David Lynch Explains How Simple Daily Habits Enhance His Creativity

in Creativity, Film, Life | November 20th, 2020

At first glance, Madame Bovary and Blue Vel­vet would seem to have lit­tle in com­mon, as would their cre­ators. But the artis­tic life Gus­tave Flaubert led and the one David Lynch now leads share a basic pre­cept: “Be reg­u­lar and order­ly in your life,” as the for­mer once put it, “so that you may be vio­lent and orig­i­nal in your work.” Lynch has spo­ken about his ways as an artis­tic crea­ture of habit many times over the years, as demon­strat­ed by the inter­view clip com­pi­la­tion above. “Some peo­ple have heard the sto­ry that I went to Bob’s Big Boy for sev­en years every day at 2:30 and had the same thing,” he told Jay Leno in 1992. “That was my longest habit pat­tern, I think.”

Lynch’s reg­u­lar­i­ty at that Los Ange­les burg­er joint is just one of the rou­tines that has struc­tured his exis­tence. “I like habit­u­al behav­ior because it’s a known fac­tor,” he says, “and then your mind is free to think about oth­er things.” When life has an order, he lat­er told Char­lie Rose, “then you’re free to men­tal­ly go off any place. You’ve got a safe sort of foun­da­tion, and a place to spring off from.”

More recent­ly, on a phone Q&A for the David Lynch Foun­da­tion, the auteur described his rou­tine thus: “I wake up and I brush my teeth and I use the bath­room. Then I have a cap­puc­ci­no and some cig­a­rettes. Then I medi­ate, and then I have either some amrit nec­tar or a small smooth­ie with pro­tein pow­der and blue­ber­ries and peach­es. And then I go to work.”

How­ev­er con­tra­dic­to­ry they may seem, Lynch’s long-stand­ing twin loves of smok­ing and med­i­ta­tion both express them­selves as rou­tine actions. And if the back­grounds of his Youtube videos — includ­ing his lit­tle-vary­ing dai­ly Los Ange­les weath­er reports — are any­thing to go by, he per­forms them in the kind of unclut­tered phys­i­cal space he’s long pre­ferred: “The pur­er the envi­ron­ment,” as he puts it, “the more fan­tas­tic the inte­ri­or world can be.” His 1980s and 90s com­ic strip The Angri­est Dog in the World took place in such an envi­ron­ment, its near­ly unchang­ing visu­als and increas­ing­ly bizarre text an artis­tic cor­rel­a­tive to his ideas about dai­ly life and the imag­i­na­tion. But what­ev­er their inter­est in his meth­ods, Lynch’s fans want to know one thing above all: what the imag­i­na­tion of this least angry of all artists will bring forth next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

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

David Lynch Cre­ates Dai­ly Weath­er Reports for Los Ange­les: How the Film­mak­er Pass­es Time in Quar­an­tine

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Lou Reed Concert Film Berlin Streaming Free Online for the Next Week

in Film, Music, Theatre | November 20th, 2020

Last laughs can be sweet, and accord­ing to music jour­nal­ist, Antho­ny DeCur­tis, his friend, the late Lou Reed, “rev­eled” in the crit­i­cal drub­bing that greet­ed his 3rd solo album, 1973’s Berlin.

Not imme­di­ate­ly, how­ev­er.

Berlin, which fol­lowed hard on the heels of Reed’s wide­ly adored Trans­former, had a painful, pro­tract­ed deliv­ery.

This was due in part due to RCA execs get­ting cold feet about releas­ing Reed’s grim con­cept record as a dou­ble album. This neces­si­tat­ed a lot of prun­ing, a week before dead­line.

Pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin, who had plant­ed the idea for a con­cept album based on a track from Reed’s epony­mous first solo effort, was detox­ing in the hos­pi­tal, and thus not present for the final mas­ter­ing.

But much of the hell lead­ing to Berlin’s release was a hell of Reed’s own mak­ing.

His depen­dence on drugs and alco­hol ham­pered the writ­ing process, as per Reed’s first wife, Bet­tye Kro­n­stad, who filed for divorce mid­way through the process.

If you want a glimpse of what that marriage’s final days might have been like, look to Berlin.

Kro­n­stad was dis­tressed to find many pri­vate details from their rela­tion­ship on dis­play in the trag­ic rock opera. There was some fic­tion­al­iza­tion, but Reed also put his thumb on the scales when it suit­ed him, in songs like “The Kids,” which recast Kronstad’s late moth­er in a par­tic­u­lar­ly unfair way.

