The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912): The Truly Weird Origin of Modern Stop-Motion Animation

These days, ever more ambi­tions com­put­er-ani­mat­ed spec­ta­cles seem to arrive in the­aters every few weeks. But how many of them cap­ture our imag­i­na­tions as ful­ly as works of the thor­ough­ly ana­log art of stop-motion ani­ma­tion? The uncan­ny effect (and imme­di­ate­ly vis­i­ble labor-inten­sive­ness) of real, phys­i­cal pup­pets and objects made to move as if by them­selves still cap­ti­vates view­ers young and old: just watch how the Wal­lace and Gromit series, Ter­ry Gilliam’s Mon­ty Python shorts, The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, and even the orig­i­nal King Kong as well as Ray Har­ry­hausen’s mon­sters in Jason and the Arg­onauts and The 7th Voy­age of Sin­bad have held up over the decades.

The film­mak­ers who best under­stand the mag­ic of cin­e­ma still use stop-motion today, as Wes Ander­son has in The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. They all owe some­thing to a Pol­ish-Russ­ian ani­ma­tor of the ear­ly-to-mid-20th cen­tu­ry by the name of Ladis­las Stare­vich. Long­time Open Cul­ture read­ers may remem­ber the works of Stare­vich pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here, includ­ing the Goethe adap­ta­tion The Tale of the Fox and the much ear­li­er The Cam­era­man’s Revenge, a tale of infi­deli­ty and its con­se­quences told entire­ly with dead bugs for actors. Stare­vich, then the Direc­tor of the Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry in Kau­nas, Lithua­nia, pulled off this cin­e­mat­ic feat “by installing wheels and strings in each insect, and occa­sion­al­ly replac­ing their legs with plas­tic or met­al ones,” says Phil Edwards in the Vox Almanac video above.

“How Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion Began” comes as a chap­ter of a minis­eries called Almanac Hol­ly­would­n’t, which tells the sto­ries of “big changes to movies that came from out­side Hol­ly­wood.” It would be hard indeed to find any­thing less Hol­ly­wood than a man installing wheels and strings into insect corpses at a Lithuan­ian muse­um in 1912, but in time The Cam­era­man’s Revenge proved as deeply influ­en­tial as it remains deeply weird. Stare­vich kept on mak­ing films, and sin­gle­hand­ed­ly fur­ther­ing the art of stop-motion ani­ma­tion, until his death in France (where he’d relo­cat­ed after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion) in 1965.

And though Stare­vich may not be a house­hold name today, Edwards reveals while trac­ing the sub­se­quent his­to­ry of stop-motion ani­ma­tion that cin­e­ma has­n’t entire­ly failed to pay him trib­ute: Ander­son­’s The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox is in a sense a direct homage to The Tale of the Fox, and Gilliam has called Stare­vich’s work “absolute­ly breath­tak­ing, sur­re­al, inven­tive and extra­or­di­nary, encom­pass­ing every­thing that Jan Svankma­jer, Waler­ian Borow­czyk and the Quay Broth­ers would do sub­se­quent­ly.” He sug­gests that, before we enter the “mind-bend­ing worlds” of more recent ani­ma­tors, we “remem­ber that it was all done years ago, by some­one most of us have for­got­ten about now” — and with lit­tle more than a few dead bugs at that.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Amaz­ing 1912 Ani­ma­tion of Stop-Motion Pio­neer Ladis­las Stare­vich, Star­ring Dead Bugs

The Tale of the Fox: Watch Ladis­las Starevich’s Ani­ma­tion of Goethe’s Great Ger­man Folk­tale (1937)

The Mas­cot, a Pio­neer­ing Stop Ani­ma­tion Film by Wla­dys­law Starewicz

The His­to­ry of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Span­ning 116 Years, Revis­it­ed in a 3‑Minute Video

Ray Harryhausen’s Creepy War of the Worlds Sketch­es and Stop-Motion Test Footage

Spike Jonze’s Stop Motion Film Haunt­ing­ly Ani­mates Paris’ Famed Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny Book­store

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two of the most tren­chant and endur­ing crit­ics of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Han­nah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both Ger­man Jews who emi­grat­ed to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marx­ist Adorno saw fas­cist ten­den­cies every­where in his new coun­try. Decades before Noam Chom­sky coined the con­cept, he argued that all mass media under advanced cap­i­tal­ism served one par­tic­u­lar pur­pose: man­u­fac­tur­ing con­sent.

