With the naked eye, it’s nearly impossible to see what happens inside a DSLR camera when the shutter activates. But all of that changes when you use a high speed camera — the Phantom Flex — to slow things down to 10,000fps. Above, you can see The Slow Mo Guys do their thing. It’s fun to watch, and you’ll probably learn a few things about how a camera works.
If I close my eyes on hallucinogens, I get a vision of great scaly dragons in outer space, they’re winding slowly and eating their own tails. Sometimes my skin and all the room seem sparkling with scales, and it’s all made out of serpent stuff. And as if the whole illusion of life were made of reptile dream.
He also mentioned that drugs made him barf. That alone seems a persuasive reason to stop taking them.
Despite his strong desire to continue his pursuit of ever higher levels of consciousness, the cons were beginning to outweigh the pros.
It took nearly a year for the Paris Review to publish the interview. So long that the subject felt the need to revise his earlier statements, via the typewritten letter above.
His post-interview psychedelic excursions appear to have transpired in the sort of benign universe typically imagined by a preschooler with a big box of crayons: “tiny jeweled violet flowers,” “giant green waves,” a “great yellow sun.” Otherwise known as Big Sur on acid.
I wonder if Johnson ever found out he had a rabidly anti-war Beat Poet (and “masses of green bulb-headed Kelp vegetable-snake undersea beings”) praying for his recovery.
Apparently it worked.
The complete June 1965 interview can be read in the Paris Review’s archives. Those who’ve grown unaccustomed to reading courier font as executed by a midcentury manual typewriter will find the complete text of Ginsberg’s letter below.
June 2, 1966
To readers of Paris Review:
Re LSD, Psylocibin [sic], etc., Paris Review #37 p. 46: “So I couldn’t go any further. I may later on occasion, if I feel more reassurance.”
Between occasion of interview with Thomas Clark June ’65 and publication May ’66 more reassurance came. I tried small doses of LSD twice in secluded tree and ocean cliff haven at Big Sur. No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake’s illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet’s oceanic horizon. No harm. President Johnson that day went into the Valley of Shadow operating room because of his gall bladder & Berkley’s Vietnam Day Committee was preparing anxious manifestoes for our march toward Oakland police and Hell’s Angels. Realizing that more vile words from me would send out physical vibrations into the atmosphere that might curse poor Johnson’s flesh and further unbalance his soul, I knelt on the sand surrounded by masses of green bulb-headed Kelp vegetable-snake undersea beings washed up by last night’s tempest, and prayed for the President’s tranquil health. Since there has been so much legislative mis-comprehension of the LSD boon I regret that my unedited ambivalence in Thomas Clark’s tape transcript interview was published wanting this footnote.
Few bands in rock ‘n’ roll history have faced as many charges of selling out—back when the term meant something—as The Clash. Even before they’d released their first record, they were accused of killing punk rock by signing to major label CBS. And 1985’s Cut the Crap, the final Clash release (hardly a Clash record at all by any true fan’s measure) has more or less been seen, rightly or not, as a money grab. For a band who stood in solidarity with working people and revolutionary leftist movements, The Clash walked a delicate line between financial success and political credibility.
Most critics date the end of the band well before that hated final album, made without guitarist Mick Jones and longtime drummer Topper Headon. As Rolling Stone writes, “The Clash came to a rather sad ending in May 1983,” when they accepted a $500,000 offer from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to headline the ‘New Wave Day’ of a massive festival in San Bernardino, California.
By this time, Headon had been kicked out of the band for drug problems, replaced by 23-year-old Pete Howard, “and Mick Jones and Joe Strummer were barely speaking.”
By the time they got to San Bernardino, California for the festival, they were in complete disarray. Things got worse when they learned fans were paying $25 to attend the show. They had been told previously that prices would be set at $17, and shortly before they went onstage, they held a press conference. The band announced they wouldn’t go on unless Apple gave $100,000 to charity. It was chaos. Some later claimed the real cause of their rage was the knowledge that Van Halen were getting a million dollars for their set.
Arriving onstage two hours late, under a banner that read “The Clash Not For Sale,” they played an angry set of songs, between which Strummer taunted the crowd. He opens with a sneer: “Alright then, here we are, in the capital of the decadent U.S. of A. This here set of music is now dedicated to making sure that those people in the crowd who have children, there is something left for them later in the centuries.” It’s an odd statement, announcing Strummer’s sense that The Clash were leaving a legacy, and that they were exiting the cultural stage.
Despite their rage, they still walked away with half a million bucks. Four months later, Mick Jones was out—the San Bernardino concert would be his last with the band—and The Clash, as the world had known them, were effectively dead. As a swan song, it’s a hell of a show, infighting and lineup changes aside. See the whole thing above (except “London Calling,” which cuts off midway through). It’s maybe a shame they didn’t retire the name after this performance, however. Though Strummer and bassist Paul Simenon toured with three replacements as The Clash in the years to come and, writes Dangerous Minds, “did a few things worth remembering between 1984 and 1986,” in most people’s minds, that part of the band’s history is best left out of the official record.
When we get deep enough into our enthusiasm for film, cinephiles start speculating in ways that might strike non-cinephiles as, well, unusual. The video essayist koganada, for example, states in the video above his desire to “build a time machine and travel to Italy circa 1952” and “ask Vittorio de Sica to make a film using Hollywood actors like Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones, and then team de Sica up with a Hollywood producer, the kind that likes to impose his will and sensibility onto a film — someone like David O. Selznick. In bringing these two worlds of cinema together, I’d hope for a clash in cinema so great that it would result in two cuts of the same film, one by de Sica and the other by Selznick.”
