Written by Ron Grainer, and then famously arranged and recorded by Delia Derbyshire in 1963, the Doctor Who theme song has been adapted and covered many times, and even referenced by Pink Floyd. In the hands of comedian Bill Bailey, the song comes out a little differently–a little like a Belgian Jacques Brel-esque jazz creation. This recording of “Docteur Qui” apparently comes from the DVD Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra. Enjoy…
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Kurt Vonnegut’s life was not without its ironies. Fighting in World War II, that descendant of a long line of German immigrants in the United States found himself imprisoned in Dresden just when it was devastated by Allied firebombing. To understand the relevance of this experience to his literary work, one need only know that his captors made him live in a slaughterhouse. It’s not surprising that anti-war sentiments would surface again and again in the books he wrote after coming home. But one would hardly expect him to have spent his time away from the writing desk on a military-themed board game.
“After releasing his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, to positive reviews and poor sales, he needed other streams of income to support his growing family,” writes the New York Times’ Julia Carmel of the young Vonnegut. Of all his endeavors — which included public relations, a car dealership and a very brief stint at Sports Illustrated — he was most passionate about designing a board game called General Headquarters.” Readers of Vonnegut’s novels might expect a sardonically didactic object lesson on the futility of war, but in fact, “GHQ is a fast-paced two-player battle game in which each player maneuvers military units — infantry, armored vehicles, artillery and an airborne regiment — to capture the other player’s headquarters.”
Vonnegut never did manage to sell the game, which has only just come available for purchase at Barnes & Noble stores. Its long-delayed production was the project of a tabletop game designer called Geoff Engelstein, who ran across a brief mention of GHQ that eventually inspired him to inquire about the game’s status with the writer’s estate. The 40 pages of notes amid Vonnegut’s papers include several revisions of its rules, but also pitch letters to board-game companies suggesting that GHQcould “become the third popular checkerboard game” — and even “be used to train cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.”
Despite probably having missed its chance to enter the standard military-academy curriculum, the game could nevertheless become a must-have among collectors of Vonnegutiana. According to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library’s online store, “this first edition of GHQ features deluxe wooden pieces and a 24-page commentary booklet, showing Kurt Vonnegut’s actual design notes to give insight into his creative process.” It may “lack the signature dark sense of humor that runs through Mr. Vonnegut’s writing,” as Carmel puts it, but it surely couldn’t be without his less widely acknowledged — but no less characteristic — instinct for entertainment value.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Born 196 years ago, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a period of immense social, political, and technological change, paralleled in his own life by his radical shift from hedonistic nobleman to theologian, anarchist, and vegetarian pacifist. Though he did not live to see the Russian Revolution, the novelist did see Tsar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms, including the 1861 Emancipation order that changed the social character of the country. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy saw the coming of new recording technology that would revolutionize the direction of his own life’s work—telling stories.
In his later years Tolstoy appeared in the new medium of film, which captured his 80th birthday in 1908, and his funeral procession two years later. He was the subject of the first color photograph taken in Russia (top) also in 1908. And that same year, Tolstoy made several audio recordings of his voice, on a phonograph sent to him personally by Thomas Edison. You can hear one of those recordings, “The Power of Childhood,” made on April 19th, 1908, just above.
You’ll note, of course, that the great author reads in his native language. Most of the recordings he made, which he intended for the edification of his countrymen, are in Russian. Below, however, you can hear him read from his last book, Wise Thoughts For Every Day in English, German, French and Russian. The book collects Tolstoy’s favorite passages from thinkers as diverse as Lao-Tzu and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on this recording, “Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction” as an old man, “believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people.” To that end, he made a series of short recordings, which you can hear at this site, on such subjects as art, law, morality, poverty, nonviolence, and capital punishment.
The story of how Tolstoy came to make these recordings is a fascinating one. Interested in the new technology, Tolstoy made his first recording in 1895, when, writes The Moscow Times, “an Edison representative came to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, to record the author’s voice. Those recordings were taken over the border to Berlin, where they lay in an archive until they were brought back to the Soviet Union after World War II.” When Stephen Bonsal, editor of the New York Times learned of Tolstoy’s interest in recording technology in 1907, he promised to send the novelist an Edison phonograph of his own. Edison himself, hearing of this, refused to accept any payment, and personally sent his own machine to Tolstoy’s estate with the engraved message “A Gift to Count Leo Tolstoy from Thomas Alva Edison.”
