Bob Moog Demonstrates His Revolutionary Moog Model D Synthesizer

There are far bet­ter play­ers of Bob Moog’s won­der­ous ana­log syn­the­siz­ers than Bob Moog himself–from Wendy Car­los, who rein­ter­pret­ed Bach for the new­fan­gled instru­ment in the 60s to Rick Wake­man and Richard Wright to Gior­gio Moroder to Gary Numan, to vir­tu­al­ly any­one who has ever record­ed music with a Moog. Bob Moog was not a musi­cian, he was an engi­neer who took piano lessons before earn­ing his B.A. in physics, M.A. in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, and Ph.D. in engi­neer­ing physics from Cor­nell.

Aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials have no bear­ing on what moves us musi­cal­ly, but it’s always worth not­ing that the Moog synthesizers—which did more to change the sound of mod­ern music than per­haps any instru­ment since the elec­tric guitar—came out of decades of dogged sci­en­tif­ic research, begin­ning when Moog was only 14 years old and built a home­made Theremin from plans he found print­ed in the mag­a­zine Elec­tron­ics World. That was 1949. Almost thir­ty years lat­er, the Min­i­moog Mod­el D appeared, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary portable ver­sion of stu­dio-sized machine Car­los used to reimag­ine clas­si­cal music in the late 60s.

“It’s an ana­logue mono­phon­ic syn­the­siz­er,” says Moog in the video above. “That means it makes the wave­forms by elec­tron­ic means and it plays one note at a time.” Sounds rather prim­i­tive by our stan­dards, but watch the demon­stra­tion below by Marc Doty, who walks us through the sweep­ing range of func­tions in the com­pact machine, made between 1970 and 1981 (and reis­sued for a lim­it­ed run in 2016). Its banks of wave­form selec­tors, oscil­la­tors, fil­ters, and envelopes pro­duce “some­thing sweet­er,” says Doty, than your aver­age syn­thet­ic sounds, though he can’t quite put his fin­ger on what it is.

We’ve all heard the dif­fer­ence, whether we know it or not, and dis­crim­i­nat­ing ears can pick a Min­i­moog out of any line­up of ana­logue synths. It is, Doty declares in the descrip­tion for his video, “per­haps the most beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful sound­ing, and func­tion­al syn­the­siz­er ever pro­duced.” Called the Mod­el D because it was the fourth iter­a­tion of pre­vi­ous ver­sions made in-house between 1969–70, it was tru­ly, says author and com­pos­er Albert Glin­sky, “the first portable syn­the­siz­er where every­thing is con­tained in one unit. It real­ly is the pro­to­type, the ances­tor, of every portable key­board in every music shop today.”

One of its inno­va­tions, the pitch wheel, now stan­dard issue on almost all of those mass-pro­duced suc­ces­sors of the Min­i­moog, was the first of its kind. If Moog “had patent­ed [the pitch wheel],” says David Bor­den, one of the first musi­cians to play the Min­i­moog live, “he would have been an extreme­ly wealthy man.” Oth­ers have made sim­i­lar obser­va­tions about Moog’s pio­neer­ing sound-shap­ing tech­nolo­gies, but as Richard Leon points out at Sound on Sound, it’s a good thing for us all that the inven­tor wasn’t moti­vat­ed by prof­it.

Com­pe­ti­tion near­ly buried the com­pa­ny Moog sold in the mid-70s (only reac­quir­ing rights to his own name in 2002), but had Moog “tried to cre­ate a monop­oly on these fun­da­men­tals,” Leon writes, “it’s like­ly the synth indus­try as we know it today would nev­er have hap­pened.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

A 10-Hour Playlist of Music Inspired by Robert Moog’s Icon­ic Syn­the­siz­er: Hear Elec­tron­ic Works by Kraftwerk, Devo, Ste­vie Won­der, Rick Wake­man & More

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

Watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Taking Batting Practice in Strikingly Restored Footage (1931)

How would Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and oth­er famous ballplay­ers of bygone eras fare if put on the dia­mond today? Vari­a­tions on that ques­tion tend to come up in con­ver­sa­tion among enthu­si­asts of base­ball and its his­to­ry, and dif­fer­ent peo­ple bring dif­fer­ent kinds of evi­dence to bear in search of an answer: sta­tis­tics, eye­wit­ness accounts, analo­gies between par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal play­ers and cur­rent ones. But the fact remains that none of us have ever actu­al­ly seen the likes of Ruth, who played his last pro­fes­sion­al game in 1935, and Gehrig, who did so in 1939, in their prime. But now we can at least get a lit­tle clos­er by watch­ing the film clip above, which shows both of the titan­ic Yan­kees at bat­ting prac­tice on April 11, 1931.

