“The Wonderground Map of London Town,” the Iconic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Subway System

in History, Maps | September 15th, 2016

underground-1913-map

Most major world cities now boast far-reach­ing and con­ve­nient sub­way sys­tems, but Lon­don will always have the orig­i­nal from which all the rest descend. It will also, arguably, always have, in the Tube, by far the most icon­ic. The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Rail­way, the first under­ground train line to open in Lon­don and thus the first in the world, entered ser­vice in 1863. Oth­er lines fol­lowed, run by sev­er­al dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, until, says Make Big Plans, all the oper­a­tors “agreed on a joint mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy in 1908 that fea­tured the now famil­iar logo with a red disk and the word ‘Under­ground.’ ”

wonderground5

But by 1913, writes the BBC’s Emma Jane Kir­by, “pas­sen­gers are moan­ing about unpunc­tu­al­i­ty, about over­crowd­ing, about con­fu­sion and dirt. The Tube, crammed on work­days (some 400,000 peo­ple now work in the heart of the city) is vir­tu­al­ly emp­ty at week­ends and hol­i­days and the com­pa­ny is fast los­ing mon­ey and pub­lic sup­port. What we need, thinks [Lon­don Under­ground com­mer­cial direc­tor Frank] Pick, is stronger brand­ing.” In addi­tion to the immor­tal logo, he want­ed “some eye-catch­ing posters, dis­tinct from gen­er­al adver­tise­ment bills, that will make Lon­don­ers of all social class­es proud to jour­ney around their city and vis­it its attrac­tions.”

wonderground

But a tran­sit sys­tem, even the for­mi­da­ble Lon­don Under­ground, is only as good as its maps. Eric Gill, the Arts and Crafts move­ment lumi­nary who helped design the Tube’s type­face, asked his archi­tect-car­tog­ra­ph­er-graph­ic design­er broth­er Mac­Don­ald to come up with an eye-catch­ing one. In the result, writes the Anti­quar­i­an Book­sellers’ Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca’s Elis­a­beth Bur­don, “all the attrac­tions and ameni­ties of Lon­don are laid before the view­er in a man­ner which is both visu­al­ly excit­ing and yet with­in a com­pre­hen­si­ble struc­ture; the city is pre­sent­ed in the man­ner of a medieval walled town, the curved hori­zon recall­ing the medieval world map’s enclos­ing cir­cle, all bound­ed by a dec­o­ra­tive bor­der in which coats of arms evoke a sense of sta­bil­i­ty and tra­di­tion.”

wonderground-detail-2

Apart from its degree of his­tor­i­cal astute­ness and car­to­graph­i­cal sound­ness, Gill’s “Won­der­ground Map,” as Lon­don­ers came to call it, con­tained enough humor that some of the pas­sen­gers who con­sult­ed it missed their trains due to sheer amuse­ment. Kir­by points out that, “on the Har­row Road, a farm work­er till­ing the soil cries ‘Har­row­ing work, this!’ an excla­ma­tion which is coun­tered by the query ‘What is work, is it a herb?’ deliv­ered by an effete gen­tle­man near­by.” A sign placed at the map’s east­ern edge points the way to “Vic­to­ria Park, Wanstead Flats, Har­wich, Rus­sia and oth­er vil­lages,” while “at Regen­t’s Park Zoo a pre­his­toric-look­ing bird eats a child through the bars of its cage as the child laments, ‘and I promised moth­er I’d be home for tea by five!’ ”

wondergound-detail-1

The Won­der­ground Map attained such pop­u­lar­i­ty that it became the first Lon­don Under­ground poster sold com­mer­cial­ly for homes and offices, and remains on sale more than a cen­tu­ry lat­er. You can view the whole thing online, and in zoomable detail, here; if you’d like a print­able ver­sion, you can find one here. The his­to­ry of Lon­don now cred­its it as hav­ing effec­tive­ly “saved” the Tube, whose rep­u­ta­tion for dys­func­tion and dis­com­fort had reached a crit­i­cal point. New­er sub­way sys­tems else­where may have since made great tech­no­log­i­cal leaps beyond the Lon­don Under­ground (as my ex-Lon­don­er friends here in Seoul don’t hes­i­tate to remind me), but we can safe­ly say that none will ever inspire quite so beloved a work of car­tog­ra­phy.