Edison asked Tolstoy for many multi-lingual recordings, requesting “short messages” in English and French, “conveying to the people of the world some thoughts that would tend to their moral and social advancement.” Tolstoy diligently made several recordings, some of which were then shipped to Edison in 1908. On February 21 of that year, the New York Times published an article on the exchange titled “Tolstoy’s Gift to Edison. Will Send Record of His Voice—Edison Gave Him a Phonograph.” The world eagerly awaited the world-famous author’s message to its “civilized peoples.” It seems however, that the message never arrived. According to Sputnik News, the fate of that legendary recording “has yet to be found out.” Nevertheless, thanks to Edison, we have several other recordings of Tolstoy’s very well-preserved voice, the record of a life lived to the end with fierce conviction and curiosity.
The phrase “April is the cruelest month” was first printed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in common circulation almost as long. One can easily know it without having the faintest idea of its source, let alone its meaning. This is not, of course, to call T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land an obscure work. Despite having met with a derisive, even hostile initial reception, it went on to draw acclaim as one of the central English-language poems of the twentieth century, to say nothing of its status as an achievement within the modernist movement. But how, here in the twenty-first century, to read it afresh?
It’s an adaptation, to be precise, of the first of The Waste Land’s five sections, “The Burial of the Dead,” which opens on a First World War battlefield — at least in Peters’ adaptation, which puts the first line “April is the cruelest month” into the context of nightmarish imagery of bloodshed and death — and ends in a workaday London likened to Dante’s hell.
The Waste Land presents a tempting but daunting opportunity to an illustrator, filled as it is with vivid evocations of place and appearances by intriguing characters (including, in this section, “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante”), and characterized as it is by extensive literary quotation and sudden shifts of context. But Peters has made a bold start of it, and anyone who reads his adaptation of “The Burial of the Dead” will be waiting for his adaptations of “A Game of Chess” through “What the Thunder Said.” Though much-scrutinized over the past century, Eliot’s modernist masterpiece (hear Eliot read it here) still tends to confound first-time readers. To them, I always advise considering poetry a visual medium, an idea whose possibilities Peters continues to explore on a much more literal level. Explore it here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algorithms can act like a nagging friend, suggesting a video for days until I finally give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tantalizing title: “Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)”.
First of all, before, during, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, theories were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Facebook groups. After the mind-blowing Episode 8, they went into overdrive, including the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *overlaid* on each other. And I highlighted one in-depth journey through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cultural event for this very site.
So when I finally clicked on the link I balked immediately: Four and a half hours? Are you kidding me? (You might be saying the very thing to yourself now.) But just like the narrator says, bear with me. Over the week, I watched the entire thing in 30-minute segments, not because it was grueling, but because time is precious and there is a lot to chew over. By the end, I was recommending the video to friends only to find some of them were already deep inside Twin Perfect’s analysis.
So here we are, with me highly encouraging you to invest the time (providing you have watched all three seasons of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me), but also not wanting to ruin some of Twin Perfect’s theories, which he lays out like a prosecutor, walking us through a general theory of Lynch.
However, I will make a few points:
In 2019, we posted a video in which Lynch explains both the Unified Field Theory and Transcendental Meditation. There are at least two major sequences that Twin Perfect suggests reflect the Unified Field.
Lynch’s obsession with electricity and fire is essential to the theory.
The One-Armed Man’s quote “I mean it as it is, as it sounds,” doubles as Lynch’s approach: Twin Perfect does a masterful job showing many, many examples where Lynch is directly explaining his use of metaphor and symbol to us. Sometimes that is straight into the camera.
We now know why Season Three featured a three-minute shot of a man sweeping up peanuts from a bar floor.
I’ve always felt that The Return was an exploration of the dangers of nostalgia, and this essay confirmed it for me. There was something missing at the center of the Third Season, indeed.
Twin Perfect reads all quotes from the director in a mock-Lynch voice. For some this will grate; for me it was A BEAUTIFUL THING (wiggly finger gesture).
I have been working on this video for two years, writing and researching and editing. I’ve been reading and watching and listening to every creator interview and AMA, every DVD extra and featurette, every TV special, every fan theory, blog, and podcast — any and all Twin Peaks-related posts I could find — trying to hone and polish my script to be the best I thought it could possibly be. I focus-grouped my video with people, challenging them to poke as many holes in my arguments as they could so that I could better illustrate my ideas. I tried my best to create something others would find of value, something that would add to the ongoing mystery and spark new discussions about my favorite series.
Are there some problems with the theory? Sure. But for every “I don’t know, man,” I said to myself, he immediately followed it up with something spot on. I think he deserves that MFA in Twin Peaks Studies.
So brew up some strong coffee and cut yourself a slice of cherry pie, and get stuck in.
Take a sufficiently long road trip across America, and you’re bound to encounter something or someone Lynchian. Whether or not that idea lay behind Interview Project, the undertaking had the endorsement of David Lynch himself. Not coincidentally, it was conceived by his son Austin, who along with filmmaker Jason S. (known for the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempting to call the real America, a nation populated by colorful, sometimes desperate, often unconventionally eloquent characters, 121 of whom Interview Project finds passing the day in bars, working at stores, or just sitting on the roadside.
