The Ancient Astronomy of Stonehenge Decoded

in Architecture, Astronomy, History | June 11th, 2018

The summer solstice draws nigh, and many of us will spend it bemoaning the fact that we have yet again failed to make it to Stonehenge to view the sun rising over its massive Heel Stone.

Don’t beat yourself up too badly.

According to Vox’s Senior Editorial Producer Joss Fong, above, it’s likely that the winter solstice was actually a far bigger deal to the Neolithic builders who engineered the site.

While much of it is now in ruins, archeologists, historians, astronomers, and other experts have been able to reconstruct what the ancient monument would have looked like in its heyday. The placement of the massive stones in carefully arranged concentric circles suggest that its feats of astronomy were no accident.

As Fong points out, the builders would not have known that the earth travels around the sun, nor that it tilts on its vertical axis, thus effecting where the sun’s rays will strike throughout the year.

They would, however, have had good cause to monitor any natural phenomena as it related to their agricultural practices.

The summer solstice would have come at the height of their growing season, but if this year’s sunrise celebrants spin 180 degrees, they will be facing in the same direction as those ancient builders would have when they arrived to celebrate the winter solstice with a sunset feast.

These days, the winter solstice attracts a sizable number of tourists, along with neo-druids, neo-pagans, and Wiccans.

Bundle up and join them, take a virtual tour, or at the very least, try your hand at assembling the nifty Aedes-Ars Stonehenge Model Kit Fong glues together like a pro.

Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View

Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female characters hits the lecture circuit to set the record straight opens June 12 at The Tank in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Nirvana Refuses to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ After the Crowd Hurls Sexist Insults at the Opening Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

in Music | June 11th, 2018

“Anger is an energy,” shouts John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, on Public Image Limited’s “Rise,” the 1986 single written in reaction to Apartheid South African and Northern Irish interrogation techniques. In typical fashion, Lydon succinctly sums up the motive force of punk, in a song, as he told MTV’s Kevin Seal, about “all kinds of torture,” which “doesn’t really achieve anything. Violence doesn’t really achieve anything.”

Some angry energy creates, and some does nothing but destroy. A few years later, Nirvana brought the angry energy of punk back into mainstream consciousness, with a frontman who spoke out frequently against sexism and sexist violence. In 1992, the band—already a global phenomenon after the release of Nevermind and the explosive success of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—performed a particularly pissed-off-yet-creative live set. They did so in reaction to a wave of abuse hurled at their opening act by a crowd of 50,000 in Buenos Aires.

“We brought this all-girl band over from Portland called Calamity Jane,” Kurt Cobain later remembered. “During their entire set, the whole audience… was throwing money and everything out of their pockets, mud and rocks, just pelting them. Eventually the girls stormed off crying. It was terrible, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once.”

Enraged, Cobain threatened to cancel, but was talked out of it by bassist Krist Novaselic. Instead, the band took the stage and “openly mocked the audience,” writes Alex Young at Consequence of Sound, “by playing mostly rarities and the backend of Nevermind.” Cobain at least managed to turn the ugly moment into a positive experience for his band.

We ended up having fun, laughing at them (the audience). Before every song, I’d play the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and then stop. They didn’t realize that we were protesting against what they’d done. We played for about forty minutes, and most of the songs were off Incesticide, so they didn’t recognize anything. We wound up playing the secret noise song (‘Endless, Nameless’) that’s at the end of Nevermind, and because we were so in a rage and were just so pissed off about this whole situation, that song and whole set were one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.

The whole show was captured on film by a professional crew, and you can watch it above to see what the experience was like for the audience. The opening track, “Nobody Knows I’m New Wave,” is “one of only a handful of Nirvana songs,” notes Young, “never to be released. Nirvana archivists theorize the impromptu jam was made up on the spot.”

