Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Because of Pink Floyd, I’ve Spent Decades Undoing the Idea That There’s a Dark Side of the Moon”

in Music, Science | August 18th, 2017

In 1973, Pink Floyd released their influ­en­tial con­cept album, The Dark Side of the Moon, which gar­nered both crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess. The album sold some 45 mil­lion copies, and remained on Bill­board­’s Top LPs & Tapes chart for 741 weeks (from 1973 to 1988). All of which was great for Pink Floyd. But not so much for sci­ence and edu­ca­tion.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson explains above. “That Pink Floyd had an album with that title meant I spent decades hav­ing to undo [that fact] as an edu­ca­tor.” That’s because “there is no dark side of the moon.” “There’s a far side and there’s a near.” “But all sides of the moon receive sun­light across the month.”

To delve deep­er into this, it’s worth read­ing this short arti­cle (Myth­busters: Is There Real­ly a Dark Side of the Moon?) from Yale Sci­en­tif­ic Mag­a­zine. There, they elab­o­rate:

No mat­ter where we are on Earth, we see and always have seen only one face of the moon. Since the moon rotates on its axis in the same amount of time that it takes the body to orbit our plan­et, the same half face of the moon is con­sis­tent­ly exposed to view­ers on Earth. This tim­ing is caused by a phe­nom­e­non called tidal lock­ing, which occurs when a larg­er astro­nom­i­cal body (Earth) exerts a strong grav­i­ta­tion­al pull on a small­er body (the moon), forc­ing one side of the small­er body to always face the larg­er one.…

[T]he fact that we earth­lings can­not see the far side of the moon does not mean that this face is nev­er exposed to sun­light. In fact, the far side of the moon is no more and no less dark than the hemi­sphere we do see.

Get the rest here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

Michio Kaku & Noam Chom­sky School Moon Land­ing and 9/11 Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rists

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How TV Addles Kids’ Brains: A Short Film Directed by Godfrey Reggio (Maker of Koyaanisqatsi) & Scored by Philip Glass

in Film, Television | August 18th, 2017

On Octo­ber 4, 1982, “more than 5,000 peo­ple filled the Radio City Music Hall to expe­ri­ence a remark­able event. That event was the world pre­miere of Koy­aanisqat­si.” So says the poster for the wide release of that film, an exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary with­out spo­ken words on the nat­ur­al and man­made envi­ron­ment that nei­ther looked nor sound­ed — nor felt — like any­thing many of its view­ers had ever expe­ri­enced in a movie the­ater before.

Unable to muster any of their stan­dard reac­tions, they had no choice but to sit and observe as, in slow motion and fast motion and every speed in between, water­falls thun­dered, chasms yawned, sky­scrap­ers soared, com­muters scur­ried, and rock­ets launched before their eyes — all to the music of Philip Glass. You might say that Koy­aanisqat­si (see trail­er below), as well as its for­mal­ly sim­i­lar sequels Powaqqat­si and Naqoyqat­si, puts its view­ers in an altered state of mind.

The tril­o­gy’s direc­tor, a for­mer monk-in-train­ing named God­frey Reg­gio, might say the same thing about tele­vi­sion, whose flick­er­ing blueish pres­ence emerges from time to time in his work, but he would­n’t mean it in a good way. In 1995, between Powaqqat­si and Naqoyqat­si, he made a short called Evi­dence which, in the words of koyaanisqatsi.org, “looks into the eyes of chil­dren watch­ing tele­vi­sion — in this case Walt Disney’s Dum­bo. Though engaged in a dai­ly rou­tine, they appear drugged, retard­ed, like the patients of a men­tal hos­pi­tal.”

Accom­pa­ny­ing and in a sense com­ment­ing on their glazed, often slack-jawed expres­sions, we once again, as in Reg­gio’s trans­fix­ing fea­ture doc­u­men­taries, have a Glass-com­posed score. Unlike movie­go­ers in a the­ater, “tele­vi­sion view­ers become prey to the television’s own light impuls­es, they go into an altered state — a trans­fixed con­di­tion where the eyes, the mind, the breath­ing of the sub­ject is clear­ly under the con­trol of an out­side force. In a poet­ic sense and with­out exag­ger­at­ing one might say that the tele­vi­sion tech­nol­o­gy is eat­ing the sub­jects who sit before its gaze.”

