Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Some year later, in 1991, the BBC dramatized eight stories from Bradbury’s collection. Adapted by Lawrence Gilbert, the stories were performed by a full cast and aired on the radio. The audio, running almost two hours, can be streamed below thanks to Archive.org. It’s otherwise housed in our collection of 550 Free Audio Books. Enjoy.
Below we have some other radio dramatizations of sci-fi/dystopian classics.
David Lynch’s cult masterpiece Eraserhead freaked me out the first time I watched it back in high school. Few movies I’ve seen managed to operate so purely on dream logic, and fewer still had such an ability to stir the murky waters of my subconscious. And though the movie gave me nightmares, I was strangely drawn to the film. So I watched it again. And again. By the tenth or so viewing, I found myself laughing as if I were watching a Will Ferrell movie. Eraserhead might evoke all kinds of half-understood primal fears but it is also pretty damned funny.
That thread of black comedy extends in one form or another through all of Lynch’s work, from Frank Booth’s profane insistence on Pabst Blue Ribbon in Blue Velvet to the bumbling hitman who accidentally shoots a woman in the ass in Mulholland Drive. Lynch, like Hitchcock before him, realized that the horrible and the hilarious are, depending on your perspective, a hair’s width apart.
After the Mulholland Drive, Lynch became disenchanted with making movies while at the same time he grew intrigued by the possibilities offered by cheap digital cameras and the internet. In 2002, he made the animated series Dumbland, which Lynch himself called “very stupid, very crude.” Indeed, the simple black and white line drawings of Dumbland make Beavis and Butthead look like something out of Hayao Miyazaki. Lynch did everything himself, including all the voices.
Each short, which lasts around 3 minutes, centers on Randy — a semi-feral, prodigiously flatulent beast of a man who is just as likely to shout profanities at you as punch you in the face. Basically, think Homer Simpson meets Frank Booth. He lives with his unnamed wife, who looks like she’s always on the brink of mental collapse, and his young son. And since this is a David Lynch production, motives are unexplained, the atmosphere is filled with menace, and the dialogue is pregnant with a subtext that is utterly obscure.
The first episode, which you can see above (and be warned, there is a lot of swearing), shows Randy staring covetously at his neighbor’s shed before barking at a helicopter hovering overhead. His reedy neighbor reveals that he’s missing a limb and has some unusual sexual proclivities. The episode is absurd, disquieting and pretty funny. You can see the rest of the series here (or here). You can watch it all in about a half hour.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
May 31, 1889, Walt Whitman’s seventieth birthday, occasioned a celebration of the poet in his hometown of Camden, New Jersey, with a several course dinner called “The Feast of Reason” followed by a program called “The Flow of Soul,” a succession of testimonial speeches and readings by prominent politicians and a few minor literary figures. Whitman himself was in ill health, but he managed to attend during dessert, deliver a brief response, then stay for over two hours afterward (see the event’s original program, with menu, here). While the event itself, writes Ed Folsom in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, was intended as a “local celebration of Camden’s most famous personality,” the occasion prompted admirers worldwide to send birthday wishes by wire and letter. Some of the famous literary figures who wrote included John Addington Symonds, William Dean Howells, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Mark Twain.
Twain’s letter (first page above) is not only a deeply heartfelt appreciation of the greatest living American poet, it is also, as Letters of Note puts it, “a love letter to human endeavor.” Twain enumerates with awe the astounding technological advances Whitman has witnessed in his lifetime, from steam power to photography to electric light. The letter is characteristic of the optimism of the age—so perfectly captured a little over a decade later in Henry Adams’ memoir chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Twain, hardly a religious man, evinces an almost rapturous faith in progress, concluding with a Biblical allusion and a somewhat obscure reference to an apocalyptic figure—“him for whom the earth was made”—who would appear in thirty years time. One can’t help but think, in hindsight, of Yeats’ 1919 occult meditation on the loss of that Victorian certainty in “The Second Coming.” As Marc L. Roark observes at The Literary Table, “Twain was correct — thirty years from the letter would see technology like the world never knew. Unfortunately, that technology was that of war.”
Hartford, May 24/89
To Walt Whitman:
You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world’s history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.
What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen the monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence & attention to business, but isn’t connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen much — but tarry yet a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last! — & still growing, visibly growing while you look. In that day, who that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege not attainable by his neighbor, let him procure his slippers & get ready to dance, for there is going to be music. Abide, & see these things! Thirty of us who honor & love you, offer the opportunity. We have among us 600 years, good & sound, left in the bank of life. Take 30 of them — the richest birth-day gift ever offered to poet in this world — & sit down & wait. Wait till you see that great figure appear, & catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was made, & that he will proclaim that human wheat is worth more than human tares, & proceed to organize human values on that basis.