An alter­na­tive ver­sion of the map can be viewed and down­loaded at the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

1927 Lon­don Shown in Mov­ing Col­or

2,000 Years of London’s His­tor­i­cal Devel­op­ment, Ani­mat­ed in 7 Min­utes

Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Lets You Fly Through 17th Cen­tu­ry Lon­don

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemi­an Cof­fee Bars Doc­u­ment­ed in a Vin­tage 1959 News­reel

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Carl Sagan & the Dalai Lama Meet in 1991 and Discuss When Science Can Answer Big Questions Better Than Religion

in Religion, Science | September 14th, 2016

sagan-dalai-lama

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a 1997 essay in Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, Stephen Jay Gould (in)famously called the realms of reli­gion and sci­ence “Nonover­lap­ping Mag­is­te­ria”—a phrase that acknowl­edges both endeav­ors as equal­ly pow­er­ful and impor­tant to human life. His the­o­ry entails “respect­ful dis­course” and “con­stant input from both mag­is­te­ria toward the com­mon goal of wis­dom.” Many par­ti­sans then and now have found the idea hope­less­ly naïve or mis­guid­ed, and Gould did describe a rather specif­i­cal­ly enlight­ened exam­ple of the posi­tion: a per­son seek­ing “a more spir­i­tu­al view of nature” who also acknowl­edges “the fac­tu­al­i­ty of evo­lu­tion and oth­er phe­nom­e­na.” An edu­cat­ed skep­tic, with mys­ti­cal and poet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties.

The major­i­ty of reli­gious believ­ers do not fit this descrip­tion. But some do. So too did Carl Sagan, to whom Gould ded­i­cat­ed his essay in a post­script. Sagan “shared my con­cern for fruit­ful coop­er­a­tion between the dif­fer­ent but vital realms of sci­ence and reli­gion.” How­ev­er, like Gould, Sagan gave the sci­en­tif­ic method the over­ride, and stren­u­ous­ly advo­cat­ed that we all do like­wise or become eas­i­ly duped by char­la­tans or by our own flawed per­cep­tions. Sagan acknowl­edged the cos­mos as a great mystery—one he want­ed to under­stand, not wor­ship. And he spoke of the nat­ur­al world with the kind of lyri­cal awe and rev­er­ence often reserved for the super­nat­ur­al.

Sagan, in fact, orga­nized and attend­ed the meet­ing at the Vat­i­can that occa­sioned Gould’s essay. He also found him­self, in the ear­ly 1990s, con­nect­ing deeply with anoth­er world reli­gious leader, the Dalai Lama. The exiled Tibetan Bud­dhist and the astro­physi­cist first met in Itha­ca in 1991, sit­ting down for the dis­cus­sion record­ed in the video above. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty ren­ders this record­ing near­ly unwatch­able. Their con­ver­sion is audi­ble but they both dis­ap­pear into a pix­e­lat­ed blue blur. That said, the con­ver­sa­tion mer­its preser­va­tion in any form (you can also read a tran­script of their talk here).

Sagan puts to the Dalai Lama the ques­tion he asked every major reli­gious leader he met with: “What hap­pens if the doc­trine of a religion—Buddhism let’s say—is con­tra­dict­ed by some find­ing, some discovery—in sci­ence, let’s say—what does a believ­er in Bud­dhism do in that case?” The answer below came very much as a sur­prise to Sagan, who lat­er said the Dalai Lama “replied as no tra­di­tion­al­ist or fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gious lead­ers do.”

DL: ‘For Bud­dhists that is not a prob­lem. The Bud­dha him­self made clear that the impor­tant thing is your own inves­ti­ga­tion. You should know the real­i­ty, no mat­ter what the scrip­ture says. In case you find a contradiction—opposite of the scrip­tures’ explanation—you should rely on that find­ing, rather than scrip­ture.’

CS: ‘So, that is very much like sci­ence?’

DL: ‘Yes, that’s right. So I think that the basic Bud­dhist con­cept is that at the begin­ning it is worth­while or bet­ter to remain skep­ti­cal. Then car­ry out exper­i­ments through exter­nal means as well as inter­nal means. If through inves­ti­ga­tion things become clear and con­vinc­ing, then it is time to accept or believe. If, through sci­ence, there is proof that after death there is no con­ti­nu­ity of human mind, of life, then—theoretically speaking—Buddhists will have to accept that.’

