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Today we take a ride on the world’s oldest electric suspension railway—the Wuppertal Schwebebahn in Germany.
Actually, we’ll take two rides, traveling back in time to do so, thanks to YouTuber pwduze, who had a bit of fun trying to match up two videos discovered online for comparison’s sake.
The journey on the left was filmed in 1902, when this miracle of modern engineering was but a year old.
The train passes over a broad road traveled mostly by pedestrians.
Note the absence of cars, traffic lights, and signage, as well as the proliferation of greenery, animals, and space between houses.
The trip on the right was taken much more recently, shortly after the railway began upgrading its fleet to cars with cushioned seats, air conditioning, information displays, LED lighting, increased access for people with disabilities and regenerative brakes.
An extended version at the bottom of this page provides a glimpse of the control panel inside the driver’s booth.
There are some changes visible beyond the windshield, too.
Now, cars, buses, and trucks dominate the road.
A large monument seems to have disappeared at the 2:34 mark, along with the plaza it once occupied.
Fieldstone walls and 19th-century architectural flourishes have been replaced with bland cement.
There’s been a lot of building—and rebuilding. 40% of Wuppertal’s buildings were destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII.
Although Wuppertal is still the greenest city in Germany, with access to public parks and woodland paths never more than a ten-minute walk away, the views across the Wupper river to the right are decidedly less expansive.
For the Schwebebahn’s first riders at the turn of the 20th century, these vistas along the eight-mile route must have been a revelation. Many of them would have ridden trains and elevators, but the unobstructed, straight-down views from the suspended monorail would have been novel, if not terrifying.
The bridge structures appear to have changed little over the last 120 years, despite several safety upgrades.
Those steampunk silhouettes are a testament to the planning—and expense—that resulted in this unique mass transit system, whose origin story is summarized by Elmar Thyen, head of Schwebebahn’s Corporate Communications and Strategic Marketing:
We had a situation with a very rich city, and very rich citizens who were eager to be socially active. They said, ‘Which space is publicly owned so we don’t have to go over private land?… It might make sense to have an elevated railway over the river.’
In the end, this is what the merchants wanted. They wanted the emperor to come and say, ‘This is cool, this is innovative: high tech, and still Prussian.’
At present, the suspension railway is only operating on the weekends, with a return to regular service anticipated for August 2021. Face masks are required. Tickets are still just a few bucks.
It takes a lot of swagger and confidence to play a couple of barre chords on a guitar, look like the coolest cat doing so, and revolutionize rock music while doing so. That’s Link Wray we’re talking about, and the song is the 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble.” It still sounds fresh today for the same reasons it was controversial at the time. It sounds sleazy, grungy, dirty. This is a song for a pool hall, or a biker bar, and just reeks of cigarettes and liquor. And from Pulp Fiction onwards, the song has popped up in many movies and TV shows, giving a scene a bit of cool danger.
The above video is from a one-hour gig that Wray and his band performed at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, 1974, the former ice skating rink that promoter Bill Graham turned into one of the primo music venues of its day. And Link Wray playing was like one of the gods of rock descending to anoint the crowd. Presley–though Wray defended him during his act–had dropped out of mainstream culture. The original rock and rollers, Wray’s peers, were either dead or nostalgia acts. So this appearance is magical, rock spirit made flesh, looking dangerous and sexual in all his swagger.
That swagger was well earned. Fred Lincoln Wray was born in North Carolina to a Shawnee mother, as a Cherokee and White father had returned from WWI with PTSD. In the mostly Black neighborhood where he grew up, he would hide underneath the bed when the Ku Klux Klan would come through on a terror campaign. “Elvis, he grew up — I don’t want to sound racist when I say this — he grew up white man poor,” Wray said in an interview. “I was growing up Shawnee poor.”
He suffered weak eyesight and bad hearing from childhood measles, and later when he served time in the army, he’d contract tuberculosis, lose one lung, and was told he wouldn’t have a singing career.
But he did have his guitar skills, which he’d learned as a child from a traveling Black guitarist called Hambone. Back from the army he formed a group with his brothers Vernon and Doug, and was going by the name Lucky. They gigged around Virginia and Washington, DC, and were asked by a local promoter to come up with a song similar to The Diamonds’ “The Stroll.” What they came up with was an instrumental called “Oddball.” It was a hit played live but when they went into a studio to record a demo, it just didn’t have “that sound”. Wray started punching holes in his speakers with a pencil and in one stroke created the fuzztone guitar sound.
