The Simpsons have mocked or referenced literature over its 27 (!!) seasons, usually through a book Lisa was reading, or with guest appearances (e.g., Michael Chabon & Jonathan Franzen, Maya Angelou and Amy Tan). And it has referenced Edgar Allan Poe in both title (“The Tell-Tale Head” from the first season) and in passing (in “Lisa’s Rival” from 1994, the title character builds a diorama based on the same Poe tale.)
But on the first ever “Treehouse of Horror” from 1990–the Simpsons’ recurring Halloween episode–they adapted Poe’s “The Raven” more faithfully than any bit of lit found in any other episode. The poem, read by James Earl Jones, remains intact, more or less, but with Dan Castellaneta’s Homer Simpson providing the unnamed narrator’s voice. Marge makes an appearance as the long departed Lenore, with hair so tall it needs an extra canvas to contain it in portrait. Maggie and Lisa are the censer-swinging seraphim, and Bart is the annoying raven that drives Homer insane.
Castellaneta does a great job delivering Poe’s verse with conviction and humor, while keeping the character true to both Homer and Poe. It’s a balancing act harder than it sounds.
Suffice it to say that this foray into Poe was good enough for several teachers guides (including this one from The New York Times) to suggest using the video in class. (We’d love to hear about this if you were a teacher or student who experienced this.) And it’s the first and only time that Poe got co-writing credit on a Simpsons episode.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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.
And, as we pointed out previously, her electronic music, recorded under her own name and with the band White Noise, influenced “most every current legend in the business—from Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers to Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.” Along with documentaries and high praise in the music press, the late Derbyshire now has her own Exhibition at the Coventry Music Museum, as of December 6 of last year.
Yet for all her influence among dance music composers and sound effects wizards, Derbyshire and her music remain pretty obscure—that is except for one composition, instantly recognizable as the original theme to the BBC’s sci-fit hit Doctor Who (hear it at the top), “the best-known work of a ragtag group of technicians,” writes The Atlantic, “who unwittingly helped shape the course of 20th-century music.” Written by composer Ron Granier, the song was actually brought into being by the Radiophonic Workshop, and by Derbyshire especially. The story of the Doctor Who theme’s creation is almost as interesting as the tune itself, with its “swooping, hissing and pulsing” that “manages to be at once haunting, goofy and ethereal.” Just above, you can see Derbyshire and her assistant Dick Mills tell it in brief.
What we learn from them is fascinating, considering that compositions like this are now created in powerful computer systems with dozens of separate tracks and digital effects. The Doctor Who theme, on the other hand, recorded in 1963, was made even before basic analog synthesizers came into use. “There are no musicians,” says Mills, “there are no synthesizers, and in those days, we didn’t even have a 2‑track or a stereo machine, it was always mono.” (Despite popular misconceptions, the theme does not feature a Theremin.) Derbyshire confirms; each and every part of the song “was constructed on quarter-inch mono tape,” she says, “inch by inch by inch,” using such recording techniques as “filtered white noise” and something called a “wobbulator.” How were all of these painstakingly constructed individual parts combined without multi track technology? “We created three separate tapes,” Derbyshire explains, “put them onto three machines and stood next to them and said “Ready, steady, go!” and pushed all the ‘start’ buttons at once. It seemed to work.”
The theme came about when Grainer received a commission from the BBC after his well-received work on other series. He “composed the theme on a single sheet of A4 manuscript,” writes Mark Ayres in an extensive online history, “and sent it over from his home in Portugal, leaving the Workshop to get on with it.” Aware that the musique concrète techniques Derbyshire and her team used “were very time-consuming, Grainer provided a very simple composition, in essence just the famous bass line and a swooping melody,” as well as vaguely evocative instructions for orchestration like “wind bubble” and “cloud.” Ayres writes, “To an inventive radiophonic composer such as Delia Derbyshire, this was a gift.” Indeed “upon hearing it,” The Atlantic notes, “a very impressed Grainer barely recognized it as his composition. Due to BBC policies at the time, Granier—against his objections—is still officially credited as the sole writer.” But the credit for this futuristic work—which sounds absolutely like nothing else of the time and “which brought to a wide audience methods once exclusive to the high modernism of experimental composition”—should equally go to Derbyshire and her team. You can contrast that ahead-of-its-time original theme with all of the iterations to follow in the video just above.