You’ll also see from the tracklist below that Cobain “was misremembering or embellishing a bit here and there,” writes Dangerous Minds. “While they did unearth a handful of rarities from their odds-n-ends collection Insesticide… as well as ‘All Apologies’ (it later turned up on In Utero)… they also played most of Nevermind.” Nonetheless, we can see the show, with its abrasive opening jam (“I promise to shit on your head”) as an attempt to both alienate obnoxious fans and turn rage into a creative force.

Setlist:
Nobody Knows I’m New Wave
Aneurysm
Breed
Drain You
Beeswax
Spank Thru
School
Come as You Are
Lithium
Lounge Act
Sliver
About a Girl
Polly
Jam
In Bloom
Territorial Pissings
Been a Son
On a Plain
Negative Creep
Blew

Encore:
All Apologies
Endless, Nameless

via Dangerous Minds

The First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)

Nirvana’s Last Concert: Audio/ Video Recorded on March 1, 1994

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

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

David Bowie Memorialized in Traditional Japanese Woodblock Prints

in Art, Life, Music | June 8th, 2018

The East beckons me — Japan — but I’m a bit worried that I’ll get too Zen there and my writing will dry up. — David Bowie, 1980

David Bowie’s longstanding fascination with Japan pervaded his work, becoming the gateway through which many of his fans began to explore that country’s cultural traditions and aesthetics.

Perhaps the entry point is designer Kansai Yamamoto’s Ziggy Stardust togs, Yukio Mishima’s 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace from the Sea—one of Bowie’s top 100 books—or the 1000s of images photographer Masayoshi Sukita captured of the rocker over a period of four decades.

Maybe it was Aladdin Sane’s kabuki-like makeup or director Nagisa Oshima’s World War II drama, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, in which Bowie played a British officer in a Japanese POW camp.

The recent release of two modern ukiyo‑e woodblock prints featuring the rocker has caused such mass swooning among legions of Japanophile Bowie fans, the reverberations may well be powerful enough to ring temple bells in Kyoto.

For each print, artist Masumi Ishikawa casts Bowie as both himself and an iconic Japanese figure.

In the image at the top of the page, Bowie’s Aladdin Sane assumes the pose of the central character in Edo Period artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s Kidômaru and the Tengu, below.

The other print relocates the dashing Bowie from Terry O’Neill’s Diamond Dogs publicity photos to the realm of magician Takezawa Toji, whose spinning top performances had the power to summon dragons, at least as depicted by Kuniyoshi.

The prints were ordered by the Ukiyo‑e Project, whose mission is to portray today’s artists and pop icons on traditional woodblock prints. (Bowie follows previous honorees Kiss and Iron Maiden.)

The prints and the blocks from which the impressions were made will be on display at BOOKMARC in Tokyo’s Omotesando neighborhood from June 23 to July 1.

via Spoon and Tamago

Special David Bowie MetroCards Get Released in New York City

The Periodic Table of David Bowie: A Visualization of the Seminal Artist’s Influence and Influences

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and Bowie fan. Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female characters hits the lecture circuit to set the record straight opens June 12 at The Tank in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Steve Martin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Einstein & Picasso in a Smart Comedy Routine

in Comedy, Math, Physics | June 8th, 2018

Back in 2002, Stanford University mathematics professor Robert Osserman chatted with comedian and banjo player extraordinaire Steve Martin in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. The event was called “Funny Numbers” and it was intended to deliver an off-kilter discussion on math. Boy did it deliver.

The first half of the discussion was loose and relaxed. Martin talked about his writing, banjos and his childhood interest in math. “In high school, I used to be able to make magic squares,” said Martin. “I like anything kind of ‘jumbly.’ I like anagrams. What else do I like? I like sex.”

Then Robin Williams, that manic ball of energy, showed up. As you can see from the five videos throughout this post, the night quickly spiraled into comic madness.

They riffed on the Osbournes, Henry Kissinger, number theory, and physics. “Schrödinger, pick up your cat,” barks Williams at the end of a particularly inspired tear. “He’s alive. He’s dead. What a pet!”