This may sound like the speculation of a fanboy, albeit a highbrow fanboy, but you can hardly call it idle speculation. This video essay, as you can see, actually manages to screen, side-by-side, scenes from what really do look like two different versions of the same early-1950s film, one cut in the classic Hollywood style, and one cut in the Italian neorealist style. This “experiment” in cinema illuminates the rhythms, emphases, and values of both kinds of filmmaking, adding nuance to the conception of one as clear-eyed, methodical, and uncompromising, and the other as idealized, flamboyant, and crowd-pleasing.
So has kogonada actually built this time machine and commissioned two cuts of the same picture from the director of Bicycle Thieves and the producer of Gone with the Wind? Not quite, but film history has provided him with the next best thing: 1954’s Terminal Station and The Indiscretion of an American Wife. De Sica “was one of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers when David O. Selznick commissioned TerminalStation from him and his screenwriting partner, Cesare Zavattini,” writes critic Dave Kehr in a Criterion Collection essay. But the production soon hit some serious snags. Criterion goes on to add:
The troubled collaboration between director Vittorio De Sica and producer David O. Selznick resulted in two cuts of the same film. De Sica’s version, Terminal Station, was screened at a length of one-and-a-half hours, but after disappointing previews, Selznick severely re-edited it and changed the title to Indiscretion of an American Wife without De Sica’s permission.
Though Kehr finds de Sica’s take on the material “immeasurably superior” to Selznick’s, he adds that “both have quite distinct emotional and dramatic qualities, and it is fascinating to see how identical material can be pushed and pulled, wholly through the postproduction process, in two radically different directions.” Even casual cinephiles stand to learn a lot from a back-to-back viewing of Terminal Station and The Indiscretion of an American Wife, but only in this video essay’s five minutes can we see them so carefully compared and contrasted side-by-side. Briefly but densely, it reveals to us the nature of both classic Hollywood and Italian neorealism — no time travel required.
Several years ago, an interviewer asked Stephen Fry to look backward — to reflect on his life and answer this question, “What do you wish you had known when you were 18”? What lessons would you draw in hindsight? Some of his answers included:
Don’t set goals for yourself, particularly material ones. They’re disastrous and will keep you from becoming who you really are.
Keep your ego in check. You’ll be better liked, and more opportunities will come your way.
Get outside your comfort zone by traveling to distant lands and reading books in a serendipitous way.
Be a giver, not a taker. It’s more rewarding.
In the clip above, Gay Byrne, a broadcaster with RTÉ, now asks Fry to look forward and answer another question: Suppose there is a God, and you arrive at the Pearly Gates, what would you say to him, her or it? Fry, an avowed secular humanist, isn’t throwing God any softballs: Why create a world where kids have bone cancer? Why create insects that burrow into children’s eyes and render them blind? Why create a world with so much pain, misery and injustice in it? As he answers these questions, and concludes that such a God (were it to exist) would be nothing short of maniacal, Byrne’s face contorts, revealing his discomfort. You can watch other scenes from the interview here, and catch Fry’s animated primers on secular humanism here.
It’s not my favorite Marlene Dietrich gem on the internet. No, that would be her temperamental screen test for The Blue Angel (1930). But it’s still a precious find. Above, we have an audio clip featuring Dietrich, one of the towering movie stars of early cinema, playing the musical saw. Andrea James writes over at BoingBoing: “Dietrich always wanted to be a classical musician. Since her cabaret act and film career left little time for her to do the required practice, she played the musical saw instead. Throughout World War II she wowed USO audiences with the novelty.” And that’s what we get a taste of here. In other clips available on Youtube, you can find Dietrich playing her “singing saw,” and again playing the musical saw on the radio, circa 1945.
Drones can give us an extraordinary view of cities still in their prime — cities like Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok & Mexico City. They can also give us a rare glimpse of places no longer inhabited, places quieted by the unspeakable. We’ve shown you a drone’s-eye view of Chernobyl. This week, it’s Auschwitz. Shot by the BBC, this sobering footage carries us over the massive Nazi concentration, built in Southern Poland, where 1.1 million people died during World War II, most of them (90%) European Jews. Many died in the gas chambers. Others of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, and sadistic medical experiments.
On this website, you can also watch a newly-released short documentary on Auschwitz. Produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Meryl Streep, it premiered last week before 300 Holocaust survivors in Auschwitz, helping to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
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Last month, we featured Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou’s series of video essays examining the filmmaking techniques of directors like Martin Scorsese, Edgar Wright, Steven Spielberg, and David Fincher. His newest piece looks at just one element of just one scene, but one directed by one of the highest figures, if not the highest figure, in the cinematic pantheon: Akira Kurosawa. Zhou, as any cinephile might expect, has a full-length examination of “the Emperor” of Japanese film in the works, but for now he’s put out a short video essay on the geometry of a couple minutes from The Bad Sleep Well (1960).
That 1960 release, a non-period piece not quite as well known as Kurosawa films like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Kagemusha, tells a Hamlet-like tale against the cultural backdrop of postwar Japanese corporate corruption.
Despite its non-epic nature, it has drawn my own attention again and again over the years, just as it seems to have drawn Zhou’s. Here, he uses it to illustrate Kurosawa’s penchant for constructing scenes not out of, as Hitchcock once put it, “photographs of people talking” — a dull practice that more than persists on screens today — but out of geometrical shapes.
You might like to compare this brief study of Kurosawa’s geometry with video essayist Kogonada’s look at the geometry of Wes Anderson’s movies. Just as you can’t watch the Every Frame a Painting mini-episode on The Bad Sleep Well without looking for shapes in the next Kurosawa pictures you watch, you can’t watch “Centered” without drawing a mental line down the center of your next screening of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, or their Andersonian successors. Zhou says he feels bored when subjected to the undisciplined visual composition in most major films, but here we have two filmmakers one can always rely on for the antidote.
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