Arendt land­ed on a dif­fer­ent part of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, draw­ing her phi­los­o­phy from Aris­to­tle and St. Augus­tine. Clas­si­cal demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and an ethics of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty informed her belief in the cen­tral impor­tance of shared real­i­ty in a func­tion­ing civ­il society—of a press that is free not only to pub­lish what it wish­es, but to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for telling the truth, with­out which democ­ra­cy becomes impos­si­ble.

A press that dis­sem­i­nates half-truths and pro­pa­gan­da, Arendt argued, is not a fea­ture of lib­er­al­ism but a sign of author­i­tar­i­an rule. “Total­i­tar­i­an rulers orga­nize… mass sen­ti­ment,” she told French writer Roger Errera in 1974, “and by orga­niz­ing it artic­u­late it, and by artic­u­lat­ing it make the peo­ple some­how love it. They were told before, thou should not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very dif­fi­cult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behav­ior.”

This break­down of moral norms, Arendt argued, can occur “the moment we no longer have a free press.” The prob­lem, how­ev­er, is more com­pli­cat­ed than mass media that spreads lies. Echo­ing ideas devel­oped in her 1951 study The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Arendt explained that “lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows.”

Bom­bard­ed with con­tra­dic­to­ry and often incred­i­ble claims, peo­ple become cyn­i­cal and give up try­ing to under­stand any­thing. “And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.” The state­ment was any­thing but the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s an empir­i­cal obser­va­tion from much recent 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Arendt’s thought devel­oped in rela­tion to total­i­tar­i­an regimes that active­ly cen­sored, con­trolled, and micro­man­aged the press to achieve spe­cif­ic ends. She does not address the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in which we find ourselves—though Adorno cer­tain­ly did: a press con­trolled not direct­ly by the gov­ern­ment but by an increas­ing­ly few, and increas­ing­ly mono­lith­ic and pow­er­ful, num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions, all with vest­ed inter­ests in pol­i­cy direc­tion that pre­serves and expands their influ­ence.

The exam­ples of undue influ­ence mul­ti­ply. One might con­sid­er the recent­ly approved Gan­nett-Gate­house merg­er, which brought togeth­er two of the biggest news pub­lish­ers in the coun­try and may “speed the demise of local news,” as Michael Pos­ner writes at Forbes, there­by fur­ther open­ing the doors for rumor, spec­u­la­tion, and tar­get­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion. But in such a con­di­tion, we are not pow­er­less as indi­vid­u­als, Arendt argued, even if the pre­con­di­tions for a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety are under­mined.

Though the facts may be con­fused or obscured, we retain the capac­i­ty for moral judg­ment, for assess­ing deep­er truths about the char­ac­ter of those in pow­er. “In act­ing and speak­ing,” she wrote in 1975’s The Human Con­di­tion, “men show who they are, reveal active­ly their unique per­son­al iden­ti­ties…. This dis­clo­sure of ‘who’ in con­tradis­tinc­tion to ‘what’ some­body is—his qual­i­ties, gifts, tal­ents, and short­com­ings, which he may dis­play or hide—is implic­it in every­thing some­body says and does.”

Even if demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions let the free press fail, Arendt argued, we each bear a per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty under author­i­tar­i­an rule to judge and to act—or to refuse—in an ethics pred­i­cat­ed on what she called, after Socrates, the “silent dia­logue between me and myself.”

