Miles Davis Iconic 1959 Album Kind of Blue Turns 60: Revisit the Album That Changed American Music

in Music | August 20th, 2019

No amount of con­tin­u­ous repeats in cof­feeshops around the world can dull the crys­talline bril­liance of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue one bit. The album turned 60 three days ago, and it still stands as one of the most influ­en­tial albums, jazz or oth­er­wise, of all time… indeed, as “one of the sin­gle great­est achieve­ments in Amer­i­can music.”

So says one of sev­er­al crit­ics prais­ing the album in the intro­duc­tion to an inter­view with Ash­ley Kahn, author of Kind of Blue: The Mak­ing of the Miles Davis Mas­ter­piece. Kind of Blue is a “cor­ner­stone record, not only for jazz. It’s a cor­ner­stone record for music,” anoth­er voice com­ments. It “cap­tures the essence of jazz.” It’s “sort of like the Bible, in a way. You know, you just have one in your house.”

This would make Davis not only the com­pos­er of a new jazz Bible, but also a Bible sales­man. He had no doubt his prod­uct would sell. “Davis was a can­ny mon­ey man and pro­mot­er of his own image,” wrote David Years­ley on the album’s anniver­sary. One 1960 record com­pa­ny memo stat­ed he “’was pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with the amount of jazz now on juke­box­es in many areas of the coun­try while he is not rep­re­sent­ed.’”

Colum­bia respond­ed, and as a result, many peo­ple around the U.S. “first heard this music in din­ers and bars over the juke­box.” The cre­ative ten­sions in the Birth of the Cool record­ings, made ten years ear­li­er, announced a new kind of jazz with their full release in 1957. The cool had matured in Kind of Blue’s ful­ly modal turn. “Its icy hau­teur sets the stan­dard for art that draws you in by pre­tend­ing it doesn’t need any­one or any­thing but itself.” It’s quite a con­fi­dent appeal.

Sales are nei­ther nec­es­sary nor suf­fi­cient to make a clas­sic album, but in the case of Kind of Blue, all of the stars aligned: crit­ics uni­ver­sal­ly praise it, musi­cians uni­ver­sal­ly love it, and record buy­ers uni­ver­sal­ly buy it. “The thing about this album,” says Kahn, “that’s dif­fer­ent from what hap­pened with some oth­er well-cel­e­brat­ed albums… is that it became an icon­ic album not when it came out but long after because peo­ple kept buy­ing it. Peo­ple would not let it go out of print.”

Davis knew how to get his work before the pub­lic, but he also knew it deserved to be heard by mil­lions both inside and out­side jazz. Beloved in the jazz world right away, it was the “vox pop­uli” that spread the album’s fame every­where else. Drum­mer Jim­my Cobb talks in the clip at the top about how Davis “fell a lit­tle bit into [the] con­cept” of Bill Evans, the pianist who played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the music’s con­struc­tion. “To me,” says Cobb, the gig was “just anoth­er Miles Davis ses­sion,” with an Evans twist.

None of the musi­cians in the sex­tet had any idea the record would get as big as it did. Yet as Davis him­self said, in a clas­sic line from an ear­li­er record­ing ses­sion, “I’m gonna play it first, and tell you what it is lat­er.” We look back on 1959 as a water­shed year in jazz, thanks in large part to the impact of Kind of Blue. Maybe we still haven’t fig­ured out, 60 years lat­er, what it is. Learn more about the crit­i­cal, musi­cal, and com­mer­cial impor­tance of Kind of Blue in the Poly­phon­ic video explain­er above, “How Miles Davis Changed Jazz.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

The Influ­ence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visu­al­iza­tion: For His 90th Birth­day Today

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

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Watch Some of the Most Powerful Bass Guitar Solos Ever: Geddy Lee, Flea, Bootsy Collins, John Deacon & More

in Music | August 20th, 2019

At her site Ari’s Bass Blog, bass play­er and teacher Ari­ane Cap shoots down many of the argu­ments against solo bass music—that is, music played sole­ly on bass gui­tar. To the objec­tion that “bass­es have a job to do in a band con­text,” she writes, “what this ‘job’ is can vary great­ly!” To anoth­er com­plaint, she responds, “even when imi­tat­ing gui­tar tech­niques on the bass, it is still bass play­ing.” Her defens­es of solo bass (and her fine instruc­tions on how to play it well) work equal­ly for the bass solo, when the often least-noticed mem­ber of the band steps out and takes the lead for a few moments.

