Heads up: For the next 24 hours, all Blu-rays and DVDs are 50% off at Criterion.com with promo code MADFOX! Includes films by Wes Anderson, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Kurosawa and many more. Don’t dilly dally. It looks like some of the films are selling out fast.
Let’s test our agriculture math skills with a little dairy industry story problem:
If an 8‑ounce glass of whole milk provides 149 calories, 8 grams of protein, 276 milligrams of calcium, 8 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat and 24 milligrams of cholesterol, and a cup of two-percent milk has 120 calories, 5 grams of fat, 3 grams of saturated fat and 20 milligrams of cholesterol, what kind of music will result in an overall milk production increase of 3%?
Huh. Based on the concert tees of the boys I grew up around in Indiana, I would have guessed Rush or Guns N’ Roses. (Maybe there was some Barry Manilow going on behind closed barn doors?)
Actually, research shows that bovine musical preference, like that of aerobics instructors, hinges less on any specific artist than on beats per minute.
…I hope they didn’t spend too much on this study. Upon reflection, isn’t it just common sense that noise-sensitive herd animals attached to machines via their udders would choose a mellow groove over death metal or psychobilly?
(Poor Bananarama. It must’ve stung when the University of Leicester’s team told the world that 1,000 Holstein Friesian cattle liked listening to nothing at all better than their 1986 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, “Venus.”)
Should the above tune ever grow old (doubtful) there’s always Shakespeare. According to NPR, a theatrical reading of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” proved popular, milk-wise, with an audience of UK cows. And Modern Farmerhas honored Lou Reed by including one of his compositions (no, not “Metal Machine Music, Part 1”) in their recent Playlist To Milk By:
If you head over to the Huy Fong Foods web site, they’ll tell you that Sriracha, their ever-popular Thai condiment, is “made from sun ripen chilies which are ground into a smooth paste along with garlic and packaged in a convenient squeeze bottle.” It’s the chilies that make your mouth burn when you pour that Sriracha onto your eggs or burgers, or in your soup and, yes, cocktails. But if you want to get scientific about things, it’s actually the capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin — the two compounds inside the hot peppers — that set your mouth aflame. All of this, and more, gets covered by this new video, The Chemistry of Sriracha, from the American Chemical Society. It’s part of their video series, Reactions, that examines the chemistry of everyday things.
On Sunday, 23 February 2014, Alice Herz-Sommer, thought to be the oldest Holocaust survivor, died in London. She has been an inspiration to many people as the story of her life is shown in the Oscar-nominated documentary called “The Lady in Number 6″ (the video above is the official trailer).
Alice was born in Prague – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – in 1903. She started playing the piano as a child and took lessons with Conrad Ansorge, a student of Liszt. At 16, she attended the master class at Prague’s prestigious German musical academy. Later, Alice became a respected concert pianist in Prague. Through her family, she also knew Franz Kafka. All of this changed when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Along with other Jews living in Prague, Alice was initially forced to live in Prague’s ghetto before being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, along with her five-year-old son Raphael. Eventually her whole family, including her husband, cellist Leopold Sommer, and her mother, was sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Dachau, where they were killed.
Alice and her son survived Theresienstadt because the Nazis used this particular concentration camp to show the world how “well” the inmates were treated. A propaganda film by the Nazis was shot and a delegation from the Danish and International Red Cross was shown around in 1943. To boost morale, Alice and many other imprisoned musicians regularly performed for the inmates. Despite the unimaginable living conditions, Alice and her son survived. They moved to Israel after the war, where she taught music. In 1986, she moved to London. Her son died in 2001 (obituary here).
The way Alice dealt with those horrible times is particularly inspiring. She says about the role of music: “I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope … it’s a sort of religion actually. Music is … is God. In difficult times you feel it, especially when you are suffering.” When asked by German journalists if she hated Germans, she replied: “I never hate, and I will never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.”
Extra material:
Art Therapy Blog has a transcript of the trailer, memorable quotes by Alice and two BBC Radio interviews with her.
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.
Edgar Allan Poe isn’t read much as an essayist, which is too bad. His essays reveal a quick and ironic cast of mind where his dark poetry and stories often mark him as a single-minded hypersensitive, “like a peony just past bloom.” Where Poe the poet can be lugubrious, Poe the essayist is brisk, incisive, and, well… kinda catty. Take the following aphoristic witticisms from his 1846 “A Few Words on Etiquette”:
Never use the term genteel — it is only to be found in the mouths of those who have it nowhere else.