“Not everyone ‘digs’ underground movies, but those who do can ‘dig’ ’em here.” Now imagine those words spoken in the archetypal so-square-it’s-cool consummate midcentury newscaster voice — or actually watch them enunciated in just that manner out on the steps of New York’s The Bridge, “one of several small theaters around the country where ‘underground’ films are shown.” The report, which aired on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on December 31st, 1965, introduced to mainstream Americans such avant-garde filmmakers as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol — as well as a certain band called the Velvet Underground.
This six-minute segment spends some time with Piero Heliczer, filmmaker, poet, and “once the Jackie Coogan of Italy.” As Dangerous Minds’ Martin Schneider writes, “When CBS came a‑callin’ to do its story, Heliczer was shooting a 12-minute short called Dirt, featuring the Velvet Underground, and that was the scene Heliczer happened to be shooting that day. (For some reason none of the fellows in the band are wearing a shirt.)” Schneider also quotes Velvet Underground founding member Sterling Morrison, who credits playing in Heliczer’s “happenings” with showing him the possibilities of experimental music: “The path ahead became suddenly clear — I could work on music that was different from ordinary rock & roll since Piero had given us a context to perform.”
I can only imagine how the viewers of fifty years and one week ago must have reacted to hearing these cutting-edge filmmakers discussing “the narrative aspect and the poetic aspect” of cinema, let alone seeing clips of their works themselves, right down to a representative twenty seconds of Andy Warhol’sSleep. It even includes a clip from Brakhage’s Two: Creeley/McClurewhich must have made more than a few of them wonder if their set had suddenly gone on the blink. But even the most staid of CBS’s audience must have come away with a novel idea or two worth thinking about, such as Brakhage’s stated aim of making movies “for viewing in a living room, rather than in a theater.” That, perhaps, they could dig.
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Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russian polymathic inventor Léon Theremin demonstrating the strange instrument that bears his surname, and we noted that the Theremin was the first electronic instrument. This is not strictly true, though it is the first electronic instrument to be mass produced and widely used in original composition and performance. But like biological evolution, the history of musical instrument development is littered with dead ends, anomalies, and forgotten ancestors (such as the octobass). One such obscure oddity, the Telharmonium, appeared almost 20 years before the Theremin, and it was patented by its American inventor, Thaddeus Cahill, even earlier, in 1897. (See some of the many diagrams from the original patent below.)
Cahill, a lawyer who had previously invented devices for pianos and typewriters, created the Telharmonium—also called the Dynamaphone—to broadcast music over the telephone, making it a precursor not to the Theremin but to the later scourge of telephone hold music. “In a large way,” writes Jay Williston at Synthmuseum.com, “Cahill invented what we know of today as ‘Muzak.’” He built the first prototype Telharmonium, the Mark I, in 1901. It weighed seven tons. The final incarnation of the instrument, the Mark III, took 50 people to build at the cost of $200,000 and was “60 feet long, weighed almost 200 tons and incorporated over 2000 electric switches…. Music was usually played by two people (4 hands) and consisted of mostly classical works by Bach, Chopin, Greig, Rossini and others.” The workings of the gargantuan machine resemble the boiler room of an industrial facility. (See several photographs here.)
Needless to say, this was a highly impractical instrument. Nevertheless, Cahill not only found willing investors for the enormous contraption, but he also staged successful demonstrations in Baltimore, then—after disassembling and moving the thing by train—in New York. By 1905, his New England Electric Music Company “made a deal with the New York Telephone Company to lay special lines so that he could transmit the signals from the Telharmonium throughout the city.” Cahill used the term “synthesizing” in his patent, which some say makes the Telharmonium the first synthesizer, though its operation was as much mechanical as electronic, using a complicated series of gears and cylinders to replicate the musical range of a piano. (See the operation explained in the video at the top.) “Raised bumps on cylinders helped create musical contour notes,” writes Popular Mechanics, “not unlike a music box, with the size of the cylinder determining the pitch.”