The idea that bass play­ers are all wall­flow­ers or invis­i­ble, less-tal­ent­ed mem­bers of the band is, of course, a bad rock and roll stereo­type. Nat­u­ral­ly, the best bass soloists in rock are some of the play­ers who have drawn the most atten­tion to the instru­ment and shown how crit­i­cal it is.

But not all great bass play­ers are great soloists. The solo requires a par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of pow­er and agili­ty. The bass soloist is some­thing of a musi­cal ath­lete.

A gui­tar solo can coast, so to speak, on tone, on per­fect­ly-cho­sen notes played with just the right vibra­to and sus­tain. A bass solo is anoth­er mon­ster. Whether plucked, picked, or slapped, bass solos usu­al­ly involve a lot of notes attacked very hard and very fast, up and down the neck—a feat any­one who’s held a bass gui­tar will know requires a lot of dex­ter­i­ty and strength.

Mar­vel as you watch the shoul­ders, arms, and fin­gers on left and right hands of these play­ers move with uncan­ny pre­ci­sion, in clips from some of the all-time bass solo greats here. At the top, John Entwistle wins top prize for suc­cinct­ness. His bored expres­sion may seem to give away the pre-record­ed TV game, but even live onstage he nev­er seemed to raise an eye­brow when pulling off licks like these.

Below him, Ged­dy Lee stretch­es out, and makes your arms tired from watch­ing him move all over the fret­board, build­ing from one fig­ure to anoth­er before a final explo­sive shred. Fur­ther up, Stu­art Hamm, onstage with Joe Satri­ani in 1988, gives a solo bass per­for­mance at the Mon­treux Jazz Fes­ti­val, mov­ing effort­less­ly from Beethoven’s “Moon­light Sonata” to a series of gor­geous arpeg­gios to some genre-hop­ping the­atrics the crowd devours.

Though he made his bones as one of the fastest bass soloists on the block, Fleas’s solo bass per­for­mance uses delay and echo effects to slow things down sig­nif­i­cant­ly and expand the pos­si­bil­i­ties of solo bass, bring­ing it into the tonal realm of the gui­tar while still demon­strat­ing the tremen­dous phys­i­cal­i­ty bass play­ing requires. Just above, see Boot­sy Collins pull off a sim­i­lar feat in a full band con­text, prov­ing that bass solos can be made of slow, soul­ful melod­i­cism and heavy, fuzzed-out licks.

Collin’s tour-de-force per­for­mance is hard to top, but for con­trast, and to reem­pha­size the ver­sa­til­i­ty of the bass as a solo instru­ment, whether play­ing all alone or tak­ing a brief turn in the spot­light, see Queen’s John Dea­con pull out a flaw­less, short and seri­ous­ly sweet bass solo live on “Liar,” just above, looped for ten min­utes straight so you can mem­o­rize every note.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Neil Peart, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

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

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The Importance of Film Editing Demonstrated by the Bad Editing of Major Films: Bohemian Rhapsody, Suicide Squad & More

in Film | August 20th, 2019

It’s one of cin­e­ma’s great­est ironies that edit­ing can make or break a film, but few movie­go­ers under­stand what an edi­tor actu­al­ly does. Edit­ing involves tak­ing shots and assem­bling them in the right order, yes, but what makes an order — all the tran­si­tions from moment to moment and scene to scene — “right”? Even if we can’t explain good edit­ing, we know bad edit­ing when we see it, and even more so when when we feel it. The hard-to-pin-down sen­sa­tion of a movie being “off” or “wrong” often comes out of incom­pe­tent edit­ing, and by break­ing down the bad edit­ing in a vari­ety of recent pic­tures, these three videos throw into con­trast what it takes for edit­ing to be good.

