Singing a piece of music for the first time while reading the notes from a sheet is hard, and requires complete control of one’s vocals. Today, the most popular ways of teaching this skill to musicians are based on the solfège method, where notes on a scale are matched to particular syllables: your standard do, re, mi, fa, so la, si. Students practice singing different combinations of these syllables, using varying rhythms and intervals, and eventually cement their knowledge of that particular scale. The method is, surprisingly, almost a millenium old, with the first European use of this mnemonic technique dating back to the middle ages.
In the 11th century, a monk known as Guido of Arezzo, began to use the “Guidonian hand” as way to teach medieval music singers his hexachord, or six-note scales. Arezzo, who had also devised the modern musical notation system, had noticed that singers struggled to remember the various Gregorian chants that the monastic orders performed in the monasteries.
To help their memorization, Guido decided to take the first syllable in each line of the well known hymn Ut Queant Laxis, and created a hexachord, or six note scale, that singers familiar with the hymn already knew: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. The hand, shown above, was a map of the musical notes in this hexachord system, with each note associated with a particular joint. In all, the Guidonian hand ranges almost three octaves. Although it had fallen out of use for the past few centuries, the Guidonian hand seems to be making a comeback. Here’s a video of the method in action, forwarded our way by Anton Hecht, an Open Culture reader:
I love the concept, but can’t help feel that using the Guidonian hand during a performance makes you look a little like a first grader struggling with basic arithmetic.
For more information on the Guidonian hand, check out this writeup of a 2011 Stanford symposium, and watch another demonstration video, here.
In one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” King’s discussion of opening lines is compelling because of his dual focus as an avid reader and a prodigious writer of fiction—he doesn’t lose sight of either perspective:
We’ve talked so much about the reader, but you can’t forget that the opening line is important to the writer, too. To the person who’s actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both.
This is excellent advice. As you orient your reader, so you orient yourself, pointing your work in the direction it needs to go. Now King admits that he doesn’t think much about the opening line as he writes, in a first draft, at least. That perfectly crafted and inviting opening sentence is something that emerges in revision, which can be where the bulk of a writer’s work happens.
Revision in the second draft, “one of them, anyway,” may “necessitate some big changes” says King in his 2000 memoir slash writing guide On Writing. And yet, it is an essential process, and one that “hardly ever fails.” Below, we bring you King’s top twenty rules from On Writing. About half of these relate directly to revision. The other half cover the intangibles—attitude, discipline, work habits. A number of these suggestions reliably pop up in every writer’s guide. But quite a few of them were born of Stephen King’s many decades of trial and error and—writes the Barnes & Noble book blog—“over 350 million copies” sold, “like them or loathe them.”
1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”
3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”
4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”
5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”
6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”
7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”
8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”
10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”
11. There are two secrets to success. “I stayed physical healthy, and I stayed married.”
12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”
13. Eliminate distraction. “There’s should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”
14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”
15. Dig. “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”
16. Take a break. “You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”
17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”
18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.”
19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”
They say Seinfeld was about nothing. But the clip above puts that sense of nothingness into perspective. Running six plus minutes, the montage assembled by LJ Frezza presents “A supercut of empty shots. A New York without people.” Essentially moments of pure nothingness. When you’re done, you can graduate to some more existentialist ideas — some fun, some substantive — in our archive.
Born in Philadelphia, Brenner started out a documentary filmmaker, but eventually launched a career as a comedian. His big break came on January 8, 1971 when Johnny Carson let him do nine minutes of standup on The Tonight Show. Carson apparently liked Brenner’s observational comedy routine. In years to come, Brenner made a record-setting 157 appearances on Johnny’s show, sometimes as a comedy act, sometimes as a substitute host. Above you can watch the very first of those funny appearances.
After the infant Herzog survived a bombing that covered him in rubble, his mother, understandably fearing for her children’s safety, fled to the mountains. The remoteness of his upbringing sheltered him in some ways (“I did not even know that cinema existed until I was 11”) and not, in others. (“At age four, I was in possession of a functioning submachine gun and my brother had a hand grenade.”)
When he says that hunger was a prevailing theme, I dare you to disagree.
Dire predictions, and yet he fills me with cheer every time he opens his mouth. I swear it’s not just that marvelous, much imitated voice. It’s also a comfort to know we’ve got a prolific artist remaining at his outpost from a sense of duty, gloomy yet stout as a child in his belief that an ecstasy of truth lies within human grasp.