Green spectacles are an abomination, fitted only for students of divinity.
Almost every defect of face may be concealed by a judicious use and arrangement of hair.
Are these casual bon mots or serious prescriptions? Why not both? An editor at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore notes that the etiquette essay “bears much the same humorous tone and mixture of genuine and satirical commentary as Poe’s essay ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ from 6 years earlier.” Indeed, in that earlier critical work on interior design, Poe makes confident judgments, leaps from point to point with delightfully specific examples, and employs a mix of levity and gravity.
Poe begins “The Philosophy of Furniture” with “a somewhat Coleridegy assertion” from Hegel then launches into a pitiless critique of various national styles. His last point—“The Yankees alone are preposterous”—is the basis for what follows, a disquisition on the sad state of American interior design, brought about by “an aristocracy of dollars” in which “the display of wealth” takes the place of heraldry. His critique recalls (and perhaps alludes to) English poet Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington,” whose satirical target makes such a tasteless mess of his villa that his neighbors cry out “What sums are thrown away!”
In Poe’s case, the offending estate is “what is termed in the United States, a well-furnished apartment.” He decries the injudicious use of curtains, the poor display of carpets (“the soul of the apartment”), and the problem “of gas and of glass.” Poe deliciously details the decorating habits of a parvenu American aristocracy, whose defects are discernable by even the “veriest bumpkin.” But he offers more than snark. “Like any good critic,” writes The Smithsonian, “Poe doesn’t just condemn, he offers solutions.” In the final, lengthy paragraph of “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Poe turns his talent for vivid description to a portrait of his perfect boudoir. Above, you can see a 1959 recreation of Poe’s “small and not, ostentatious chamber with whose decorations no fault can be found.” But this may be redundant. Poe furnishes us with sufficient fine detail that we can better create his ideal room in our imagination. See the excerpts below, and read Poe’s complete essay here.
The proprietor lies asleep on a sofa — the weather is cool — the time is near midnight: I will make a sketch of the room ere he awakes. It is oblong — some thirty feet in length and twenty-five in breadth — a shape affording the best (ordinary) opportunities for the adjustment of furniture. It has but one door — by no means a wide one — which is at one end of the parallelogram, and but two windows, which are at the other. These latter are large, reaching down to the floor — have deep recesses — and open on an Italian veranda. Their panes are of a crimson-tinted glass, set in rose-wood framings, more massive than usual. They are curtained within the recess, by a thick silver tissue adapted to the shape of the window, and hanging loosely in small volumes. Without the recess are curtains of an exceedingly rich crimson silk, fringed with a deep network of gold, and lined with silver tissue, which is the material of the exterior blind. There are no cornices; but the folds of the whole fabric (which are sharp rather than massive, and have an airy appearance), issue from beneath a broad entablature of rich gilt-work, which encircles the room at the junction of the ceiling and walls […]
The carpet — of Saxony material — is quite half an inch thick, and is of the same crimson ground, relieved simply by the appearance of a gold cord (like that festooning the curtains) slightly relieved above the surface of the ground, and thrown upon it in such a manner as to form a succession of short irregular curves — one occasionally overlaying the other. The walls are prepared with a glossy paper of a silver gray tint, spotted with small Arabesque devices of a fainter hue of the prevalent crimson. Many paintings relieve the expanse of paper. These are chiefly landscapes of an imaginative cast — such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman. There are, nevertheless, three or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty — portraits in the manner of Sully. The tone of each picture is warm, but dark […]
Two large low sofas of rosewood and crimson silk, gold-flowered, form the only seats, with the exception of two light conversation chairs, also of rose-wood. There is a pianoforte (rose-wood, also), without cover, and thrown open. An octagonal table, formed altogether of the richest gold-threaded marble, is placed near one of the sofas. This is also without cover — the drapery of the curtains has been thought sufficient.. Four large and gorgeous Sevres vases, in which bloom a profusion of sweet and vivid flowers, occupy the slightly rounded angles of the room. A tall candelabrum, bearing a small antique lamp with highly perfumed oil, is standing near the head of my sleeping friend. Some light and graceful hanging shelves, with golden edges and crimson silk cords with gold tassels, sustain two or three hundred magnificently bound books. Beyond these things, there is no furniture, if we except an Argand lamp, with a plain crimson-tinted ground glass shade, which depends from the lofty vaulted ceiling by a single slender gold chain, and throws a tranquil but magical radiance over all.
