When Japan’s Top Animators Made a Thrilling Cyberpunk Commercial for Irish Beer: Watch Last Orders (1997)

in Animation, Television | January 26th, 2018

When it came out in 1995, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell showed the world what the art of Japanese animation could do with the kind of gritty, tech-saturated, globalized cyberpunk visions popularized in the previous decade by William Gibson and other writers. The film’s particularly successful release in the United Kingdom got some culturally savvy marketers in Ireland thinking: why not use this sort of thing to sell beer?

But rather than ripping it off and watering it down — all too par for the course in advertising — they hired animators straight from Production I.G., Ghost in the Shell’s studio, to create a whole new animated cyberpunk reality, the one in which Last Orders, the minute-long spot above, takes place. The 1997 commercial tells the story of six samurai rushing through a cityscape that has everything we’ve now come to expect from this genre: forests of high-rises, bustling streets, mysterious women, artificial humanoids, the technological everywhere merged with the organic, and neon signs aplenty.

The samurai converge on their destination, a tavern, just in time to silently but firmly signal their demand for their drink of choice: Murphy’s Irish Stout, a Heineken-distributed brew offered as a lighter, less bitter alternative to the market-dominating Guinness. But no matter of the steely determination of the samurai in Last Orders, the first anime-style commercial ever to air in the UK and Ireland, it seems that one challenges such an iconic brand at one’s peril: Murphy’s currently has only a five-percent share of the Irish stout market, and that mostly thanks to a 28-percent share in its native Cork.

The Japanese animators who worked on the commercial have fared rather better, going on to, among many other respected projects, Blood: The Last Vampire and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. Though I’ve never encountered Murphy’s on any tap, I’d gladly watch a movie or even an entire series set in its world. The stout market, the mighty Guinness included, may have been on the decline in recent years, but cyberpunk, in our own ever more globalized and tech-saturated reality, seems about due for a comeback.

via Kotaku

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Space Rock Opera Rigel 9: A Rare Recording from 1985

in Literature, Music, Sci Fi | January 26th, 2018

In her remembrance of recently departed sci-fi great Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood describes “an absurd vision” she drew from Le Guin’s fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea: “There was Ursula, moving calmly down a hill of whispering sand under the unchanging stars; and there was me, distraught and running after her and calling ‘No! Come Back! We need you here and now!’” Atwood longs for Le Guin’s responses to the crises of the present, the old hierarchies of power and privilege reasserting their cruel dominance over men, women, children, and an already overburdened environment.

The problem of power and its abuses is one Le Guin returned to over and over in her work. “As an anarchist,” writes Atwood,” she would have wanted a self-governing society, with gender and racial equality.” As a keen anthropological observer of human behavior, she saw how and why technologically-advanced, yet psychologically reactionary societies stray from these ideals, destabilizing the ecological balance they depend on to survive and thrive. Le Guin fought back in her way. She was a prolific builder of poetic new worlds. Through them, we will always have her wisdom, and in a few rare instances, we have her music.

No, Le Guin didn’t compose, but she did write librettos for three different collaborative projects. Above, we have her “most noteworthy melodic undertaking,” according to Locus magazine’s Jeff Berkwits, Rigel 9, a space opera with music by avant-garde composer David Bedford, recorded and released in 1985. (It’s also streamable on Spotify. Listen below or here.) Rigel 9 “tells a pretty classic space story,” Cara Giaimo writes at Atlas Obscura. “Three astronauts, named Anders, Kapper, and Lee, are sent to explore a strange world. After Anders goes off to collect plant samples and is kidnapped by extraterrestrials, Kapper and Lee argue over whether to rescue him or save themselves.”

Amidst this drama of tiny red aliens, a double sun, air that smells of cinnamon and yellow and orange trees, we learn a few unsettling facts about what has happened back on Earth. “The Earth has no more forests,” sings Anders, “no wilderness, no still places.” Evoking a Sartrean horror on a planetary scale, he gives us an image of “only human faces, only human voices…. The Earth has no more silence.” The resources we need to replenish not only air and water, but also weary minds have disappeared. These revelations set up Anders’ seduction by the lushness and quiet of Rigel 9, and the gorgeous soprano voices of its inhabitants.