Reed once took a shot at the album’s crit­i­cal recep­tion, sug­gest­ing that peo­ple didn’t like it because its depic­tion of a mis­er­able cou­ple, whose union is marred by infi­deli­ty, domes­tic abuse, addic­tion, and sui­cide, was “too real”:

It’s not like a TV pro­gram where all the bad things that hap­pen to peo­ple are tol­er­a­ble. Life isn’t like that. And nei­ther is the album.

Some­times he bluffed:

I have nev­er been inter­est­ed in crit­i­cal recep­tions, decep­tions, hel­los, good­byes, huz­zahs, hur­rahs. I don’t read them, so I don’t care.

At oth­er times, he raged:

There are peo­ple I’ll nev­er for­give for the way they fucked me over with Berlin. The way that album was over­looked was the biggest dis­ap­point­ment I ever faced.

In a more vul­ner­a­ble mood, he admit­ted:

Berlin was a big flop and it made me very sad. The way that album was over­looked was prob­a­bly the biggest dis­ap­point­ment I ever faced. I pulled the blinds shut at that point, and they’ve remained closed.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, his ear­ly plans for stag­ing a the­atri­cal com­pan­ion piece to the album, with pos­si­ble par­tic­i­pa­tion by Andy Warhol, were shelved.

34 years lat­er…

Cue direc­tor Julian Schn­abel, the Brook­lyn Youth Cho­rus, and St. Ann’s Ware­house, the New York City venue that had pre­vi­ous­ly co-com­mis­sioned Songs for Drel­la, a musi­cal Warhol trib­ute by Reed and John Cale.

In 2006, Reed took cen­ter­stage in Brook­lyn for a 5‑night the­atri­cal run of Berlin that also fea­tured a 35-piece ensem­ble, orig­i­nal gui­tarist Steve Hunter, and dreamy videos by the director’s daugh­ter, Lola, star­ring Emmanuelle Seign­er as an abstract sketch of the doomed pro­tag­o­nist, Car­o­line.

The result­ing con­cert film, which St. Ann’s Ware­house is stream­ing for free through Novem­ber 29, proved far more pop­u­lar with crit­ics than the 1973 record had been. (Three years pri­or to the St Ann’s stag­ing, Rolling Stone upgrad­ed its orig­i­nal opin­ion of the album from career end­ing dis­as­ter to 344th Great­est Album of All Time.)

Stephen Holden’s glow­ing New York Times review of the film made mul­ti­ple men­tion of angels and demons, as is per­haps to be expect­ed when a work com­bines Lou Reed, a Sid and Nan­cy-ish romance, a children’s choir, and the ethe­re­al voice of Anohni, late of Antony and the John­sons.

Read­ers, see for your­self, and let us know—did RCA’s pro­mo­tion­al poster for the orig­i­nal album get some­thing right near­ly 50 years ago? Is this “a film for the ears?”

Lis­ten to the orig­i­nal 1973 album and the live con­cert ver­sion at St. Ann’s for free on Spo­ti­fy.

Stream Julian Schnabel’s Lou Reed’s Berlin, Live at St. Ann’s Ware­house here through Novem­ber 29.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schn­abel Films It (2006)

Lou Reed’s Mix­tape for Andy Warhol Dis­cov­ered by Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor: Fea­tures 12 Pre­vi­ous­ly Unre­leased Songs

Lou Reed Cre­ates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686)

in Art, Science | November 20th, 2020

The peri­od called the Enlight­en­ment pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion in which one sense, vision, became priv­i­leged above all oth­ers. As a result, Sachiko Kusukawa writes at The Roy­al Soci­ety Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Sci­ence, “sci­ence is supreme­ly visu­al. Indeed, one might say, exces­sive­ly so.” Kusukawa sit­u­ates Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist and illus­tra­tor Richard Waller at the begin­ning of her his­to­ry about how sight came to dom­i­nate, and Sarah Lowen­gard places Waller’s col­or chart, pre­sent­ed at the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1686, at a for­ma­tive moment in “the cre­ation of col­or in Eigh­teenth-Cen­tu­ry Europe.”

