There are a number of well known perks to being a rock star. One of the more obscure ones is sustained access to zero gravity, the condition of relative near weightlessness achievable in a state of free fall.
Access should not be equated with ease, however, as singer Damien Kulash and his sister, director and choreographer Trish Sie, explain above. The band’s website goes into further detail about the science of the shoot inside an industrial Russian military aircraft flying parabolic maneuvers:
The longest period of weightlessness that it is possible to achieve in these circumstances is about 27 seconds, and after each period of weightlessness, it takes about five minutes for the plane to recover and prepare for the next round. Because we wanted the video to be a single, uninterrupted routine, we shot continuously over the course of 8 consecutive weightless periods, which took about 45 minutes, total. We paused our actions, and the music, during the non-weightless periods, and then cut out these sections and smoothed over each transition with a morph.
The Russian flight crew collaborated with the non-Russian-speaking film crew and band on a mutually comprehensible countdown system that ensured everyone was ready to rumble each time the plane hit zero gravity.
Simulated overhead bins, bus seats, and dummy windows lit from with LEDs provided the illusion of a commercial flight.
The copious offscreen air sickness was not faked (58 regurgitations by Tim Nordwind’s reckoning.)
The finished product, right above, is the crowning achievement for a band long celebrated for tasking itself with one-take video challenges involving treadmills, Ikea furniture, and trained animals. (That’s director Sie in front of the camera with tango partner Moti Buchboot for “Skyscrapers.”)
In my little corner of the world, we’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of Moogfest this May, just moved down the mountains from Asheville—where it has convened since 2004—to the scrappy town of Durham, NC. Like SXSW for electronic music, the four-day event features dozens of performances, workshops, talks, films, and art installations. Why North Carolina? Because that’s where New York City-born engineer Robert Moog (rhymes with “vogue”)—inventor of one of the first, and certainly the most famous, analog synthesizer—moved in 1978 and set up shop for his handmade line of modular synths, “Minimoog”s, and other unique creations. “One doesn’t hear much talk of synthesizers here in western North Carolina,” Moog said at the time, “From this vantage point, it’s easy to get a good perspective on the electronic musical instrument scene.”
The perspective characterizes Moog’s influence on modern music since the late-sixties—as a non-musician outsider whose musical technology stands miles above the competition, its unmistakable sound sought after by nearly everyone in popular music since it debuted on a number of commercial recordings in 1967. A curious development indeed, since Moog never intended the synthesizer to be used as a standalone instrument but as a specialized piece of studio equipment. However, in the mid-sixties, a forward-looking jazz musician named Paul Beaver happened to get his hands on a modular Moog synthesizer, and began to use it on odd, psychedelic albums like Mort Garson’s The Zodiac Cosmic Sounds and famed Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine’s Psychedelic Percussion (hear “Love-In (December)” above).
Shortly after these releases, Mike Bloomfield’s psych-rock outfit The Electric Flag made heavy use of the Moog in their soundtrack for Roger Corman’s sixtiesploitation film The Trip (hear “Fine Jung Thing” above), and the analog synthesizer was on its way to becoming a staple of popular music. In late ’67, The Doors called Beaver into the studio during the recording of Strange Days, and he used the Moog throughout the album to alter Jim Morrison’s voice and provide other effects (hear “Strange Days” at the top). Contrary to popular misconceptions, Brian Wilson did not use a Moog synthesizer for the recording of “Good Vibrations” the year prior, but an “electro-theremin” built and played by Paul Tanner. He did, however, have Bob Moog build a replica of that instrument to play the song live. (The Moog theremin is still in production today.)
Then, in 1968 Wendy Carlos used a Moog Synthesizer to reinterpret several Bach compositions, and Switched-On Bach became a novelty hit that led to many more classical Moog recordings from Carlos, as well as to her original contributions to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. (Unfortunately, few of Carlos’ recordings are available online, but you can hear The Shining’s main theme above.) Switched-On Bach took the Moog synthesizer mainstream—it was the first classical album to go platinum. (Glenn Gould called it “one of the most startling achievements of the recording industry in this generation and certainly one of the great feats in the history of keyboard performance.”) And after the release of Carlos’ futuristic classical albums, and an evolution of Moog’s instruments into more musician-friendly forms, analog synths began to appear everywhere.