Most of the nine “Movies that Were Ruined by Real­ly Bad Edit­ing” in the Loop­er video at the top of the post are part of high-pro­file fran­chis­es. Giv­en the size of their bud­gets and the impor­tance of their box-office per­for­mance, you might think such films would­n’t per­mit tech­ni­cal slop­pi­ness of any kind. Yet in Alien: Covenant every­thing hap­pens in an order that kills the dra­mat­ic ten­sion; the chaot­ic Tak­en 3, “a severe case of death by a thou­sand cin­e­mat­ic cuts,” plays out “at the speed any oth­er movie would run if you acci­den­tal­ly hit the fast-for­ward but­ton sev­er­al times”; Trans­form­ers: Age of Extinc­tion goes heavy on the wrong scenes and “treats its robot aliens as a sub­plot”; and Sui­cide Squad pro­vides an exam­ple of “a stu­dio pub­licly adver­tis­ing a movie as one thing, pan­ick­ing, then com­plete­ly reshap­ing the same film all inside of one fran­tic mar­ket­ing blitz.”

“Edit­ing is going down the crap­per these days,” says Fold­ing Ideas host Dan Olson in his in-depth exam­i­na­tion of Sui­cide Squad’s incom­pe­tent cut­ting. “The edit­ing was shock­ing­ly awful in every way,” he says, turn­ing it into a kind of neg­a­tive show­case of the edi­tor’s art: “I would seri­ous­ly advise any­one with an inter­est in the art of cin­e­mat­ic edit­ing to do their own full autop­sy to see just how much went wrong and plain old does­n’t work.” Olson points to exam­ples of Sui­cide Squad’s often inex­plic­a­ble choic­es, such as fill­ing the first half of the film with hyper­ki­net­ic char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions that play more like trail­ers, devel­op­ing char­ac­ters only to sud­den­ly drop them, los­ing track of the phys­i­cal loca­tions of char­ac­ters, and repeat­ed­ly abus­ing the Kuleshov Effect in a way that feels like the “cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.”

But then, it would have been more of a sur­prise for a crit­i­cal dis­as­ter like Sui­cide Squad to have been well-edit­ed. What about the Fred­die Mer­cury biopic Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, which won an Acad­e­my Award specif­i­cal­ly for its edit­ing? Its recep­tion of that par­tic­u­lar Oscar is inter­est­ing, says video essay­ist Thomas Flight, “because the movie con­tains sev­er­al scenes that are mas­ter class­es in poor edit­ing.” In one offend­ing sequence, “many of the cuts are unmo­ti­vat­ed,” which mean that the edi­tor made them for no appar­ent rea­son, at least none serv­ing sto­ry or the dra­ma. Oth­ers “ignore spa­tial con­ti­nu­ity,” which makes it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the audi­ence to under­stand who and what is sup­posed to be where. And “the pace is sim­ply too fast,” mean­ing that the lengths of the shots are too short for the action: edit­ing that suits a rock con­cert does­n’t suit a con­ver­sa­tion.

Even view­ers who oth­er­wise enjoyed Bohemi­an Rhap­sody will have sensed some­thing the mat­ter with the cuts in the scene Flight high­lights. But nobody could have a worse reac­tion to it than John Ottman, the man who edit­ed the film, and whose work has been cred­it­ed with mak­ing (rather than fur­ther break­ing) the trou­bled pro­duc­tion. As men­tioned in March here on Open Cul­ture, that par­tic­u­lar scene was cut not by Ottman but direc­tor Dex­ter Fletch­er, who came in to take Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’s reins after the depar­ture of Bryan Singer. “When­ev­er I see it, I want to put a bag over my head,” Ottman told the Wash­ing­ton Post. Most movie­go­ers don’t see edit­ing when it’s good, only when it’s bad — but when it’s espe­cial­ly bad, it makes edi­tors them­selves long for invis­i­bil­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

Hitch­cock on the Filmmaker’s Essen­tial Tool: The Kuleshov Effect

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’s Bad Edit­ing: A Break­down

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.

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Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

in Literature, Music | August 20th, 2019

In 2001 or 2002, gui­tarist and singer David Gilmour of Pink Floyd record­ed a musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of William Shake­speare’s “Son­net 18″ at his home stu­dio aboard the his­toric, 90-foot house­boat the Asto­ria. This video of Gilmour singing the son­net was released as an extra on the 2002 DVD David Gilmour in Con­cert, but the song itself is con­nect­ed with When Love Speaks, a 2002 ben­e­fit album for Lon­don’s Roy­al Acad­e­my for the Dra­mat­ic Arts.