What’s more, it shows them mov­ing at real-life speed. “Fox Movi­etone sound cam­eras made slow-motion cap­tures of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at bat­ting prac­tice dur­ing an exhi­bi­tion prac­tice in Brook­lyn, New York,” writes uploader Guy Jones (whose oth­er base­ball videos include Ruth hit­ting a home run on open­ing day the same year and Ruth’s last appear­ance at bat a decade lat­er). “With mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, we can wit­ness this footage adjust­ed to a nor­mal speed which results in a very high fram­er­ate.”

In oth­er words, the film shows Ruth and Gehrig not just mov­ing in the very same way they did in real life, but cap­tured with a smooth­ness uncom­mon in news­reel footage from the 1930s. For com­par­i­son, Jones includes at the end of the video “more footage of the prac­tice (shot at typ­i­cal fps) and the orig­i­nal un-edit­ed slow-mo cap­tures.”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, what this film reveals does­n’t impress observers of mod­ern base­ball. “Ruth and Gehrig in no way look like a mod­ern ballplay­er,” writes The Big Lead­’s Kyle Koster. “Ruth is off-bal­ance, falling into his swing. Gehrig rou­tine­ly lifts his back foot off the ground. Again, it’s bat­ting prac­tice so the com­pet­i­tive juices weren’t flow­ing. But even by that stan­dard, the whole exer­cise looks slop­py and inef­fi­cient.” Cut4’s Jake Mintz gets harsh­er, as well as more tech­ni­cal: “Tell me Ruth’s cocka­mamie swing mechan­ics would enable him to hit a 98-mph heater.” As for the Iron Horse, his “hack is a lit­tle bet­ter,” but still “absurd­ly low” by today’s stan­dards. It goes to show, Mintz writes, that “these two leg­ends, while unde­ni­ably tran­scen­dent in their time, would be good Double‑A hit­ters at best if they played today.” We evolve, our tech­nolo­gies evolve, and so, it seems, do the games we play.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Home Movies of Duke Elling­ton Play­ing Base­ball (And How Base­ball Coined the Word “Jazz”)

Read Online Haru­ki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Base­ball Game Launched His Writ­ing Career

Fritz Lang’s M: The Restored Ver­sion of the Clas­sic 1931 Film

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

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.

How Eric Clapton Created the Classic Song “Layla”

The sto­ry of Eric Clap­ton and “Lay­la” has always both­ered me because to under­stand it is to under­stand how fal­li­ble and crazed any of us can be when it comes to love. We under­stand that our rock gods are human, but there’s some­thing about Clap­ton falling in love with the wife (Pat­tie Boyd) of one of his best mates (George Har­ri­son, a freakin’ Bea­t­le, man!) and then writ­ing a whole album about it, that is just unset­tling. Is this some­thing tawdry writ epic? Or is this some­thing epic that has the waft­ing aro­ma of taw­dri­ness?

Poly­phon­ic takes on the behind the scenes sto­ry of this rock mas­ter­piece and rewinds sev­er­al cen­turies to the source of Layla’s name: “Lay­la and Maj­nun,” a roman­tic poem from 12th cen­tu­ry Per­sian poet Niẓā­mi Gan­javi based on an actu­al woman from the 6th Cen­tu­ry who drove her poet para­mour mad. Lord Byron called the trag­ic poem “The Romeo and Juli­et of the East,” as unre­quit­ed love leaves both Maj­nun and Lay­la dead after the latter’s father for­bids her to be with the poet.

Eric Clap­ton heard of the poem from his Sufi friend Abdalqadir as-Sufi (for­mer­ly Ian Dal­las), and so when he wrote a slow bal­lad about his unre­quit­ed love for Pat­ti, “Lay­la” made per­fect sense as a name.

The song might have stayed a ballad–think of Clapton’s slowed down ver­sion from his MTV “Unplugged” special–if it wasn’t for Duane All­man of the All­man Broth­ers. The two had yet to meet, but were aware of each oth­er. All­man had grabbed Clapton’s atten­tion with his fiery solo work at the end of Wil­son Pickett’s cov­er of “Hey Jude”:

When Clap­ton and All­man did meet, the two set to jam­ming and All­man made the his­to­ry-chang­ing deci­sion to speed up Clapton’s bal­lad and use a riff tak­en from Albert King. “Lay­la” was born. Allman’s bot­tle­neck slide style met Clapton’s string bend­ing, and the track is a con­ver­sa­tion between the two, where no words are need­ed.