Artists like Carlos explored the synthesizer’s use as not only a generator of weird, spaced-out sounds and effects, but as an instrument in its own right, capable of all of the nuance required to play the finest classical music. The modular synthesizer, however, was still an awkwardly bulky instrument, suited for the studio, not the road. That changed in 1971 when the “Minimoog Model D” was born. You can see a short history of that revolutionary instrument above. The Minimoog and its siblings drove prog rock, disco, jazz fusion, the ambient work of Brian Eno, Teutonic electro-pop of Kraftwerk, and soothing Gallic new age soundscapes of Jean-Michel Jarre. Bob Marley incorporated the Minimoog into his roots reggae, and Gary Numan charted the path of the New Wave future with the portable synthesizer.
And as anyone who’s heard Daft Punk’s now-ubiquitous Random Access Memories knows, the forefather of their sound was Italian superproducer Giorgio Moroder, who brought us nearly all of Donna Summer’s disco hits, including the futuristic “I Feel Love,” above, in 1977. Although nothing really sounded like this at the time—nor for many years afterward—we can hear in this pioneering track that it’s only a short hop from Moroder’s pulsing, flanging, synth arpeggios to most of the modern dance music we hear today.
Though we certainly credit all of the composers, producers, and musicians who embraced analog synthesizers and pushed their development forward, all of their musical innovation would have meant little without the inventiveness of the man who, from his mountaintop retreat in Asheville, North Carolina, personally oversaw the technology of a musical revolution. For more on the genius of Bob Moog, watch Hans Fjellestad’s documentary Moog, or listen to the Sound Opinions podcast above, featuring onetime official Moog Foundation historian Brian Kehew.
What to do when your love life goes south? Twentieth-century America established the tradition of seeking the counsel of an advice columnist, but in eighteenth-century Austria, with neither Dear Abby nor Ann Landers to whom to turn, you’d have to settle for the next best thing: Immanuel Kant. At least the 22-year-old Maria von Herbert, an avid student of Kant’s philosophy, felt that was her only option, and in 1791 wrote as imploringly follows to the author of A Critique of Pure Reason:
Great Kant,
As a believer calls to his God, I call to you for help, for comfort, or for counsel to prepare me for death. Your writings prove that there is a future life. But as for this life, I have found nothing, nothing at all that could replace the good I have lost, for I loved someone who, in my eyes, encompassed within himself all that is worthwhile, so that I lived only for him, everything else was in comparison just rubbish, cheap trinkets. Well, I have offended this person, because of a long drawn out lie, which I have now disclosed to him, though there was nothing unfavourable to my character in it, I had no vice in my life that needed hiding. The lie was enough though, and his love vanished. As an honourable man, he doesn’t refuse me friendship. But that inner feeling that once, unbidden, led us to each other, is no more – oh my heart splinters into a thousand pieces! If I hadn’t read so much of your work I would certainly have put an end to my life. But the conclusion I had to draw from your theory stops me – it is wrong for me to die because my life is tormented, instead I’m supposed to live because of my being. Now put yourself in my place, and either damn me or comfort me. I’ve read the metaphysic of morals, and the categorical imperative, and it doesn’t help a bit. My reason abandons me just when I need it. Answer me, I implore you – or you won’t be acting in accordance with your own imperative.
Von Herbert’s letter began a brief correspondence taken, two centuries later, as the subject of Kant Scholar Rae Helen Langton’s paper “Duty and Desolation.” The aged philosopher, writes Langton, “much impressed by this letter, sought advice from a friend as to what he should do. The friend advised him strongly to reply, and to do his best to distract his correspondent from ‘the object to which she [was] enfettered.’ ”
And so Kant drafted his thorough reply:
Your deeply felt letter comes from a heart that must have been created for the sake of virtue and honesty, since it is so receptive to instruction in those qualities. I must do as you ask, namely, put myself in your place, and prescribe for you a pure moral sedative. I do not know whether your relationship is one of marriage or friendship, but it makes no significant difference. For love, be it for one’s spouse or for a friend, presupposes the same mutual esteem for the other’s character, without which it is no more than perishable, sensual delusion.
