Abiding by the strong rules he established for the characters in the Looney Tunes stable was critical to his comic approach, as Jones explains in the above video essay, a bit of a departure for Tony Zhou’s celebrated cinema series, Every Frame a Picture. Rather than examine the framing and timing of “one of the all-time masters of visual comedy,” this time Zhou delves into the evolution of his subject’s artistic sensibilities.
Jones teased out the desires that became the primary engines for those characters’ physicality as well as their behavior. Daffy comes off as an unhinged lunatic in his early appearances. His comic potential grew once Jones reframed him as a conniver who’d do anything in pursuit of wealth and glory.
Once the characters’ motivations were clear, Jones could mess around with the ol’ one-two punch. It’s a classic comic structure, wherein reality wreaks havoc on the audience’s expectations about how things should unfold. Then again, a child can tell you what drives Jones’ creation, the passionate French skunk, Pepé Le Pew, as well as how those amorous ambitions of his are likely to work out. Funny! Dependably so!
Zhou also draws attention to the evolution of the characters’ expressions, from the antic to the economical. John Belushi was not the only comic genius to understand the power of a raised eyebrow.
A quick heads up, Wilco just released its ninth studio album, Star Wars. And right now you can download it for free via Wilco’s website. But don’t dilly dally, the free download will only be available for 30 days. On the band’s Instagram account, Jeff Tweedy gave a simple explanation for the unexpected giveaway: “Well, the biggest reason, and I’m not sure we even need any others, is that it felt like it would be fun.” Indeed.
Last week: we highlighted a couple more downloads that will be free for a limited time. Find them below.
Fans of Twin Peaks, the early-1990s television series co-created and in large part directed by David Lynch, have had a lot to get excited about recently. Most prominently, we’ve heard a lot of will-he-or-won’t-he talk about whether Lynch will participate in the show’s much-discussed 21st-century reboot. That has no doubt stoked public interest in Twin Peaks (available on Hulu here), which in some sense has never really died away, even though it went off the air 24 years ago (and by all accounts got pretty lackluster in its second season); some of us, while we wait for the new series, have even engaged in all manner of Twin Peaks-themed writing, art, and even music projects.
Many Australian Twin Peaks fans, while they wait for the new series, made it over to Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art earlier this year for the exhibitionDavid Lynch: Between Two Worlds. If they went on April 18th, they saw experimental post-punk band Xiu Xiu perform their own interpretation of the Twin Peaks score. “The music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans,” says Xiu Xiu leader Jamie Stewart. “It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. The idea of holding the ‘purity’ of the 1950s up to the cold light of a violent moon and exposing the skull beneath the frozen, worried smile has been a stunning influence on us.”
Xiu Xiu, since Stewart formed it in San Jose in 2002, has steadily gained a reputation as, in the words of Vice, “the weirdest band you know.” Part of that has to do with the formal adventurousness of their music itself, and part to do with their invariably disturbing music videos. No wonder, then, that they would feel such an affinity with David Lynch, no stranger to getting called “weird” by audiences and the maker of some unsettling music and music videos himself. Given the potential overlap in their followings, and given that nobody seems to know how many production decisions the new Twin Peaks has yet made, perhaps someone can check and see whether Xiu Xiu might have the time to record its score?
Les Paul, known primarily for the iconic guitar that bears his name, also invented most of the recording technology we still use today, including the use of reverb as a studio effect. But of course he didn’t invent reverberation anymore than he invented the guitar; he just turned both of them electric. Reverb has existed as long as there have been soundwaves, obstacles for them to hit, and ears to hear what happens when they do. In every possible space—landscape, cityscape, and architectural formation—the effect announces itself differently, though we’re seldom aware of it unless we’re in grand, cavernous spaces like a cathedral or mountain gorge.
But musicians and audio engineers like Les Paul have always paid special attention to the way sound manifests in space, as have singers like the gent above, who calls himself the Wikisinger, real name Joachim Müllner. With “no artificial reverb added,” Müllner demonstrates how much environment contributes to the quality of what we hear with a montage of sound and video clips from several—very aesthetically pleasing—locations.
In each place, Müllner sings the same strange song: in a tunnel, an attic, a field before an oil derricks, the nave of a cathedral, and an anechoic chamber—which resembles the interior of an alien spacecraft and produces no reflections whatsoever. Sometimes the effect is subtle, inviting you to lean in and listen more closely; sometimes it’s outsized and operatic.