That’s not to say, of course, that col­or didn’t exist before charts like Waller’s, but it did­n’t exist in neat tax­onomies that divid­ed col­or dis­crete­ly, named and cat­e­go­rized it, and mapped the nat­ur­al world by means of col­or the­o­ry. Waller’s “‘Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors Both Mixt and Sim­ple’ would per­mit unam­bigu­ous descrip­tions of the col­ors of nat­ur­al bod­ies. To describe a plant, for exam­ple, one could com­pare it to the chart and use the names found there to iden­ti­fy the col­ors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions of the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he sug­gest­ed.”

The nat­u­ral­ist approach to col­or would inform the arti­fi­cial cre­ation of col­or, help­ing “man­u­fac­tur­ers to pro­duce con­sis­tent dyes and paints,” notes the Smith­son­ian Libraries. Waller’s sys­tem was not pre­cise enough for the task, but many oth­ers, includ­ing board game pio­neer Mil­ton Bradley, picked up his work and refined it, pro­duc­ing not only sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al col­or guides, but also ped­a­go­gies like Bradley’s Ele­men­tary Col­or text­book for chil­dren. Kei­th Moore, Head of Library & Infor­ma­tion Ser­vices at the Roy­al Soci­ety, traces Waller’s col­or dots through the arts, “from the low art Ben-Day dots in the vin­tage com­ic books I used to read as a child to the high art pointil­lism and divi­sion­ism pio­neered by Georges Seu­rat.”

Dozens of col­or sys­tems, wheels, charts, and tables appeared over the next few hun­dred years, from the elab­o­rate to the very sim­ple. All of them have encoun­tered the same basic issue, name­ly the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of visu­al per­cep­tion. “Waller’s visu­al sys­tem exhibits the same con­cep­tu­al prob­lem… that plagued near­ly all eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems. Which col­ors can be includ­ed and what is their ‘cor­rect’ order? The answer was always tem­pered by avail­able col­or­ing mate­ri­als and choice of media.” As more pig­ments became avail­able, so too did more col­ors in the col­or charts.

Is the mak­ing of col­or clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems more of a sci­ence or an art? It depends, per­haps, on what they’re used for, but “col­or remains elu­sive to sci­en­tists and col­or experts,” the Smith­son­ian points out, over 400 years after Waller’s chart. Since then, how­ev­er, the lan­guage of col­or has evolved, as he envi­sioned, into a prac­ti­cal and poet­ic syn­tax and vocab­u­lary.

See a larg­er ver­sion of the chart here and read about it in detail in Lowen­gard’s excel­lent arti­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

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

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How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

in History, Photography | November 19th, 2020

Errol Mor­ris did­n’t go all the way to the Crimean Penin­su­la just because of a sen­tence writ­ten by Susan Son­tag. “No,” he once explained to a friend, “it was actu­al­ly two sen­tences.” Found in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, Son­tag’s late book-length essay on war pho­tog­ra­phy, these lines deal with the fact that “many of the canon­i­cal images of ear­ly war pho­tog­ra­phy turn out to have been staged, or to have had their sub­jects tam­pered with.” Take Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death, pio­neer­ing war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Roger Fen­ton’s famous­ly des­o­late 1855 image from the Crimean War. Fen­ton actu­al­ly shot this land­scape twice: in one pic­ture, “can­non­balls are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before tak­ing the sec­ond pic­ture — the one that is always repro­duced — he over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself.”

Or did he? Mor­ris had his doubts — and, as the mak­er of such acclaimed doc­u­men­taries on the nature of truth and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion as The Thin Blue Line and Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure and the author of the book Believ­ing is See­ing: Obser­va­tions on the Mys­ter­ies of Pho­tog­ra­phy — he clear­ly has an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in the sub­ject.

“I spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time look­ing at the two pho­tographs and think­ing about the two sen­tences,” Mor­ris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Son­tag know that Fen­ton altered the land­scape or, for that mat­ter, ‘over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself?’ ” How, for that mat­ter, “did Son­tag know the sequence of the pho­tographs? How did she know which pho­to­graph came first?”