Profiling David Lynch in the nineties, David Foster Wallace observed that “a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures — grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.”
Interview Project sticks to small-town or rural settings — Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Tuba City, Arizona — but still encounters people who may at first glance strike viewers as disturbing, menacing, saddening, forbidding, or some combination thereof. But they all have compelling stories to tell, and can do so within five minutes.
Being the subject of an Interview Project video requires a degree of forthright openness that those who’ve spent their lives in the U.S. may not recognize as characteristically American. Though often beset by a host of crises, ailments, and grievances (imposed from without or within), they don’t hesitate to assert themselves and their worldviews. Though there’s obvious curiosity value in all these eccentric convictions, regional twangs, and sometimes harrowing misfortunes, what emerges above all from these interviews is an impressive resilience. Young or old, coherent or otherwise, with or without a place to live, these people all come off as survivors.
When Interview Project first went online in 2009, it wasn’t viewable on Youtube. Now, for its fifteenth anniversary, all of its videos have been uploaded to that platform, and in high definition at that. Seen in this new context, Interview Project looks like an antecedent to certain Youtube channels that have risen to popularity in the decade and a half since: Soft White Underbelly, for instance, which devotes itself to interviewees at the extreme margins of society. Extremity isn’t the signal characteristic of Interview Project’s subjects, depart dramatically though their experiences may from the modern middle-class template. One could pity how short their lives fall of the “American Dream” — or one could consider the possibility that they’re all living that dream in their own way.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Private Snafu was the U.S. Army’s worst soldier. He was sloppy, lazy and prone to shooting off his mouth to Nazi agents. And he was hugely popular with his fellow GIs.
Private Snafu was, of course, an animated cartoon character designed for the military recruits. He was an adorable dolt who sounded like Bugs Bunny and looked a bit like Elmer Fudd. And in every episode, he taught soldiers what not to do, from blabbing about troop movements to not taking malaria medication.
The idea for the series reportedly came from Frank Capra — the Oscar-winning director of It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and, during WWII, the chairman of the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit. He wanted to create a cartoon series for new recruits, many of whom were young, unworldly and in some cases illiterate. Capra gave Disney first shot at developing the idea but Warner Bros’ Leon Schlesinger, a man who was as famous for his hard-driving business acumen as he was for wearing excessive cologne, offered a bid that was 2/3rds below that of Disney.
The talent behind this series was impressive, featuring a veritable who’s who of non-Disney animating talent, including Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Friz Freleng. Snafu was voiced by Mel Blanc, who famously did Bunny Bugs, Daffy Duck and later Marvin the Martian. And one of the main writers was none other than Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel.
As you can see in the first Snafu short Coming!! (1943), directed by Chuck Jones (see above), the movie displays a salty sensibility intended for an army camp rather than a Sunday matinee. The movie opens with a deadpan voiceover explaining that, in informal military parlance, SNAFU means “Situation Normal All…All Fouled Up,” hinting that the usual translation of the acronym includes a popular Anglo-Saxon word. Later, it shows Private Snafu daydreaming about a burlesque show – complete with a shapely exotic dancer doffing her duds – as he obliviously wrecks a plane.
Though there were no writing credits for each individual episode, just listen to the voiceover for Gripes (1943), directed by Friz Freleng. Dr. Seuss’s trademark singsong cadence is unmistakable including lines like:
“The moral, Snafu, is that the harder you work, the sooner we’re gonna beat Hitler, that jerk.”
Gas! (1944), directed by Chuck Jones, features a cameo from Bugs Bunny.
And finally, Going Home, directed by Chuck Jones, was slated to come out in 1944 but the War Department kiboshed it. The rationale was never explained but some think that the film’s reference to a massive, top-secret weapon that was to be deployed over Japan was just a little too close to the Manhattan Project.
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.
The 80-second clip above captures a rocket launch, something of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or another. What makes its viewers call it “the greatest shot in television” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one viewing to notice. In it, science historian James Burke speaks about how “certain gases ignite, and that the thermos flask permits you to store vast quantities of those gases safely, in their frozen liquid form, until you want to ignite them.” Use a sufficiently large flask filled with hydrogen and oxygen, design it to mix the gases and set light to them, and “you get that” — that is, you get the rocket that launches behind Burke just as soon as he points to it.
One can only admire Burke’s composure in discussing such technical matters in a shot that had to be perfectly timed on the first and only take. What you wouldn’t know unless you saw it in context is that it also comes as the final, culminating moment of a 50-minute explanatory journey that begins with credit cards, then makes its way through the invention of everything from a knight’s armor to canned food to air conditioning to the Saturn V rocket, which put man on the moon.
Formally speaking, this was a typical episode of Connections, Burke’s 1978 television series that traces the most important and surprising moves in the evolution of science and technology throughout human history.