The big labels wouldn’t bite, but Cadence Records’ Milt Grant said yes. Or rather, his teenage stepdaughter and her friends said yes, and Milt put aside his own distaste. Juvenile delinquents were at once both a “problem” and a way to sell product, especially with the hit musical and movie West Side Story. “Rumble” was a much better name than “Oddball,” and, on March 31, 1958, it was released.
Some DJs refused to play the single in cities where teenage gang violence was a problem. When Wray and his band played American Bandstand, Dick Clark didn’t mention the title. It didn’t stop the single from being a hit.
And it was influential. Wray pretty much invented power-chord riffing, and influenced Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Neil Young, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, and countless others. Curmudgeon-genius Mark E. Smith of the Fall named him as one of the only two musicians he respected (the other was Iggy Pop).
Link Wray’s Cherokee and Shawnee heritage was not well known among the general public, but the recent documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the Worldbrought the influence of Native American musicians out into the open for celebration, connecting Link Wray with Robbie Robertson, Charlie Patton, Mildred Bailey, and Stevie Salas.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
And The Plastic Bag Store, a pop-up installation that was preparing to open in Times Square.
The theaters remain dark, but the ban is back on, as of October 19th. The 7‑month pause was hastened by the pandemic, but also by an unsuccessful lawsuit brought by flexible packing manufacturer Poly-Pak Industries.
The Plastic Bag Store was allowed to open, too, albeit in an altered format from the hybrid art installation-adult puppet show creator Robin Frohardt has been working on for several years.
She has long intended for the project’s New York premiere to coincide with the ban.
Not because she hoped to get rich selling bags to citizens accustomed to getting them free with purchase.
There’s nothing to buy in this “store.”
It’s a performance of sorts, but there’s no admission charge.
It’s definitely an education, and a meditation on how history can be doomed to repeat itself, in one way or another.
The Plastic Bag Store just ended its sold out 3‑week run, playing to crowds of ticket holders now capped at 12 audience members per performance. The live elements have morphed into a trio of short films that are projected after ticket holders—customers if you will—have had a chance to look around.
There’s plenty to see.
The Times Square installation space has been kitted out to resemble a roomy bodega stocked with produce, baked goods, sushi rolls on plastic trays, shrink wrapped meat, and other familiar, if slightly skewed items.
Rows of 2 liter soda bottles with iconic red labels are shelved across from the magazine rack. Tubs of Bag & Jerry’s Mint Plastic Chip are in the freezer case.
The original plan allowed for customers to handle the goods as they wanted. Now such interactions are prohibited.
Prior to March, New Yorkers were pretty handsy with produce, unabashedly pressing thumbs into avocados and holding tomatoes and melons to nostrils to determine ripeness.
The pandemic curbed that habit.
No matter. Nothing is ripe in the Plastic Bag Store, where any item not contained in a can or cardboard box has been constructed from the thousands of plastic bags Frohardt has collected over the years.
I’m a real connoisseur now. There are certain colors I’m really attracted to. Certain bags are harder to find. I definitely look at trash differently than most people. I’m always looking for reds and oranges and greens. Sometimes I find a really interesting color that I haven’t seen before, like salmon or lavender. That’s always exciting.
This diversity of materials helps with visual verisimilitude, most impressive in the produce section.
The product labels been richly fortified with satirical commentary.
A family sized package of Yucky Shards appeals to children with sparkles, a rainbow, and a bright eyed cartoon mascot who doesn’t seem to mind the 6‑pack yoke that’s attached itself to its person.
Everything about the “non-organic, triple-washed Spring Green Mix” from “Earthbag Farm” looks familiar, including the plastic container.
Packages of Sometimes feminine pads promise “super protection” that will “literally last forever.”
The cupcakes on display in the bakery section are topped with such festive embellishments as a “disposable” lighter and flossing pick.
The tone is not scolding but rather comic, as Frohardt uses her spoofs to delight attendees into serious consideration of the “foreverness” of plastic and its environmental impact:
There is great humor to be found in the pitfalls of capitalism, and I find that humor and satire can be powerful tools for social criticism especially with issues that feel too sad and overwhelming to confront directly.