Mark Twain
See Letters of Note for the remaining images of Twain’s letter. You can peruse all of the speeches, letters, and telegrams addressed to Whitman on his 70th birthday in the collection Camden’s Compliment to Walt Whitman, published that same year.
The Church of Scientology has a number of fascinatingly distinctive characteristics, including but not limited to its foundation by a science-fiction novelist. That novelist, a certain L. Ron Hubbard, launched his religion in the America of the 1950s, a prosperous place in a Space Age decade when all things science-fictional enjoyed a perhaps unprecedented popularity. Another big mainstream sci-fi wave would wash over the country in the late 1970s and early 80s, when, as Nathan Rabin puts it at Slate, “thanks to the popularity of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and theStar Wars and Star Trek franchises, space was the place and science fiction was the hottest genre around. Scientology wanted in, so an ambitious plan was hatched: Hubbard’s epic 1982 Battlefield Earth novel, to be followed by Space Jazz,” an album containing a “sonic space opera” based on the novel. At the top of post, you can hear the track “Earth, My Beautiful Home,” one of the project’s few un-bombastic numbers, and one performed by a genuinely more-than-credible jazz pianist, Chick Corea.
The Church of Scientology counts Corea as a member, as it then did another of Space Jazz’s guest players, bassist (and Corea’s Return to Forever bandmate) Stanley Clarke. This puts the album into the unusual class of works both written and performed by Scientologists, a group which also includes Battlefield Earth’s much later, John Travolta-starring cinematic adaptation, now known as one of the most notable flops in film history. Rabin, in his article, also covers several other albums credited to Hubbard, including 1986’s posthumous Mission Earth, recorded by multi-instrumentalist/Scientologist Edgar Winter, which he calls the only one “that could conceivably be played on the radio without prompting confused cries of, ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’ and ‘Is this even music?’ ” Some say science fiction has undergone another boom in recent years, but alas, we still await the great Scientological concept album of the 21st century.
Vi Hart is back at it again. Hart has a knack for demystifying complex concepts with her visually-rich mathematical videos. She has previously tackled Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Compositionsand the Space-Time Continuum. This week, she’s taking on the concept of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon consider whether it wants to end the era of net neutrality and the open web — something that could have far-reaching consequences for you. The web keeps getting more and more corporatized (even by companies that claim to support net neutrality). And by killing net neutrality, the FCC can officially ensure that big corporations run the show.
In the video above, Hart explains the concept of net neutrality and why it’s important to defend. On her blog, she also includes a lot of additional resources — including more videos that explain net neutrality, plus information on how you can tell your political representatives to keep the web open.
We’ve previously documented the strange case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fervent Spiritualism, which Mark Strauss of io9 aptly describes as “hard to reconcile [with] the man who created the literary embodiment of empirical thinking,” Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was so eager to believe in the existence of fairies and what he called “psychic matters” that he was frequently taken in by hoaxes. But the physician and novelist’s seemingly odd views obtained widely among his contemporaries who sought confirmation of the afterlife and communion with their dead relatives, millions of whom were lost in the Civil War, then World War I.
Spiritualism provided a comfort to the bereaved, as well as ample opportunity for grifters and charlatans. And yet, Strauss points out, the rise of Spiritualism in the 19th century may also have been due to the rising influence of science in popular culture, as more and more people sought experimental evidence for their supernatural beliefs. Conan Doyle wrote twenty books on the subject, including the two-volume 1924 History of Spiritualism. In a speech he gave in May of 1930, just before his death, he explained the appeal. Hear the audio above and read a transcription below:
People ask, what do you get from spiritualism? The first thing you get is that it absolutely removes all fear of death. Secondly, it bridges death for those dear ones whom we may lose. We need have no fear that we are calling them back, for all that we do is to make such conditions as experience has taught us, will enable them to come if they wish. And the initiative lies always with them.
Two months later at a séance attended by thousands at the Royal Albert Hall, a medium claimed to have communicated with the Sherlock Holmes author. And four years after that, another medium, Noah Zerdin, held a séance attended by hundreds, and Conan Doyle is said to have been one of 44 who spoke from the beyond. This time, the event was recorded, on 26 acetate disks, which were only discovered 67 years later in 2001 by Zerdin’s son, who donated them to the British Library. The 1934 recordings featured in a 2002 BBC radio documentary called What Grandad Did in the Dark.