“It’s in the tip of their fin­gers,” says engi­neer Tom Dowd, lis­ten­ing to the iso­lat­ed tracks in the video below. “It’s not in a knob, it’s not in how loud they play, it’s touch.”

Over this, Clap­ton deliv­ers his des­per­ate lyrics, sung by a man at his wits end, much like Maj­nun of the poem.

And then, that coda, which takes up half the song. Drum­mer Jim Gor­don was work­ing on the piano piece for a solo album in secret. When Clap­ton dis­cov­ered Gor­don was record­ing on the sly, he wasn’t angry. Instead he insist­ed it be added to the end of the rock­ing first half. The song is a per­fect bal­ance between fran­tic rock and roman­tic bal­lad.

But in the real world, “Lay­la” didn’t do the job. Clap­ton played the album for Pat­tie Boyd three weeks lat­er, and though she under­stood its beau­ty, Boyd was embar­rassed by its mes­sage.

“I couldn’t believe I was the inspi­ra­tion for putting this togeth­er,” she said in an inter­view. “I didn’t want this to hap­pen.” She was also mor­ti­fied think­ing that every­body would know exact­ly who “Lay­la” was about.

“It didn’t work,” Clap­ton recalled. “It was all for noth­ing.”

The song was a flop in the charts, espe­cial­ly as it was cut in half for the sin­gle. It would find its audi­ence three years lat­er when the full ver­sion appeared on both a Clap­ton anthol­o­gy and a best of col­lec­tion of Duane Allman’s work. Final­ly it rock­et­ed up the charts, and it’s kind of stayed in clas­sic rock playlists ever since.

And as for Boyd, she actu­al­ly did leave George Har­ri­son in 1974 to mar­ry Clap­ton in 1979, a mar­riage that last­ed 10 years. Not all mar­riages last. The orig­i­nal flame dies out. It’s just that, in “Lay­la“ ‘s case, the flame is there every time the nee­dle drops into the groove.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

23-Year-Old Eric Clap­ton Demon­strates the Ele­ments of His Gui­tar Sound (1968)

Hear Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Bea­t­les’ ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)

Eric Clap­ton Tries Out Gui­tars at Home and Talks About the Bea­t­les, Cream, and His Musi­cal Roots

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.

How E.E. Cummings Writes a Poem

Most of us encounter E.E. Cum­mings at an ear­ly age; his poems for adults reg­u­lar­ly appear in poet­ry antholo­gies for chil­dren. We derive great plea­sure from his brazen mis­spellings, port­man­teaus, neol­o­gisms, and “typo­graph­i­cal high jinks,” as Paul Mul­doon writes at The New York­er. Look at this famous writer break­ing all the rules, and there­by giv­ing us occa­sion to talk about the rules, about how poet­ry is dif­fer­ent, about how, among poets, E.E. Cum­mings stands alone.

Only some­one with a keen facil­i­ty for lan­guage can bend it to their indi­vid­ual will, some­thing we may rec­og­nize when read­ing Cum­mings in high school, when we also rec­og­nize the irony and grim satire in his poems. The inven­tive whim­sy had veiled some­thing dark­er. In 1960, then-high-school stu­dent Peter Carl­ton got the chance to inter­view Cum­mings about his poem “Human­i­ty, I love you,” then post­ed the exchange online 37 years lat­er. “I, for one, do not love human­i­ty,” the poet told him, “I feel that human­i­ty itself is cru­el and unjust.”

A com­mon sen­ti­ment among mod­ernists, espe­cial­ly those, like Cum­mings, who had served in World War I. But few of his con­tem­po­raries, who includ­ed James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, had his abil­i­ty to speak to so many dif­fer­ent audi­ences. It’s almost shock­ing to see the shift in voice between Cum­mings’ inter­view with young Carl­ton and a let­ter he wrote to Pound 20 years ear­li­er, full of the usu­al Cum­mings coinages (“innul­luxu­ls”) and vicious lit­er­ary barbs (Archibald MacLeish becomes “the macarchibald maclap­dog macleash”).