Unable to turn up any per­sua­sive evi­dence, Mor­ris launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of his own, inter­view­ing experts, dig­ging into Fen­ton’s let­ters, and even­tu­al­ly mak­ing his way to the Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death itself (not to be con­fused with the oth­er, bet­ter-known val­ley across which Ten­nyson’s Light Brigade charged). All of this Mor­ris did in the name of find­ing out which came first, the pho­to with the can­non­balls beside the road, or the one with the can­non­balls on the road. You can hear him dis­cuss this increas­ing­ly obses­sive quest for the truth in the video above from Vox’s Dark­room, the series that pre­vi­ous­ly gave us a break­down of the very first faked pho­to­graph. But then, as this and oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions by Mor­ris into the rela­tion­ship between images, lan­guage, and real­i­ty have under­scored, there is no such thing as a true pho­to­graph.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris: Two Essen­tial Truths About Pho­tog­ra­phy

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

How the “First Pho­to­jour­nal­ist,” Math­ew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Pho­tos from the Civ­il War

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series, First Per­son, Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man

in Art, History | November 19th, 2020

da vinci todo list

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, pret­ty dull, filled with those quo­tid­i­an lit­tle tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laun­dry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local mar­ket.

Leonar­do Da Vin­ci was, how­ev­er, no ordi­nary per­son. And his to-do lists were any­thing but dull.

Da Vin­ci would car­ry around a note­book, where he would write and draw any­thing that moved him. “It is use­ful,” Leonar­do once wrote, to “con­stant­ly observe, note, and con­sid­er.” Buried in one of these books, dat­ing back to around the 1490s, is a to-do list. And what a to-do list.

NPR’s Robert Krul­wich had it direct­ly trans­lat­ed. And while all of the list might not be imme­di­ate­ly clear, remem­ber that Da Vin­ci nev­er intend­ed for it to be read by web surfers 500  years in the future.

[Cal­cu­late] the mea­sure­ment of Milan and Sub­urbs

[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its church­es, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cor­du­sio

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of Corte Vec­chio (the court­yard in the duke’s palace).

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of the castel­lo (the duke’s palace itself)

Get the mas­ter of arith­metic to show you how to square a tri­an­gle.

Get Mess­er Fazio (a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine and law in Pavia) to show you about pro­por­tion.

Get the Brera Fri­ar (at the Bene­dic­tine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Pon­deribus (a medieval text on mechan­ics)

[Talk to] Gian­ni­no, the Bom­bardier, re. the means by which the tow­er of Fer­rara is walled with­out loop­holes (no one real­ly knows what Da Vin­ci meant by this)

Ask Benedet­to Poti­nari (A Flo­ren­tine Mer­chant) by what means they go on ice in Flan­ders

Draw Milan

Ask Mae­stro Anto­nio how mor­tars are posi­tioned on bas­tions by day or night.

[Exam­ine] the Cross­bow of Mas­tro Gian­net­to

Find a mas­ter of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lom­bard man­ner

[Ask about] the mea­sure­ment of the sun promised me by Mae­stro Gio­van­ni Francese

Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the math­e­mat­ic.

You can just feel Da Vinci’s vora­cious curios­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al rest­less­ness. Note how many of the entries are about get­ting an expert to teach him some­thing, be it math­e­mat­ics, physics or astron­o­my. Also who casu­al­ly lists “draw Milan” as an ambi­tion?

Lat­er to-do lists, dat­ing around 1510, seemed to focus on Da Vinci’s grow­ing fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my. In a note­book filled with beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered draw­ings of bones and vis­cera, he rat­tles off more tasks that need to get done. Things like get a skull, describe the jaw of a croc­o­dile and tongue of a wood­peck­er, assess a corpse using his fin­ger as a unit of mea­sure­ment.

On that same page, he lists what he con­sid­ers to be impor­tant qual­i­ties of an anatom­i­cal draughts­man. A firm com­mand of per­spec­tive and a knowl­edge of the inner work­ings of the body are key. So is hav­ing a strong stom­ach.

You can see a page of Da Vinci’s note­book above but be warned. Even if you are con­ver­sant in 16th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian, Da Vin­ci wrote every­thing in mir­ror script.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2014.

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

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thomas Edison’s Huge­ly Ambi­tious “To-Do” List from 1888

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imag­ined by Leonar­do da Vin­ci in 1502— and Prove That It Actu­al­ly Works

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

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The Beautiful Video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” Featuring 9,000 Hand-Drawn Frames of Animation

in Animation, Music | November 19th, 2020

The ani­mat­ed video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yel­low Dress” opens on a sax­o­phon­ist with a famil­iar story—one so well-known to his band­mates they can read it on his face. But then the per­spec­tive shifts, and we fol­low instead the woman (or “girl”) of his woes, as she comes to see him play, gets ogled and turned into a fan­ta­sy by the men in the club, pur­sues the res­i­dent lothario, crush­ing the hearts of them all, includ­ing the sax­o­phon­ist, who plays his blues instead of col­laps­ing into a drink.

