Thanks to Laura Dern, David Lynch took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. And, of course, there’s a twist — which involves a double shot of espresso and Lynch playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the trumpet. If you ever wondered what Lynch looks like without his classic quiff, you won’t want to miss this one minute bit.
Polaroid photography, which looked about to fade out forever for a while there, has in recent years made a comeback. Chalk it up, if you must, to a grand revaluing wave of the physically analog in our age of digital ephemerality — the same tide on which enthusiasm for vinyl, zines, and even VHS tapes has risen again. But we must acknowledge that Andy Warhol, in a sense, got there first. It hardly counts as the only matter on which the mastermind of the Factory showed prescience; take, for instance, his quip about everyone in the future getting fifteen minutes of fame, a prediction which, as Jonathan Lethem put it, has in our present hardened into “drab processional.” Some of these very 21st-century people now enjoying (or enduring) their own fifteen minutes — most of them presumably not even born within Warhol’s lifetime — surely keep a Polaroid camera at hand. They acknowledge, on some level, what the consummate 20th-century “pop artist” sensed: that the ostensibly cheap and disposable, including self-developing film used for untrained vacation snapshots and mere reference material for “real” works of art, has its own kind of permanence.
Here we have a selection of Warhol’s own works of Polaroid photography, a medium he took up around 1970 and used to further his interest in portraiture. The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, just one of the institutions to put them on display, says that “these images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silk-screen paintings, drawings, and prints.” The wide subset they showed “reveals that superstars were not the only figures that Warhol photographed with his Polaroid Big Shot, the distinct plastic camera he used for the majority of his sittings. Over half of those who sat for him were little known or remain unidentified.” Whether of Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson, Debbie Harry, himself, a row of bananas, or someone faintly recognizable yet ultimately unnamable, each of Warhol’s Polaroids remains “fully identified with the artwork that ultimately grew out of it; the face depicted becomes a kind of signifier for larger cultural concepts of beauty, power, and worth.”
Now what would Warhol, a known early enthusiast of computer art, have said about the arrival of Instagram filters meant to make our instantaneous, high-resolution digital photos look like Polaroids again?
A comparison between the invention of radio and that of the Internet need not be a strained or superfical exercise. Parallels abound. The communication tool that first drew the world together with news, drama, and music took shape in a small but crowded field of amateur enthusiasts, engineers and physicists, military strategists, and competing corporate interests. In 1920, the technology emerged fully into the consumer sector with the first commercial broadcast by Westinghouse’s KDKA station in Pittsburgh on November 2, Election Day. By 1924, the U.S. had 600 commercial stations around the country, and in 1927, the model spread across the Atlantic when the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) succeeded the British Broadcasting Company, formerly an extension of the Post Office.
Unlike the Wild West frontier of U.S. radio, since its 1922 inception the BBC operated under a centralized command structure that, paradoxically, fostered some very egalitarian attitudes to broadcasting—in certain respects. In others, however, the BBC, led by “conscientious founder” Lord John Reith, took on the task of providing its listeners with “elevating and educative” material, particularly avant garde music like the work of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. The BBC, writes David Stubbs in Fear of Music, “were prepared to be quite bold in their broadcasting policy, making a point of including ‘futurist’ or ‘art music,’ as they termed it.” As you might imagine, “listeners proved a little recalcitrant in the face of this highbrow policy.”
In response to the volume of listener complaints, the BBC began a PR campaign in 1927 that sought to train audiences in how to listen to challenging and unfamiliar broadcasts. One statement released by the BBC stresses responsible, “correct,” listening practices: “If there be an art of broadcasting there is equally an art of listening… there can be no excuse for the listener who tunes in to a programme, willy nilly, and complains that he does not care for it.” The next year, the BBC Handbook 1928 included the following castigation of listener antipathy and restlessness.
Every new invention that brings desirable things more easily within our reach thereby to some extent cheapens them… We seem to be entering upon a kind of arm-chair period of civilisation, when everything that goes to make up adventure is dealt with wholesale, and delivered, as it were, to the individual at his own door.