Again, the Edgar Allan Poe Society editor helpfully notes that “Poe, in this article, has adopted an intentionally humorous tone.” Should we take this seriously or treat is as Poe-ean satire? Why not both?
Imagine Vice President Joe Biden being on the receiving end of a vociferous attack in the press by former Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner. Now, picture Biden demanding satisfaction, and taking the morning off from his vice presidential duties to settle things man-to-man, and Geithner winding up in a coma. As unbelievable as this episode may seem today, this kind of affair played out some 200 years ago on a much grander scale when Vice President Aaron Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton during a duel. The Burr-Hamilton confrontation remains an infamous black mark on American politics. Burr, serving as VP in Thomas Jefferson’s administration, is widely seen as a villain for murdering Hamilton. Hamilton, for his part, is beloved as one of the Founding Fathers and a vocal champion of the U.S. Constitution. For our non-American readers, this adulation translates to his face now gracing the $10 bill.
But were things really so simple? Dana O’Keefe, the filmmaker behind Aaron Burr, Part 2, answers with a resounding no. “History is a contest, not unlike a duel. I ended his life. But he ruined mine. I won the duel, but I lost my place in history,” Burr declares in the opening monologue of O’Keefe’s 8‑minute short, and it is precisely Burr’s place in history that the film seeks to address. In O’Keefe’s modern retelling, Burr emerges as an unfairly maligned figure, whose bravery in battle has been overshadowed by the incompetence of superiors such as Generals George Washington and Richard Montgomery. It’s effective. Mixing archival footage of original documents with re-enactments and present day shots, O’Keefe creates a gritty, sometimes witty, hardboiled feel to Burr’s story, and viewers begin to sympathize with the disparaged figure. To the sounds of tracks like Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” and some creative use of iPhones, O’Keefe dispels the idea that Burr shot Hamilton first. Rather, Burr is the honorable party, and Hamilton is the scoundrel. It’s well worth a watch.
Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Prometheus, the Apple Macintosh 1984 Super Bowl ad, the upcoming Biblically-based (and Biblically-sized) Exodus: if you want a thoroughly through-and-through vision, executed at full scale and tinted with more than a touch of dystopian grimness, you go to Ridley Scott. But no director commences his career making pictures like these; most of them have to begin in humbler places, pulling together whatever grant money, film-school resources, and helpful acquaintances they can to realize, and in the process often compromise, their long-incubated cinematic dreams. So it went with Scott himself, who made the short film above, 1965’s Boy and Bicycle, while a student at London’s Royal College of Art. But even this comparatively tiny project, with its rich 16-millimeter images, adept camera movement, and utterly hopeless setting, shows signs of what sort of filmmaker the twentysomething Scott would become a decade or two later.
Though he received his photographic education in London, Scott took his camera out for the Boy and Bicycle shoot to West Hartlepool, where he’d attended art school several years earlier. That bit of the soon-to-be-deindustrialized north of England provided, especially in the British Steel North Works cooling tower and blast furnace, just the sort of background we’d expect to see in the mature director’s work. And through this bleak landscape (which reminds me of nothing so much as the inhospitable Osaka he would portray more than twenty years later in Black Rain) we have the titular boy on the titular bicycle, played by — classic first-time filmmaker’s strategy — the director’s younger brother. In this case, that brother would grow up to become Tony Scott, a celebrated if aesthetically polarizing director (Top Gun, True Romance, Domino) in his own right. Not one to waste a resonant image, Ridley Scott would a decade later revisit Boy and Bicycle in the beloved advertisement for Hovis bread just above.
Other early short films by great directors can be found below, and in our collection of 635 Free Movies Online.
Last fall, our readers loved watching Iron Horse, a bluegrass band from Alabama, performing a most unusual version of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” The band’s take on Metallica’s anthem was originally recorded on the 2003 album, Fade to Bluegrass: Tribute to Metallica, where Iron Horse — with Tony Robertson on mandolin, Vance Henry on guitar, Ricky Rogers on bass, and Anthony Richardson on banjo — played Metallica hits in bluegrass fashion — “or at least as bluegrass as it’s possible for Metallica songs to be.”
This January, the quartet released a new video, this time covering “Rocket Man.” Sung by Elton John in ’72, written by Bernie Taupin, and inspired by a Ray Bradbury story, Rocket Man has been covered/performed by Coldplay, Kate Bush, My Morning Jacket and many others. But, if you have a scorecard, you’ll almost certainly give Iron Horse top marks for creativity and originality. Hope you enjoy.
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