Read Arendt’s full pas­sage on the free press and truth below:

The moment we no longer have a free press, any­thing can hap­pen. What makes it pos­si­ble for a total­i­tar­i­an or any oth­er dic­ta­tor­ship to rule is that peo­ple are not informed; how can you have an opin­ion if you are not informed? If every­body always lies to you, the con­se­quence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes any­thing any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows. And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.

via Michio Kaku­tani

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

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

Prisons Around the U.S. Are Banning and Restricting Access to Books

“We live,” wrote philoso­pher Alain Badiou, “in a con­tra­dic­tion.” Dehu­man­iza­tion must be nor­mal­ized in order to keep the econ­o­my going. “A bru­tal state of affairs… where all exis­tence is eval­u­at­ed in terms of mon­ey alone—is pre­sent­ed to us as ide­al.” Yet the mar­ket that promis­es free­dom just as often strips it away, in pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ships that bring cen­sor­ship and rent-seek­ing into hap­py sym­bio­sis.

In recent years, free mar­ket oppor­tunism has tak­en hold in the most unfree places in the U.S., the country’s pris­ons, which hold more peo­ple pro­por­tion­al­ly than in any oth­er nation in the world: a huge, pre­vi­ous­ly untapped mar­ket for sales of hygiene prod­ucts and vis­its with fam­i­ly. “Like the mil­i­tary,” writes Adam Bluestein at Inc., “the cor­rec­tions sys­tem is a big, well-cap­i­tal­ized cus­tomer.”

One recent com­mer­cial encroach­ment on pris­on­ers’ free­doms arrived this year when the West Vir­ginia Divi­sion of Cor­rec­tions issued inmates tablets, under a con­tract with a com­pa­ny called Glob­al Tel Link, who charge them by the minute to read books online. One might make the argu­ment that forc­ing inmates to pay for basic needs sat­is­fies some ide­al of pun­ish­ment. But to restrict access to books seems to dis­pense with the pre­tense that prison might also be a place of reha­bil­i­ta­tion.

“Any inmates look­ing to read Moby Dick,” reports Rea­son, “may find that it will cost them far more than it would have if they’d sim­ply got­ten a mass mar­ket paper­back.” Katy Ryan of the Appalachi­an Prison Book Project, which donates free books and mate­ri­als to pris­ons, points out how lim­it­ing the scheme is: “If you pause to think or reflect, that will cost you. If you want to reread a book, you will pay the entire cost again.”

West Vir­ginia is not ban­ning print books, pur­chased or donat­ed. It is, how­ev­er, charg­ing inmates for already free mate­r­i­al. The books they pay per minute to read online are all on Project Guten­berg, the open plat­form for thou­sands of free eBooks. That the pro­gram amounts to a kind of eco­nom­ic-based cen­sor­ship may hard­ly be coin­ci­dence. Oth­er states around the coun­try have begun lim­it­ing, or out­right ban­ning, books in pris­ons.

The Wash­ing­ton State Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions has pro­hib­it­ed all books donat­ed by non­prof­its, pre­sum­ably because they might be used to smug­gle con­tra­band. Prison offi­cials at the Danville Cor­rec­tion­al Cen­ter in Illi­nois made clear what they con­sid­ered con­tra­band—books about black his­to­ry, 200 of which were removed from the prison library—including W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk and Har­ri­et Beech­er Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cab­in—after they were deemed “too racial.”

These are only a few exam­ples of a wide­spread phe­nom­e­non PEN Amer­i­ca details in a new report, “Lit­er­a­ture Locked Up: How Prison Book Restric­tion Poli­cies Con­sti­tute the Nation’s Largest Book Ban.” Para­dox­i­cal­ly, some restric­tions can seem at odds with mar­ket demands—such as lim­its on inmates’ abil­i­ty to order books from online retail­ers. But like many con­tra­dic­tions in the sys­tem, per­haps these also serve a larg­er goal—preventing pris­on­ers from edu­cat­ing them­selves may ensure a steady stream of repeat cus­tomers in the huge­ly prof­itable carcer­al indus­try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive

On the Pow­er of Teach­ing Phi­los­o­phy in Pris­ons

Artist is Cre­at­ing a Parthenon Made of 100,000 Banned Books: A Mon­u­ment to Democ­ra­cy & Intel­lec­tu­al Free­dom