Of course, many Bud­dhists may not find this sur­pris­ing at all. The prin­ci­ples the Dalai Lama out­lines are clear­ly out­lined in the Kala­ma Sut­ta, a sup­posed dis­course of the Bud­dha in which he issues a “Char­ter of Free Inquiry” as one inter­pre­ta­tion has it. It is indeed a unique fea­ture in world reli­gions, though the Dalai Lama did add—“mischievously,” said Sagan—that “it will be hard to dis­prove rein­car­na­tion!” In such areas where a propo­si­tion can­not be fal­si­fied, reli­gion and sci­ence may agree to disagree—civilly or otherwise—or change the sub­ject. In the course of their acquain­tance, Sagan and the Dalai Lama dis­agreed on very lit­tle.

When it comes to Bud­dhism, the Dalai Lama points out that the con­ver­sa­tion between sci­ence and reli­gion is hard­ly one-sided: “Some sci­en­tists also show a gen­uine and keen inter­est in Bud­dhist expla­na­tions…. One thing is quite clear: As far as men­tal sci­ences are con­cerned, Bud­dhism is very high­ly advanced.” The inter­est researchers and neu­ro­sci­en­tists have shown in Bud­dhist psy­chol­o­gy and med­i­ta­tive ther­a­py has only increased in the past twen­ty-five years, such that entire depart­ments devot­ed to mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion have sprung up at ven­er­a­ble uni­ver­si­ties and respect­ed med­ical schools.

And since Sagan’s death in 1996, the Dalai Lama has con­tin­ued to reflect on the con­ver­gences between sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery and Bud­dhism in his books and talks. And Sagan’s wid­ow Ann Druyan has car­ried on Sagan’s lega­cy, shar­ing the awe and won­der of sci­ence with a pop­u­lar audi­ence through film, print, and tele­vi­sion. In 2007, Druyan appeared at Cor­nell to talk about the affini­ties between Sagan and the Dalai Lama dur­ing their first and sub­se­quent meet­ings. You can see her talk in full here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

The Dalai Lama on the Neu­ro­science of Com­pas­sion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Aldous Huxley Identifies the Dystopian Threats to Our Freedom (1958)

in History, Sci Fi, Technology | September 14th, 2016

20 years after Aldous Hux­ley pub­lished Brave New World (1931), he was still the medi­a’s go-to futur­ist. Let me cite two exam­ples:

In 1950, Red­book Mag­a­zine asked four experts (includ­ing Hux­ley) “what the world may look like fifty years hence?,” to which the author respond­ed:

Dur­ing the next fifty years mankind will face three great prob­lems: the prob­lem of avoid­ing war; the prob­lem of feed­ing and cloth­ing a pop­u­la­tion of two and a quar­ter bil­lions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three bil­lions, and the prob­lem of sup­ply­ing these bil­lions with­out ruin­ing the planet’s irre­place­able resources.

Then, in 1958, a young reporter named Mike Wal­lace had Hux­ley play prophet on a 30-minute TV show. Over­pop­u­la­tion gets dis­cussed again. But then Hux­ley returns to some famil­iar dystopi­an themes, iden­ti­fy­ing some emerg­ing threats to our free­doms. 

  • Overor­ga­ni­za­tion: “Well anoth­er force which I think is very strong­ly oper­a­tive in this coun­try is the force of what may be called of overor­ga­ni­za­tion. Er…As tech­nol­o­gy becomes more and more com­pli­cat­ed, it becomes nec­es­sary to have more and more elab­o­rate orga­ni­za­tions, more hier­ar­chi­cal orga­ni­za­tions, and inci­den­tal­ly the advance of tech­nol­o­gy is being accom­pa­nied by an advance in the sci­ence of orga­ni­za­tion.

    It’s now pos­si­ble to make orga­ni­za­tions on a larg­er scale than it was ever pos­si­ble before, and so that you have more and more peo­ple liv­ing their lives out as sub­or­di­nates in these hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tems con­trolled by bureau­cra­cy, either the bureau­cra­cies of big busi­ness­es or the bureau­cra­cies of big gov­ern­ment.”

  • Abuse of new tech­nolo­gies: “There are cer­tain­ly devices which can be used [to lim­it free­doms.] I mean, let us er…take after all, a piece of very recent and very painful his­to­ry is the pro­pa­gan­da used by Hitler, which was incred­i­bly effec­tive.