The project was orga­nized by the com­pos­er and con­duc­tor Michael Kamen, who died a lit­tle more than a year after the album was released. When Love Speaks fea­tures a mix­ture of dra­mat­ic and musi­cal per­for­mances of Shake­speare’s Son­nets and oth­er works, with artists rang­ing from John Giel­gud to Lady­smith Black Mam­bazo.

Kamen wrote much of the music for the project, includ­ing the arrange­ment for Son­net 18, which is sung on the album by Bryan Fer­ry. A spe­cial ben­e­fit con­cert to cel­e­brate the release of the album was held on Feb­ru­ary 10, 2002 at the Old Vic The­atre in Lon­don, but Fer­ry did not attend. Gilmour appeared and sang the son­net in his place. It was appar­ent­ly around that time that Gilmour record­ed his own vocal track for Kamen’s song.

“Son­net 18” is per­haps the most famous of Shake­speare’s 154 son­nets. It was writ­ten in about 1595, and most schol­ars now agree the poem is addressed to a man. The son­net is com­posed in iambic pen­tame­ter, with three rhymed qua­trains fol­lowed by a con­clud­ing cou­plet:

Shall I com­pare thee to a sum­mer’s day?
Thou art more love­ly and more tem­per­ate:
Rough winds do shake the dar­ling buds of May,
And sum­mer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Some­time too hot the eye of heav­en shines,
And often is his gold com­plex­ion dim­m’d;
And every fair from fair some­time declines,
By chance or nature’s chang­ing course untrim­m’d
But thy eter­nal sum­mer shall not fade,
Nor lose pos­ses­sion of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wan­der’st in his shade,
When in eter­nal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pom­peii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

Shakespeare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

A Sur­vey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course)

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

 

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Newly-Discovered John Coltrane Album, Blue World, To Be Released in September: Hear the Title Track Now

in Film, Music | August 19th, 2019

In the pho­to on the cov­er of soon-to-be-released Coltrane album Blue World, the leg­endary sax­o­phon­ist and com­pos­er is shown in pro­file, gaz­ing into the mid­dle dis­tance, res­olute, vig­i­lant, and searching—a ship’s cap­tain sight­ing a new shore. Record­ed at Rudy Van Gelder’s study in New Jer­sey in 1964, the col­lec­tion of songs sees Coltrane guid­ing clas­sic quar­tet of McCoy Tyn­er, Jim­my Gar­ri­son, and Elvin Jones between 1964’s “epic album” Cres­cent and their 1965 mas­ter­piece, A Love Supreme.

Like the “lost album,” Both Direc­tions at Once—made in 1963 and released just last year—the new­ly-dis­cov­ered Blue World show­cas­es some excel­lent alter­nate takes of famous Coltrane com­po­si­tions, as well as new (to most lis­ten­ers) orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al in the form of the title track, which you can hear in the video above. The album was record­ed as a sound­track to the film Le chat dans le sac by Que­be­coise direc­tor Gilles Groulx, and the session’s “date had gone unno­ticed” for decades “in ses­sion record­ings logs” reports Nate Chi­nen at NPR. “The music has occu­pied a blind spot for Trane-olo­gists, archivists and his­to­ri­ans.

The full album, to be released on Sep­tem­ber 27th, fea­tures two alter­nate takes of Giant Steps’ “Naima,” three takes of “Vil­lage Blues” and alter­nate record­ings of “Like Son­ny” and “Trane­ing In.” Blue World “offers a spe­cial oppor­tu­ni­ty,” notes Ash­ley Kahn in the album’s lin­er notes, “to com­pare these ver­sions with pre­vi­ous per­spec­tives, reveal­ing both Coltrane’s per­son­al progress and the inter­ac­tive con­sis­ten­cy and son­ic details the Clas­sic Quar­tet had firm­ly estab­lished as their col­lec­tive sig­na­ture.”

Fans of Groulx’s film will have heard 10 min­utes of Blue World in the film, which is all the direc­tor end­ed up using of the 37-minute ses­sion, though the movie’s first view­ers may not have known exact­ly what they were hear­ing in the title track, whose “method­i­cal yet unscript­ed push into dif­fer­ent tonal cen­ters,” writes Chi­nen, express­es “a form of incan­ta­to­ry fer­vor” as a pre­lude to A Love Supreme. This posthu­mous release presages Coltrane’s modal forms mov­ing into what is arguably the great­est, and most per­son­al, work of his career.