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

Doris Kearns Goodwin Teaches U.S. Presidential History & Leadership

FYI: Pres­i­den­tial his­to­ri­an Doris Kearns Goodwin–author of Lead­er­ship: In Tur­bu­lent Times, Team of Rivals: The Polit­i­cal Genius of Abra­ham Lin­coln, and No Ordi­nary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roo­sevelthas just released a new online course on Mas­ter­Class. Here’s the ground that the course cov­ers:

Alto­geth­er, she’s spent more than 50 years study­ing great Amer­i­can pres­i­dents and lead­ers of the past, writ­ing sev­er­al award-win­ning, best­selling biogra­phies, includ­ing No Ordi­nary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roo­sevelt: The Home Front in World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize for His­to­ry. Now she’s shar­ing her knowl­edge and teach­ing you to lead like a pres­i­dent.

In Doris’s Mas­ter­Class, you can learn to devel­op the char­ac­ter­is­tics and human skills of excep­tion­al Amer­i­can lead­er­ship, from Lin­coln to Oba­ma. Doris brings to life the sto­ries and expe­ri­ences of four pres­i­dents she knows by heart—Lincoln, Ted­dy Roo­sevelt, FDR, and LBJ—and shares a tem­plate of human skills that make great lead­ers: humil­i­ty, empa­thy, resilience, self-aware­ness, self-reflec­tion, the abil­i­ty to cre­ate a team and com­mu­ni­cate through sto­ries, and shar­ing your ambi­tion for the greater good. She also uses exam­ples from oth­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, includ­ing Eleanor Roo­sevelt, Win­ston Churchill, and Mar­tin Luther King Jr., to teach effec­tive lead­er­ship qual­i­ties and prac­ti­cal wis­dom for every day. Learn how to make bet­ter deci­sions, man­age a cri­sis, and get a mes­sage across, whether you’re inter­act­ing with the media, com­mu­ni­cat­ing to a team at work, or deliv­er­ing a speech meant to inspire and empow­er thou­sands of peo­ple.

In this class, you’ll learn about:
• Devel­op­ing emo­tion­al intel­li­gence
• Expe­ri­ences and sto­ries of U.S. pres­i­dents
• Build­ing resilience
• Build­ing and lead­ing a team
• Mak­ing bet­ter deci­sions, big or small
• Nav­i­gat­ing a cri­sis
• Deliv­er­ing a mes­sage and con­sid­er­ing an audi­ence
• The pow­er of speech­es
• Replen­ish­ing your ener­gy
• Civic engage­ment

You can sign up for Kearns Good­win’s course here.

As a free unre­lat­ed bonus, you can stream Kearns Good­win’s long inter­view with Tim Fer­ris. There, she takes an engag­ing look at the lead­er­ship skills of four Amer­i­can presidents–Lincoln, FDR, Ted­dy Roo­sevelt and LBJ. It’s well worth a lis­ten…

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

How to Take Every Mas­ter­Class Course For Less Than a Cup of Good Cof­fee

The 2,000+ Films Watched by Pres­i­dents Nixon, Carter & Rea­gan in the White House

 

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Watch 21 Animated Ideas from Big Thinkers: Steven Pinker, Carol Dweck, Philip Zimbardo, David Harvey & More

The Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures and Com­merce, bet­ter known as the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Arts, and best known sim­ply as the RSA, was found­ed in 1754. At the time, nobody could have imag­ined a world in which the peo­ple of every land, no mat­ter how far-flung, could hear the same talks by well-known schol­ars and speak­ers, let alone see them ani­mat­ed as if on a con­fer­ence-room white­board. Yet even back then, in an era before the inven­tion of ani­ma­tion and white­boards, let alone com­put­ers and the inter­net, peo­ple had an appetite for strong, often coun­ter­in­tu­itive or even con­trar­i­an ideas to diag­nose and poten­tial­ly even solve social prob­lems — an appetite for which the RSA Ani­mate series of videos was made.