    I mean, what were Hitler’s meth­ods? Hitler used ter­ror on the one kind, brute force on the one hand, but he also used a very effi­cient form of pro­pa­gan­da, which er…he was using every mod­ern device at that time. He did­n’t have TV., but he had the radio which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of peo­ple. I mean, the Ger­mans were a high­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple.

  • Drugs: I mean, in this book that you men­tioned, this book of mine, “Brave New World,” er…I pos­tu­lat­ed it a sub­stance called ‘soma,’ which was a very ver­sa­tile drug. It would make peo­ple feel hap­py in small dos­es, it would make them see visions in medi­um dos­es, and it would send them to sleep in large dos­es.…

    If you want to pre­serve your pow­er indef­i­nite­ly, you have to get the con­sent of the ruled, and this they will do part­ly by drugs as I fore­saw in “Brave New World,” part­ly by these new tech­niques of pro­pa­gan­da. They will do it by bypass­ing the sort of ratio­nal side of man and appeal­ing to his sub­con­scious and his deep­er emo­tions, and his phys­i­ol­o­gy even, and so, mak­ing him actu­al­ly love his slav­ery.

Above, you can watch ani­mat­ed excerpts from Wal­lace’s inter­view with Hux­ley, cour­tesy of Blank on Blank. Find the com­plete orig­i­nal inter­view below, along with a tran­script here. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley Pre­dicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Read Brave New World

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

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Hear 9 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Classic Western Films: From Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns to Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight

in Film, Music | September 14th, 2016

What goes into the mak­ing of a great film score? And how does a director/composer team like David Lynch and Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, or Ser­gio Leone and Ennio Mor­ri­cone, form such a per­fect part­ner­ship? Sev­er­al days ago, we brought you video of Badale­men­ti in a spir­it­ed, detailed recre­ation of how he and Lynch com­posed the unfor­get­table Twin Peaks’ themes, with­out which, I’d argue, there may have been no Twin Peaks.

Like­wise, with­out the music of Mor­ri­cone behind them, Leone’s spare, styl­ish, hard-boiled-yet-com­ic west­erns may nev­er have spear­head­ed the almost clas­si­cal genre of the “Spaghet­ti West­ern,” known just as often for its music as for its visu­al lan­guage.

What does Mor­ri­cone have to say about this? Pre­cious lit­tle. Or so dis­cov­ered Steely Dan’s Don­ald Fagen when he inter­viewed Mor­ri­cone for Pre­miere mag­a­zine in August of 1989. Fagen is well known for his obses­sive knowl­edge of cul­ture high and low and his hip, the­o­ret­i­cal bent. Mor­ri­cone, we learn, works more intu­itive­ly. But the results are the same. We may equal­ly find our­selves hum­ming the refrain to “Peg” as the theme to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly.

And we may find our­selves plea­sur­ably ana­lyz­ing “Peg”’s iron­ic rede­ploy­ment of soft rock tropes, just as we may approach Morricone’s inim­itable style as crit­i­cal the­o­rists, as Fagen does when he asks the ques­tion below. Like­ly the most lead­ing ques­tion in all of music jour­nal­ism (with the excep­tion of this Bri­an Eno inter­view):

But isn’t it true that the Leone films, with their ele­va­tion of myth­ic struc­tures, their com­ic book visu­al style and extreme irony, are now per­ceived as sig­nal­ing an aes­thet­ic trans­mu­ta­tion by a gen­er­a­tion of artists and film­mak­ers? And isn’t it also true that your music for those films reflect­ed and abet­ted Leone’s vision by draw­ing on the same eerie cat­a­log of gen­res — Hol­ly­wood west­ern, Japan­ese samu­rai, Amer­i­can pop, and Ital­ian Opera? That your scores func­tioned both “inside” the film as a nar­ra­tive voice and “out­side” the film as the com­men­tary of a wink­ing jester? Put it all togeth­er and does­n’t it spell “post­mod­ern,” in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroach­ment of the devices of art and, in fact, an estab­lish­ment of a new nar­ra­tive plane found­ed on the devices them­selves? Isn’t that what’s attract­ing low­er Man­hat­tan?

