It’s one of those questions I’ve always wondered about. And maybe you have too. Just how do they extract caffeine from coffee beans? In the first episode of a new Mental Floss series, “Big Questions,” a guy named Craig, rocking a tight t shirt, gives us some answers. If I’m guessing right, the video relies fairly heavily on this Scientific American article from 1999. It helps demystify the process a little more.
Charles Baudelaire’s decadent visions pushed the Victorian cult of beauty toward modernism, Henry Miller’s lurid epics pushed a then staid modernism toward anarchic beat writing, and Georges Bataille and the surrealists of his arts journal Documents gave us much of the culture we have today, call it what you will if postmodern is too passé. Obsessed with torture, pornography, horror, and bodily fluids, Bataille “wanted to bring art down to the base level of other physical phenomena,” says surrealist scholar Dawn Ades. Where other transgressive figures of the past have mostly been tamed, Bataille, I submit, is still quite dangerous. The Bataille quote that opens the film above, A perte de vue (“As far as the eye can see”), won’t go down easily with almost anyone: “The world,” reads narrator Jean-Claude Dauphin, “is only inhabitable on the condition that nothing in it is respected.” This, the documentary suggests, is Bataille’s philosophy, one he defines as “a need for sensibility to call up disturbance.”
Bataille, a failed priest and sometime librarian, founded surrealist flagship Documents in 1929, published 15 issues, then went on to write novels, poems, and essays for the next thirty years. But his most famous work has remained his first, The Story of the Eye, originally published under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928. It’s a book that even today can seem like “social anthrax,” as novelist John Wray put it, in a way that other once taboo-breaking works like Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, certainly do not. It’s an apt comparison, not on literary grounds, but given that both writers were haunted by once fervent Catholicism turned to fervent rejection. Writes Mark Hudson in The Guardian, “he did believe in his own transgressive philosophies in a quasi-religious sense.” Like Joyce, “there’s a powerful dualism in his thought, a profound religious impulse.” Unlike Joyce—or Bataille’s fellow surrealists for that matter, who “excommunicated” him from the movement—“there is still much in his work that is difficult to redeem and far from being accommodated by the mainstream—if indeed it ever can be.”
You can read four of Bataille’s challenging pieces at Supervert’s elibrary: The Story of the Eye and three essays, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” “The Big Toe,” and “The Cruel Practice of Art.” Bataille’s philosophy, writes Supervert, “apparently lay in personal experience—in particular his childhood with a suicidal mother and a blind, syphilitic father.” This kind of psychologizing may seem superfluous, yet Bataille introduces himself to us, in his own words—through audio interviews in the first few minutes of A pert de vue—as the product of “a sad place to be.” Personal origins aside, Bataille’s philosophy has resonated widely and “helped pave the way to contemporary critical theory.” By embracing everything rejected, feared, or held in contempt, Bataille reclaimed everyday parts of human existence—those we euphemize or seek to contain—for literature, philosophy… and well, the internet. If some of Bataille’s preoccupations are irredeemable for mainstream tastes, you may find as you watch the film above and read Bataille’s writing that this is for good reason.
We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of the Beatles as Serious Artists™ that it’s easy to forget—at least for those of us who weren’t there—how highly commercial a franchise they were in the mid-sixties. It’s no wonder Joe Strummer’s line about “phony Beatlemania” in the Clash’s “London Calling” resonated so strongly for those disaffected with the reign of the Fab Four. The real thing was overwhelming enough, but the slew of official, unofficial, and bootleg merchandising that followed it, much of it aimed at children, makes the band’s dominance seem, well, kinda juvenile. Before they escaped pop stardom and retreated to the studio to record their psychedelic masterpieces, the Beatles received every possible commercial treatment, from lunchboxes and cereal bowls to jigsaw puzzles, lampshades, and a Ringo Starr bubble bath. Perusing an online auction of Beatles merch is a bit like touring Graceland.
There’s one artifact from the height of Beatlemania that you won’t find, however. Instead, you can watch it for free on Youtube. I refer to The Beatles, a half-hour Saturday morning cartoon show that ran on ABC from September, 1965 to September 1969 and produced a total of 39 episodes. The band themselves had almost nothing to do with the show, other than appearing in an odd promotion. Trading entirely in broad slapstick comedy of the Scooby-Doo variety, the show saw the four mates tumble into one goofy situation after another, some supernatural, some musical, some theatrical. Although all natural performers themselves, no Beatle ever voiced his character on the show. Instead, American actor Paul Frees, as John and George, and British actor Lance Percival, as Paul and Ringo, imitated them, very badly. The Beatles cartoon show aired at a time when the kids TV landscape was just beginning to resemble the one we have today, with ABC competitor CBS running superhero shows like Space Ghost, Superman, and Mighty Mouse, but the surreal plots and musical numbers on The Beatles were an attempt to reach adults as well. Watch clips from Season 1 above.