Was Cum­mings a rad­i­cal? A roman­tic? A lit­er­ary naïf? An out­sider? A savvy, cyn­i­cal play­er of the game? He con­tained mul­ti­tudes. From Eliot he “learned to dis­trust the hier­ar­chi­cal in every aspect of life,” writes Mul­doon, “begin­ning with his own being. In his poet­ry, ‘I’ becomes ‘i.’” What­ev­er atti­tudes he express­es, Cum­mings always forces us to wres­tle with language—its dura­bil­i­ty and mal­leabil­i­ty, its famil­iar strangenesses—first.

In his most acces­si­ble poem, “i car­ry your heart with me (i car­ry it in,” Cum­mings draws our atten­tion to the sim­plic­i­ty of his arche­typ­al images, as if to smirk­ing­ly announce, “this is a uni­ver­sal love poem.” Stan­dard fare. But such obvi­ous mir­ror­ing of form and con­tent does not dimin­ish the poem’s accom­plish­ment, argues Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, in the video above. On the con­trary, sim­ple rep­e­ti­tions lead us into far more com­pli­cat­ed recur­sions inside the poem.

Puschak quotes lines from Yeats to illus­trate the deft­ness of Cum­mings’ decep­tive sim­plic­i­ty: “A line will take us hours maybe; / yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitch­ing and unstitch­ing has been naught.” While many a poet has made the art seem easy, few have made it seem so play­ful or irrev­er­ent as Cum­mings, or have delight­ed so many peo­ple of so many ages and walks of life—so few of whom may sus­pect the con­cep­tu­al heft and rig­or that went into his work.

To read Cum­mings’ poet­ry your­self, pick up a copy of his com­plete poems.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Child­hood Draw­ings from Poet E.E. Cum­mings Show the Young Artist’s Play­ful Seri­ous­ness

Cel­e­brate Valentine’s Day with a Charm­ing Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion of an E.E. Cum­mings’ Love Poem

E.E. Cum­mings Recites ‘Any­one Lived in a Pret­ty How Town,’ 1953

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

Charles Bukowski Explains What Good Writing and the Good Life Have in Common

I have no pol­i­tics, I observe. I have no sides except the side of the human spir­it, which after all does sound rather shal­low, like a pitch­man, but which means most­ly my spir­it, which means yours too, for if I am not tru­ly alive, how can I see you?

—Charles Bukows­ki, Notes of. Dirty Old Man

In Notes of a Dirty Old Man, his week­ly col­umn for the under­ground L.A. news­pa­per Open City, Charles Bukows­ki became the com­mon man’s philoso­pher, issu­ing pro­fun­di­ties amidst wild vul­gar­i­ties and prov­ing that he did, in fact, have a pol­i­tics, as much as he had the­o­ries and con­trar­i­an half-thoughts and opin­ions aplen­ty. He took sides when it came to lit­er­a­ture, at least—the side of Celine, Dos­to­evsky, and Camus, for exam­ple, against Faulkn­er, Shake­speare, and George Bernard Shaw (“the most overblown fan­ta­sy of the Ages”).

Bukows­ki had no room for cool appre­ci­a­tion or mild pref­er­ence. With him, as with Cat­ul­lus, life was love and hate. Get him talk­ing on any sub­ject and those loves and hates would emerge, as would his ideas about mat­ters of most con­se­quence: life, death, drink­ing, sex, and, of course, writ­ing. In the inter­view clip above, for exam­ple, Bukows­ki is asked if he fears death. He answers, “No, in fact, I almost feel good at the approach of death.” This becomes a med­i­ta­tion on rep­e­ti­tion and dull­ness, and on the “juice” that a good life—and good writing—requires.

…. You see, as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You under­stand? You keep see­ing the same thing over and over again… so you get a lit­tle bit tired of life. So as death comes, you almost say, okay, baby, it’s time, it’s good.

The answer puts the inter­view­er in mind of Mal­colm Lowry’s Under the Vol­cano, which sends Bukows­ki on one of his sig­na­ture cranky cri­tiques, also an intro­duc­tion to his the­o­ry of prose, which can be summed up in just three syl­la­bles, “BIM BIM BIM!”—the sound he makes to show the “quick­ness” of a well-writ­ten line. Good writ­ing needs “pace,” “life,” and “sun­light.” “Each line,” he says, “must be full of a deli­cious lit­tle juice, they must be full of pow­er, they must make you like to turn a page, bim bim bim!” Writ­ing like Lowry’s, he says, is “too leisure­ly.” There’s too much set­up, too lit­tle pay­off.