Mor­ri­cone: [shrugs]

Fagen quick­ly adapts, switch­es to rapid-fire ques­tions to which Mor­ri­cone gives a breezy one-word answer. “Bel­lis­si­mo!” He’s a very busy man. He does­n’t live in the same world as those La Dolce Vita peo­ple, a “small group of peo­ple who got up at 11 P.M. and lived at night.” He wakes up at 5 in the morn­ing. Mor­ri­cone needn’t indulge us with sto­ries or bore us with the­o­ret­i­cal pos­es. His last words to Fagen, “I have always want­ed to com­pose,” tell us what we need to know about him. Every­thing else is in the music.

Hear that music above in a five-hour playlist of some of Mor­ri­cone best-known scores from his sto­ried past—The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, and non-Leone west­ern, The Mer­ce­nary.

And Mor­ri­cone’s still speak­ing through his west­ern scores, as he did just recent­ly in the work of anoth­er chat­ty, obses­sive, heav­i­ly ref­er­en­tial admirer—Quentin Taran­ti­no’s The Hate­ful Eight, also in the playlist above. Bel­lis­si­mo!

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns, Start­ing with The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

in Film, Music | September 14th, 2016

Major motion pic­tures almost always have music, and that music usu­al­ly comes com­posed espe­cial­ly for the movie. Every movie­go­er knows this, of course, and most of them will by now be hum­ming their favorite film-score music to them­selves: themes from Star Wars, Jaws, The God­fa­ther, the Indi­ana Jones or James Bond movies, and so on. But what about the music from more recent cin­e­mat­ic fran­chis­es? What about the music from the still-com­ing-out Mar­vel Comics movies, the most suc­cess­ful such fran­chise of all time? Why no mem­o­rable themes come to mind, much less hum­ma­ble ones, con­sti­tutes the cen­tral ques­tion of the new video essay from Every Frame a Paint­ing.

Its argu­ment points to sev­er­al dif­fer­ent fac­tors, includ­ing Mar­vel and oth­er mod­ern movies’ pre­dictable use and overuse of music, as well as their ten­den­cy to put dis­tract­ing lay­ers of noise and dia­logue on top of it. But the deep­er prob­lem, which has become sys­temic in the world of film scor­ing, has to do with some­thing called “temp music,” which is what it sounds like: music tem­porar­i­ly used in a movie dur­ing edit­ing before its real score gets com­posed. That sounds innocu­ous enough, but this video fea­tures a clip in which no less a pro­lif­ic and respect­ed com­pos­er than Dan­ny Elf­man describes temp music as “the bane of my exis­tence,” and after watch­ing it you’ll sure­ly see — or rather, hear — why.

Temp music usu­al­ly comes from the scores of oth­er movies. With mod­ern non­lin­ear edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, the direc­tor or edi­tor can pick out tracks that approx­i­mate the envi­sioned tone of the work in progress and sim­ply insert them into their scenes. But after hun­dreds upon hun­dreds of hours of watch­ing the project scored with the temp music, the temp music starts to sound like the one true score, espe­cial­ly if the edi­tor has cut tight­ly to it. “Make it sound like the temp music,” insist the orders too often giv­en to the com­pos­er work­ing on an “orig­i­nal” score for the film, which soon winds up as temp music itself on the next block­buster-to-be in the edit­ing room.

This musi­cal ouroboros, which Every Frame a Paint­ing demon­strates by play­ing a vari­ety of scenes first with their temp music and then with their final score (with more such com­par­isons to watch in the sup­ple­men­tary video just above), has robbed even Hol­ly­wood’s high­est-pro­file pic­tures — espe­cial­ly Hol­ly­wood’s high­est-pro­file pic­tures — of an essen­tial tool of evo­ca­tion and emo­tion. But only a tru­ly risk-tak­ing film­mak­er could break this cycle of bland­ness: a film­mak­er like Stan­ley Kubrick who, work­ing on 2001: A Space Odyssey, refused to use its com­mis­sioned score that (in Roger Ebert’s words) “like all scores, attempts to under­line the action — to give us emo­tion­al cues.” Instead, he decid­ed to score the movie with the likes of Györ­gy Ligeti, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khacha­turi­an and (speak­ing of mem­o­rable themes) Richard Strauss — all of which he had, of course, used as temp music.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

Music from Star Wars, Kubrick, Scors­ese & Tim Bur­ton Films Played by the Prague Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra: Stream Full Albums