A love like that wants to communicate itself completely, and it expects of its respondent a similar sharing of heart, unweakened by distrustful reticence. That is what the ideal of friendship demands. But there is something in us which puts limits on such frankness, some obstacle to this mutual outpouring of the heart, which makes one keep some part of one’s thoughts locked within oneself, even when one is most intimate. The sages of old complained of this secret distrust – ‘My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend!’
We can’t expect frankness of people, since everyone fears that to reveal himself completely would be to make himself despised by others. But this lack of frankness, this reticence, is still very different from dishonesty. What the honest but reticent man says is true, but not the whole truth. What the dishonest man says is something he knows to be false. Such an assertion is called, in the theory of virtue, a lie. It may be harmless, but it is not on that account innocent. It is a serious violation of a duty to oneself; it subverts the dignity of humanity in our own person, and attacks the roots of our thinking. As you see, you have sought counsel from a physician who is no flatterer. I speak for your beloved and present him with arguments that justify his having wavered in his affection for you.
Ask yourself whether you reproach yourself for the imprudence of confessing, or for the immorality intrinsic to the lie. If the former, then you regret having done your duty. And why? Because it has resulted in the loss of your friend’s confidence. This regret is not motivated by anything moral, since it is produced by an awareness not of the act itself, but of its consequences. But if your reproach is grounded in a moral judgment of your behaviour, it would be a poor moral physician who would advise you to cast it from your mind.
When your change in attitude has been revealed to your beloved, only time will be needed to quench, little by little, the traces of his justified indignation, and to transform his coldness into a more firmly grounded love. If this doesn’t happen, then the earlier warmth of his affection was more physical than moral, and would have disappeared anyway – a misfortune which we often encounter in life, and when we do, must meet with composure. For the value of life, insofar as it consists of the enjoyment we get from people, is vastly overrated.
Here then, my dear friend, you find the customary divisions of a sermon: instruction, penalty and comfort. Devote yourself to the first two; when they have had their effect, comfort will be found by itself.
Von Herbert’s original “long drawn out lie,” according to another letter Langton quotes from a mutual friend of Von Hebert’s and Kant’s, came about when, “in order to realize an idealistic love, she gave herself to a man who misused her trust. And then, trying to achieve such love with another, she told her new lover about the previous one.” But by the time she picked up her pen to cast her fate to the judgment of her favorite thinker, the problem had transcended the state of a lovers’ quarrel to become an all-consuming state of desire-free hollowness. Only Kantian principles, she insisted, stood between her and suicide.
She lays out her situation even more clearly in her reply to Kant’s reply:
My vision is clear now. I feel that a vast emptiness extends inside me, and all around me—so that I almost find myself to be superfluous, unnecessary. Nothing attracts me. I’m tormented by a boredom that makes life intolerable. Don’t think me arrogant for saying this, but the demands of morality are too easy for me. I would eagerly do twice as much as they command. They only get their prestige from the attractiveness of sin, and it costs me almost no effort to resist that. […] I don’t study the natural sciences or the arts any more, since I don’t feel that I’m genius enough to extend them; and for myself, there’s no need to know them. I’m indifferent to everything that doesn’t bear on the categorical imperative, and my transcendental consciousness—although I’m all done with those thoughts too.
You can see, perhaps, why I only want one thing, namely to shorten this pointless life, a life which I am convinced will get neither better nor worse. If you consider that I am still young and that each day interests me only to the extent that it brings me closer to death, you can judge what a great benefactor you would be if you were to examine this question closely. I ask you, because my conception of morality is silent here, whereas it speaks decisively on all other matters. And if you cannot give me the answer I seek, I beg you to give me something that will get this intolerable emptiness out of my soul.
“Kant never replied,” writes Langton. “In 1803 Maria von Herbert killed herself, having worked out at last an answer to that persistent and troubling question — the question to which Kant, and her own moral sense, had responded with silence. Was that a vicious thing to do? Not entirely. As Kant himself concedes, ‘Self-murder requires courage, and in this attitude there is always room for reverence for humanity in one’s own person.’ ” The words of a thinker, indeed, though we can probably see why no modern-day Immanuel Kant has gone into the business of providing solace to the brokenhearted.