Bedford’s music is transporting, with “Bowie-esque synth sweeps” and saxophones, thrilling choral movements, and a pounding rhythm section that puts one in mind of Queen. Scottish New Wave duo Strawberry Switchblade make an appearance, as the lead voices of an alien funeral procession (top). The dialogue and spoken performances can be a bit corny, but the space rock opera has never been suited for subtlety, and Le Guin and Bedford purposefully created the drama as a radio play of sorts. “We had talked about the composition as ‘opera for ear,” she explained, “That is, a ‘radio opera… We liked the idea of being able to imagine the scenery, and then putting that scenery into the words and the music.”

That same year, Le Guin released another musical effort, teaming with musician Todd Barton for a cassette-only production called Music and Poetry of Kesh, released together with her novel Always Coming Home. And ten years later, she worked with classical composer Elinor Armer on Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts. This eight-movement work features Le Guin herself, narrating a text about “a fantastical realm,” Berkwits writes, “the Uttermost Archipelago in the fifth quarter of Island Earth—where sound literally sustains life.” Just above, hear one movement, “The Seasons of Oling,” a further reminder that Le Guin, who never shrank from the violence of our world, could always imagine enthralling alternatives.

via Atlas Obscura

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Robert Reich Makes His UC Berkeley Course on Wealth and Inequality in America Available on Facebook

in Current Affairs, Economics | January 25th, 2018

Robert B. Reich served as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and was later named one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the 20th century by TIME Magazine. Nowadays, Reich teaches courses on public policy at UC Berkeley, and uses his popular Facebook page to discuss policy questions with a much broader audience. So here’s the next the logical step: This semester, Reich is teaching a Berkeley course on wealth and inequality in America, and he’s making the lectures themselves available on Facebook too. Watch the opening lecture above, and then check back in for new installments.

Note: Once you start playing the video, you might need to enable the audio in the lower right hand corner of the video player.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Read the Shortest Academic Article Ever Written: “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ ”

in Psychology, Writing | January 25th, 2018

We’ve featured impressively short academic papers here on Open Culture before, like John Nash’s 26-page PhD thesis and this two-sentence “Counterexample to Euler’s Conjecture on Sums and Like Powers,” but if you’ve set your sights on writing one shorter still, don’t get your hopes up. The almost certainly unbeatable example of a short academic paper appeared more than forty years ago, in the fall 1974 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analyses, its main text coming in at exactly zero words. You can read it, if indeed “read” is the word, above or at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Written, or at least thought up, by psychologist Dennis Upper, “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ ” has nothing but its title, one footnote (indicating that “portions of this paper were not presented at the 81st annual American Psychological Association Convention”), and the fulsome comments of a reviewer: “I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and X‑rays and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style. I suggest it be published without revision. Clearly it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen — yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr. Upper’s failure. In comparison with the other manuscripts I get from you containing all that complicated detail, this one was a pleasure to examine.”

Some describe writer’s block, whether in science or literature or any other field requiring the proper arrangement of words, as a fear of the blank page. If looking at Upper’s void-like paper frightens you, consider having a look at the Louisiana Channel series we featured in 2016 wherein writers like Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Mitchell talk about how they deal with the blank page themselves. Atwood finds that it “beckons you in to write something on it,” that “it must be filled,” but if you don’t hear the same call, you’ll have to come up with an approach of your own. Just don’t try titling, footnoting, and turning in the empty sheet — it’s been done.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Animated Scores to Music by Radiohead, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Photek & Other Electronic/Post-Punk/Avant-Garde Musicians

in Animation, Music | January 25th, 2018

A few weeks ago, we told you about Stephen Malinowski and the Music Animation Machine, a popular and pretty expansive YouTube channel that features scrolling, color-coordinated animated “scores” for classical works from Debussy to Bach and Stravinsky.

But what if there was a version of this, somewhere somehow, for electronic music?

Ask the question of the Internet, dear reader, and the gods will provide. For just over a year motion graphics designer Johannes Lampert has been working in a similar style to interpret the work of electronic, post-punk, and modern composers like Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt in which every sound is represented by a different animated symbol.

In the above video, Lampert takes on Talking Heads’ multilayered, Fela Kuti-inspired “The Great Curve” from Remain in Light. The video gives us jagged lines for Tina Weymouth’s bass, a steady border of dots for Chris Frantz’ propulsive drum tracks, and several gaps into which the three vocal lines of the song—David Byrne’s lead, and Nona Hendryx and the band’s multitracked call-and-response backing vocals—drop and pulse. Add to that an unbroken jagged line that replicates Adrian Belew’s searing and soaring solo.

