled as some sort of a nov­el­ty act, but as Lydon puts it, her “shrieks and war­bles are beau­ty beyond belief” to many ears, and she was tak­en seri­ous­ly and award­ed an icon­ic sta­tus. Or, in anoth­er one of Lydon’s lit­tle gems: “Kate Bush and her grand piano… that’s like John Wayne and his sad­dle.” I already warned you I’m a fan. You may just hear a bag of cats.

After the release of The Kick Inside, Bush embarked on her first and only tour in 1979. The video below is a per­for­mance of “Wuther­ing Heights” from a Ger­man appear­ance:

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, she would nev­er tour again and only per­form live spo­rad­i­cal­ly. This is in part due to her desire to con­trol every part of her career, from writ­ing and pro­duc­ing, to per­form­ing and pro­mo­tion. In “Queen of British Pop,” her broth­er describes her frus­tra­tion with the world of talk shows and mag­a­zine inter­views, which tend­ed to triv­i­al­ize her music and ask con­de­scend­ing ques­tions about her love life and hair styling. Any pop sen­sa­tion should expect this, I sup­pose, but Bush resent­ed the way she was objec­ti­fied by her label and the press. She con­sid­ered her­self a seri­ous artist and set out to prove it by focus­ing exclu­sive­ly on her work, not her­self, as the prod­uct, a deci­sion that earned her a rep­u­ta­tion (not entire­ly unde­served) as a “weirdo recluse,” but also enabled her to retain com­plete cre­ative con­trol, make a series of remark­ably eclec­tic and per­son­al records, and become a pio­neer and a pos­i­tive fig­ure for dozens of female artists after her. She did make the occa­sion­al for­ay onto tele­vi­sion and film after her retreat from the lime­light. A mem­o­rable exam­ple is this sil­ly duet with Rowan Atkin­son (in char­ac­ter as a sleazy Amer­i­can lounge singer) for a 1986 Com­ic Relief con­cert.

Bush won high praise from crit­ics and peers last year for her return to “sub­lime and ridicu­lous” ter­ri­to­ry with lat­est album 50 Words for Snow. A 1993 doc­u­men­tary called “This Wom­an’s Work,” avail­able free here, presents a longer explo­ration of her work, with sev­er­al inter­views with Bush.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

This is What Oliver Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphetamines

In this week’s issue of the New York­er, neu­rol­o­gist and writer Oliv­er Sacks has an arti­cle titled “Altered States.” Sub­ti­tled “Self-exper­i­ments in chem­istry,” it cov­ers, to be blunter, what Sacks expe­ri­enced and learned — or failed to learn, sub­stance depend­ing — when he began doing drugs.

His desire to con­duct these self-exper­i­ments flared up in his thir­ties, when, among oth­er sud­den jolts of curios­i­ty, he felt a sus­pi­cion that he had nev­er real­ly seen the col­or indi­go. “One sun­ny Sat­ur­day in 1964, I devel­oped a phar­ma­co­log­ic launch­pad con­sist­ing of a base of amphet­a­mine (for gen­er­al arousal), LSD (for hal­lu­cino­genic inten­si­ty), and a touch of cannabis (for a lit­tle added delir­i­um). About twen­ty min­utes after tak­ing this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, ‘I want to see indi­go now — now!’ ” The result­ing expe­ri­ence, and sure­ly many oth­ers besides, should appear in detail in Sacks’ upcom­ing book Hal­lu­ci­na­tions. While you need to sub­scribe to the mag­a­zine to read the New York­er piece, any­one can watch the video above, which spends a few min­utes with Sacks talk­ing about what drugs taught him about the brain.

Every sub­ject Sacks writes about seems to start with his inter­est in our unusu­al sen­so­ry expe­ri­ences and end in the organ­ic work­ings of our brains. His body of work com­pris­es books on migraine, encephali­tis, visu­al agnosia, deaf­ness, autism, col­or blind­ness, and var­i­ous oth­er per­cep­tu­al impair­ments. Think­ing back to his self-induced hal­lu­ci­na­tions, he remem­bers feel­ing that “the drugs might sen­si­tize me to expe­ri­ences of a sort my patients could have,” mak­ing him more empa­thet­ic to what they were going through. On the oth­er hand, he says, some drugs “gave me some very direct knowl­edge of what phys­i­ol­o­gists would call the reward sys­tems of the brain,” pro­duc­ing “intense plea­sure, some­times plea­sure of an almost orgas­mic degree, with no par­tic­u­lar con­tent,” the kind that made him fear he would become one of those famous lab rats with an elec­trode con­nect­ed to its brain’s plea­sure cen­ter, push­ing and push­ing the lever to stim­u­late that cen­ter to the very end. But he stepped back, observed, wrote, and avoid­ed that fate, or at least its equiv­a­lent in the human domain, liv­ing to tell the tale more elo­quent­ly than most any writer around.