At least that seems to be the sto­ry, a typ­i­cal nightlife scene ren­dered in a very dynam­ic, atyp­i­cal way. The video, from a track off Gilmour’s 2015 album Rat­tle that Lock, was direct­ed by Dan­ny Mad­den for Ornana Films, who write, “The music video is made of about 9,000 frames of ani­ma­tion that were touched by sev­er­al hands to get the lay­ered con­tours, vibrant col­ors, and exag­ger­at­ed char­ac­ter design of old French Lith­o­graph posters. We want­ed to cre­ate a mov­ing ver­sion of that look, as if each frame had all the lay­ers stamped on the page.”

An incred­i­ble amount of inten­sive artis­tic labor went into cre­at­ing the boozy, swirling effects in each scene. “We ani­mat­ed with pen­cil, then con­tour lines were gone over with a brush tip mark­er. We used gouache to get nice life in the vary­ing brush­strokes, then we lay­ered the con­tours over the paint lay­er in the com­posit­ing step so that the colours would do inter­est­ing things when they ran togeth­er.” Maybe these images could be recre­at­ed con­vinc­ing­ly with dig­i­tal effects… but I sus­pect not.

The song “looks back at [Gilmour’s] ear­li­est musi­cal influ­ence,” writes a Guardian review of the Rat­tle that Lock. If so, it’s a nascent influ­ence that did not emerge often in his Pink Floyd play­ing, though the song may also indi­rect­ly pay trib­ute to the jazz-trained Richard Wright, memo­ri­al­ized else­where on the album. You can see sev­er­al more scenes from this extra­or­di­nary video at Dezeen.

via Laugh­ing Squid 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

David Gilmour Talks About the Mys­ter­ies of His Famous Gui­tar Tone

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Music Video from 1979

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

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Discover the Cyanometer, the Device Invented in 1789 Just to Measure the Blueness of the Sky

in Design, Science | November 18th, 2020

Eng­lish astronomer and physi­cist James Jeans’ 1931 essay “Why the Sky is Blue” has become a clas­sic of con­cise expos­i­to­ry writ­ing since it was first pub­lished in a series of talks. In only four para­graphs and one strik­ing­ly detailed, yet sim­ple anal­o­gy, Jeans gave mil­lions of stu­dents a grasp of celes­tial blue­ness in prose that does not sub­sti­tute nature’s poet­ry for sci­en­tif­ic jar­gon and dia­grams.

Over a hun­dred years ear­li­er, anoth­er sci­en­tist cre­at­ed a sim­i­lar­ly poet­ic device; in this case, one which attempt­ed to depict how the sky is blue. Swiss physi­cist Horace Béné­dict de Saus­sure’s 1789 Cyanome­ter, “a cir­cle of paper swatch­es dyed in increas­ing­ly deep blues, shad­ing from white to black,” Sarah Laskow writes at Atlas Obscu­ra, “includ­ed 52 blues… in its most advanced iter­a­tion,” intend­ed to show “how the col­or of the sky changed with ele­va­tion.”

Saussure’s fas­ci­na­tion with the blue­ness of the sky began when he was a young stu­dent and trav­eled to the base of Mont Blanc. Over­awed by the sum­mit, he dreamt of climb­ing it, but instead used his fam­i­ly’s wealth to offer a reward to the first per­son who could. Twen­ty-sev­en years lat­er, Saus­sure him­self would ascend to the top, in 1786, car­ry­ing with him “pieces of paper col­ored dif­fer­ent shades of blue, to hold up against the sky and match its col­or.”

Saus­sure was tak­en with a phe­nom­e­non report­ed by moun­taineers: as one climbs high­er, the sky turns a deep­er shade of blue. He began to for­mu­late a hypoth­e­sis, the Roy­al Soci­ety of Chem­istry Explains:

Armed with his tools and a small chem­istry set, he trekked round the val­leys and beyond. As his trips car­ried him ever high­er, he puz­zled about the colour of the sky. Local leg­end had it that if one climbed high enough it turned black and one would see, or even fall into, the void — such ter­rors kept ordi­nary men away from the peaks. But to Saus­sure, the blue colour was an opti­cal effect. And because on some days the blue of the sky fad­ed imper­cep­ti­bly into the white of the clouds, Saus­sure con­clud­ed that the colour must indi­cate its mois­ture con­tent. 