We can’t under­stand what goes right and what goes wrong in our soci­eties with­out under­stand­ing how we think. To that end the RSA has com­mis­sioned ani­mat­ed videos based on talks by psy­chi­a­trist Iain McGilchrist on our “divid­ed brain,” for­mer polit­i­cal strate­gist (and cur­rent RSA Chief Exec­u­tive) Matthew Tay­lor on how our left and right brains shape our pol­i­tics, psy­chol­o­gist Steven Pinker on lan­guage as a win­dow into human nature, philoso­pher-soci­ol­o­gist Rena­ta Sale­cl on the para­dox­i­cal down­side of choice, psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bar­do on our per­cep­tion of time, “social and eth­i­cal prophet” Jere­my Rifkin on empa­thy, philoso­pher Roman Krz­nar­ic on “out­ro­spec­tion,” jour­nal­ist Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich on “the dark­er side of pos­i­tive think­ing,” and behav­ioral-eco­nom­ics researcher Dan Ariely on dri­ve and dis­hon­esty.

Eco­nom­ics is anoth­er field that has pro­vid­ed the RSA with a sur­feit of ani­mat­able mate­r­i­al — even of the kind “econ­o­mists don’t want you to see,” as the RSA pro­motes econ­o­mist Ha-joon Chang’s talk on “why every sin­gle per­son can and SHOULD get their head around basic eco­nom­ics” and “how eas­i­ly eco­nom­ic myths and assump­tions become gospel.”

Freako­nom­ics co-authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub­n­er make an appear­ance to break down altru­ism, and “eco­nom­ic geo­g­ra­ph­er” David Har­vey attempts to envi­sion a sys­tem beyond cap­i­tal­ism. And on the parts of the intel­lec­tu­al map where eco­nom­ics over­laps pol­i­tics, the RSA brings us fig­ures like Slavoj Žižek, who “inves­ti­gates the sur­pris­ing eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing.”

As, in essence, an edu­ca­tion­al enter­prise, RSA Ani­mate videos also look into new ways to think about edu­ca­tion itself. Edu­ca­tion­al­ist Car­ol Dweck exam­ines the issues of “why kids say they’re bored at school, or why they stop try­ing when the work gets hard­er” by look­ing at what kind of praise helps young stu­dents, and what kind harms them.

Edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty expert Sir Ken Robin­son explains the need to change our very par­a­digms of edu­ca­tion. And accord­ing to the RSA’s speak­ers, those aren’t the only par­a­digms we should change: Microsoft Chief Envi­sion­ing Offi­cer Dave Coplin argues that we should re-imag­ine work, and tech­nol­o­gy crit­ic Evge­ny Moro­zov argues that we should rethink the “cyber-utopi­anism” that has exposed harm­ful side-effects of our dig­i­tal world.

httvs://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&list=PL39BF9545D740ECFF&index=11&t=0s

But it is in this world that the RSA pro­motes “21st-cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ment,” a con­cept fur­ther explored in anoth­er talk by Matthew Tay­lor — and one of which you can get a few dos­es, ten min­utes at a time, on the full RSA Ani­mate Youtube playlist. Watch the com­plete playlist of 21 videos, from start to fin­ish, below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Decline of Civilization’s Right Brain: Ani­mat­ed

Dan Ariely’s Ani­mat­ed Talk Reveals How and Why We’re All Dis­hon­est

The Pow­er of “Out­ro­spec­tion” — A Way of Life, A Force for Social Change — Explained with Ani­ma­tion

The His­to­ry of Music Told in Sev­en Rapid­ly Illus­trat­ed Min­utes

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

London Calling: A New Museum Exhibition Celebrates The Clash’s Iconic Album

In 1983, Rolling Stone pro­claimed it the year of the “sec­ond British Inva­sion,” a “gold­en age” of music from the likes of Duran Duran, Span­dau Bal­let, Cul­ture Club, the Human League, Depeche Mode, and oth­er radio-friend­ly synth pop hit­mak­ers. The label stuck. Thir­ty years lat­er, CBS News com­mem­o­rat­ed the year “a slew of [New Wave] acts came over to the states with their synthesizer-driven/R&B‑inspired music.”