The filmmaker’s claim to “no artificial reverb” sounds a little slippery after viewing the Wikisinger’s performance since one of the most dramatic clips features his voice, and person, reduplicated several times. And we should keep in mind that no recording technology is perfectly transparent. Microphones and other equipment always add, or subtract, something to the sound. As slick as an advertisement, the short video uses a heavily mediated form to convey the simple idea of natural reverberation. You may, in fact, have seen something just like this not long ago. Before the Wikisinger, there was the Wikidrummer. In another “no reverb added” video above, he snaps, cracks, booms, and crashes through the same beat in garages, open fields, and underpasses. With each abrupt shift in location comes an abrupt shift in the frequency and duration of the sounds, as the full spectrum collides with metal, concrete, asphalt, and open air.
The ways in which sound and space interact can determine the shape of a musical form. This subject has given musician, artist, and theorist of music and art, David Byrne much to think about. As he puts in in a TED talk above, the “nature of the room”—the quality of its reverb—guides the evolution of musical genres and styles. Beginning with the example of CBGBs and like dive bars around the country, he describes how the art punk pioneered by his band the Talking Heads depended on such spaces and “didn’t sound all that great” in places strictly designed for music, like Carnegie Hall. His talk then takes us to some fascinating architectural environments, such as the kinds of rooms Mozart composed and played in. Byrne speaks to the neophytes as well as to the audiophiles among us, and his talk works as a perfect intellectual complement to the sonic and visual adventure on offer in the Wikisinger and –drummer’s videos. Both approaches equally persuade us of the prime significance of that intangible wonder called reverb.
Like many children of the 70s, I was wild for Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and had the merchandise to prove it. I was a Snoopy girl, for the most part, but not averse to receiving items featuring other characters—Linus, Schroeder, the caustic Lucy, PigPen, and, of course, Charlie Brown. My father was a sucker for the comparatively butch Peppermint Patty, and Marcie, the bespectacled hanger-on who referred to Patty as “Sir.”
But there was one character I don’t remember seeing on any Peanuts swag in 1970s Indiana…. Actually, that’s not accurate. I don’t remember any Shermy sweatshirts. Female second bananas like Violet, the original, i.e. non-Peppermint Patty, and Frieda were also underrepresented, despite the latter’s oft-mentioned naturally curly hair.
The character I’m thinking of never became a major player, but he was notable. Ground-breaking even. Can you guess?
Thats right: Franklin, the only African-American member of the Peanuts gang.
(An African-American toddler, Milo, below, had a 17-strip run in 1977 when Charlie Brown had to skip town after exacting his revenge on the kite-eating tree… That’s it. Poor Franklin.)
Franklin owes his existence, in large part, to Harriet Glickman, a white teacher from LA, who found letter writing one of the few forms of activism in which a mother of three children—all squarely within the Peanuts demographic—could fully participate. Raised by liberal parents to consider herself a global citizen, and to speak out against injustice, she wrote the authors of several leading comic strips in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in April, 1968. Would the creators of Peanuts and Mary Worth consider introducing a black character into the mix, as a first step on what Glickman foresaw as a “long and tortuous road” toward a future climate of “open friendship, trust and mobility” between the races?
Mary Worth’sAllen Saunders declined, apparently saying that he shared Glickman’s sentiments but feared the syndicate would drop his strip if he followed her suggestion.
Schulz didn’t exactly leap at the chance, either, saying that he was in the same boat as the other sympathetic cartoonists who’d begged off. What he feared wasn’t so much the syndicate’s response, as the suspicion that he might be seen as “patronizing our Negro friends.”
Glickman persisted, asking his permission to share his letter with some of her “Negro friends,” all parents. Perhaps they could offer some thoughts that might induce the cartoonist to say yes.
I’d like to express an opinion as a Negro father of two young boys. We have a situation in America in which racial enmity is constantly portrayed.
Like Glickman, he felt that a “casual day-to-day scene” featuring a non-white character would give his sons and other children of color a chance to see themselves reflected in the strip, while promoting “racial amity” to readers of all races.
Glickman expressed hope that Peanuts would eventually grow to include more than one black child:
Let them be as adorable as the others…but please…allow them a Lucy!