Just above, you can hear the supposed voice of Arthur Conan Doyle speaking from the spirit world. The audio is seriously spooky, but I’m not inclined to believe that it’s anything more than a hoax, although the technology of the time would make manipulation of the direct recordings difficult. So-called “spirit voices” in recordings such as this are known as EVP (“electronic voice phenomenon”), and there are many such examples of the genre at the British Library, including a batch of 60 tapes made by a Dr. Konstantin Raudive, “who believed that the dead could communicate with the living through the medium of radio waves.”
A post on the British Library site comments that “the recorded evidence is not especially convincing, being short comments or fragments that without the accompanying spoken ‘translation’ would probably not strike the listener as having any meaningful content.” The Conan Doyle audio seems a little more coherent, though it’s difficult to make out exactly what the voice says. Compare the two samples and draw your own conclusions. Or better yet, consider what Sherlock Holmes would make of this alleged “evidence.”
Like many in the Honeycomb Kids generation, I didn’t properly appreciate children’s television icon Gumby until Eddie Murphy parodied him on Saturday Night Live. This sparked a revival. Watching Gumby episodes in the company of other merry young adults reframed my previously held view of him as a relic from a time when TV was boring. Turns out that Gumby and his equine sidekick Pokey were actually pretty funny, weird-in-a-good-way, and far more soulful than the witless flat animation jamming the airwaves of my 70s childhood.
I decided to take the kids, gambling that they might respond to Gumby as I did now, not the way I did when I was their age. Their screen time was pretty limited back then, and as a result, they’d avidly watch just about anything.
The first video we encountered was Gumbasia, the experimental, character-free, stop motion riff above that Clokey made as a student at USC. It was produced in 1953 and released in 1955.
Not exactly what I’d been priming the children to expect on the subway ride over.
“That’s Gumby?” they cried in dismay. “That cube?”
No. But those morphing cubes and squiggles did give birth to an empire, after producer and president of the Motion Picture Producers Association, Sam Engel, offered to bankroll a pilot, declaring Gumbasia the most exciting film he’d ever seen in his life. Clokey was teaching English at the Harvard Military Academy. Engel’s sole wish was to improve the quality of children’s television programming. He asked Clokey if he could “make little clay figures out of that clay and animate them.”
Clokey did just that, with Engel bankrolling the pilot, “Gumby on the Moon.” The producer was so pleased with the result, he refused to take a cut when Gumby was given a seven year contract at NBC.
Imagine a Cinderella story like that happening today!
If this small morsel of Gumby history leaves you craving more, book your flight for the inaugural Gumby Fest in Glendora, California, where Gumby grew to maturity in “an unassuming industrial building.”
If you have an interest in how the internet has widened the very concept of education, you may well know about Google’s Art Project, a digital wealth of free visual art information and viewing opportunities we’ve featured before. And you more than likely know about Khan Academy, the highest-profile producer of educational videos on the internet. Now, from the combined power of their learning resources comes this collection of video introductions to over 100 important paintings. Ranging from between two to nine minutes and covering works of art created in eras from 575 B.C.E to the Second World War, these brief but intellectually dense and visually rich lessons bear the label of Smarthistory, “a multimedia web-book about art and art history” that merged with Khan Academy in 2011.
In the video at the top of the post, Smarthistory introduces us to Botticelli’s 1486 Tbe Birth of Venus, “one of the most iconic images in the history of Western art” — its content, its context, and its inspiration. The Birth of Venus might seem like one of those images that needs no introduction, but as all the information revealed in the video reminds us, most of us, if not art historians ourselves, could at least use a refresher.
Just above, we have Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 The Bedroom, a painting that, in the words of the artist himself, “ought to rest the brain — or rather, the imagination.” Though we all know the name of this particular post-Impressionist, we may not have seen this particular canvas of his before, a fact Smarthistory’s experts Beth Harris and Steven Zucker take into account when they explain to us how they themselves think about it. “What you’re talking about is the root of abstraction itself,” says Zucker. “It’s not that this is representative; it’s that the formal qualities of painting itself can have their own experiential aspect.” And they speak just as insightfully on the paintings we encounter, in one form or another, every so often in our daily lives. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, for instance, a replica of which I saw on the side of one coffee mug I used every day for years, gets discussed below as “an expression of wartime alienation” that delivers “an immediate implication that we are alone” that “makes us look for some sign of life, but we don’t see anything.” Smarthistory’s videos manage to reveal a great deal of emotional, technical, and historical knowledge on these and many other paintings in a fraction of the time it takes a student to cross campus for their art history lecture — let alone to sit through its entire slideshow. You can see all 100 videos in the collection here.
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