Amidst this fren­zy of praise, no one men­tions the Clash, who played their final show in 1983. The year pre­vi­ous they hit num­ber 8 on the Bill­board Hot 100 with “Rock the Cas­bah.” Com­bat Rock arguably proved that punk was still rel­e­vant in the ear­ly 1980s, though a punk trans­fig­ured into dance­floor-friend­ly funk, dub, and spo­ken word exper­i­men­ta­tion. Just as arguably, the Clash should be prop­er­ly seen as lead­ers of the true sec­ond British Invasion—an inva­sion of British punk and post-punk bands in the late 70s.

Four charm­ing lads who’d grown up play­ing in the clubs, they spoke a work­ing-class idiom, wrote in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent voic­es, took a con­sis­tent­ly anti-war stance, and took punk where it had not gone before with stu­dio and world music exper­i­ments. One needn’t com­pare their 1979 dou­ble album Lon­don Call­ing to Sgt. Pepper’s—though it does top sev­er­al crit­ics best-of-all-time lists—to see its sim­i­lar influ­ence on con­tem­po­rary music.

Its title track even hit num­ber 30 on the Bill­board Dis­co Top 100 chart in 1980, a move that helped open the door for sev­er­al dozen punk-inspired British New Wave bands to come. Lon­don Call­ing wasn’t uni­ver­sal­ly beloved. The com­mer­cial aims and more pol­ished deliv­ery divid­ed punk fans, and some crit­ics panned the album. None of that has mat­tered at all to the mil­lions of devot­ed fans world­wide. Its icon­ic cov­er has become just as rec­og­niz­able as the orig­i­nal that inspired it.

Now, and until April 2020, tru­ly devot­ed fans can expe­ri­ence that album as no one has before by see­ing in per­son, the actu­al Fend­er Pre­ci­sion bass that Paul Simenon smashed in the cov­er photo—only one of the many his­toric arti­facts on dis­play at the Muse­um of Lon­don in a free exhi­bi­tion cel­e­brat­ing the album’s 40th anniver­sary. Vis­i­tors can also see “Mick Jones’s 1950s Gib­son ES-295,” writes Ellen Goto­skey at Men­tal Floss, “Joe Strummer’s white 1950s Fend­er Esquire,” and a pair of Top­per Head­on’s drum­sticks.

Also on dis­play are “sketch­es from artist Ray Lowry that depict scenes from the Lon­don Call­ing tour,” as well as an ear­ly sketch by Lowry of the album cov­er, and “pho­tos tak­en by Pen­nie Smith (who snapped the Lon­don Call­ing cov­er image).” View­ers can see Strummer’s type­writer, his note­book from the rehearsal and record­ing of the record, and Simenon’s weath­ered late-70s leather jack­et.

The exhi­bi­tion may be free, but tick­ets to Lon­don are pricey. Still, fans can play along at home with the Lon­don Call­ing Scrap­book, a 120-page hard­back book full of archival mate­r­i­al and includ­ed in Sony’s anniver­sary re-release of the album. But no lover of the Clash is with­out their own copy of Lon­don Call­ing. Put it on in cel­e­bra­tion and judge whether, as the Muse­um of Lon­don writes, its “music and lyrics remain as rel­e­vant today as they were on release.”

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear The Clash’s Vanil­la Tapes, Demos of Near­ly Every Song From Lon­don Call­ing

“Stay Free: The Sto­ry of the Clash” Nar­rat­ed by Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Pod­cast

The Clash Play Their Final Show (San Bernardi­no, 1983)

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

What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

Each of us has a nor­mal state of mind, as well as our own way of reach­ing a dif­fer­ent state of mind. As the School of Life video above reminds us, such habits go back quite deep into record­ed his­to­ry, to the eras when, then as now, “Hin­du sages, Chris­t­ian monks and Bud­dhist ascetics” spoke of “reach­ing moments of ‘high­er con­scious­ness’ – through med­i­ta­tion or chant­i­ng, fast­ing or pil­grim­ages.” In recent years, the prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion has spread even, and per­haps espe­cial­ly, among those of us who don’t sub­scribe to Bud­dhism, or indeed to any reli­gion at all. Peri­od­ic fast­ing has come to be seen as a neces­si­ty in cer­tain cir­cles of wealthy first-worlders, as has “dopamine fast­ing” among those who feel their minds com­pro­mised by the dis­trac­tions of high tech­nol­o­gy and social media. (And one needs only glance at that social media to see how seri­ous­ly some of us are tak­ing our pil­grim­ages.)