It’s really easy to turn away from images of turtles choking on straws. That stuff comes up in my Instagram feed all the time, and I’m like “Whoa! Swipe on past” because it’s too hard to look at. So what I’m trying to do is to make something that’s fun to look at, and fun to engage with, so you can think about it. Instead of just saying, “That’s fucked up! Ok on to the next thing.”
The Plastic Bag Store’s film segments also wield comedy to get their message across.
From the stiff shadow puppet Ancient Greeks who are seduced by the self-flattering slogan of a new product, Knowledge Water, which comes in single use vessels, to the recipient of a message in a plastic bottle, discovered so far into the future that he can only admire its craftsmanship, having no clue as to its purpose. (Letter carrier is his best guess. Eventually, other letter carriers are discovered in the freezing equatorial ocean, and housed in a museum alongside other hilariously mislabeled relics of a long dead civilization.)
“In 1962, when British filmmaker Richard Attenborough began researching what would become his 1982 Gandhi film,” writes Lauren Frayer at NPR, “he asked Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, how he should portray his late colleague.” Gandhi was revered, treated as a saint in his own lifetime, long before Attenborough arrived in India. But Nehru begged the filmmaker to treat the man like a mere mortal, with all his “weaknesses, his moods and his failings.” Gandhi was “much too human” to be holy.
Do Gandhi’s failings—for example his early racism (which he outgrew “quite decisively,” his biographer asserts)—mean he must be canceled? Nehru didn’t think so. But nor did he think telling the truth about a beloved public figure was anything less than intellectually honest. Gandhi’s failings, however, are maybe easier to stomach than those of his political nemesis Winston Churchill, who hated the Indian leader passionately and also, more or less, hated everyone else who didn’t belong to his idea of a master race, a hatred that even extended to the German people writ large. (He once described Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.”)
Churchill was thoroughly unapologetic about what Vice President Henry Wallace called his theory of “Anglo-Saxon superiority.” He has, perhaps, been “the subject of false or exaggerated allegations,” Richard Toye writes at CNN, but “he said enough horrifying things”—and backed them with colonial policy—”that there is no need to invent more.” Even his “fellow Conservative imperialists” felt his ideas were rather out-of-date “or even downright shocking.” The victims of Churchill’s racism numbered in the millions, but those colonial subjects have been erased in political and popular culture.
“There’s no Western statesman–at least in the English-speaking world–more routinely lionized than Winston Churchill,” Ishaan Tharoor writes at The Washington Post, in ritual hagiographies like 2017’s The Darkest Hour. The film portrays what is “of course, an important part of the celebrated British prime minister’s legacy,” notes Aeon, but it also “paints an extremely incomplete picture of his life.” The short claymation film above aims, with biting wit, to correct the record and how Churchill epitomized the failson tradition of the aristocracy.
During his military career, Churchill “had great fun laying waste to entire villages in the Swat Valley in what is now known in Pakistan.” Claymation Churchill informs us that he “also killed several savages in the Sudan.” Churchill, the great hero of World War II and staunch enemy of the Nazis, opposed women’s suffrage and embraced eugenics and “the sterilization of the feeble-minded.” (He once wrote an article claiming “it may be that, unwittingly, [Jews] are inviting persecution–that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.”) The catalogue of abuses continues.
The short, by UK filmmaker Steve Roberts, tells truths about Churchill that “are often glossed over in surface-level treatments of Churchill’s biography.” They are not, by any stretch, insignificant truths. If someone were to find them very upsetting, I might suggest they take it up with Churchill….
This has to share some comedic DNA with a presidential press conference held at the Four Seasons–Four Seasons Total Landscaping, that is. Classic.
It’s fitting for the day, even though it was recorded long ago (1990). The footage above features Patti Smith and her departed husband Fred “Sonic” Smith performing a stripped-down, acoustic version of her classic “People Have the Power.” A rare recording of Smith and Sonic performing together, this is a little treasure. Savor the moment.
People have the power
The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the world from fools
It’s decreed: the people rule
It’s decreed: the people rule
Listen. I believe everything we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth’s revolution
We have the power!