In the more than two decades since, this kind of crit­i­cism of tele­vi­sion has giv­en way to a more gen­er­al crit­i­cism of elec­tron­ic media, most of whose cur­rent­ly pop­u­lar forms did­n’t exist in 1995; Reg­gio and Glass’ most recent col­lab­o­ra­tion, 2013’s Vis­i­tors, deals with “human­i­ty’s trance­like rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­o­gy.” You and your chil­dren may have escaped the “trac­tor beam that holds its sub­jects in total con­trol” as Evi­dence depicts it, but in the 21st cen­tu­ry the num­ber of trac­tor beams has great­ly mul­ti­plied. And so the ques­tion remains worth ask­ing: which ones have you under their con­trol?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Koy­aanisqat­si at 1552% Speed

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Mar­shall McLuhan Explains Why We’re Blind to How Tech­nol­o­gy Changes Us, Rais­ing the Ques­tion: What Have the Inter­net & Social Media Done to Us?

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Prof. Cal New­port

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations”

in Music | August 18th, 2017

I didn’t get the Beach Boys for a while. They had pro­vid­ed the sound­track to an alien world, one I knew most­ly from chew­ing gum com­mer­cials. They were “uncool—cornball,” writes Ben Ratliff, “unen­light­ened” pur­vey­ors of “beach priv­i­lege.” The “nar­ra­tors of Beach Boys songs used their time as they liked: amuse­ment parks, surf­ing, drag rac­ing, dat­ing, sit­ting in their rooms.” They had no cares, no real bur­dens, just shal­low sum­mer loves and heartaches. They came off as some of the bland­est, safest-sound­ing peo­ple on earth.

Then, in a puz­zling turn in the nineties, indie artists like Neu­tral Milk Hotel, Jim O’Rourke, and The Sea and Cake began exper­i­ment­ing with the com­plex arrange­ments, odd instru­men­ta­tion, and sun­ny melodies of 60s pop artists like The Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach.

This is music that can seduce us into think­ing it is sim­plis­tic, child­ish, unin­spired vanil­la. Its use as back­ground muzak in super­mar­kets and shop­ping malls con­firms the impres­sion. But crit­i­cal lis­ten­ing explodes it. (Dig the phras­ing in the oth­er­wise sil­ly, Bacharach/Hal David-com­posed “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”)

Yes, it took a retro-hip return to ’60s lounge music, bossa nova, and surf pop for many peo­ple to recon­sid­er the Beach Boys as seri­ous artists. And while the trend became a lit­tle cloy­ing, once I put on the head­phones and gave the rad­i­cal Pet Sounds a few dozen spins, as so many song­writ­ers I admired had gushed about doing, I got it. Of course. Yes. The arrange­ments, and those har­monies…. It isn’t only the tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry, though there’s that. It’s how thor­ough­ly weird those clas­si­cal­ly-inspired arrange­ments are. Per­haps a bet­ter way to put it would be, total­ly coun­ter­in­tu­itive.

What near­ly any oth­er pop arranger would nat­u­ral­ly do with a har­mo­ny or rhythm part—just to get the house in order and show­case more impor­tant “lead” parts—Brian Wil­son almost nev­er does. As the min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er John Adams put it, “more than any oth­er song­writer of that era, Bri­an Wil­son under­stood the val­ue of har­mon­ic sur­prise.” At least in Pet Sounds and the long-unfin­ished “labyrinth of melody” SMiLE, each part of the song sus­tains its own indi­vid­ual inter­est with­out break­ing away from the minia­ture sym­phon­ic whole.

Even with­in the har­monies, there is a strange ten­sion, an off-kil­ter wob­bling as in a machine whose gears are all just a bit off-cen­ter. Instru­ments and voic­es go in and out of key, tem­pos slow and quick­en. The vocal har­monies are angel­ic, but trou­bled, uncer­tain, maudlin, and under­lined with unex­pect­ed inten­si­ty giv­en the innocu­ous­ness of their lyrics. In the iso­lat­ed vocal tracks here for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” and “Good Vibra­tions,” you may catch it, or not. It isn’t fore­bod­ing, exact­ly, but a kind of uneasy recog­ni­tion that the plea­sures these songs cel­e­brate will soon pass away. An Arca­di­an theme in the Cal­i­for­nia pas­toral.