Still, on top of our moun­tain, deep into our sit­ting-and-breath­ing ses­sions, or even after hav­ing con­sumed our mind-alter­ing sub­stance of choice, we do feel, if only for a moment, that some­thing has changed with­in us. We under­stand things we don’t even con­sid­er under­stand­ing in our nor­mal state of mind, “where what we are prin­ci­pal­ly con­cerned with is our­selves, our sur­vival and our own suc­cess, nar­row­ly defined.”

When we occu­py this “low­er con­scious­ness,” we “strike back when we’re hit, blame oth­ers, quell any stray ques­tions that lack imme­di­ate rel­e­vance, fail to free-asso­ciate and stick close­ly to a flat­ter­ing image of who we are and where we are head­ing.” But when we enter a state of “high­er con­scious­ness,” how­ev­er we define it, “the mind moves beyond its par­tic­u­lar self-inter­ests and crav­ings. We start to think of oth­er peo­ple in a more imag­i­na­tive way.”

When we rise from low­er to high­er con­scious­ness, we find it much hard­er to think of our fel­low human beings as ene­mies. “Rather than crit­i­cize and attack, we are free to imag­ine that their behav­ior is dri­ven by pres­sures derived from their own more prim­i­tive minds, which they are gen­er­al­ly in no posi­tion to tell us about.” The more time we spend in our high­er con­scious­ness, the more we “devel­op the abil­i­ty to explain oth­ers’ actions by their dis­tress, rather than sim­ply in terms of how it affects us. We per­ceive that the appro­pri­ate response to human­i­ty is not fear, cyn­i­cism or aggres­sion, but always — when we can man­age it — love.” When our con­scious­ness reach­es the prop­er alti­tude, “the world reveals itself as quite dif­fer­ent: a place of suf­fer­ing and mis­guid­ed effort, full of peo­ple striv­ing to be heard and lash­ing out against oth­ers, but also a place of ten­der­ness and long­ing, beau­ty and touch­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The fit­ting response is uni­ver­sal sym­pa­thy and kind­ness.”

This may all come across as a bit new-age, sound­ing “mad­den­ing­ly vague, wishy washy, touchy-feely – and, for want of a bet­ter word, annoy­ing.” But the con­cept of high­er con­scious­ness is var­i­ous­ly inter­pret­ed not just across cul­tur­al and reli­gious tra­di­tions but in sci­en­tif­ic research as well, where we find a sharp dis­tinc­tion drawn between the neo­cor­tex, “the seat of imag­i­na­tion, empa­thy and impar­tial judge­ment,” and the “rep­til­ian mind” below. This sug­gests that we’d ben­e­fit from under­stand­ing states of high­er con­scious­ness as ful­ly as we can, as well as try­ing to “make the most of them when they arise, and har­vest their insights for the time when we require them most” — that is to say, the rest of our ordi­nary lives, espe­cial­ly their most stress­ful, try­ing moments. The instinc­tive, unimag­i­na­tive defen­sive­ness of the low­er con­scious­ness does have strengths of its own, but we can’t take advan­tage of them unless we learn to put it in its place.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness Course: A Free Online Course from Cal­tech

The Unex­pect­ed Ways East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Can Make Us Wis­er, More Com­pas­sion­ate & Bet­ter Able to Appre­ci­ate Our Lives

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

Neuroscience & Jazz Improvisation: How Improvisation Shapes Creativity and What Happens Inside Our Brain

Jazz impro­vi­sa­tion has become a hot top­ic in neu­ro­science late­ly, and lit­tle won­der. “Musi­cal impro­vi­sa­tion is one of the most com­plex forms of cre­ative behav­ior,” write the authors of a study pub­lished in April in Brain Con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Research on the brains of impro­vis­ers offers “a real­is­tic task par­a­digm for the inves­ti­ga­tion of real-time creativity”—an even hot­ter top­ic in neu­ro­science.