The album also joins the dis­tin­guished com­pa­ny of jazz sound­tracks for French New Wave films, like the Miles Davis-scored Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, direct­ed by Louis Malle. Inspired by Godard and his jazz-lov­ing con­tem­po­raries, Groulx’s very New Wave style can be seen in the excerpts from Le Chat dans le sac in the video at the top (and in the full film here). Coltrane’s rest­less ener­gy con­tin­ues to sur­prise and inspire over fifty years after his death, show­ing, per­haps, that there real­ly “is nev­er any end,” as he told Nat Hentoff around the time of Blue World’s record­ing. “There are always new sounds to imag­ine; new feel­ings to get at” in his time­less sound.

Look for Blue World from Impulse! records on Sep­tem­ber 27th. See a full track­list, cour­tesy of Spin, below.

01 Naima (Take 1)
02 Vil­lage Blues (Take 2)
03 Blue World
04 Vil­lage Blues (Take 1)
05 Vil­lage Blues (Take 3)
06 Like Son­ny
07 Trane­ing In
08 Naima (Take 2)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream Online the Com­plete “Lost” John Coltrane Album, Both Direc­tions at Once

Jazz Decon­struct­ed: What Makes John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” So Ground­break­ing and Rad­i­cal?

Watch Miles Davis Impro­vise Music for Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

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

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Cy Kuckenbaker’s Time Collapse Videos Let You See Daily Life As You’ve Never Seen It Before

in Photography, Random, Software, Technology, Travel | August 19th, 2019

There are apps to track the num­ber of dai­ly min­utes you habit­u­al­ly frit­ter away on social media, but can your smart­phone help you get a han­dle on the auto­mo­tive col­or pref­er­ences of mid­day San Diego dri­vers?

Or the num­ber of planes land­ing at San Diego Inter­na­tion­al Air­port on the day after Thanks­giv­ing?

Or, for that mat­ter, the traf­fic pat­terns of non-pro­fes­sion­al surfers hop­ing to catch a wave at at Point Loma?

No, but film­mak­er Cy Kuck­en­bak­er can.

His “time col­lapse” videos stemmed from a desire to get to know the city in which he lives with the same vig­or he brought to bear as a Peace Corps vol­un­teer in his 20s, explor­ing Iraq, Africa, and East­ern Europe.

This impulse might lead oth­ers to join a club, take a class, or check out restau­rants in an unfa­mil­iar neigh­bor­hood.

For Kuck­en­bak­er, it means set­ting up his cam­era for a fixed shot, uncer­tain if his exper­i­ment will even work, then spend­ing hours and hours in the edit­ing room, remov­ing the time between events with­out alter­ing the speed of his sub­jects.

It’s a form that requires a lot of patience on the part of its cre­ator.

He esti­mates that he spent 2 hours edit­ing for every sec­ond of Mid­day Traf­fic Time Col­lapsed and Reor­ga­nized by Col­or: San Diego Study #3, above, pro­vid­ing him ample time to lis­ten to the fol­low­ing audio­books (get your free Audi­ble tri­al here):

Rev­o­lu­tion 1989 by Vic­tor Sebestyen

How Music Works by David Byrne

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Hen­ry Dana

Super Sad True Love Sto­ry by Gary Shteyn­gart

1493 by Charles Mann

1491 by Charles Mann

With the Old Breed by E. Sledge

The Emper­or of Mal­adies by Sid­dhartha Mukher­jee

The Unbear­able Light­ness of Being by Milan Kun­dera

Each car was keyed out of the orig­i­nal shot, then ranked and rein­sert­ed based on col­or. 28 of the raw footage’s 462 didn’t make the cut due to errat­ic shape or move­ment. See if you can spot them in the extreme­ly ordi­nary-look­ing orig­i­nal footage, below. Extra cred­it for spot­ting the emp­ty Gatorade bot­tle that made it into every frame of the com­pres­sion:

His stud­ies may not reveal much about his home city to the aver­age tourist, but Kuck­en­bak­er him­self is able to inter­pret the num­bers in ways that go beyond mere quan­ti­ty and aver­ages, such as San Die­gans’ appar­ent vehic­u­lar col­or pref­er­ence:

Nation­al­ly, red is a more pop­u­lar col­or than blue. But not San Diego. San Diego, there’s more blue than red, so it’s like, you know, an out­lier. And I thought about that for a while and it’s like, per­son­al­ly, the way I under­stand the city, that makes sense to me. The sort of tone of the city, the atti­tude of the city—it’s an ocean city. I can see why peo­ple would think, “Well, I live in San Diego. Why would I have a red… I want a blue car!”