When Martin and Williams read passages from Martin’s hit play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile Williams read his part at different points as if he were Marlon Brando, Peter Lorre and Elmer Fudd. At another time, Williams and Martin riffed on the number zero. Williams, for once acting as the straight man, asked Osserman, “I have one quick question, up to the Crusades, the number zero didn’t exist, right? In Western civilization.” To which Martin bellowed, “That is a lie! How dare you imply that the number zero…oh, I think he’s right.”

The videos are weirdly glitchy, though the audio is just fine. And the comedy is completely hilarious and surprisingly thought provoking.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in September, 2015.

Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968)

Listen as Albert Einstein Reads ‘The Common Language of Science’ (1941)

Einstein Explains His Famous Formula, E=mc², in Original Audio

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Deep Study of Terence Malick’s Filmography

in Film | June 8th, 2018

Yesterday we featured the Directors Series, the ever-expanding collection of video essays that seeks out the essence of the auteurs of our time by closely examining their entire filmographies. So far, the series’ creator Cameron Beyl has taken on the work of Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Christopher Nolan — all titans of cinema, and with the exception of the last, all American. Given that apparent cultural inclination, Beyl’s choice of a subject for the just-begun current chapter of the Directors Series follows naturally: that uncompromising American transcendentalist of the silver screen, Terrence Malick.

It also makes good sense to focus on Malick now, given that he’s spent the past few years in a period of surprising late-career productivity. After establishing the filmmaker’s identity and main themes as well as giving a sketch of his colorful (and often only sparsely documented) life, Beyl uses his first episode on Malick to get into his “crimes of passion” movies, his 1973 debut Badlands and its 1978 follow-up Days of Heaven.

The latter seems to have solidified in the cinematic consciousness many of the basic elements of Malick’s style, including hushed yet often grandly philosophical narration; a worshipful, even religious view of the natural world; and a relentless expansion of his own visual language. But though the film won Malick a Best Director award at Cannes, he didn’t make another movie for twenty years.

After returning to filmmaking in 1998 with the James Jones-adapting World War II picture The Thin Red Line, Malick appeared to pick up right where he left off: The New World, his interpretation of John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas, came in 2005, followed by 2011’s Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life. That film, deeply personal in its depiction of an American childhood in the 1940s and even more deeply personal in its zoom out to the cosmic scale, reveals as much about Malick’s obsessions as anything he’s done. Yet the startlingly many pictures he has directed since — the improvised romantic drama To the Wonder, the Los Angeles odyssey Knight of Cups, the history-of-the-universe documentary Voyage of Time, the experimental musical Song to Song, and his upcoming return to WWII Radegund — tell us, as Beyl will show, that his cinematic explorations have many more awe-inspiring places still to take us.

Watch Part 1 of the Malick study above. Find future parts on the Directors Series Vimeo page.

Video Essayist Kogonada Makes His Own Acclaimed Feature Film: Watch His Tributes to Its Inspirations Like Ozu, Linklater & Malick

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 ( None ) |

Ozzy Osbourne’s Guitarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sabbath on a Hello Kitty Guitar

in Comedy, Music | June 8th, 2018

When Sanrio—that megalithic maker of kawaii icon Hello Kitty—partnered with guitar companies to make pastel-colored six-strings bearing the mouthless kitten’s face, many a big-time musician found the ostensibly kid’s‑oriented instruments irresistible. Hello Kitty guitars were “possibly the apex of Sanrio’s cross-media synergy-blitz,” wrote David McNamee in a cranky 2009 piece at The Guardian, “that has seen them slap the cold, vacant stare of their brand-leading cash cow… on to every conceivable kind of consumer merchandise including vibrators (sorry, massagers), assault rifles, tampons, condoms, urinal cakes, cars, computers, booze and pet costumes.”