At OC HQ you will find two Bialetti espresso makers on the stove–one small, the other large–and together they power us through the day. Invented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, the octagonal, Art Deco-designed coffee maker eventually became a staple in Italian homes (90% of them), thanks to his son Renato, who died last week at the age of 93. A savvy marketer to the end, Bialetti went to the grave with his product, buried, as he was, in an espresso maker that doubled as an urn. All in all, I can’t think of much better ways to spend eternity.
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I knew such things as comedy albums existed. I’d spied a couple of them in my parent’s record collection. But they seemed like such quaint and dated things. After all, I’d grown up on Eddie Murphy’s scandalous HBO specials, had seen George Carlin and Richard Pryor pace the stage delivering epic comic commentary. I had imbibed a steady stream of standup and sketches on Comedy Central. What need had I of a comedy album?! The facial expressions, rare props, ridiculous outfits… weren’t these visual cues necessary to carry the jokes?
Then I heard Lenny Bruce’s live double album from his 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and flipped out (hear an excerpt above). I didn’t know very much about Bruce at the time—not much more than the name. But after listening to that record enough times to memorize every line and inflection, I became very interested in how comedians brought listeners to tears of laughter with only their voices. Bruce was a master. “Onstage,” writes Richard Brody, “he was a one-man cartoon, doing all the voices and poses of movie parodies that he infused with his own stringent and paradoxical morality.” So cartoonish was his act at times that one joke became an actual cartoon—“Thank You Mask Man,” a NSFW classic.
Bruce’s act swung like a jazz performance, sometimes hitting a blue note, and pulling his audience down with a serious scene, then ramping right up into wild, nasal runs of high-pitched comic virtuosity. Other comics, like the deadpan Bob Newhart, hardly ever varied their volume, tempo, and tone, and therein lay the understated appeal of Newhart’s “Button-Down Mind.” Then there are the characters and impressions of Lily Tomlin, the unhinged rants of Richard Pryor, the screaming of Sam Kinison, the narcoleptic drone of Steven Wright, the childlike warble of Emo Philips… Every comic uses his or her voice as an instrument, tapping into the audience’s musical sense of rhythm and timing as much as their intellectual sense of irony and absurdity.
Today, we bring you a playlist of 30+ standup comedy albums, ranging from current comic masters like Amy Schumer, Tig Notaro, and Louis C.K. to beloved comics from decades past like Gilda Radner and Bill Hicks. (You can purchase copies of these classic albums here.) We’ve got the famous duo of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (yes, they do “2000 Year Old Man”), we’ve got Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and even… hell, why not? Andrew Dice Clay. And Lenny Bruce’s Carnegie Hall Concert made the cut as well, an absolute must-hear. Most of these picks were chosen by Open Culture readers on Twitter, with a few taken from this Spin list of the “40 Greatest Comedy Albums of All Time.” If there’s an album you think we absolutely have to add to the playlist above, let us know in the comments. If you don’t have Spotify, download it free here. And if you object to using the service, why not preview some of these, then go buy the ones that crack you up the hardest? All of the albums on the playlist can be found on Amazon here.
Taught by award-winning filmmakers from a range of specialties, including Brian Tufano and Mike Figgis, it covers everything from storytelling, to budgeting, to understanding the impact of a soundtrack.
Here, for instance, is Brian Tufano, the established cinematographer, talking about filming the infamous toilet scene in Trainspotting — turns out you can do a great deal using half a toilet and the technique trompe-l’œil (“fool the eye”).
As part of the course, you can also can also watch shorts from recent graduates of the NFTS (a few of which are already collecting awards) and get recommended videos from the Bafta Guru collection — a site dedicated to getting new blood into the industry.
The free course, Explore Filmmaking, is offered through FutureLearn and gives you the chance to trade opinions with thousands of other film buffs online, plus get comments as the weeks go by from the filmmakers teaching the course.
Here’s the breakdown of what the course covers:
1 — Introduction: how does a film get from script to screen?
Nik Powell, director of the NFTS and producer of more than 40 films, including The Crying Game, Mona Lisa and Company of Wolves.
2 — Storytelling: what’s the difference between plot and theme?
Destiny Ekharaga, director of Gone Too Far.
3 — Decisions: how to choose budget, schedule, location and kit?