Moby Offers Up Free Music to Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Frank Zappa Explains the Decline of the Music Business (1987)

in Music | September 13th, 2016

“Remem­ber the 60s?” says Frank Zap­pa in the inter­view above, “that era that a lot of peo­ple have these glo­ri­ous mem­o­ries of?… they real­ly weren’t that great, those years.” Ever the grumpy uncle. But Zap­pa does get nos­tal­gic for one thing, and it’s an unex­pect­ed one: the music busi­ness. “One thing that did hap­pen in the 60s,” he says, “was some music of an unusu­al and exper­i­men­tal nature did get record­ed, did get released.” The exec­u­tives of the day were “cig­ar-chomp­ing old guys who looked at the prod­uct and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’”

“We were bet­ter off with those guys,” says Zap­pa, “than we are with the hip, young exec­u­tives,” mak­ing deci­sions about what peo­ple should hear. The hip­pies are more con­ser­v­a­tive than the con­ser­v­a­tive “old guys” ever were. This Zap­pa of 1987 rec­om­mends get­ting back to the “who knows?” approach, “that entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it” of the grand old indus­try barons of the 60s.

One can almost imag­ine Zappa—in the 60s—pining for the days of Edi­son, who refused to give up on the wax cylin­der but would also record vir­tu­al­ly any­thing. If both the time of Edi­son and the time of Zap­pa were bonan­zas for mak­ers of nov­el­ty records, so much the bet­ter. Zap­pa was nov­el.

Still it seems like a fun­ny sen­ti­ment com­ing from a guy who built most of his career in oppo­si­tion to the record indus­try. But it was in the peri­od of alleged decay that Zap­pa broke with Warn­er Bros. and found­ed his own label in 1977, mak­ing a deal with Phono­gram to dis­trib­ute his releas­es in the U.S. When Phono­gram refused to release his 1981 sin­gle “I Don’t Wan­na Get Draft­ed,” Zap­pa cre­at­ed anoth­er label, Bark­ing Pump­kin Records, mak­ing sure he got to make and sell the music he want­ed to.

In many ways peo­ple like Zappa—or lat­er Kate Bush or Prince—anticipated our cur­rent music indus­try, in which we have artists start­ing labels left and right, con­trol­ling their own pro­duc­tion and out­put. But those artists are most­ly a tiny hand­ful of huge­ly suc­cess­ful stars with mogul-sized ambi­tions. Does this help or harm the music econ­o­my as a whole? Inde­pen­dent musi­cians very rarely get the small­est win­dow on how things work at the lev­el of Bey­once, Jay‑Z, or Tay­lor Swift (who “is the indus­try,” Bloomberg once breath­less­ly pro­claimed). But as Zap­pa notes, “the per­son in the exec­u­tive chair may not be the final arbiter of taste for the entire pop­u­la­tion.” Even if those exec­u­tives are them­selves artists, we may great­ly ben­e­fit from a wider range of “unusu­al and exper­i­men­tal” sounds in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Zap­pa sug­gests the way to do that is to get the “cig­ar-chomp­ing old guys” (and they were all guys) back in charge.

The rest of Zappa’s inter­view con­cerns the bogey­man of 80s and 90s music, the PMRC, and his very strong feel­ings about cen­sor­ship, social con­trol, and sex. It’s clas­sic Zap­pa and won’t raise any eye­brows now, but it is inter­est­ing to hear his take on the decline of the music busi­ness since the 60s. We use dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria to mea­sure the apex of the industry—often depend­ing on whether the labels or the artists made more mon­ey. Whichev­er peri­od we lion­ize, for what­ev­er rea­son, with­in a hun­dred-year win­dow a tiny hand­ful of musi­cians and record exec­u­tives made enor­mous, dynasty-mak­ing for­tunes. It just so hap­pens that these days it’s an even tinier hand­ful of musi­cians and exec­u­tives at the top, mak­ing even huger for­tunes. And there’s a lot more syn­er­gy between them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bizarre Time When Frank Zappa’s Entire­ly Instru­men­tal Album Received an “Explic­it Lyrics” Stick­er

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Deconstructing Saving Private Ryan’s Epic Opening Battle Scene: How Spielberg Captures Chaos with Clarity

in Film, History | September 13th, 2016

Not long after Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan came out, the buzz had it that, had noth­ing but a two-hour blank screen fol­lowed its open­ing sequence depict­ing the Oma­ha Beach assault of June 6, 1944, Steven Spiel­berg would still win an Oscar. The genre of war movies, which goes almost as far back as the medi­um of cin­e­ma itself, falls into peri­od­ic exhaus­tion, but the direc­tor of block­busters like Jaws and E.T. had man­aged to revi­tal­ize it. How did he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors pull it off, start­ing with the har­row­ing World War II bat­tle scene to end all har­row­ing World War II bat­tle scenes? 