The huge, very loud Telharmonium Mark III ended up in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera House for a time as Cahill worked on his scheme for pumping music through the telephone lines. But this plan did not come off smoothly. “The problem was,” Popular Mechanics points out,” all cables leak off radio waves. Sending a gigantic, amplified signal on turn-of-the-20th-century phone lines was bound to cause trouble.” The Telharmonium created interference on other phone lines and even interrupted Naval radio transmissions. “Rumor has it,” the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts writes, “that a New York businessman, infuriated by the constant network interference, broke into the building where the Telharmonium was housed and destroyed it, throwing pieces of the machinery into the Hudson river below.”
The story seems unlikely, but it serves as a symbol for the instrument’s collapse. Cahill’s company folded in 1908, though the final Telharmonium supposedly remained operational until 1916. No recordings of the instrument have survived, and Thaddeus Cahill’s brother Arthur eventually sold the last prototype off for scrap in 1950 after failing to find a buyer. The entire rationale for the instrument had been supplanted by radio broadcasting. The Telharmonium may have failed to catch on, but it still had a significant impact. Its unique design inspired another important electronic instrument, the Hammond organ. And its very existence gave musical futurists a vision. The Douglas Anderson School writes:
Despite its final demise, the Telharmonium triggered the birth of electronic music—The Italian Composer and intellectual Ferruccio Busoni inspired by the machine at the height of its popularity was moved to write his “Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music” (1907) which in turn became the clarion call and inspiration for the new generation of electronic composers such as Edgard Varèse and Luigi Russolo.
The instrument also made quite an impression on another American inventor, Mark Twain, who enthusiastically demonstrated it through the telephone during a New Year’s gathering at his home, after giving a speech about his own not inconsiderable status as an innovator and early adopter of new technologies. “Unfortunately for Thaddeus Cahill,” writes William Weir at The Hartford Courant, “Twain’s support wasn’t enough to make a success of the Telharmonium.” Learn more about the instrument’s history from this book.
One of the things I miss about living in a city with a subway system is the myriad thoughtful design elements that go into managing a perpetual flow of tourists and commuters. New York’s subway map presents us with an iconic tangle of interlocking tributaries resembling diagrams of a circulatory system. The NYC system’s ingeniously simple graphic presentation of lettered and numbered trains, encircled in their corresponding colors, can be read by most anyone with a rudimentary grasp on the English alphabet—from a new language learner to a small child. The Washington, DC subway system, though a much more prosaic affair overall, whisks riders through impressively cavernous, catacomb-like stations, with brutalist tile and concrete honeycombs that seem to go on forever. The squiggly lines of its color-coded map likewise promise ease of use and legibility.
And then there are the hours of reading time granted by a subway commute, a leisure I’ve relinquished now that I rely on car and bike. So you can imagine my envious delight in learning about Brazil’s Ticket Books, which are exactly what they sound like—books that work as subway tickets, designed with the minimalist care that major transit systems do so well. And what’s more, they’re free: “To celebrate World Book Day last April 23rd,” writes “future-forward online resource” PSFK, “[Brazillian publisher] L&PM gave away 10,000 books for free at subway stations across São Paulo. Each book came with ten free trips.” Riders could then recharge them and use the books again or pass them on to others to encourage more reading, an important public service given that Brazilians only read two books per year on average.
With subway map-inspired covers designed by firm Agência Africa, the books include The Great Gatsby, The Art of War, Hamlet, Murder Alley by Agatha Christie, Hundred Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, and more (including comic collections from Charles Schulz and Garfield’s Jim Davis). Watch an explainer video at the top of the post and see some lovely images of the book covers above. The campaign won three trophies at the Cannes Lions Festival in the categories “Promo,” “Outdoor,” and “Design,” and has proved so popular that publisher L&PM has expanded the project to other Brazilian cities, giving me yet more reason to visit Brazil. And if Ticket Books makes its way to a subway-enabled city near me, I may consider moving.