The chirpy Lisa Loeb took to Hello Kitty guitars as part of a personal brand makeover, which doesn’t much surprise since she eventually moved to writing children’s music. But “a scan of YouTube,” McNamee goes on, “reveals that Hello Kitty’s core audience is actually balding, middle-aged men, shredding out covers of Yngwie Malmsteen and Rush.”

I’m not sure how accurate this statement is in market research terms, but I can testify to knowing at least two middle-aged men who swear by pink Hello Kitty Stratocasters.

Go ahead, laugh it up, but you probably wouldn’t do so in front of certain Sanrio shredders, like former Ozzy Osbourne and current Black Label Society guitarist Zakk Wylde, who has made a side gig—as we noted in yesterday’s post—playing covers of heavy rock tunes on tiny, cutesy Hello Kitty acoustic guitars. See for yourself in his Hello Kitty take on Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B.” at the top and a version of his own original “Autumn Changes” further up. Would you laugh at seriously versatile Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 and his Hello Kitty guitar? Maybe, but reserve your judgment until after you’ve seen him start his “new career” in Hello Kitty guitar marketing above.

Rising to the challenge, Mark Tremonti and Eric Friedman decided to take on Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” on a Hello Kitty guitar and ukulele, “refusing to skip the track’s various solos,” points out Loudwire. It’s ”a true jam on truly crappy instruments that the boys somehow made work.” What, exactly, is the appeal of these Hello Kitty sessions to people who aren’t, presumably, the usual Hello Kitty tween demographic?

Maybe it’s just some good clean fun from people who might seem to take themselves a little too seriously sometimes. When rock stars show a sense of humor, it makes them more relatable, right? Hey, even the Beatles made their bones with musical comedy, so why shouldn’t Evanescence’s Amy Lee give us a moving, candlelit rendition of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” as played on a Hello Kitty keyboard?

See all of these videos and more—including Bumblefoot’s soulful Hello Kitty metal classics covers and a potty-mouthed Mike Portnoy bashing away on a Hello Kitty drumkit—at Loudwire’s YouTube channel.

via Guitar World

Calm Down & Study with Relaxing Piano, Jazz & Harp Covers of Music from Hayao Miyazaki Films

Mister Rogers Turns Kids On to Jazz with Help of a Young Wynton Marsalis and Other Jazz Legends (1986)

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

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

“The Directors Series” Presents Free Immersive Studies of Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson & Christopher Nolan

in Film | June 7th, 2018

Humorist and movie critic Joe Queenan once stood outside a theater after a screening of Jurassic Park and asked each exiting viewer if they knew who directed the film they’d just seen. Only five out of the ten who talked to him, he reported, could name Steven Spielberg. (Not just one but two of those who couldn’t said, inexplicably, that the Michael Crichton adaptation had been directed by Stephen King.)

Queenan pulled this stunt as an informal test of “auteur theory,” which holds that the director, despite the inherently collaborative nature of the medium, is ultimately the “author” of a motion picture. But what does it say about auteur theory that half of his sample of viewers couldn’t come up with the name of quite possibly the most famous filmmaker alive? Does the identity of a film’s director matter as much as those of us who subscribe to auteur theory believe it does?

As for the case for the auteur, if you’ve got fifteen hours or so to spare, you can watch it made in depth by the Directors Series. These multi-part video essays by writer-director Cameron Beyl examine what makes an auteur an auteur not just one filmography, but one film at a time.

Beyl launched the series with the ideal selection of Stanley Kubrick, an almost Platonic ideal of the modern auteur, whose career-long jumping from subject to subject and even genre to genre reveals all the more clearly the elements of his bold cinematic signature.

Then came series-within-the-series on directors from the generation after Kubrick: David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and Christopher Nolan. Though all alive and vey much still active, they’ve all forged the kind of strong styles that inspire worshipful retrospectives at cinematheques the world over. Even the kind of moviegoer who thinks Stephen King directed Jurassic Park surely senses, on some level, the common sensibility shared by films as outwardly different as Fight Club and Gone Girl, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, Raising Arizona and Fargo, Memento and Interstellar.