Apple had lots of big announcements today — a new watch, a new iPhone, and payment system. But wait, there’s more! On its big day, Apple also announced that anyone with an iTunes account can download for freeSongs of Innocence, U2’s first album in 5 years. The album will remain free on iTunes until October 13, 2014, after which time it will be released on CD and maybe vinyl. You can access the album in several ways.
1.) On your iOS device, go to the Music app and select the Albums tab. Select Songs of Innocence. Tap a track to listen or tap the iCloud icon to download.
2.) On your Mac or PC, open iTunes, then select the Albums tab. Select Songs of Innocence. Select a track to listen or click the iCloud icon to download.
3.) On any of your devices, go to Featured Stations and select Songs of Innocence to listen. Starting September 10.
A good few people objected to a recent project that colorized old photos of Walt Whitman, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, and other historical characters. Leave them alone! they grumped. The past, they wanted left in black and white. But this is not so easily done when some photos—whether of august personages like Leo Tolstoy above, or of ordinary anonymous peasants below—were always processed in color. The Tolstoy image dates from 1908, two years before his death, but the process is much older, and successful color photographs, not simply hand-painted colorizations, go back at least to the Lumiere Brothers’ Autochromes from the late 19th century.
The method that gave us Tolstoy in color involved taking three photographs—with a red, a green, and a blue filter—then projecting the resulting prints through filters of the same color. It’s a procedure that dates to Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell’s 1861 experiments, which put to the test several earlier theories. The photographs you see here are the work of scientist and inventor Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, who had perfected the projection method to such a degree that—as he wrote in a letter to Tolstoy asking him to pose—he only needed “from 1 to 3 seconds to take the photograph.” Thus it would not be “overly tiresome” for the soon-to-be eighty-year-old novelist.
Tolstoy, of course, was a national institution, and had warranted an earlier attempt at a color portrait by an anonymous amateur to whom Prokudin-Gorsky refers in his letter of request. The first attempt, the inventor implies, was a botched job. Billing himself as a specialist in “photography ‘in natural colors,’” the self-confident entrepreneur assured the writer he could produce “excellent results” with “accurate colors.” “My colored projections,” he wrote, “are known in both Europe and in Russia.” Prokudin-Gorsky was received and given two days to take several color photographs, though whether the others have survived, I do not know. We do know that the portrait appeared in the August, 1908 issue of The Proceedings of the Russian Technical Society as “the first Russian color photoportrait.” The journal offered the image in tribute to Tolstoy’s upcoming 80th birthday celebration, writing:
Our periodical, as a purely technical one, cannot honor this venerable representative of Russian thought and word with special articles. Desiring, however, to take part in the general festivities, the editorial staff […] decided to publish in this, its August issue, the newest portrait of Tolstoy, which is the dernier mot in photographic technology. The portrait was taken on location and in natural colors, achieved through technical methods alone, without any use of the artist’s brush or tool.
Prokudin-Gorsky expressed his gratitude to the novelist by mailing him a photographic periodical containing “many pictures produced in my workshops from my photographs.” Perhaps the other photos we see here were contained in that journal. Prokudin-Gorsky had every reason to be proud of his work, and the Russian Technical Society every reason to endorse it. The pictures are stunning.
Some of the photographs, like the Tolstoy portrait, have a painterly, almost impressionistic quality. Others, like the 1911 village scene with the Nikolaevskii Cathedral in the distance, have almost the depth of field and fine-grained clarity of 35mm film. And some, like that of the already cartoonish structure below, have an almost hallucinatory CGI quality. The method wasn’t perfect—even with such short exposures, subjects had to remain absolutely still. If they moved, the result was an eerie double exposure effect you see in the middle distance of the field workers photographed above. But overall, these photographs simply astonish in their crispness and fidelity.