Currently there are 12 tracks available on Anatomy of a Track’s Youtube channel, with a posting record that suggests Johannes Lampert is working on one every two months.

Lampert experiments with the layout and graphics of his animations, making their design complement the music. Hence “The Great Curve” looking like African textiles, Gil-Scott Heron’s “New York Is Killing Me” aping the New York Subway map, and Photek’s “The Rain” as a puddle filled with pulsing raindrops.

Maybe the most complex video so far is for Radiohead’s “Bloom,” which is just as chaotic as the band’s tumbling drum machine. But it does uncover how steady the bass is in this track while all around the other instruments are shimmering and ethereal. And for just a good time, Justice’s “Phantom” is turned into a dynamic light show that looks like a night drive down a Japanese expressway.

I would put it to you that modern electronic artists think about their music much like these animations. I mean, what are music editing programs like ProTools or Logic Pro but horizontal scrolls of dots and sound waves?

No doubt Lampert has more tricks up his sleeve and more tracks to animate. Stay tuned.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Celebrate the Life & Writing of Ursula K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Classic Radio Dramatizations of Her Stories

in Literature, Sci Fi | January 24th, 2018

Until yesterday, had you asked me to name my favorite living writers, Ursula K. Le Guin’s name would appear near the top of the list. As of yesterday, I can no longer say this. Le Guin passed away at the age of 88, and left millions of fans bereft—fans with whom she had shared some of the finest science fiction and fantasy written in the 20th century, and with whom she happily shared her wisdom and advice in the free online workshops she held in her later years, her way of connecting with readers when she retired from writing.

Like many people, I first came to Le Guin’s work through her 1969 Nebula and Hugo-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that exploded ideas about what science fiction could be and do. That novel is part of a series of stories called the “Hainish cycle,” which—like C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy—are deeply philosophical and deeply sensitive to the emotional and psychological resonances of the questions they grapple with.

But unlike Lewis, Le Guin sought not to resurrect old mythologies, but to show how the boundaries and divisions we take for granted might easily become arbitrary and unfamiliar; how we might become something entirely new and different.

There are many other writers who come to mind when I think of Le Guin—Octavia Butler, Frank Herbert, Iain Banks, and, of course, Tolkien. Like many of the best writers in her genres, Le Guin’s fiction is contemplative as well as spectacular—she could write space opera, sword and sorcery, and adventure stories just as well as any of her contemporaries, but her sustained focus on the nuanced interrelations of character and theme—on the agony of choice, the possibility of freedom and connection without coercion, the social and ecological consequences of blind acquisition and thoughtless action—gave her work a depth many of her contemporaries lacked.

Le Guin’s anarchist environmentalism and “tough-minded feminist sensibility” opened up paths for dozens of writers who came after her and who also did not fit the typical molds established by the pulpy magazine stories of the early twentieth century. She was a scholar, earning an M.A. in French and Italian literature and doing doctoral work in France on a Fulbright in the mid-fifties. But unlike certain, more insecure, writers, Le Guin did not wear her learning on her sleeve. She wove it into the texture of her narratives and the allusive lyricism of her prose.

Le Guin’s highly distinctive qualities—her poetry and inquiry, toughness and sensitivity—are evident in even minor, lesser-known stories. Today, to celebrate her life, we bring you a few of those stories, as adapted into radio dramas by the 70s program Mind Webs and the late 80s NPR showcase Sci-Fi Radio. At the top of the post, hear “Diary of a Rose,” below, “Field of Vision,” and, above, “The End.”

And, just above, hear part one of a CBC dramatization of Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, the fifth novel in the Hainish cycle, though chronologically the cycle’s beginning. (Hear all six parts of the dramatized novel here.) Subtitled “an Ambiguous Utopia,” the novel, writes DePauw University’s Judah Bierman, is “a prizeworthy contribution to the debate about the responsibility of knowledge, of the visionary and of the scientist, in a planned society.” But like all of Le Guin’s fiction, it is so much more than that, a work that bears repeated reading, and listening, and that never exhausts its possibilities.

Note: If you’re interested in getting professionally read versions of Le Guin’s novels, consider signing up for a 30-day free trial to Audible.com. When you sign up for a free trial, they let you download two audiobooks for free, and keep the books, regardless of whether you become a long-term subscriber or not. Get details here.