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One type of argument made against “auteur theory,” which posits a film’s director as its “author,” holds that certain non-directorial collaborators contribute just as many — or, as Pauline Kael argued about Citizen Kane, more — of a work of cinema’s defining qualities. Surely a video essayist like Lewis Bond, co-creator with Luiza Liz Bond of Youtube channel The Cinema Cartography, subscribes to auteur theory: just look at the increasingly in-depth analyses he’s created on Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Lynch — all, of course, directors. But the recent Cinema Cartography essay “The Cinematography That Changed Cinema” sees him turning away from the figure of the director, exploring instead the auteur-like contributions of those masters of the camera.
Any competent cinematographer can make shots pretty; few can make them truly cinematic. Here we use “cinematic” in the sense that Peter Greenaway would, referring to the vast capabilities of the medium to go beyond photographically illustrating essentially verbal stories — capabilities that, alas, have so far gone mostly unused. It should come as no surprise this essay uses Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover to establish its perspective on the power of cinematography.
Ironically, the movie’s inventiveness in that respect and all others produces “a film so removed from cinema that it rarely feels as though it was even intended to be a film.” Shot by Sacha Vierny (best known for Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour), its ultra-artificial images resemble those of no other movies, much less anything in real life, and for that reason they sweep us along.
Drawing examples from dozens of films over half an hour, the Bonds show how cinematographers have not just represented or enhanced reality, but created it anew. This happens in such pictures famous for their visual lushness as Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes (cinematographer: Jack Cardiff), Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (John Alcott), Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (Néstor Almendros), and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saitô, and Shôji Ueda). But it also happens in less likely cinematic realms: 1970s Italian horror, documentary, and even productions stripped nearly bare of money and equipment, whether by choice (as under the rigors of the Dogme 95 manifesto) or by necessity (as in Mikhail Kalatozov’s still aesthetically exhilarating I Am Cuba). You could call each of these films beautiful, but as every cinephile has felt, film doesn’t exist to achieve beauty: it exists to go beyond it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Before he directed such mind-bending masterpieces as Time Bandits, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, before he became short-hand for a filmmaker cursed with cosmically bad luck, before he became the sole American member of seminal British comedy group Monty Python, Terry Gilliam made a name for himself creating odd animated bits for the UK series Do Not Adjust Your Set. Gilliam preferred cut-out animation, which involved pushing bits of paper in front of a camera instead of photographing pre-drawn cels. The process allows for more spontaneity than traditional animation along with being comparatively cheaper and easier to do.
Gilliam also preferred to use old photographs and illustrations to create sketches that were surreal and hilarious. Think Max Ernst meets Mad Magazine. For Monty Python’s Flying Circus, he created some of the most memorable moments of a show chock full of memorable moments: A pram that devours old ladies, a massive cat that menaces London, and a mustached police officer who pulls open his shirt to reveal the chest of a shapely woman. He also created the show’s most iconic image, that giant foot during the title sequence.
On Bob Godfrey’s series Do It Yourself Film Animation Show, Gilliam delved into the nuts and bolts of his technique. You can watch it above. Along the way, he sums up his thoughts on the medium:
The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn’t really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use. That’s why I use cut-out. It’s the easiest form of animation I know.
He also notes that the key to cut-out animation is to know its limitations. Graceful, elegant movement à la Walt Disney is damned near impossible. Swift, sudden movements, on the other hand, are much simpler. That’s why there are far more beheadings in his segments than ballroom dancing. Watch the whole clip. If you are a hardcore Python enthusiast, as I am, it is pleasure to watch him work. Below find one of his first animated movies, Storytime, which includes, among other things, the tale of Don the Cockroach.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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.
If Neil Young proved anything in his feud with Lynyrd Skynyrd (actually “more like a spirited debate between respectful friends,” writes Ultimate Classic Rock), it’s that Canadians could play southern rock just as well as the Southern Man, an argument more or less also won at the same time by The Band’s Music from Big Pink. Young’s songwriting contributions to the tradition are just as well recognized as “The Weight.” Foremost among them, we must place “Powderfinger,” covered by everyone from Band of Horses to Cowboy Junkies (below) to Rusted Root to Phish, and which Young sent to Ronnie Van Zant, who might have recorded it for the next Skynyrd album had he not died in 1977.