The ten­sion is there in Wilson’s idol Phil Spector’s com­posi­tons as well, but the con­trast is remark­ably greater in Pet Sounds, of long­ing, nos­tal­gia, and youth at its peak. The utopia they imag­ine may only appeal to a spe­cif­ic sub­set of boomer Amer­i­cans, but their intri­cate, melod­i­cal­ly com­plex, yet har­mo­nious­ly appeal­ing sound­world belongs to every­one. As Zack Schon­feld observed in a sad­ly prophet­ic review of Wilson’s Pet Sounds per­for­mance in Brook­lyn last sum­mer, “it is hard to imag­ine mod­ern indie or indie-pop—or pop in general—without Pet Sounds.” (That includes, of course The Bea­t­les, who answered with Sgt. Pep­pers.) “A world with­out Pet Sounds is a fright­en­ing dystopia,” he writes, “like imag­in­ing a world with­out beach­es or one in which Don­ald Trump is pres­i­dent.” Maybe as you sit back and lis­ten to the oth­er­world­ly beau­ty of these naked har­monies, think of all those love­ly beach­es we still have left.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter Bri­an Wilson’s Cre­ative Process While Mak­ing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

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

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Why Jim Carrey Needs to Paint: “Painting Frees Me, from the Past and Future, from Regret and Worry”

in Art, Comedy, Creativity, Film | August 18th, 2017

In his top-gross­ing come­dies, actor Jim Car­rey dis­played an antic qual­i­ty that seemed to rule over his per­son­al life as well. While oth­er stars used inter­views as oppor­tu­ni­ties to nor­malise them­selves to the civil­ians in the audi­ence, clown prince Car­rey was relent­less, an uncon­trol­lable fire hose of fun­ny faces and voic­es that felt not unlike demons.

All that out­put was exhaust­ing, and caused many to won­der if the man was capa­ble of calm­ing down long enough to receive any mean­ing­ful input.

His per­for­mances in films such as the Tru­man Show and Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind sug­gest­ed that per­haps he was…

As did the rev­e­la­tion that he spent a lot of his child­hood in his bed­room draw­ing — the flip side to his crazy liv­ing room per­for­mances, staged, in part, to keep an emo­tion­al­ly trou­bled fam­i­ly from sink­ing any low­er. He also drew in school, aggra­vat­ing teach­ers with unau­tho­rised por­traits.

As Car­rey recalled in a 2011 inter­view:

After I became famous, my sixth-grade teacher sent me sketch­es she had con­fis­cat­ed. She kept them because she thought they were cute. She also knew how to har­ness the ener­gy. If I was qui­et, she would give me 15 min­utes at the end of class to per­form. Today, I’d be on Rital­in, and Ace Ven­tu­ra would have nev­er been made.

These days, the fun­ny man seems to have turned his back on per­form­ing in favor of a more con­tem­pla­tive visu­al arts prac­tice. His most recent act­ing cred­it is over a year old. As David Bushell’s doc­u­men­tary short, I Need­ed Col­or, above reveals, the quan­ti­ty of Carrey’s out­put is still impres­sive, but there’s a qual­i­ta­tive dif­fer­ence where the artist is con­cerned.

His face and body are calm, and the crazed imper­a­tive to enter­tain seems to have left him. Watch­ing him go about his work, one is remind­ed of car­toon­ist and edu­ca­tor Lyn­da Barry’s obser­va­tions about the neu­ro­log­i­cal con­nec­tion between the abil­i­ty to go down the rab­bit hole of art and a child’s men­tal health:

I think it’s what keeps us sane. I think about how, if I’m sit­ting here with a kid who’s four years old and I have all these mark­ers and I say, do you want to draw, and that kid’s too freaked out to draw, we’d be wor­ried about that kid a lit­tle bit, wouldn’t you? We’d be wor­ried about them emo­tion­al­ly. OK, on this side I have a 40-year-old, same sit­u­a­tion, she’s too scared to draw, but we’re not wor­ried about her. Why? Because there is a tac­it under­stand­ing that some­thing is going on when kids are play­ing or [draw­ing] that has some­thing to do with their men­tal health. All of us know that if a kid is not allowed to play till he’s 21, he’s going to be a nut. He’s going to be a psy­chopath, actu­al­ly. The brain stud­ies they’ve done of kids in deep play show that their brains are iden­ti­cal to an adult’s brain that is in cre­ative con­cen­tra­tion. We know that play is essen­tial for men­tal health. I would argue that so is draw­ing.