It’s as if Amazon were right around the corner, and, in a certain sense, it was. Like personal computing technology, the wireless revolutionized communications and offered instant access to information, if not yet goods, and not yet on an “on-demand” basis. Unlike Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, however, British commercial radio strove mightily to control the ethics and aesthetics of its content. The handbook goes on to elaborate its proposed remedy for the potential cheapening of culture it identifies above:
The listener, in other words, should be an epicure and not a glutton; he should choose his broadcast fare with discrimination, and when the time comes give himself deliberately to the enjoyment of it… To sum up, I would urge upon those who use wireless to cultivate the art of listening; to discriminate in what they listen to, and to listen with their mind as well as their ears. In that way they will not only increase their pleasure, but actually contribute their part to the improvement and perfection of an art which is yet in its childhood.
It seems that these lengthy prose prescriptions did not convey the message as efficiently as they might. In 1930, BBC administrators published a handbook that took a much more direct approach, which you can see above. Titled “Good Listening,” the list of instructions, transcribed below, proceeds under the assumption that any dissatisfaction with BBC programming should be blamed solely on impatient, slothful listeners. As BBC program advisor Filson Young wrote that year in a Radio Times article, “Good listeners will produce good programmes more surely and more certainly than anything else… Many of you have not even begun to master the art of listening. The arch-fault of the average listener is that he does not select.”
GOOD LISTENING
Make sure that your set is working properly before you settle down to listen.
Choose your programmes as carefully as you choose which theatre to go to. It is just as important to you to enjoy yourself at home as at the theatre.
Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall. You can’t get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading. Give it your full attention. Try turning out the lights so that your eye is not caught by familiar objects in the room. Your imagination will be twice as vivid.
If you only listen with half an ear you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticise.
Think of your favourite occupation. Don’t you like a change sometimes? Give the wireless a rest now and then.
All maybe more than a little condescending, perhaps, but that last bit of advice now seems eternal.
It’s called “The Red Special.” Or sometimes “The Fireplace.” That’s the guitar that Brian May (guitarist of Queen and physics researcher) began building with his father circa 1963, when Brian was about 16 years old. Lacking money but not ingenuity, the father-son team built the guitar using materials found around the home. The neck of the guitar was fashioned from an 18th-century fireplace mantel, the inlays on the neck from a mother-of-pearl button. For the body, they used wood from an old oak table. Then the bricoleurs combined a bike saddlebag holder, a plastic knitting needle tip, and motorbike valve springs to create a tremolo arm. It’s a kind of magic! But here’s perhaps the most amazing part of the story. The resulting guitar wasn’t a rickety novelty. May used The Red Special during Queen’s recording sessions and live performances, and he still apparently plays a restored version today. If you find yourself inspired by this DIY story, you can head over to BrianMayGuitars and buy your own Red Special replica.
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Maison Carnot, an ad studio in France, has produced a delightful short film that lets you see Paris through the viewfinder of the classic Pentax 67 camera. Antoine Pai, one of the filmmakers, told Petapixel, “As Parisians, we are so used to the charm of our city that we forget sometimes to take a minute and observe.” “Marcel Proust once said, ‘Mystery is not about traveling to new places but it’s about looking with new eyes.’ That is totally what we felt while shooting this film.” To see Paris through a differnent lens, watchParis Through Pentax above. To get the backstory on the contraption Maison Carnot jerry-rigged to shoot the film, head over to Petapixel.
First presented in the early 1960s at Caltech by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, the lectures were eventually turned into a book by Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands. The text went on to become arguably the most popular physics book ever written, selling more than 1.5 million copies in English, and getting translated into a dozen languages.
Perhaps one of the difficulties of writing concisely on Badiou is that Badiou himself roams far and wide—from Hegel to Lacan, Kant, Marx, Descartes, and even St. Paul. Not easily identifiable as belonging to one school or another, Badiou’s work, though staunchly politically left, resists anti-humanist postmodernism and seeks to ground truth in universals. It’s an unsurprising tack given that he first trained in mathematics.