In the Directors Series, Beyl reveals the techniques these filmmakers use to make their body of work a unified cinematic project, and so rise to the status of true auteurs. Try to replicate Queenan’s experiment today, and you may well find that many, if not most, of the viewers who’ve just seen one of their movies won’t know the director’s name. That, of course, doesn’t mean that they didn’t enjoy or appreciate the director’s art — but it also doesn’t mean that, equipped with the kind of insight provided by the Directors Series, you won’t enjoy and appreciate it even more.

Follow these links for more on each series: Stanley Kubrick (3 hours), David Fincher (3.5 hours), Paul Thomas Anderson (2.5 hours), the Coen Brothers (4 hours), and Christopher Nolan (3.5 hours).

The first video from each series appears on the page above.

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Transcends Science Fiction

Four Video Essays Explain the Mastery of Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (RIP)

An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays

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 ( None ) |

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Marianne Faithfull in His Very Last Performance As Ziggy Stardust (1973)

in Music | June 7th, 2018

Here’s a wonderfully weird performance by David Bowie, dressed in drag for his last appearance as Ziggy Stardust, and Marianne Faithfull as a wayward nun, singing the mawkish Sonny & Cher tune, “I Got You Babe.”

The duet was recorded for American television on October 19, 1973 at the Marquee Club in London. The producer Burt Sugarman had approached Bowie about appearing on his late-night NBC program The Midnight Special. According to the Ziggy Stardust Companion, Bowie agreed to appear on the show after being granted complete artistic control for a one-hour special. He put together a cabaret-style show featuring himself and a couple of acts from the 1960s, performing on a futuristic set. Bowie called it “The 1980 Floor Show,” as a pun on the title of his song “1984,” which was played during the opening title sequence.

Filming took place over two days. The audiences were composed of Bowie fan club members and other special guests. Due to the cramped quarters in the nightclub, the camera crew wasn’t able to cover more than two angles at any moment, so Bowie and the others had to play the same songs over and over. On the day “I Got You Babe” was filmed, the musicians and crew worked for ten straight hours.

Faithfull was invited to appear on the show as one of the back-up acts, along with The Troggs and the “flamenco rock” group Carmen. At the very end of the evening, Bowie and Faithfull appeared onstage together–he in a red PVC outfit with black ostrich plumes (he called it his “Angel of Death” costume) and she in a nun’s habit that was, by more than one account, open in the back. “This isn’t anything serious,” Bowie reportedly told the audience. “It’s just a bit of fun. We’ve hardly even rehearsed it.”

The Midnight Special appearance marked a momentary reunion of Bowie’s band, The Spiders from Mars, which had dissolved three months earlier, after Bowie’s surprise announcement that he was retiring. The lineup included Mick Ronson on lead guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, Mike Garson on piano, Mark Carr Pritchard on rhythm guitar and Aynsley Dunbar on drums. Backing vocals were provided by The Astronettes: Ava Cherry, Jason Guess and Geoffrey Maccormack. As the final performance of “The 1980 Floor Show,” Bowie’s duet with Faithfull turned out to be the very last appearance of Ziggy Stardust.

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site back in March, 2013.

The Story of Ziggy Stardust: How David Bowie Created the Character that Made Him Famous

How “Space Oddity” Launched David Bowie to Stardom: Watch the Original Music Video From 1969

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Ancient Astronomy of Stonehenge Decoded

Nirvana Refuses to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ After the Crowd Hurls Sexist Insults at the Opening Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

David Bowie Memorialized in Traditional Japanese Woodblock Prints

Steve Martin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Einstein & Picasso in a Smart Comedy Routine

A Deep Study of Terence Malick’s Filmography

Ozzy Osbourne’s Guitarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sabbath on a Hello Kitty Guitar

“The Directors Series” Presents Free Immersive Studies of Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson & Christopher Nolan

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Marianne Faithfull in His Very Last Performance As Ziggy Stardust (1973)

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