He may seem unfair to Lowry, but most writ­ers bore Bukows­ki. After pages of tedious buildup, “when they get to the grand emo­tion, there isn’t any,” he says. Bukows­ki has nev­er been one for sub­tle­ty, but no one can say his writ­ing lacks  “juice” or grand emo­tion. On the con­trary, he endears him­self to so many aspir­ing writ­ers (or aspir­ing male writ­ers, in any case) because his poet­ry and prose are so elec­tri­fy­ing­ly alive. He had a lim­it­ed range of sub­jects, most­ly con­fined to his own thoughts, feel­ings, and drunk­en mis­ad­ven­tures. Yet the voice that car­ries us through his vio­lent­ly fun­ny tales and rever­ies, wicked and maudlin and ten­der by turns, seems capa­ble of lim­it­less inven­tion.

“Writ­ing must nev­er be bor­ing,” says Bukows­ki. He set a high bar, and he met it. As writ­ers, we need not live his life to do the same. But we must each be “tru­ly alive” in our own way to make our lines go bim bim bim. “Each line,” he says, “must be an enti­ty unto itself.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

Is Charles Bukows­ki a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Bru­tal­ly Hon­est, Yet Odd­ly Inspir­ing, Poems and Decide for Your­self

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance” 

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

Expressionist Dance Costumes from the 1920s, and the Tragic Story of Lavinia Schulz & Walter Holdt

The most fruit­ful cre­ative part­ner­ships, long or short, have often been tem­pes­tu­ous. On the short­er side, and among the stormi­est, we have a hus­band-and-wife team who real­ized visions hith­er­to unseen onstage, and who very near­ly fell into total obscu­ri­ty after a mur­der-sui­cide brought their part­ner­ship to an end. But in the Ham­burg of the late 1910s and ear­ly 1920s, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, Lavinia Schulz and Wal­ter Holdt “cre­at­ed wild, Expres­sion­ist cos­tumes that looked like retro robots and Bauhaus knights,” twen­ty of them, for per­for­mances accom­pa­nied by avant-garde music. After their death in 1924, Schulz and Holdt’s work went into stor­age, nev­er to be found again until the late 1980s.

The cos­tumes had been gift­ed to the Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe, which in 1925 “staged an evening in mem­o­ry of Lavinia Schulz and Wal­ter Holdt,” writes blog­ger Jan Reet­ze.

“After this, the masks, pho­tos and draw­ings” — includ­ing dances dia­grammed in a sys­tem of Schulz’s own inven­tion — “went into a cou­ple of ‘acro­bat’s bag­gage’ box­es and fell into obliv­ion on the muse­um’s attic. They were not even inven­to­ried. Which turned out to be a stroke of luck because this way the objects did­n’t fall into the hands of the Nazis, who, with­out any doubt, would have seen these works as ‘degen­er­ate art’ and in all prob­a­bil­i­ty would have destroyed them.”

You can see the cos­tumes in action in the video at the top of the post, and more of the pho­tos tak­en by Minya Diez-Dührkoop in the last year of Schulz and Holdt’s lives at Hyper­al­ler­gic. Their per­for­mances began in the expres­sion­ism with which the Berlin-edu­cat­ed Schultz had been asso­ci­at­ed and moved toward “the sup­posed puri­ty of pre-Judeo-Chris­t­ian, Aryan-Nordic cul­ture,” as Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher writes.

“Between 1920–24, the cou­ple per­formed their dance rou­tines to the bewil­dered and often antag­o­nis­tic audi­ences of Ham­burg. Though some crit­ics appre­ci­at­ed the pair’s tal­ent and star­tling orig­i­nal­i­ty, this praise was nev­er enough to pay the rent.”

“Accord­ing to con­tem­po­rary crit­ics, Lavinia seemed to be the more cre­ative one,” writes Reet­ze. “Wal­ter, on the oth­er hand, was the bet­ter and more dis­ci­plined dancer, he exact­ly knew his for­mal means and how to use them.” The coun­ter­part to Holdt’s rig­or was Schulz’s more pri­mal genius, a sen­si­bil­i­ty that man­i­fest­ed aes­thet­i­cal­ly — seen in her high­ly uncon­ven­tion­al use of every­day mate­ri­als like “wire, gyp­sum, papi­er mâché and indus­tri­al garbage” — and emo­tion­al­ly.

