In the world of advertising, books and booze rarely go together, especially if you’re selling beer in America. But when it comes to scotch and whisky, you’ll find some exceptions. Last year, Dewars channeled the ghost of Charles Bukowski to sell its scotch. And now Bells, a British Whisky maker, aired a commercial in South Africa showing an elderly man learning to read — all so that, touchingly, he could read a book authored by his own son. You can watch a behind-the-scenes, making-of video here.
We’ve previously featured Jimi Hendrix’s final interview, preserved as an audio recording by NME’s Keith Altham, who sat down to talk with him on September 11, 1970, one week before Hendrix’s death. Now, we bring you multimedia org Blank on Blank’s animation of that interview—breezy, surreal, funny, and profound. As I wrote in our previous post, Hendrix’s “offhand lyricism and fractal imagination” are on full display here. It’s rare that a musician is as interesting to hear speaking as playing, but Hendrix was one of them. Take, for example, Hendrix’s response when Altham suggests that he invented psychedelic music:
Jimi Hendrix: [chuckles] A mad scientist approach. The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it’s how it can bend. As a word reality is nothing, but each individual’s own way of thinking. Then the establishment grabs a big piece of that.
Then there’s Hendrix on destroying guitars onstage:
Jimi Hendrix: One time I said: maybe I should burn a guitar tonight. You know [laughs] smash a guitar or something like that. And they said: yeah, yeah! I said: you really think I should? They said: yeah, that’d be cool. I said: well, ok. So like I just worked up enough anger where I could do it, you know. But like I didn’t know it was anger until they told me that it was, like with destruction and all that. But I believe everybody should have like a room where they can get rid of all their releases, where they can do their releases at. So my room is a stage. [laughs]
There are many more of these gems in the full interview that didn’t make the cut above, but the abridged Blank on Blank version appropriately captures the whimsy and good humor of the late lamented genius.
Making the rounds on the web today is a silent film showing “the final preparation and loading of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb into ‘Bockscar,’ ” the plane that would drop a devastating bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The footage from the Los Alamos National Laboratory is raw, except for the helpful annotations added by Alex Wellerstein, who runs Nuclear Secrecy: The Restricted Data Blog. Eventually, toward the 8 minute mark, the video shows “the Nagasaki explosion from the window of an observation plane.” What you don’t see is the calamitous outcome. To get a feel for the destruction, you can see our previous post,Rare Color Footage of the Hiroshima Aftermath. (Obviously Hiroshima is the other Japanese city that experienced the ruinous effects of the nuclear bomb.) Also we have 360 Degree Images of Hiroshima After the Bombing.
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When a country is in the headlines almost every day, it can be easy to forget that today’s news isn’t the whole story. Iran’s modern story features its long, bloody war with Iraq, contested presidential election results, and protests that became part of the Arab Spring.
But Iran is also known by its ancient name of Persia and is one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
In the 12th century, all of Mesopotamia blossomed. The Islamic Golden Age was a time of thriving science, scholarship and art, including bright and vivid Persian miniatures—small paintings on paper created to be collected into books.
Thousands of these miniatures—known for their bright and pure coloring—are now included in a new digital archive developed by the British Library. The paintings, often accompanied by beautiful Persian texts, are meticulously preserved, making available delicate treasures on par with, if not more beautiful than other illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells.
Because the miniatures were meant to be enjoyed in private, in books, artists could be freer with their subjects than with public wall paintings. Most miniatures included human figures, including depictions of the prophet Muhammed that showed his face, and “illuminated” ornamental borders.
The joy of the archive, which includes works from the British Museum and India Office Library, is how close we can get to the work. Zoom in as close as you like to examine the delicate flowers and script (click the screenshots to zoom into each painting). With this technology, it’s possible to see things that the naked eye would miss.
A separate archive houses rare Persian texts, including this pocket encyclopedia. The greatest beneficiaries are scholars, who can pore over beautiful, fragile documents and artwork from wherever they work, without damaging the old materials.
The ever-flickering lights, the ever-present screen, the stupefied spectators immune to a larger reality and in need of sudden enlightenment—Plato’s allegory of the cave from Book VII of The Republic is a marketing department’s dream: it sums up an entire brand in a stock-simple parable that almost anyone can follow, one that lends itself to compellingly brief visual interpretations like those above and below. In the top video, Orson Welles narrates while the camera pans over some colorfully stylized illustrations of the fable by artist Dick Oden. This preserves the didactic tone of the text, but it is a little dry. In contrast, the award-winning three-dimensional renderings of the prisoners and their nonstop nickelodeon in the Claymation Cave Allegory below offers dramatic close-ups of the chained prisoner’s faces and the hypnotic movement of firelight over the cave’s rock walls.
Plato’s “brand” is a doctrine of idealism that posits a realm of ideal forms, of which everything we know by our senses is but an inferior copy. The ironically poetic Socrates relates the story to illustrate “the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature.”
And yet it does much more than this—Plato illustrates an epistemology that supports notions of the soul and immortality, and hence his ideas survived in theology long after they was supposedly vanquished by analytic philosophy.
Plato’s idea of reason as a perfect, unchanging realm of which we’re only dimly aware is intuitively compelling. Most of us are at some time conscious of how limited our perceptions truly are. But just because the allegory of the cave is fairly easy to communicate to philosophy 101 students doesn’t mean it’s easy to adapt to the screen like the two examples above. Mark Linsenmayer of The Partially Examined Life points us toward these 20 YouTube takes on Plato’s cave, “many of them,” he writes, “frightfully amateurish and some of them presenting a warped and/or incomprehensible version of the story.” I am particularly intrigued by the silent film version below. As always, your comments on the soundness of these various interpretations are most welcome.