Mike Figgis, director of Leaving Las Vegas, TimeCode and Internal Affairs.
4 — The scene: how does a director make choices on set?
Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow, recently announced director of a re-make of The Crow, and director of music videos for artists such as The Prodigy, Olly Murrs and Devlin.
5 — Time and space: how does editing affect meaning?
Justine Wright, editor of Touching the Void, The Iron Lady and Locke.
6 — Sound and music: what is the impact of a film’s soundtrack?
Danny Hambrook, sound designer of Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Le Weekend, production sound mixer on Rush.
In short — there will be no more excuses for wrongly orientated iPhone videos. Oh and please don’t forget to namecheck Open Culture and FutureLearn in your Oscar acceptance speech.
Jess Weeks is a copywriter at FutureLearn. Along with the rest of the FutureLearn team, she’s based in the British Library in London. Yes, it is occasionally like Harry Potter.
Anthropology, authenticity, medieval aesthetics, the media, literary theory, conspiracy theory, semiotics, ugliness: the late Umberto Eco, as anyone who’s read a piece of his bibliography (which includes such intellectually serious but thoroughly entertaining novels as The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and the still-new Numero Zero) can attest, had the widest possible range of interests. That infinite-seeming list extended even to comic strips, and especially Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (which did tend to fascinate literati, even those of very different traditions).
Just over thirty years ago, the Italian novelist-essayist-critic-philosopher-semiotician wrote an essay in TheNew York Review of Books about what made that strip one of the most, if not the most compelling of the twentieth century.
“The cast of characters is elementary,” writes Eco, rattling off the names and later enumerating the resonant qualities of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Violet, Patty, Frieda, Linus, Schroeder, Pig Pen, and “the dog Snoopy, who is involved in their games and their talk.” But from this simple design arises a rich and complex reader experience:
Over this basic scheme, there is a steady flow of variations, following a rhythm found in certain primitive epics. (Primitive, too, is the habit of referring to the protagonist always by his full name—even his mother addresses Charlie Brown in that fashion, like an epic hero.) Thus you could never grasp the poetic power of Schulz’s work by reading only one or two or ten episodes: you must thoroughly understand the characters and the situations, for the grace, tenderness, and laughter are born only from the infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns, and from fidelity to the fundamental inspirations. They demand from the reader a continuous act of empathy, a participation in the inner warmth that pervades the events.
In this sense, Peanuts succeeds on the same level as Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s highly absurd, highly artistic, and enormously respected strip (though it sometimes took up entire pages) that ran from 1913 to 1944. Thanks only to the earlier work’s rigorous adherence to themes and variations, Eco writes, “the mouse’s arrogance, the dog’s unrewarded compassion, and the cat’s desperate love could arrive at what many critics felt was a genuine state of poetry, an uninterrupted elegy based on sorrowing innocence.” But Peanuts’ cast of children adds another dimension entirely:
The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage. These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization.
They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence. Schulz’s children are not a sly instrument to handle our adult problems: they experience these problems according to a childish psychology, and for this very reason they seem to us touching and hopeless, as if we were suddenly aware that our ills have polluted everything, at the root.
But the capacious mind of Eco finds even more than that in the outwardly humble Schulz’s work. If we read enough of it, “we realize that we have emerged from the banal round of consumption and escapism, and have almost reached the threshold of meditation.” And astonishingly, it works equally well for all audiences: “Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity, as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys.” And Schultz continues, even sixteen years after his own death and the strip’s end, to show us, “in the face of Charlie Brown, with two strokes of his pencil, his version of the human condition.”
Several weeks back, you might recall, Stephen Hawking delivered two Reith lectures over the radio airwaves of the BBC –one called “Do Black Holes Have No Hair?,” the other “Black Holes Ain’t as Black as They Are Painted.” Both were featured here, accompanied by some lively chalkboard animations.
Above you can watch an outtake from the second lecture, this time animated in a different aesthetic. It’s trippy, hypnotic, and unless you’re grounded in the material, the talk will leave you a little baffled–at least until the end, when Hawking leaves us with a life-affirming message anyone can relate to. “If you feel like you’re in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” At once, he’s talking literally about black holes that are no longer thought to consume everything they encounter, and the metaphorical ones we all run into, somewhere along the way, in life.
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