Reet­ze quotes from the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of com­pos­er Hans Heinz Stuck­en­schmidt, who briefly lived with the cou­ple: Depri­va­tion, hunger, cold­ness, nordic land­scape with storm, ice, and cat­a­stro­phes: That was her world, and she had found her­self in it with Holdt.”

Schulz and Holdt also refused to be paid for their per­for­mances. “You can­not sell spir­i­tu­al ideas for mon­ey,” Schulz wrote. “Spir­it and mon­ey are two antag­o­nis­tic poles, and if you sell spir­i­tu­al ideas for mon­ey, you sold the spir­it to the mon­ey and lost the spir­it.” Even­tu­al­ly their pover­ty — as well as the unusu­al­ly volatile nature of their rela­tion­ship, said to spark phys­i­cal mar­i­tal spats on stage — reached a break­ing point. “Both were in their 20s, and had earned lit­tle mon­ey from their artis­tic work,” writes Meier. “In finan­cial ruin, on June 18, 1924, Schulz shot Holdt, and then turned the gun on her­self.” But against all odds, their still-star­tling cre­ativ­i­ty — the kind that can, per­haps, emerge only from the oppo­si­tion of two incom­pat­i­ble forces — lives on.

via Dan­ger­ous Mind

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let, First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

An Online Trove of His­toric Sewing Pat­terns & Cos­tumes

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

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.

American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s

Palimpsest has become clichéd as a descrip­tor of cities, but only due to its truth. Repeat­ed­ly eras­ing and rewrit­ing parts of cities over years, decades, and cen­turies has left us with built envi­ron­ments that reflect every peri­od of urban his­to­ry at once. Or at least in an ide­al world they do: we’ve all felt the dull­ness of new cities built whole, or of old cities that have bare­ly changed in liv­ing mem­o­ry, dull­ness that under­scores the val­ue of places in which a vari­ety of forms, styles, and eras all coex­ist. Take New York, which even in the 1930s pre­sent­ed the gen­teel­ly his­tor­i­cal along­side the thor­ough­ly mod­ern. The New York­er video above places dri­ving footage from that era along­side the same places — the Brook­lyn Bridge, Cen­tral Park, Harlem, the West Side High­way— shot in 2017, high­light­ing what has changed, and even more so what has­n’t.

Los Ange­les has under­gone a more dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion, as Kevin McAlester’s side-by-side video of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and 2016 reveals. “An area of rough­ly five square blocks in down­town Los Ange­les,” says The New York­er, Bunker Hill was from 1959 “the sub­ject of a mas­sive urban-renew­al project, in which ‘improve­ment’ was gen­er­al­ly defined by the peo­ple who stood to prof­it from it, as well as their back­ers at City Hall, at the expense of any­one stand­ing in their way.”

The 53-year process turned a neigh­bor­hood of “some of the city’s most ele­gant man­sions and hotels,” lat­er sub­di­vid­ed and “pop­u­lat­ed by a mix of pen­sion­ers, immi­grants, work­ers, and peo­ple look­ing to get lost,” into an attempt­ed acrop­o­lis of works by archi­tec­tur­al super­stars, includ­ing Frank Gehry’s Dis­ney Con­cert Hall, recent Pritzk­er-win­ner Ara­ta Isoza­k­i’s Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, and John Port­man’s (movie-beloved) Bonaven­ture Hotel.

Above the clas­sic Amer­i­can build­ings of Detroit stands anoth­er of Port­man’s sig­na­ture glass-and-steel cylin­ders: the Renais­sance Cen­ter, com­mis­sioned in the 1970s by Hen­ry Ford II as the cen­ter­piece of the city’s hoped-for revival. Three decades ear­li­er, says The New York­er, “Detroit was the fourth-largest city in Amer­i­ca, draw­ing in work­ers with oppor­tu­ni­ties for sta­ble employ­ment on the assem­bly lines at the Ford, Gen­er­al Motors, and Chrysler plants.” But soon “fac­to­ries closed, and jobs van­ished from the city that had been the cen­ter of the indus­try.” The Motor City’s down­ward slide con­tin­ued until its 2013 bank­rupt­cy, but some auto man­u­fac­tur­ing remains, as shown in this split-screen video of Detroit over the past cen­tu­ry along­side Detroit in 2018. It even includes footage of the QLine, the street­car that opened in the pre­vi­ous year amid the lat­est wave of inter­est in restor­ing Detroit to its for­mer glo­ry. As in any city, the most sol­id future for Detroit must be built, in part, with the mate­ri­als of its past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Col­orized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

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.