Researchers study jazz play­ers for the same rea­son they take MRI scans of the brains of freestyle rappers—both involve cre­at­ing spon­ta­neous works “where revi­sion is not pos­si­ble,” and where only a few for­mal rules gov­ern the activ­i­ty, whether rhyme and meter or chord struc­ture and har­mo­ny. Those who mas­ter the basics can leap into end­less­ly com­plex feats of impro­visato­ry brava­do at any moment.

It’s a pow­er most of us only dream of possessing—though it’s also the case that many a researcher of jazz impro­vi­sa­tions also hap­pens to be a musi­cian, includ­ing study author Mar­tin Nor­gaard, a trained jazz vio­lin­ist who “began study­ing the effects of musi­cal impro­vi­sa­tion… while earn­ing his Ph.D. from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin,” notes Jen­nifer Rainey Mar­quez at Geor­gia State Uni­ver­si­ty Research Mag­a­zine.

Nor­gaard inter­viewed both stu­dents and pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians, and he ana­lyzed the solos of Char­lie Park­er to find pat­terns relat­ed to spe­cif­ic kinds of brain activ­i­ty. In this recent study, Nor­gaard, now at Geor­gia State Uni­ver­si­ty, worked with Mukesh Dhamala, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of physics and astron­o­my, using an fMRI to mea­sure the brain activ­i­ty of “advanced jazz musi­cians” who sang both stan­dards and impro­vi­sa­tions while being scanned.

The researchers’ find­ings are con­sis­tent with sim­i­lar stud­ies, like those of John Hop­kins sur­geon Charles Limb, who also con­sid­ers jazz a key to under­stand­ing cre­ativ­i­ty. While impro­vis­ing, musi­cians show decreased activ­i­ty in the pre­frontal cor­tex, the area of the brain that gen­er­ates plan­ning and over­think­ing, and gets in the way of what psy­chol­o­gists call a state of “flow.” Impro­vis­ing might engage “a small­er, more focused brain net­work,” says Nor­gaard, “while oth­er parts of the brain go qui­et.”

Train­ing and prac­tice in impro­vi­sa­tion may also have longer-term results as well. A study con­trast­ing the brain activ­i­ty of jazz and clas­si­cal play­ers found that the for­mer were much quick­er and more adapt­able in their think­ing. The researchers attrib­uted these qual­i­ties to changes in the brain wrought by years of impro­vis­ing. Nor­gaard and his team are much more cir­cum­spect in their con­clu­sions, but they do sug­gest a causal link.

In a study of 155 8th graders enrolled in a jazz for kids pro­gram, Nor­gaard found that the half who were giv­en train­ing in impro­vi­sa­tion showed “sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­i­ty.” Research like this not only val­i­dates the intu­itions of jazz musi­cians them­selves; it also helps define spe­cif­ic ques­tions about the cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits of play­ing music, which are gen­er­al­ly evi­dent in study after study.

“For near­ly three decades,” Nor­gaard says, “sci­en­tists have explored the idea that learn­ing to play an instru­ment is linked to aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ment.” But there are “many types of music learn­ing.” It’s cer­tain­ly not as sim­ple as study­ing Bach to work on accu­ra­cy or Coltrane for flex­i­bil­i­ty, but dif­fer­ent kinds of music cre­ates dif­fer­ent struc­tures in the brain. We might next won­der about the math­e­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties of these struc­tures, or how they inter­act with mod­ern the­o­ries of physics. Rest assured, there are jazz-play­ing sci­en­tists out there work­ing on the ques­tion.

via Futu­ri­ty

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This is Your Brain on Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: The Neu­ro­science of Cre­ativ­i­ty

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

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

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