As if his philosophical work weren’t enough, Badiou also writes novels and plays. Of the latter, his Ahmed the Philosopher: 34 Short Plays for Children & Everyone Else has recently appeared in an English translation by Joseph Litvak. Just above, you can see Litvak as Ahmed and Badiou himself as “a curmudgeonly French demon,” writes Critical Theory, “who takes joy in informing for the police.” Filmed in Germany in 2011,
This scene, entitled “Terror,” serves as a commentary on French xenophobia towards Arab immigrants. Badiou at one point also draws reference to Nazi-occupied France, a sort of “good old days” for Badiou’s callous character.
Badiou as the “demon of the cities” spotlights the brute limitations imposed by violent, unjust police, who summarily execute innocent people in the streets. Taking perverse pleasure in describing such an occurrence, the demon leers, “I like to imagine that I’m hidden behind a curtain. I salivate!” before going on to describe with relish the even uglier scenario of a “bungled” shooting. The audience giggles uneasily, unsure quite how to respond to the exaggerated evil Badiou performs. It seems unthinkable, absurd, their nervous laughter suggests, that anyone but a cartoon devil could take such sadistic delight in this kind of cruelty, much less, as the demon does, initiate it with anonymous libel. It’s an unnerving performance of an even more unnerving piece of writing. Below, you can see more scenes from Ahmed the Philosopher, performed in English sans Badiou at UC Irvine in 2010.
If you like Badiou as an actor, this may be your only chance to see him perform. However, the extroverted philosopher hopes to break into Hollywood in another capacity—bringing his translation of Plato’s Republicto the screen, with, in his grand design, Brad Pitt in the leading role, Sean Connery as Socrates, and Meryl Streep as “Mrs. Plato.” I wish him all the luck in the world. With the blockbuster success of religous epics like Noah, perhaps we’re primed for a Hollywood version of ancient Greek thought, though like the former film, purists would no doubt find ample reason to fly up in arms over a guaranteed multitude of philosophical blasphemies.
We still think of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as the most impressive debut in film history. In an alternate cinematic reality, however, Welles might have debuted not with a revolutionarily fragmented portrait of a tormented newspaper magnate, but a slapstick farce. This real 1938 production, titled — spare us your jokes — Too Much Johnson, ran aground on not just financial problems, but logistical ones. Welles conceived the film as part of a stage show for his Mercury Theatre company, they of the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. An adaptation of William Gillette’s 1894 play of the same name about a philandering playboy on the run in Cuba, this then-state-of-the-art Too Much Johnson would have given its audiences a filmed as well as a live experience in one. Alas, when Welles had the money to complete post production, he found that the Connecticut theater in which he’d planned a pre-Broadway run didn’t have the ceiling height to accommodate projection.
Long presumed lost after a 1970 fire took Welles’ only print, Too Much Johnson resurfaced in 2008. After a restoration by the George Eastman House museum of film and photography (along with collaborators like Cinemazero and the National Film Preservation Foundation), the film made its debut at last year’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Though without its intended context — and for that reason never screened by Welles himself — the film nonetheless won no modest critical acclaim. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls it “breathlessly enjoyable viewing,” praising not just Welles but star Joseph Cotten’s “tremendous movie debut,” an ” affectionate romp through Keystone two-reelers, Harold Lloyd’s stunt slapstick, European serials, Soviet montage and, notably, Welles’s favoured steep expressionist-influenced camera angles.” Bright Lights Film Journal’s Joseph McBride frames it as “a youthful tribute not only to the spirited tradition of exuberant low comedy but also to the past of the medium [Welles] was about to enter.”
You can download the restored Too Much Johnson footage, and read more about the film and the project of bringing it back to light, at the National Film Preservation Foundation’s site. Or simply click here. (Don’t forget to spend a little time at their donation page as well, given the expense of a restoration like this.) Have a look at the 23-year-old Welles’ handiwork, laugh at its comedy, appreciate its ambition, and ask yourself: does this kid have what it takes to make it in show business?
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