Animated Series Drawn & Recorded Tells “Untold Stories” from Music History: Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Blind Willie Johnson & More

Who hasn’t tast­ed the plea­sures, guilty or oth­er­wise, of VH1’s Behind the Music? The long-run­ning show, a juicy mix of tabloid gos­sip, doc­u­men­tary insight, and unabashed nos­tal­gia, debuted in 1997, a total­ly dif­fer­ent media age. Its orig­i­nal view­ers were the first gen­er­a­tion to use email, shop online, or down­load (usu­al­ly pirat­ed) music. Peo­ple were will­ing to sit through episodes of an hour or more, with­out a pause but­ton, whether they liked the music or not. (Some of the best shows pro­file the most ridicu­lous one-hit won­ders).

Behind the Music is still on, and you can stream old episodes all day long, paus­ing every few min­utes to check email or social media, stream anoth­er video, or down­load an album in sec­onds. But with so many dis­trac­tions, it’s easy to lose the thread of Huey Lewis and the News’ rise to star­dom or the thrilling life and times of Ice‑T. We need sto­ries like these, but we may need them in a small­er, more self-con­tained form.

Enter Drawn & Record­ed: Mod­ern Myths of Music, an online series that deliv­ers the fris­son of Behind the Music in a frac­tion of the time, with the added bonus of whim­si­cal, high-qual­i­ty ani­ma­tion and nar­ra­tion by T. Bone Bur­nett. Now in its fourth sea­son, the award-win­ning series, direct­ed and hand-drawn by ani­ma­tor Drew Christie for stu­dio Gun­pow­der & Sky, brings us anec­dotes “some­times hilar­i­ous, occa­sion­al­ly trag­ic, always com­pelling,” writes Ani­ma­tion Mag­a­zine.

Those sto­ries include “Leonard Cohen’s escape from Cuban author­i­ties after being detained under sus­pi­cion of espi­onage” (see the trail­er here) and the ori­gins of Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” (above), a sto­ry we cov­ered in a pre­vi­ous post. Drawn & Record­ed has dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed itself from the afore­men­tioned pop music doc­u­men­tary show not only in its length and aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties but also in its will­ing­ness to ven­ture deep­er into music his­to­ry.

The episode below, for exam­ple, fea­tures trag­ic blues­man Blind Willie John­son, who made mod­ern his­to­ry when his music trav­eled into out­er space on the Voy­ager Gold­en Record. Giv­en their lengths of under five min­utes, each Drawn & Record­ed must prune its sto­ry carefully—there’s no room for mean­der­ing or gra­tu­itous rep­e­ti­tion. Each of the vignettes promis­es an “untold sto­ry” from music his­to­ry, and while that may not always be the case, they are each well-told and sur­pris­ing and often as strange as Christie’s ani­ma­tions and Burnett’s haunt­ed, raspy bari­tone sug­gest.

In the episode below, coun­try leg­end Jim­mie Rogers, whose influ­ence “would range from Hank Williams to Louis Arm­strong to Bob Dylan,” arrived in Kenya a decade after his death, by way of British mis­sion­ar­ies tot­ing a phono­graph. The native peo­ple became fas­ci­nat­ed with the sound of Rogers’ music. They pro­nounced his name “Chemirocha,” a word that came to mean “any­thing new and dif­fer­ent.” This became a song called “Chemirocha,” about a half-man/half-ante­lope god.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing­ly odd lit­tle tale about cross-cul­tur­al con­tact, one that has lit­tle to do with the biog­ra­phy of Jim­mie Rogers, and hence might nev­er make it into your stan­dard-issue doc­u­men­tary. But Drawn & Record­ed is some­thing else—a hand­made arti­fact that streams dig­i­tal­ly, telling sto­ries about musi­cians famous, infa­mous, and rarely remem­bered. Oth­er episodes fea­ture a can­ny mix of the con­tem­po­rary, clas­sic, and gold­en age, includ­ing Grimes, David Bowie, the Bea­t­les, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe, MF Doom, and more. Find them, notes Ani­ma­tion Mag­a­zine, “on the Net­work, avail­able on DirecTV, DirecTV Now and AT&T U‑verse” or find scat­tered episodes on Vimeo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

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

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.