Hear Inventive Stories from Ursula LeGuin & J.G. Ballard Turned Into CBC Radio Dramas

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot” Animated

in Astronomy, Life | January 24th, 2018

Back in 1990, Voyager 1 snapped a photo of planet Earth from a record distance – 3.7 billion miles away. And there we saw it, our home, Planet Earth, a small blue dot almost swallowed by the vastness of space. This image inspired the title of Carl Sagan’s 1994 book, The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which captivated millions of readers then, and still many more now.

A quarter century later, The Pale Blue Dot continues to give creative inspiration to many, including filmmakers who have produced animations that sync with Sagan’s narration of a famous passage from his book. The latest animation comes from a class of students at the Ringling College of Art and Design, located in Sarasota, Florida. Give it a watch. It will help you put everything in perspective.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Experimental Film with Early Electronic Music Featuring Anaïs Nin (1952)

in Film, Literature | January 24th, 2018

For decades, outside of feminist scholarship and readerships, French-Cuban-American diarist, novelist, and essayist Anaïs Nin was primarily known through her famous friends—most notably the experimental novelist Henry Miller, but also psychoanalyst Otto Rank. She had affairs with both men, and inspired some of their work, but Nin has always deserved much wider appreciation as an artist in her own right, whose surrealist explorations of sexuality, and sexual abuse, and posthumous collections of erotica rival Miller’s body of work—and for many readers far surpass his talents.

Now Nin’s expressive face and oracular quotations have taken over the Tumblr-sphere, such that she has been called the “patron saint of social media” and compared to Lena Dunham. Whether one finds these terms flattering or not comes down to matters of taste and, probably even more so, of age. But those who wish for a short introduction to Nin outside of the world of memes and macros will surely take an interest in the 1952 film above, “Bells of Atlantis,” shot and edited by her then-husband Ian Hugo (also known as banker High Guiler), with Nin in the starring role as the queen of Atlantis. Coilhouse offers this succinct description:

Over cascading experimental footage, Nin reads aloud from her novella House of Incest. We catch glimpses of her nude form swinging in a hammock, and we see her shadow undulating over sheer fabric blowing in the wind, but for the most part, the imagery, captured by Nin’s husband Ian Hugo, remains very abstract.

But it is not only the rare, hazy glimpses of Nin and the snippets of her reading that should draw our attention, but also the burbling, whistling, hypnotic electronic score, composed and created by the husband-and-wife-hobbyist team of Louis and Bebe Barron. Over a decade before Delia Derbyshire wowed audiences with her Dr. Who theme, the Barrons were making unheard-of experimental sounds using the technology available at the time—tape machines, oscillators, microphones, and other such low-tech analog devices.

“The Barrons were true pioneers of electronic music,” writes Messy Nessy, “and one of the crown jewels of their auditory collection is the soundtrack for the 1956 thriller sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet,” the first major motion picture with an all-electronic score. “Bells of Atlantis” breaks ground as an even earlier example of the form, and its hallucinatory visual journey recalls the surrealist filmmaking of decades past and looks forward to the psychedelic 60s.

Both the sounds the Barrons produced and the visions of Hugo turn out to be, in my humble opinion, the perfect setting for a brief introduction to Nin’s voice. After watching “Bells of Atlantis,” put on some more early electronica, and read Nin’s 1947 House of Incest for yourself, a hallucinatory prose-poem about, in Nin’s description, the “escape from a woman’s season in hell.”

via Messy Nessy/Coilhouse

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Meet Delia Derbyshire, the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ “Yesterday” Into Early Electronica

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

When Japan’s Top Animators Made a Thrilling Cyberpunk Commercial for Irish Beer: Watch Last Orders (1997)

Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Space Rock Opera Rigel 9: A Rare Recording from 1985

Robert Reich Makes His UC Berkeley Course on Wealth and Inequality in America Available on Facebook

Read the Shortest Academic Article Ever Written: “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ ”

Watch Animated Scores to Music by Radiohead, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Photek & Other Electronic/Post-Punk/Avant-Garde Musicians

Celebrate the Life & Writing of Ursula K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Classic Radio Dramatizations of Her Stories

Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot” Animated

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Experimental Film with Early Electronic Music Featuring Anaïs Nin (1952)

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