Southern rock stalwarts Drive-By Truckers, who’ve covered “Powderfinger” frequently, often sound like the sonic equivalent of the Young-Skynyrd debate (they even wrote a song about it), channeling their Alabama roots and Skynyrd obsessions through the sensitive, sharply observed, character-driven narratives Young wrote so well. “Powderfinger” was penned during the Zuma era, when Young and Crazy Horse redefined psychedelic Americana with barroom weepers like “Don’t Cry No Tears” and “Barstool Blues,” and wandering guitar epics like “Cortez the Killer” and “Danger Bird.”
The combination of beautifully loose, shambling guitars, loping rhythms, and “bizarre and brilliant” twists on Americana themes defined what many consider to be Young’s greatest period. “Between 1969’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and 1978’s Rust Never Sleeps Young reached a level of genius that few songwriters have ever topped,” Rolling Stone writes.
“Powderfinger” routinely tops best-of-Neil-Young lists. Though intended for Zuma, the song did not actually appear until four years later, opening the electric side of the live classic Rust Never Sleeps. Now we can celebrate the unreleased version at the top, recorded during the Zuma sessions and just posted to the Neil Young Archives Instagram page.
Not only does “Powderfinger” show Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their dueling guitar best; it is a lyrical masterpiece of literary compression, with a narrative fans have often struggled to piece together, and have seen as representing everything from the Civil War to Vietnam. But the general interpretation of the folk-poetic verses goes something like this, notes Rolling Stone:
It’s about a family of bootleggers (or some other kind of backwoods criminals) somewhere up in the mountains. They’ve been through many tragedies, and now the authorities are moving in on them – explaining why the approaching boat has “numbers on the side.” The 22-year-old son has been forced to deal with the situation because “Daddy’s gone,” “brother’s out hunting in the mountains” and “Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou.” The young man is standing on the dock with a rifle in his hand when the boat begins firing, so he raises the gun to return fire – but it backfires and blows his head off.
It’s a cinematic, darkly comic scene conveyed with haunting pathos and confused urgency. The track will appear on Disc 8, Dume, of the upcoming box set Neil Young Archives Volume II, which covers the prolific period between 1972 and 1976. “This 1975 version of the song was produced by Young and David Briggs,” Brock Theissen writes at Exclaim!, and features all the original members of Crazy Horse. You can also stream the unreleased early “Powderfinger” at the Neil Young Archives site. Further up, see an animated video for an acoustic version of the classic Neil Young track and hear the original live recording from Rust Never Sleeps below.
When I think of roller skates, I first think of 1997’s Boogie Nights and De La Soul’s 1991 hit “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays.’” I date myself to a time not particularly well known as a golden age of roller skating (not the kinds in those references, in any case). The 90s were known as a golden age of visual effects, when Jurassic Park, its sequels, and at the decade’s end, The Matrix, previewed a brave new world of filmmaking to come.…
When I think of roller skates, I do not tend to think of Charlie Chaplin.…
But if you’ve watched Chaplin’s classic 1936 Modern Times recently, you’ll have the film’s famous roller skating scene fresh in your mind. You may or may not know that Chaplin’s seemingly death-defying stunt on skates in that film was itself a pioneering invention of visual effects, in a strikingly contemporary work from Chaplin that, like The Matrix, helped advance the modern technologies it critiqued (and ended up playing an important role in modern philosophy).
The scene in Modern Times takes place in the toy department, on the fourth floor of a department store. Chaplin’s Tramp and Ellen (Paulette Goddard) strap on skates, he cruises around blindfolded, and seems to back right to the edge of a sheer drop where the railing has broken. “The stunt looks so real that it’s impossible to figure out where the effects are at first sight,” Nicolas Ayala writes at Screenrant, “but the technique is actually simpler than it seems. In fact, there is no gap in the floor. It’s a practical effect consisting of a matte painting placed right in front of the camera.”
Performed live on set (“with no stunt doubles,” Ayala notes), the scene doesn’t actually show Chaplin in any danger. He performs “on a fully-floored set” with a ledge to help him “discern when to stop, since it was measured to fit exactly with the photorealistic matte painting that was placed on a sheet of glass just a couple feet in front of the lens. This way, the painting would appear to be the precise size of the gap without interfering with Chaplin’s performance.”
See the matte painting outlined in a still further up, courtesy of Ayala, see the stunt diagrammed in the animation above from Petr Pechar, and learn more about the filming of Modern Times, the Matrix of its day, here.
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