Spiel­berg and com­pa­ny faced one chal­lenge above all oth­ers: “the sequence had to be chaot­ic and coher­ent at the same time,” says video essay­ist Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his exam­i­na­tion of Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan’s first 28 min­utes. All bat­tle scenes try, in one way or anoth­er and to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, to depict the near-incom­pre­hen­si­ble unpre­dictabil­i­ty and vio­lence of mil­i­tary com­bat in a com­pre­hen­si­ble man­ner, but this one accom­plish­es that goal to an extent many aston­ished view­ers may nev­er have thought pos­si­ble.

A dozen years ear­li­er, Tony Scot­t’s Top Gun did some­thing sim­i­lar with its unusu­al­ly non-dis­ori­ent­ing depic­tion of aer­i­al dog­fight­ing, but no two films could have a more dif­fer­ent atti­tude to war itself. In Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan, Spiel­berg set the glo­ry to one side and showed all the (often lit­er­al­ly) gory details that even avid view­ers of World War II movies don’t usu­al­ly see. Bor­row­ing the visu­al style from the his­tor­i­cal news­reel footage shot on the ground at Oma­ha Beach and else­where, Spiel­berg also delib­er­ate­ly fills every frame with as much detail of the action as pos­si­ble, which those real-life cam­era­men had to shoot on the fly.

“The Oma­ha Beach scene might seem like the cra­zi­est, fastest, most intense scene in all of film,” says Puschak, but he cal­cu­lates an “incred­i­bly high” aver­age shot length of 7.2 sec­onds. Instead of cut­ting, cut­ting, and cut­ting some more, Spiel­berg uses his sig­na­ture pur­pose­ful cam­era move­ment and (rel­a­tive­ly) long takes to place, and keep, the view­er in the midst of this har­row­ing event. The scene came out feel­ing so real that it actu­al­ly trig­gered post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der symp­toms in some of the vet­er­ans who went to see it — sure­ly not Spiel­berg’s inten­tion, but proof pos­i­tive of his abil­i­ty to “cap­ture chaos with clar­i­ty.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Great “Fil­mu­men­taries” Take You Inside the Mak­ing of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark & Jaws

Shot-By-Shot Break­downs of Spielberg’s Film­mak­ing in Jaws, Scorsese’s in Cape Fear, and De Palma’s in The Untouch­ables

Learn the Ele­ments of Cin­e­ma: Spielberg’s Long Takes, Scorsese’s Silence & Michael Bay’s Shots

Res­ur­rect­ing the Sounds of Abra­ham Lin­coln in Steven Spielberg’s New Biopic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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French Filmmaker Michel Gondry Creates a Steamy New Music Video for The White Stripes

in Music | September 13th, 2016

Talk about pro­lif­ic. French film­mak­er Michel Gondry has just released his 85th music video–this one for The White Stripes’ new song “City Lights.” 

Last year, Ted Mills took a look at Gondry’s music videos for Björk, Radio­head and The Chem­i­cal Broth­ers, show­ing us why Gondry, who first began exper­i­ment­ing with the for­mat in 1988, was “one of the last great music video directors”–someone who cre­at­ed “mini-epics just before the music indus­try col­lapsed, and bud­gets dis­ap­peared.” 

Most know Gondry for his 2004 fea­ture film, Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. Or per­haps you saw his ani­mat­ed 2013 doc­u­men­tary on Noam Chom­sky, Is the Man Who Is Tall Hap­py? If you did, you’ll rec­og­nize the aes­thet­ic used in the new White Stripes video above. As Rolling Stone describes it, the video is just “a sin­gle shot of the exte­ri­or of a show­er, with [a] bather visu­al­ly draw­ing out the song’s lyrics in the steam and con­den­sa­tion on the show­er door. With each line, the steam slow­ly eras­es the pre­vi­ous draw­ing, and a new image is sketched on the door.” You can try it at home.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

Watch Michel Gondry Ani­mate Philoso­pher, Lin­guist & Activist Noam Chom­sky

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radio­head & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

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