His Point Loma com­pres­sion boiled an hour’s surf­ing down to 2 min­utes and 15 sec­onds that KPBS’ David Wag­n­er her­ald­ed as “a surfer­’s wildest dream come true, a fan­ta­sy break where per­fect waves roll in one after anoth­er like clock­work, no lulls in between.”

The raw footage and Kuckenbaker’s doc­u­men­ta­tion of the After Effects tech­nique used to com­pos­ite the waves speaks to a slight­ly more tedious real­i­ty. No word on what audio books got him through this one, though he goes into the tech­ni­cal specs and quotes Joseph Con­rad on his blog.

The com­pres­sion of the near­ly 70 arriv­ing Black Fri­day flights that kicked off Kuckenbaker’s San Diego-based time col­laps­es in 2012 feels a bit mar­tial, espe­cial­ly if Ride of the Valkyries just hap­pens to be play­ing in the back­ground. It makes me wor­ry for San Diego, and also wish for a Kuck­en­bak­er to come col­lapse time in my town.

See more of Cy Kuckenbaker’s Time Col­lapse videos here.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Becom­ing: A Short Time­lapse Film Shows a Sin­gle Cell Mor­ph­ing Into a Com­plete, Com­plex Liv­ing Organ­ism

The Milky Way in Time-Lapse Video

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Aldous Huxley Trips on Acid; Talks About Cats & the Secret of Life (1962)

in History, Psychology | August 19th, 2019

Dystopia and drugs: these are the two con­cepts most com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Aldous Hux­ley, who wrote Brave New World and, decades lat­er, advo­cat­ed the mind-expand­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. The sociopo­lit­i­cal real­i­ties of the 21st cen­tu­ry have prompt­ed us to return to and more ful­ly under­stand what Hux­ley was try­ing to tell us with his nov­el­is­tic vision of a soci­ety engi­neered and auto­mat­ed into total sub­mis­sion. But how many of us real­ly under­stand his per­spec­tive on what the drugs did for his think­ing?

Hux­ley may have writ­ten elo­quent­ly on the sub­ject, most pop­u­lar­ly in 1954’s The Doors of Per­cep­tion, but in the audio clip above we can hear some of that think­ing straight from the vision­ary’s mouth. “This is a record­ing of Aldous Hux­ley on 100 μg of LSD, made on Decem­ber 23 1962,” writes the uploader, “gonzo philoso­pher” Jules Evans. “The trip sit­ter is his wife, Lau­ra Archera Hux­ley.” A trip sit­ter, for the unini­ti­at­ed, is like the des­ig­nat­ed dri­ver of a psy­che­del­ic jour­ney, a com­pan­ion who stays on the ground to look out for the one who gets high. (This same wife would, the fol­low­ing year, take Hux­ley on his final trip, the one that would take him all the way out of this world.)

Hux­ley “dis­cuss­es the secret of life — to be one­self and at the same time ‘iden­ti­cal with the divine.’ And he won­ders about the val­ue of blast­ing off into the stratos­phere, like Tim­o­thy Leary.” Leary, a fel­low cham­pi­on of psy­che­delics, began his career as a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist at Har­vard and end­ed up ded­i­cat­ing his life to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of LSD, along the way pop­u­lar­iz­ing the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out.” “Tim is alright,” says the trip­ping Hux­ley. “He’s just sort of… an Irish­man, bang­ing around, but I think he’s doing a lot of good.” But in Hux­ley’s view, Leary also “just wants to be an ass. We all have to be for­giv­en for some­thing. My God, will you for­give me!”