Though not as widely remembered as Carl Sagan’s slightly later Cosmos, Connections bears repeat viewing here in the twenty-first century, not least for the intellectual and visual bravado typified by this “greatest shot in television,” now viewed nearly 18 million times on Youtube. Watch it enough times yourself, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by having Burke walk from a non-time-sensitive shot into another with the already-framed rocket ready for liftoff. But that hardly lessens the feeling of achievement when the launch comes off. “Destination: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the planets, or Peking” — a closing line that sounded considerably more dated a few years ago than it does today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
One would have imagined Sinéad O’Connor impervious to any reaction from a hostile audience, no matter how vitriolic. But even for a public figure as outspoken and unapologetic as her, it could all get to be a bit much at times. Take the 1992 concert Columbia Records put on for the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first album. “Available on pay-per-view,” writes the New York Times’ Marc Tracy, it “featured performances by Dylan along with some of the biggest stars of his era, among them Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton,” as well as the late outlaw-country icon Kris Kristofferson.
The young O’Connor also performed, despite being “at the center of a firestorm. Just two weeks earlier, the Irish singer was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live when, at the conclusion of her second and final performance of the evening, she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II and exhorted, ‘Fight the real enemy,’ a defiant act of protest against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.” It fell to Kristofferson to introduce her, whereupon she “took the stage to a cascade of applause and boos, which did not let up as O’Connor stood silently at the microphone with her hands behind her back.”
As you can see in the video at the top of the post, Kristofferson didn’t stay offstage. After a minute he “re-emerged from stage left, put his arm around O’Connor and whispered something in her ear.” The show then went on, albeit not as planned: instead of doing Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” she did Bob Marley’s “War,” the very same song she’d sung on SNL before the notorious Pope-ripping. Rather than leaving his message as a Lost in Translation moment, Kristofferson later revealed the words he’d summoned to encourage her: “ ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ To which, he said, she responded: ‘I’m not down.’ ”
That response was characteristic of O’Connor, as was her 2021 autobiography’s note that she was thinking, “I don’t need a man to rescue me, thanks.” Whatever her feelings in the moment, her friendship with Kristofferson seems to have lasted until her death last year. “Kristofferson appeared with her in the 1997 music video for the song ‘This Is to Mother You,’ ” writes Tracy. “In 2010, the two performed a duet of Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ on an Irish talk show. It was a year after Kristofferson had released a song about the 1992 incident, ‘Sister Sinead.’ ” Outwardly, the two could hardly have had less in common, but inwardly, they must have recognized each other as kindred spirits — the likes of which we’ll surely not see again.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show–it started first as a musical stage production in 1973, then became a cult classic film in 1975. Now, a half-century later, it gets reborn as a retro video game. Scheduled to be released by Halloween, the game features “8‑bit chiptune renditions of Rocky Horror’s legendary songs,” including the “Time Warp” of course. According to The Wrap, it also boasts “8‑bit-styled graphics bringing the show’s sets and characters to life, combining ’80s nostalgia with the show’s ’70s retro vibes.” The game will be available for Sony Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Steam. Enjoy.
If you visit one tourist site in Peru, it will almost certainly be the ruined Incan city of Machu Picchu. If you visit another, it’ll probably be the Nazca Desert, home to many large-scale geoglyphs made by pre-Inca peoples between 500 BC and 500 AD. Many of these “Nazca lines” are literally that, running across the desert floor in an abstract fashion, but others are figurative, depicting human beings, flora, fauna, and various less easily categorizable chimeras. The preservative effects of the climate kept many of these designs identifiable by the time moderns discovered them in 1927, and thanks to artificial-intelligence technology, researchers are finding new ones still today.
“A team from the Japanese University of Yamagata’s Nazca Institute, in collaboration with IBM Research, discovered 303 previously unknown geoglyphs of humans and animals, all smaller in size than the vast geometric patterns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Nazca plateau,” writes the Guardian’s Dan Collyns.
“The use of AI combined with low-flying drones revolutionized the speed and rate at which the geoglyphs were discovered, according to a research paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” and many more Nazca lines could remain to be identified with these methods.
The newly identified geoglyphs “include birds, plants, spiders, humanlike figures with headdresses, decapitated heads and an orca wielding a knife,” writes CNN’s Katie Hunt. She also cites hypotheses about why the original creators of these figures did the painstaking work of displacing stone after stone to create images mostly invisible to the human eye: it’s possible that “they formed a sacred space that was perhaps a place of pilgrimage. Other theories propose they played a part in calendars, astronomy, irrigation or for movement, such as running or dancing, or communication.” Some of them, surely, were meant only for the eyes of the gods, and so it may stand to reason that only our modern gods of artificial intelligence have been able to reveal them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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