When I was young, I decided that I would learn how to pick locks. If countless intrepid TV heroes could dismantle a pair of handcuffs with nothing but a hastily swiped paperclip, why couldn’t I? The process, it turns out, was quite easy: I practiced on an old, lockable diskette cabinet, and quickly figured out how to crack the lock’s mechanism using two paperclip halves. This allowed me to proclaim that I was an expert lock picker to my friends, and that, really, the whole thing was an elementary procedure.
Although, as the astute reader would surmise, I knew next to nothing about lock picking, I was right on one count: it’s easy. Or, at least, so notes the MIT Guide to Lock Picking, written by the mysterious Ted The Tool. This primer was first published in 1987 and has been floating around various websites for the past two decades. And it’s still considered an essential introduction to the art of picking locks. It begins by outlining lock terminology:
The key is inserted into the keyway of the plug. The protrusions on the side of the keyway are called wards. Wards restrict the set of keys that can be inserted into the plug. The plug is a cylinder which can rotate when the proper key is fully inserted. The non-rotating part of the lock is called the hull. The first pin touched by the key is called pin one. The remaining pins are numbered increasingly toward the rear of the lock.
The proper key lifts each pin pair until the gap between the key pin and the driver pin reaches the sheer line. When all the pins are in this position, the plug can rotate and the lock can be opened. An incorrect key will leave some of the pins protruding between the hull and the plug, and these pins will prevent the plug from rotating.
Over its 50 pages, the guide explains the flatland and pin column lock models, and lays out the theory behind opening them. It also includes guidelines on making lock picking tools, legal information, and numerous pieces of practical advice. Most useful? It contains numerous exercises, and stresses the importance of doing your lock picking homework:
“Anyone can learn how to open desk and filing cabinet locks, but the ability to open most locks in under thirty seconds is a skill that requires practice.”
lia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
It’s often said that the French Revolution (1789–1799) created the “blueprint” for all revolutions to come. Unlike any event before it, the Revolution drew its strength from ideology — an ideology that turned on the belief that France had created a radical break with its monarchical past, and would now radically re-organize itself along egalitarian and democratic lines. To drive this message home, the revolutionaries produced thousands of pamphlets and political works of art. What’s more, they created a new revolutionary calendar and a series of revolutionary festivals that helped give cultural expression to the idea that France had entered a new political age.
More than a century later, the Russian revolutionaries would use the French blueprint and all cultural tools at their disposal to promote its Marxist ideals. You’ve seen the posters. You’ve watched the films. Maybe you’ve read their texts. But perhaps you’re not as familiar with where revolutionary propaganda all began, in which case you’ll want to rummage through a new archive of 14,000 images from the French Revolution, created by Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The new archive contains visual materials that will intrigue scholars as much as history buffs.
Above you can see one image celebrating a founding document of the Revolution — 1789’s Les droits de l’homme et du citoyen (The Rights of Man and Citizen). Immediately below, you can see a depiction of Liberty (a modern version of a Greek goddess) triumphing over past political abuses. And, at the bottom, we have a vivid display of the Revolution’s choice instrument of capital punishment — the guillotine. Plus an image of an “aristocratic hydre” in combat with the people.
The images in the archive can be sorted by theme. If you find one you like, you can choose to download the image in a high-resolution format, ranging from small to extra large. Scholars of the French Revolution won’t want to miss another part of the newly-created archive. It contains the Archives parlementaires, a series of historical documents that record the political events of the Revolution. In the mid 1990s, I spent long stretches of time reading those documents in the great reading room of the old BN.
Those who know the work of Stanley Kubrick know that the longer he made films, the more insistently he demanded the best: the most flexible, varied material to adapt to his cinematic methods; the shots with the greatest impact among hundreds of takes each; the collaborators with the strongest and most useful visions, no matter their department. That very need for high craftsmanship would, you’d think, have lead the director straight to the door of Saul Bass, the graphic designer who lived and rose to eminence in his field during the same era that Kubrick lived and rose to eminence in his. They did work together on 1960’s Spartacus and 1980’s The Shining, Kubrick’s fifth and eleventh features, but as Empire’s feature on Bass’ early work explains, “it wasn’t Stanley Kubrick who recruited him to piece together Spartacus’s opening sequences.” Still, “Kubrick had been an admirer of his fellow New Yorker from his early work with Otto Preminger,” presumably including work like his still-striking titles for The Man with the Golden Arm.
When Kubrick took a first look at Bass’ storyboards for Spartacus, as visually vivid as any of his movies themselves, he must have liked what he saw. Now you can examine them too, both at Empire and at Flavorwire’s collection of “Awesome Storyboards from 15 of Your Favorite Films.” Those of you who have watched Spartacus over and over again will recognize the look and feel sketched out (not that sketched sounds quite right for images of such a solidity unusual for storyboards) by Bass. But when the film and the drawing part ways, they do so because the plans actually came out less elaborate than the final product, not more. We see in the storyboards, as Empire says, “an elliptical sequence with the camera lingering on fragments of the fighting” with “a row of shields here, a skewered legionary there,” “but in those long-distant days when budgets went up as well as down, it was scrapped in favor of just recreating the whole thing lock, stock and flaming barrel” — very much a Kubrickian way of doing things.
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