At the top of Mont Blanc, the physi­cist mea­sured what he deemed “a blue of the 39th degree.” The num­ber meant lit­tle to any­one but him. “Upon its inven­tion, the cyanome­ter rather quick­ly fell into dis­use,” as Maria Gon­za­lez de Leon points out. “After all, very lit­tle sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion was giv­en.”

The tool did, how­ev­er, accom­pa­ny the famed geo­g­ra­ph­er Alexan­der von Hum­boldt across the Atlantic, “to the Caribbean, the Canary Islands, and South Amer­i­ca,” writes Laskow, where Hum­boldt “set a new record, at the 46th degree of blue, for the dark­est sky ever mea­sured” on the sum­mit of the Andean moun­tain Chimb­o­ra­zo. This would be one of the only notable uses of the poet­ic device. “When the true cause of the sky’s blue­ness, the scat­ter­ing of light, was dis­cov­ered decades lat­er, in the 1860s, Saussure’s cir­cle of blue had already fall­en into obscu­ri­ty.”

via Messy­Nessy/Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete Dig­i­tal Scan

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

A Vision­ary 115-Year-Old Col­or The­o­ry Man­u­al Returns to Print: Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s Col­or Prob­lems

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

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Experience Blade Runner Like You Never Have Before Through a Feature-Length Remastered Soundtrack

in Film, History, Music | November 18th, 2020

There is no one Blade Run­ner. Rid­ley Scot­t’s influ­en­tial “neo-noir” has appeared in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ver­sions over the past 38 years, both offi­cial — the “direc­tor’s cut,” the “final cut,” and lest we for­get, the now-derid­ed first the­atri­cal cut — and unof­fi­cial. So has Blade Run­ner’s sound­track, the first offi­cial release of which lagged the film by about a dozen years, and even then did­n’t include all the music so inte­gral to the unprece­dent­ed aes­thet­ic rich­ness of the futur­is­tic set­ting. Then, about a dozen more years lat­er, fol­lowed an expand­ed sound­track album, which for many fans still proved unsat­is­fy­ing. In the name of com­plete­ness and son­ic fideli­ty, at least five wide­ly dis­trib­uted bootlegs have attempt­ed to fill the gap.

Now, in our 21st-cen­tu­ry age of stream­ing, we have fan-made “remas­ters” of the Blade Run­ner sound­track like the above, the 5.7‑million-times-viewed work of a user called Greendragon861. Run­ning just over one hour and 52 min­utes — near­ly the length of the var­i­ous cuts of Blade Run­ner itself — this son­ic expe­ri­ence includes, of course, the well-known elec­tron­ic pieces by com­pos­er Van­ge­lis, those that come right to mind when you envi­sion the flame-belch­ing indus­tri­al land­scape of 21st-cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les or a police “spin­ner” tak­ing to the skies. But it also incor­po­rates back­ground music, sound effects, and even snatch­es of dia­logue from the movie. The result feels a great deal like watch­ing Blade Run­ner with­out actu­al­ly watch­ing Blade Run­ner.

Despite ini­tial­ly flop­ping, at least in the West, Blade Run­ner has exert­ed an enor­mous influ­ence on oth­er art and media — indeed, on the way human­i­ty envi­sions the future — and one still spread­ing near­ly four decades lat­er. The film seems unsur­pass­able in that regard, an achieve­ment cred­itable to a range of cre­ators: direc­tor Rid­ley Scott, of course; but also Philip K. Dick, author of its source mate­r­i­al; the late Syd Mead, who as a “visu­al futur­ist” gave focus to the world’s look and feel; mod­el mas­ter Dou­glas Trum­bull, thanks in part to whom its built and mechan­i­cal envi­ron­ment has aged so well. The list goes on, and it should­n’t fail to include Van­ge­lis as well as every­one else respon­si­ble for this intri­cate sound­scape, with­out which Blade Run­ner would­n’t be Blade Run­ner, no mat­ter the cut.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Blade Run­ner Cap­tured the Imag­i­na­tion of a Gen­er­a­tion of Elec­tron­ic Musi­cians

Sean Con­nery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Itha­ca,” Set to the Music of Van­ge­lis

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

Stream 72 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopi­an Future

Drone Footage of San Fran­cis­co Set to the Music of Blade Run­ner 2049

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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