Art saves lives, right?

Carrey’s ear­li­er suc­cess affords him the lux­u­ry of time and mon­ey to immerse him­self in his new voca­tion with­out lim­it­ing him­self to any one style or medi­um. Giant paint­ings, tiny sculp­tures, works that involve black light, squeegees, or shred­ded can­vas stitched back togeth­er with wire are all crick­et.

Giv­en his movie star sta­tus, nasty reviews are to be expect­ed, but approval is no longer what Car­rey is seek­ing:

When I paint and sculpt it stops the world for me, as if all time has been sus­pend­ed. My spir­it is com­plete­ly engaged, my heart is engaged, and I feel com­plete­ly free. I think I just like cre­at­ing. All of it is a por­tal into present, into absolute, qui­et, gen­tle, still­ness. This involve­ment, this pres­ence, is free­dom from con­cern. That’s har­mo­ny with the uni­verse.

Those who can’t make it to Sig­na­ture Gal­leries in Las Vegas this Sep­tem­ber 23 for a $10,000 per cou­ple open­ing of Carrey’s paint­ings can take a gan­der at his work for free here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold The Paint­ings of David Bowie: Neo-Expres­sion­ist Self Por­traits, Illus­tra­tions of Iggy Pop, and Much More

Jim Car­rey Sings a Pret­ty Damn Good Cov­er of The Bea­t­les “I Am the Wal­rus”

Art Exhib­it on Bill Mur­ray Opens in the UK

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting

in Politics | August 17th, 2017

The threat of wide­spread vio­lence and unrest descends upon the coun­try, thanks again to a col­lec­tion of actors vicious­ly opposed to civ­il rights, and in many cas­es, to the very exis­tence of peo­ple who are dif­fer­ent from them. They have been giv­en aid and com­fort by very pow­er­ful enablers. Vet­er­an activists swing into action. Young peo­ple on col­lege cam­pus­es turn out by the hun­dreds week after week. But for many ordi­nary peo­ple with jobs, kids, mort­gages, etc. the cost of par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­stant protests and civ­il actions may seem too great to bear. Yet, giv­en many awful exam­ples in recent his­to­ry, the cost of inac­tion may be also.

What can be done? Not all of us are Rosa Parks or Howard Zinn or Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. or Thich Nat Hanh or Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huer­ta, after all. Few of us are rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and few may wish to be. Not every­one is brave enough or tal­ent­ed enough or knowl­edge­able enough or com­mit­ted enough or, what­ev­er.

The prob­lem with this kind of think­ing is a prob­lem with so much think­ing about pol­i­tics. We look to leaders—men and women we think of as supe­ri­or beings—to do every­thing for us. This can mean del­e­gat­ing all the work of democ­ra­cy to some­times very flawed indi­vid­u­als. It can also mean we fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand how demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments work.

In the video above, Noam Chom­sky address­es the ques­tion of what ordi­nary peo­ple can do in the face of seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able injus­tice. (The clip comes from the 1992 doc­u­men­tary Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent.) “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of peo­ple are work­ing all the time, and they’re work­ing in their com­mu­ni­ties or their work­place or wher­ev­er they hap­pen to be, and they’re build­ing up the basis for pop­u­lar move­ments.”

In the his­to­ry books, there’s a cou­ple of lead­ers, you know, George Wash­ing­ton or Mar­tin Luther King, or what­ev­er, and I don’t want to say that those peo­ple are unim­por­tant. Mar­tin Luther King was cer­tain­ly impor­tant, but he was not the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. Mar­tin Luther King can appear in the his­to­ry books ‘cause lots of peo­ple whose names you will nev­er know, and whose names are all for­got­ten and who may have been killed and so on were work­ing down in the South.

King him­self often said as much. For exam­ple, in the Pref­ace of his Stride Toward Free­dom he wrote—referring to the 50,000 most­ly ordi­nary, anony­mous peo­ple who made the Mont­gomery Bus Boy­cott happen—“While the nature of this account caus­es me to make fre­quent use of the pro­noun ‘I,’ in every impor­tant part of the sto­ry it should be ‘we.’ This is not a dra­ma with only one actor.”