Within weeks of receiving Kelly’s letter, and just over two months into Glickman’s letter-writing campaign, Schulz reached a decision. He wrote Glickman that she should check the paper the week of July 29, 1968.
Franklin, his skin tone indicated by closely set diagonal lines, made his debut in a bathing suit, returning Charlie Brown’s runaway beach ball. The encounter took three days to play out, during which Franklin and Charlie Brown form an alliance of vacationing children whose usual playmates are elsewhere. It would seem that the major difference between them is that Franklin’s dad is in Vietnam. Obviously, a lot of thought went into their casual dialogue.
Benign as Franklin was, his presence sparked outrage. Some Southern readers cried foul when he showed up in the same classroom as Marcie and Peppermint Patty. Others felt Franklin wasn’t black enough.
Ultimately Franklin never achieved A‑list status, but he did resonate with certain readers, notably William Bell, a diversity officer working with the Cincinnati Police Department.
Visit Mashable to see reproductions of Glickman and Schulz’s correspondence. And watch the video above to hear more about her upbringing and another comic that featured black characters, Dateline: Danger!, a collaboration between Saunders’ son John and artist Al McWilliams.
After the great director F.W. Murnau died in a car crash in California at the young age of 42, his body was flown back to his native Germany to be buried, and that’s where he has rested since 1931.
Until this week, that is, when somebody made off with the director’s skull.
Reports are sketchy and rely on this report from German news outlet BZ, but, according to police, somebody opened up Murnau’s metal coffin and removed the head from the embalmed corpse. Wax and a candle were found at the scene, suggesting to some that the theft had occult ties.
Murnau is best known for the spookiest Dracula tale ever told in celluloid, 1922’s Nosferatu, which had coffins aplenty. It is also, by the way, free to view above. He also delved into the Satanic with his version of Faust (1926), which features a marching band of skeletons, among other apparitions:
Murnau’s filmography contains a 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Hunchback and the Dancer from the same year, though both films are lost. The director did tend towards horror, but two of his finest films did not.
The Last Laugh (1924) is a poignant tale about a hotel doorman who can’t bear the shame of being fired, and contains one of cinema’s finest “director ex machina” with an improbable but happy ending. Once Murnau moved to Hollywood, he directed Sunrise (1927), which blended the director’s expressionistic style with a Tinsel Town budget, a tale of a love nearly lost then resurrected. Four years and another three films later, Murnau’s career would be over. He died in a Santa Barbara hospital after a traffic accident by the Rincon–now a famous surfing location–just a few miles from where I now write these words, 84 years later.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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Heavy Metal owes many debts, though it doesn’t always acknowledge them—debts to classical music, through guitarists like Yngwie Malmsteen, to the blues, through Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and to jazz, through a host of players, including Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi. But while other players have picked up techniques from the jazz idiom like blast beats and sweep picking, Iommi found something else: the motivation to relearn to play the guitar after losing three of the fingertips on his right hand in an industrial accident, on his last day on the job, right before he was to embark on a European tour. He was only 17 years old. Iommi narrates the story himself above in “Fingers Bloody Fingers,” a powerful animated short by illustrator Paul Blow and animator Kee Koo.
After the gruesome accident, Iommi, “extremely depressed,” tragically resigned himself to never play the guitar again — that is, until his factory manager visited him in the hospital and told him the story of Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-Romani swing guitarist who lost two fingers in a terrible fire at age 18, himself just on the verge of stardom and highly sought after by the greatest bandleaders of the day. In the clip above from the French documentary Trois doigts de genie (Three Fingers of Genius), learn how Reinhardt overcame his disability to become one of the most famous guitarists of his day, and see why Iommi was so inspired by his story. “A lesser musician would have given up,” wrote Mike Springer in a previous post, “but Reinhardt overcame the limitation by inventing his own method of playing.” Iommi, of course, did the same, also along the way introducing a lighter gauge of string, which millions of rock guitarists now use.
Reinhardt toured and recorded with his own ensembles and with Duke Ellington and others. Unfortunately precious little footage of him exists, but you can see him above with violinist Stephane Grappelli in their Quintette du Hot Club and in a few other short clips in this post. Once you hear Django’s story of overcoming adversity, and once you hear him play, you’ll understand why he inspired Iommi to push through his own pain and limitations to become one of the most influential guitarists of his generation.
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