You can see many more of Prokudin-Gorsky’s images at this online gallery, which includes over a dozen early-twentieth century photos of Russian laborers, landscapes, and self portraits. Prokudin-Gorsky’s work also preserves images of various Eastern European peoples in traditional dress—like the final Emir of Bukhara, now Uzbekistan, below in 1910. Many of these groups were on the verge of cultural extinction in the coming years of Soviet imperialism. Unwittingly, Prokudin-Gorsky managed to beautifully capture the very end of tsarist Russia, most poignantly symbolized for so many Russians by their aged literary hero, whose birthday we celebrate again today. Google decided to do so in full color as well, with fancy doodles of his major works. You may accuse them of tampering with the past, but those who find these color photographs too modern may need to expand their definition of modernity.
August and Louis Lumière might have made the first film – a simple, static shot of workers leaving their factory for the day – but George Méliès invented the art form of cinema. Through his experiments, Méliès discovered that magic happened when he turned the camera off and on. People suddenly disappeared into thin air. Objects appeared out of nowhere. A famed magician, Méliès knew he was on to something. His discovery planted the seeds for just about every cinematic technique in the book — including animation. You can watch six of Méliès’ films here, including his landmark 1902 short A Trip to the Moon.
The person credited with making the first film-based animation, however, is James Stuart Blackton with his film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). You can watch it above. The short starts with the artist’s hand drawing on a chalkboard. Soon, however, the drawing starts to move on its own. The film is as primitive as it is fun. A man in a top hat blows cigar smoke into a woman’s face. A clown dances. Imagine the shock and awe of an audience not weaned on Pixar and Mickey Mouse watching a picture come to life for the first time.
Blackton started his career as a journalist and a vaudeville cartoonist. In 1896, he was assigned to cover Thomas Edison’s brand new invention – the Vitascope, an early film projector. Edison proved to be such a good salesman that Blackton ended up buying one. Soon he, along with his vaudeville partner Albert Smith, founded one of the first ever movie studios — the American Vitagraph Company. The company eventually became known for creating some of the first movie adaptations of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, but before that, they made short “trick” movies — flashy shorts to be shown during vaudeville shows. One of those movies, The Enchanted Drawing(1900) is essentially a filmic version of Blackton’s act with some cinematic sleight-of-hand thrown in. And as you can see below, it points the way to Blackton’s breakthrough with Humorous Phases.
In 1911, Blackton, along with his co-director, the spectacularly talented Winsor McCay, made Little Nemo, a movie that hints at the true potential of animation. Sure, their movie has way too much half-hearted live action slap stick, which pads out the running time to an over-stuffed 10 minutes, but the actual animation, which starts around 8:30, is utterly gorgeous. Watch it below.
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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
With 1984’s Neuromancer, William Gibson may not have invented cyberpunk, but he certainly crystallized it. The novel exemplifies the tradition’s mandate to bring together “high tech and low life,” or, in the words of Gibson himself, to explore what “any given science-fiction favorite would look like if we could crank up the resolution.”
It may have its direct predecessors, but Gibson’s tale of hackers, street samurai, conspiracists, and shadowy artificial intelligences against virtual reality, dystopian urban Japan, and a variety of other international and technological backdrops remains not just archetypal but, unusually for older technology-oriented fiction, exciting.
Now you can not only read Gibson’s cyberpunk-defining words, but hear them in Gibson’s voice: a 1994 abridged edition, released only on cassette tapes and now long out of print, resides in MP3 form online here .
You can get a taste of this particular Neuromancer audiobook and its production in the clip above. I always appreciate hearing authors read their own work, but people will surely disagree about whether the laid-back tones of a man who often describes himself as thoroughly un-cutting-edge ideally suit the material. If you think it doesn’t, or if you don’t like the abridged-ness of this edition, you suffer no lack of alternatives: Arthur Addison read an unabridged one for Books on Tape in 1997, in 2011 Robertson Dean read another one for Penguin Audiobooks, and in 2012 Jeff Harding did yet another. (Note: You can download the Dean edition for free via Audible if you enroll in their 30 Day Free Trial. We have more details on that here.) Those who have found themselves hooked on the internet, in any of its modern forms, will certainly hear a lot of prescience in Gibson’s conception of technology as addictive drug. But in my experience, cyberpunk stories, too, can prove fiercely habit forming. Rather than the first cyberpunk novel, or the most important one, or the genre’s blueprint, let’s just call Neuromancer the gateway.
The images came to Stanford as a gift from the Revs Institute for Automotive Research, located in Naples, Florida. If you’d like a quick primer on finding and gathering information about vintage cars in the archive, watch the introductory video below. It’ll teach you how to sift through the digital library in rapid fashion.
The images above come from the Revs Digital Library.
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