In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) unveiled a sprawling, exhaustive exhibit on Stanley Kubrick. And it had just about everything you might want on the great director. Early photographs he took for Look magazine in the 1940s? Check. The blood soaked dresses of those creepy twins from The Shining? You got it! Sketches, notes and documents about Napoleon, the greatest movie he never made? They had a whole room for that. For those cinephiles who worship at Kubrick’s altar, LACMA’s exhibit was akin to a visit to the Vatican. There were more holy relics there than you could shake a monolith at—oh, and they had one of those there too.
The exhibit wrapped up in June 2013. If you missed it and you are jonesing for more Kubrick memorabilia, take heart — LACMA designed an app in conjunction with the exhibit for the iPhone, iPad and Android and you can download it right now. For free. The app is about as sprawling as the exhibit (and it will take a bit of time to download) but it features hand drawn notes from Kubrick, behind-the-scenes pictures from all of his movies, and interviews with the director, plus ones with the likes of Elvis Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and Douglas Trumbull.
The only thing that the app and the exhibit didn’t cover is the ever-growing number of insane conspiracy theories surrounding his work. Want something about how The Shining is really about a faked moon landing or how Eyes Wide Shut is really about the Illuminati? Look somewhere else.
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.
David Bowie and Cher: the combination sounds so incongruous, but then you think about it and realize the two could hardly have more in common. Two singers of the same generation, close indeed in age but both (whether through their sensibilities or through various cosmetic technologies) perpetually youthful; both performers of not exactly rock and not exactly pop, but some oscillating form between that they’ve made wholly their own; both masters of the distinctively flamboyant and theatrical; both given to sometimes radical changes of image throughout the course of their careers; and both immediately identifiable by just one name. The only vast difference comes in their performance schedules: Bowie, despite releasing an acclaimed album The Next Day last year, seems to have quit playing live shows in the mid-2000s, while Cher’s continuing tours grow only more lavish.
Long before this current stage of Bowie and Cher’s lives as musical icons, the two came together on an episode of the latter’s short-lived solo (i.e., without ex-husband Sonny Bono, with whom she’d hosted The Sonny & Cher Show) television variety show, simply titled Cher. On the broadcast of November 23, 1975, Bowie and Cher sang “Young Americans,” at the top, “Can You Hear Me,” just above, and bits of other songs besides.
Watch these clips not just for the performances, and not just for the outfits — costumes, really, especially when you consider Cher’s even then-famous variety of artificial hairstyles — but for the video effects, which by modern standards look like something out of a late-night public-access cable program. An especially trippy set of visuals accompanies Bowie’s solo moment on the episode below, singing about the one quality that perhaps unites he and Cher more than any other: “Fame.” And lots of it.
Since Vivian Kubrick was in grade school, she worked as a collaborator with her famous filmmaker father. She had cameos in a number of his movies including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon. She shot the behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Shining at the age of 24. And she composed the score for Full Metal Jacket under the pseudonym of Abigail Mead. Kubrick seemed to groom his daughter to be his cinematic heir. And then in the late 90s, that all stopped. She cut off all contact with her family.
Kubrick’s family was initially cagey about what happened to her, saying simply that she was living in LA. But then in 2010, Kubrick’s stepdaughter Katharina opened up. “We weren’t lying, we were just being economical with the truth,” she told The Daily Beast. “Because if you say, ‘My sister has become a Scientologist,’ where do you go from that?”
The Church of Scientology’s policy of disconnection is one of its most controversial practices. It’s not clear if Vivian formerly disconnected with her family but she did reportedly attend her father’s funeral in 1999 with a Scientologist minder. When her sister Anya died of cancer in 2009, she did not attend that funeral even though they were, by all accounts, inseparable growing up.
The rift between Kubrick and his daughter became final when he asked her to score Eyes Wide Shut and she refused, as “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy,” recalled Kubrick’s wife and Vivian’s mother. “He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”
Recently on her Twitter feed, Vivian posted a series of photos of herself on the set of her father’s movies. One picture shows an eight-year old Vivian clutching a baby chimp used on 2001. Another shows her hanging out on the milk bar set of A Clockwork Orange. “I helped cut out those Styrofoam letters on the wall,” she writes. Another picture shows Vivian sitting before a 16mm Steenbeck, editing her documentary on The Shining. And, most poignantly, one of her picture’s shows Vivian and Kubrick embracing on a deck chair.
“In Memory of my Dad,” she writes. “Who I loved with all my heart and soul… Dad and Me on the back veranda of Abbots Mead.”
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.
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In 2012, the 