From director, designer, and animator Elliot Lim comes an animated tribute to his “favorite show of all time,” HBO’s The Wire – a sentiment that he shares with Pres. Obama, countless critics, and many casual TV viewers. As much as the episodes themselves, fans fondly remember The Wire’s opening credits, which functioned, Andrew Dignan once wrote, as short films that “distill each season’s themes, goals, and motifs.” The opening credits are what get the animated treatment in Lim’s video. Whether his video distills a particular set of themes, goals and motifs, I’m not yet sure. I’ll need to watch it a few more times and report back soon.
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Who really killed John F. Kennedy? Did America really land on the moon? What really brought down the Twin Towers? Few modern phenomena possess the sheer fascination quotient of conspiracy theories. If you believe in them, you’ll of course dig into them obsessively, and if you don’t believe in them, you surely feel a great curiosity about why other people do. Science writer and Skeptic magazine Editor in Chief Michael Shermer falls, needless to say, into the second group; so far into it that examining conspiracy theories and those who subscribe to them has become one of his best-known professional pursuits since at least 1997, the year of his straightforwardly titled book Why People Believe Weird Things.
On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Shermer wrote an article in the Los AngelesTimes about the reasons that event has drawn so many avid conspiracy theorists over the past half-decade. First: their cognitive dissonance resulting from the two seemingly incompatible ideas, that of JFK “as one of the most powerful people on Earth” and JFK “killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone loser, a nobody.” Second: their participation in a monological belief system, “a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network.” Third: their confirmation bias, or “the tendency to look for and find confirming evidence for what you already believe” — the umbrella man, the grassy knoll — “and to ignore disconfirming evidence.”
These factors all come into play with the other major American conspiracy theories as well. In the podcast clip at the top of the post, you can hear physicist Michio Kaku trying to set straight a moon landing conspiracy theorist. They argue that man has never set foot on the moon, but that the government instead hoodwinked us into believing it with an elaborate audiovisual production (directed, some theorists insist, by none other than Stanley Kubrick, who supposedly “confessed” in fake interview footage that recently made the internet rounds). Should you require further argument to the contrary, have a look at S.G. Collins’ Moon Hoax Not just above.
No higher-profile set of conspiracy-theory movement has come out of recent history than the 9/11 Truthers, who may differ on the details, but who all gather under the umbrella of believing that the events of that day happened not because of the actions of a conspiracy of foreign terrorists, but because of a conspiracy within the United States government itself. In the Q&A footage above (originally uploaded, in fact, by a believer), one such theorist stands up and asks linguist and activist Noam Chomsky to join in on the movement, pointing to a cover-up of the manner in which 7 World Trade Center collapsed — a big “smoking gun” of the larger conspiracy, in their eyes.
This prompts Chomsky to offer an explanation of how scientists and engineers actually go looking for the truth. Have they eliminated entirely their cognitive dissonance, monological belief systems, and confirmation biases? No human could ever do that perfectly — indeed, to be human is to be subject to all these distorting conditions and more — but the larger enterprise of science, at its best, frees us little by little from those very shackles. What a shame to voluntarily clap oneself back into them.
After a long hiatus, the RSA (The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has returned with another one of the whiteboard animated-lectures they pioneered five years ago.
The animated reboot (above) brings to life the thoughts of another Stanford psychology professor, Carol S. Dweck. The author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success(a book that appeared on Bill Gates’s Best of 2015 list), Dweck has looked closely at how our beliefs/mindsets strongly influence the paths we take in life. And, in this clip, she talks about how well-meaning parents, despite their best intentions, might be creating the wrong mindsets in their kids, paving the way for problems down the road. You can watch the complete, unanimated lecture here.
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