In just three min­utes drawn from a longer record­ing stored at UCLA’s Hux­ley archive, the writer makes a vari­ety of oth­er obser­va­tions as well. These include the desire of drug-users to “take hol­i­days from them­selves,” the val­ue of psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences show­ing peo­ple that “they don’t have to always live in this com­plete­ly con­di­tioned way,” and the chal­lenge of hav­ing to be “com­plete­ly boxed up in one­self as that cat is” — as he ges­tures, pre­sum­ably, toward a house­hold pet — “at the same time one has to be com­plete­ly iden­ti­cal with God!” LSD has report­ed­ly led some of its users to com­mu­nion with the divine, but on this trip Hux­ley set­tles for try­ing to com­mune with the feline. After a brief attempt at speak­ing the cat’s own lan­guage, he returns to Eng­lish to make a broad­er point about the human and ani­mal con­di­tion: “Luck­i­ly he does­n’t have our prob­lems. But he has his own.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Woman Takes LSD in 1956: “I’ve Nev­er Seen Such Infi­nite Beau­ty in All My Life,” “I Wish I Could Talk in Tech­ni­col­or”

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

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.

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The Books on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List (2019)

in Books | August 19th, 2019

Pho­to by Pete Souza via obamawhitehouse.archive.gov

As is his cus­tom, Barack Oba­ma post­ed on Face­book his sum­mer read­ing list, a mix of nov­els, mem­oirs, and instruc­tive non-fic­tion. If you haven’t achieved the per­fect state of tsun­doku, you can get a few new reads for the wan­ing days of sum­mer. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma writes:

It’s August, so I want­ed to let you know about a few books I’ve been read­ing this sum­mer, in case you’re look­ing for some sug­ges­tions. To start, you can’t go wrong by read­ing or re-read­ing the col­lect­ed works of Toni Mor­ri­son. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, every­thing else — they’re tran­scen­dent, all of them. You’ll be glad you read them. And while I’m at it, here are a few more titles you might want to explore:

Some­times dif­fi­cult to swal­low, The Nick­el Boys by Col­son White­head is a nec­es­sary read, detail­ing the way Jim Crow and mass incar­cer­a­tion tore apart lives and wrought con­se­quences that rip­ple into today.

Exha­la­tion by Ted Chi­ang is a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that will make you think, grap­ple with big ques­tions, and feel more human. The best kind of sci­ence fic­tion.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel­’s epic fic­tion­al­ized look at Thomas Cromwell’s rise to pow­er, came out in 2009, but I was a lit­tle busy back then, so I missed it. Still great today.

Haru­ki Murakami’s Men With­out Women exam­ines what hap­pens to char­ac­ters with­out impor­tant women in their lives; it’ll move you and con­fuse you and some­times leave you with more ques­tions than answers.

Amer­i­can Spy by Lau­ren Wilkin­son is a whole lot more than just a spy thriller, wrap­ping togeth­er the ties of fam­i­ly, of love, and of coun­try.

The Shal­lows by Nicholas Carr came out a few years ago, but its argu­ments on the internet’s impact on our brains, our lives, and our com­mu­ni­ties are still wor­thy of reflec­tion, which is some­thing we all could use a lit­tle more of in this age.

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren is a beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten mem­oir about the life of a woman in sci­ence, a bril­liant friend­ship, and the pro­fun­di­ty of trees. Ter­rif­ic.

Inland by Téa Obre­ht just came out yes­ter­day, so I won’t spoil any­thing. But those of you who’ve been wait­ing for Obreht’s next nov­el won’t be dis­ap­point­ed.

You’ll get a bet­ter sense of the com­plex­i­ty and redemp­tion with­in the Amer­i­can immi­grant sto­ry with Dinaw Mengestu’s nov­el, How to Read the Air.

Maid by Stephanie Land is a sin­gle mother’s per­son­al, unflinch­ing look at America’s class divide, a descrip­tion of the tightrope many fam­i­lies walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dig­ni­ty of all work.

POTUS’ pre­vi­ous lists of rec­om­mend­ed books can be found in the Relat­eds below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Barack Oba­ma Shares a List of Enlight­en­ing Books Worth Read­ing

The 5 Books on Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2016 Sum­mer Read­ing List

A Free POTUS Sum­mer Playlist: Pres. Oba­ma Curates 39 Songs for a Sum­mer Day

The Books on Barack Obama’s Sum­mer Read­ing List: Naipaul, Ondaat­je & More

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