As for pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als like him­self engaged in polit­i­cal strug­gle, Chom­sky says, “peo­ple like me can appear, and we can appear to be promi­nent… only because some­body else is doing the work.” He defines his own work as “help­ing peo­ple devel­op cours­es of intel­lec­tu­al self-defense” against pro­pa­gan­da and mis­in­for­ma­tion. For King, the issue came down to love in action. Respond­ing in a 1963 inter­view above to a crit­i­cal ques­tion about his meth­ods, he coun­ters the sug­ges­tion that non­vi­o­lence means sit­ting on the side­lines.

I think of love as some­thing strong and that orga­nizes itself into pow­er­ful, direct action…. We are not engaged in a strug­gle that means we sit down and do noth­ing. There’s a great deal of dif­fer­ence between non­re­sis­tance to evil and non­vi­o­lent resis­tance. Non­re­sis­tance leaves you in a state of stag­nant pas­siv­i­ty and dead­en­ing com­pla­cen­cy, where­as non­vi­o­lent resis­tance means that you do resist in a very strong and deter­mined man­ner.

Both Chom­sky, King, and every oth­er voice for jus­tice and human rights would agree that the peo­ple need to act instead of rely­ing on move­ment lead­ers. What­ev­er actions one can take—whether it’s engag­ing in informed debate with fam­i­ly, friends, or cowork­ers, writ­ing let­ters, mak­ing dona­tions to activists and orga­ni­za­tions, doc­u­ment­ing injus­tice, or tak­ing to the streets in protest or acts of civ­il disobedience—makes a dif­fer­ence. These are the small indi­vid­ual actions that, when prac­ticed dili­gent­ly and coor­di­nat­ed togeth­er in the thou­sands, make every pow­er­ful social move­ment pos­si­ble.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky & Har­ry Bela­fonte Speak on Stage for the First Time Togeth­er: Talk Trump, Klan & Hav­ing a Rebel­lious Heart

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

‘Tired of Giv­ing In’: The Arrest Report, Mug Shot and Fin­ger­prints of Rosa Parks (Decem­ber 1, 1955)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Cre­at­ing Mean­ing­ful Social Change

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

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The Last Surviving Witness of the Lincoln Assassination Appears on the TV Game Show “I’ve Got a Secret” (1956)

in History, Television | August 17th, 2017


Let’s rewind the video­tape to 1956, to Samuel James Sey­mour’s appear­ance on the CBS tele­vi­sion show, “I’ve Got a Secret.” At 96 years of age, Sey­mour was the last sur­viv­ing per­son present at Ford’s The­ater the night Abra­ham Lin­coln was assas­si­nat­ed by John Wilkes Booth (April 14, 1865).

Only five years old at the time, Mr. Sey­mour trav­eled with his father to Wash­ing­ton D.C. on a busi­ness trip, where they attend­ed a per­for­mance of Our Amer­i­can Cousin. The young­ster caught a quick glimpse of the pres­i­dent, the play began, and the rest is, well, his­to­ry.

A quick foot­note: Samuel Sey­mour died two months after his TV appear­ance. His longevi­ty had some­thing to do, I imag­ine, with declin­ing those Win­stons over the years.

Find cours­es on the Civ­il War in our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in August, 2011.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

The Poet­ry of Abra­ham Lin­coln

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

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Legendary Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

in Animation | August 17th, 2017

While our coun­try looks like it might be com­ing apart at the seams, it’s good to revis­it, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nos­tal­gic about a lost time, but so that we can remind our­selves how, giv­en the right con­di­tions, things could work well once again.

One exam­ple from his­to­ry (and recent­ly redis­cov­ered by a num­ber of blogs dur­ing the AHCA deba­cle in Con­gress) is this gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da film from 1949—the Har­ry S. Tru­man era—that pro­motes the idea of cra­dle-to-grave health care, and all for three cents a week. This mon­ey went to school nurs­es, nutri­tion­ists, fam­i­ly doc­tors, and neigh­bor­hood health depart­ments.

Direct­ed by Chuck Jones, bet­ter known for ani­mat­ing Bugs Bun­ny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and the Road Run­ner, “So Much for So Lit­tle” fol­lows our main char­ac­ter from infancy—where doc­tors help immu­nize babies against whoop­ing cough, diph­the­ria, rheumat­ic fever, and smallpox—through school to dat­ing, mar­riage, becom­ing par­ents, and set­tling into a nice, healthy retire­ment. Along the way, the gov­ern­ment has made sure that health care is noth­ing to wor­ry about.