(See also: more from Oliv­er Sacks on the New York­er’s Out Loud pod­cast.)

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stew­art

Oliv­er Sacks on the iPod

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)

Intel­li­gence comes at a price. The human species, despite its tal­ent for solv­ing prob­lems, has man­aged over the mil­len­nia to turn one of its most basic sur­vival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself. “Essen­tial­ly,” says Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky, “we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make our­selves sick.”

In the 2008 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (above), Sapol­sky and fel­low sci­en­tists explain the dead­ly con­se­quences of pro­longed stress. “If you’re a nor­mal mam­mal,” Sapol­sky says, “what stress is about is three min­utes of scream­ing ter­ror on the savan­nah, after which either it’s over with or you’re over with.” Dur­ing those three min­utes of ter­ror the body responds to immi­nent dan­ger by deploy­ing stress hor­mones that stim­u­late the heart rate and blood pres­sure while inhibit­ing oth­er func­tions, like diges­tion, growth and repro­duc­tion.

The prob­lem is, human beings tend to secrete these hor­mones con­stant­ly in response to the pres­sures of every­day life. “If you turn on the stress response chron­i­cal­ly for pure­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons,” Sapol­sky told Mark Shwartz in a 2007 inter­view for the Stan­ford News Ser­vice, “you increase your risk of adult onset dia­betes and high blood pres­sure. If you’re chron­i­cal­ly shut­ting down the diges­tive sys­tem, there’s a bunch of gas­troin­testi­nal dis­or­ders you’re more at risk for as well.”

Chron­ic stress has also been shown in sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies to dimin­ish brain cells need­ed for mem­o­ry and learn­ing, and to adverse­ly affect the way fat is dis­trib­uted in the body. It has even been shown to mea­sur­ably accel­er­ate the aging process in chro­mo­somes, a result that con­firms our intu­itive sense that peo­ple who live stress­ful lives grow old faster.

By study­ing baboon pop­u­la­tions in East Africa, Sapol­sky has found that indi­vid­u­als low­er down in the social hier­ar­chy suf­fer more stress, and con­se­quent­ly more stress-relat­ed health prob­lems, than dom­i­nant indi­vid­u­als. The same trend in human pop­u­la­tions was dis­cov­ered in the British White­hall Study. Peo­ple with more con­trol in work envi­ron­ments have low­er stress, and bet­ter health, than sub­or­di­nates.

Stress: Por­trait of a Killer is a fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant documentary–well worth the 52 min­utes it takes to watch.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sapol­sky Breaks Down Depres­sion

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

Henry Rollins Pitches Education as the Key to Restoring Democracy

Hen­ry Rollins had dropped out of col­lege and was work­ing at a Haa­gen-Dazs in Wash­ing­ton, DC when he joined the sem­i­nal L.A. hard­core punk band Black Flag in 1981, a career move that would shape the rest of the singer/author/actor/activist’s life. And although he left high­er edu­ca­tion for a more indi­vid­u­al­ized path, Rollins has a very high regard for the poten­tial of a good edu­ca­tion to change peo­ple’s lives.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Rollins’ moti­va­tion­al Big Think talk to young peo­ple on the dan­gers of resent­ment. In the short, but equal­ly inspir­ing, talk above–from the same set of inter­views–Rollins describes edu­ca­tion as the engine of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety, “the great equal­iz­er.” For Rollins, edu­ca­tion is the key to a “more vig­or­ous democ­ra­cy.” And although he makes some arguable claims about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of edu­ca­tion­al reform to sub­stan­tial­ly dimin­ish the effects of insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism and pover­ty, his view of what an edu­ca­tion should be cor­re­sponds to what edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers have stressed for decades—that mov­ing to a focus on crit­i­cal think­ing, rather than “teach­ing to the test,” is a shift that needs to hap­pen in order for stu­dents to become curi­ous, inten­tion­al, and inde­pen­dent learn­ers and, ulti­mate­ly, free and inde­pen­dent cit­i­zens.

Rollins spec­u­lates that cer­tain polit­i­cal actors and vest­ed inter­ests delib­er­ate­ly block edu­ca­tion­al reform to main­tain the sta­tus quo. Whether or not you accept his analy­sis, there’s no deny­ing that the state of pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary, and high­er edu­ca­tion in the U.S. is dire, and the func­tion­al effi­ca­cy of our demo­c­ra­t­ic process seems con­stant­ly in jeop­ardy. Allud­ing to the dic­tum attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son (who may not have actu­al­ly writ­ten this) that “An edu­cat­ed cit­i­zen­ry is a vital req­ui­site for our sur­vival as a free peo­ple,” Rollins believes that edu­ca­tion­al reforms offer “the way out” of our cur­rent polit­i­cal grid­lock and of the despair­ing sit­u­a­tions under­priv­i­leged peo­ple are born into. I think he makes a pret­ty com­pelling case in just under four min­utes.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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