The film won an Acad­e­my Award in 1950 for Doc­u­men­tary Short Subject—not best sci-fi, despite how rad­i­cal this all sounds.

So what hap­pened? John Maher at the blog Dot and Line puts it this way:

Par­ti­san­ship and cap­i­tal­ism and racist zon­ing poli­cies shat­tered its ide­al­is­tic dream that Amer­i­cans might actu­al­ly pay com­mu­nal­ly for their health as well as that of their neigh­bors and fel­low cit­i­zens.

Three cents per Amer­i­can per week wouldn’t cut it now in terms of uni­ver­sal health cov­er­age. But accord­ing to Maher, quot­ing a 2009 Kingsepp study on the orig­i­nal Afford­able Care Act, tax­pay­ers would have to pay $3.61 a week.

So folks, don’t get despon­dent, get ide­al­is­tic. The Great­est Gen­er­a­tion came back from WWII with a grand ide­al­ism. Maybe this cur­rent gen­er­a­tion just needs to fight and defeat Nazis all over again…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bun­ny, Daffy Duck & Oth­er Looney Tunes Leg­ends: A Video Essay

How to Draw Bugs Bun­ny: A Primer by Leg­endary Ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones

This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies the Amer­i­can Health­care Sys­tem

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Color Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner & More

in Film | August 17th, 2017

We tend to think of film as rough­ly divid­ed into the “black and white” and “col­or” eras, the lat­ter ush­ered in by such lav­ish Tech­ni­col­or pro­duc­tions as Gone with the Wind and The Wiz­ard of Oz. But we also know it’s not as sim­ple as that: those pic­tures came out in Hol­ly­wood’s “gold­en year” of 1939, but some film­mak­ers had already been exper­i­ment­ing with col­or, and the gold­en age of black-and-white film would con­tin­ue through the 1960s. Movies today still occa­sion­al­ly dare to ven­ture into the nev­er-entire­ly-shut­tered realm of the mono­chrome, but on the whole, col­or reigns supreme.

Even though most movies now use col­or, few use it to its fullest advan­tage. Col­or gives view­ers some­thing more to look at, of course, but it can also give a movie its visu­al iden­ti­ty. Think of the films you’ve seen that you can call back most vivid­ly to mind, almost as if you had a pro­jec­tor inside your head, and most of them will prob­a­bly have a dis­tinc­tive col­or palette.

The most mem­o­rable cin­e­mat­ic images, in oth­er words, will have been com­posed not just with any col­or they hap­pened to need, but with a very spe­cif­ic set of col­ors, delib­er­ate­ly assem­bled by the film­mak­ers for its par­tic­u­lar expres­sive­ness.

For a few years now, the Twit­ter account Cin­e­ma Palettes has drawn out and iso­lat­ed those col­ors, ten per film, for all to see. “Though based on a momen­tary still, each spec­trum of shades seems to encap­su­late its movie’s over­all mood,” writes My Mod­ern Met’s Leah Pel­le­gri­ni, point­ing to “the somber, oth­er­world­ly blues of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows: Part 2, the dream­like pinks and pur­ples of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the cloy­ing­ly pret­ty pas­tels of Edward Scis­sorhands, and the earth­ly, organ­ic greens and browns of Atone­ment.”

It will sur­prise nobody to see the work of Wes Ander­son, famed for the care he gives not just to col­or but every visu­al ele­ment of his film, appear more than once on the feed. Here we see Cin­e­ma Palettes’ selec­tions from The Roy­al Tenen­baums, as well as from Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Reser­voir Dogs, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s A Clock­work Orange, and Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner. The project reveals an aspect of film­mak­ing that few of us may think con­scious­ly about, but nev­er­the­less reflects the nature of cin­e­ma itself: the best films select not just the right col­ors but the right aspects of real­i­ty itself to present, to inten­si­fy, to dimin­ish, and to leave out entire­ly.

Explore more films and col­ors at Cin­e­ma Palettes.

via My Mod­ern Met and h/t Natal­ie W‑S

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Like Kubrick, Jodor­owsky, Taran­ti­no, Cop­po­la & Miyaza­ki Use Col­or to Tell Their Sto­ries

“Bleu, Blanc, Rouge”: a Strik­ing Super­cut of the Vivid Col­ors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films

Wes Ander­son Likes the Col­or Red (and Yel­low)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Obses­sion with the Col­or Red: A Super­cut

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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