Future Shock: Orson Welles Narrates a 1972 Film About the Perils of Technological Change

in Film | December 5th, 2014

The begin­ning of the 1972 doc­u­men­tary Future Shock, direct­ed by Alex Grasshof, shows Orson Welles, beard­ed and chomp­ing on a cig­ar, stand­ing on an air­port peo­ple mover. He turns to the cam­era and deliv­ers a mono­logue in his trade­mark silken bari­tone. “In the course of my work, which has tak­en me to just about every cor­ner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phe­nom­e­non which I’m just begin­ning to under­stand. Our mod­ern tech­nolo­gies have changed the degree of sophis­ti­ca­tion beyond our wildest dreams. But this tech­nol­o­gy has exact­ed a pret­ty heavy price. We live in an age of anx­i­ety and time of stress. And with all our sophis­ti­ca­tion, we are in fact the vic­tims of our own tech­no­log­i­cal strengths –- we are the vic­tims of shock… a future shock.”

The doc­u­men­tary itself is won­der­ful­ly dat­ed. From its bizarre open­ing mon­tage; to its sound­track, which lurch­es from ear­ly elec­tron­ic music to jazz funk; to some endear­ing video spe­cial effects, which, for what­ev­er rea­son, most­ly cen­ters around Orson Welles’s head, the film feels thor­ough­ly root­ed in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Yet many of the ideas dis­cussed in the movie are, if any­thing, more rel­e­vant now than in the 1970s.

The term “future shock” was invent­ed in Alvin Tof­fler’s huge­ly best­selling book of the same name to describe the con­stant, bewil­der­ing bar­rage of new tech­nolo­gies and all the result­ing soci­etal changes those tech­nolo­gies bring about. Any­one who has strug­gled to com­pre­hend a new, baf­fling and sup­pos­ed­ly essen­tial social media plat­form, any­one who has been dri­ven to paral­y­sis over the num­ber of choic­es on Net­flix, any­one who found their liveli­hood dec­i­mat­ed because of a hot new app knows what “future shock” is.

Tof­fler (along with his wife and uncred­it­ed co-writer Hei­di Tof­fler) argued that we are in the midst of a mas­sive struc­tur­al change from an indus­tri­al soci­ety to a post-indus­tri­al one – a soci­ety that bog­gles the mind with an over­load of infor­ma­tion and an over­load of con­sumer choic­es. “Change,” as they wrote, “is the only con­stant.”

Along the way, the Tof­flers man­aged to pre­dict the col­lapse of Amer­i­ca’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, along with things like Prozac, temp jobs, the inter­net and the mete­oric rise and fall of ins­ta-celebs (Alex from Tar­get, we hard­ly knew you.) Oth­er pre­dic­tions – under­wa­ter cities, paper clothes and being able to choose your own skin col­or – haven’t yet come to pass. Still, they had a sur­pris­ing­ly good track record con­sid­er­ing these pre­dic­tions were writ­ten over four decades ago.

The video ends with a plea from not Welles, but Tof­fler him­self, who is seen address­ing col­lege stu­dents.

If we can rec­og­nize that indus­tri­al­ism is not the only pos­si­ble form of tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, if we can begin to think more imag­i­na­tive­ly about the future, then we can pre­vent future shock and we can use tech­nol­o­gy itself to build a decent, demo­c­ra­t­ic and humane soci­ety. […] We can no longer allow tech­nol­o­gy just to come roar­ing down at us. We must begin to say “No” to cer­tain kinds of tech­nol­o­gy and begin to con­trol tech­no­log­i­cal change, because we have now reached the point at which tech­nol­o­gy is so pow­er­ful and so rapid that it may destroy us, unless we con­trol it. But what is the most impor­tant is we sim­ply do not accept every­thing; that we begin to make crit­i­cal deci­sions about what kind of world we want and what kind of tech­nol­o­gy we want.

Find oth­er short films nar­rat­ed by Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

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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Watch The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton’s Philosophical Look at Our Wanderlust Tendencies (2005)

in Philosophy, Television, Travel | December 5th, 2014

The tra­di­tion of the uncom­fort­able intel­lec­tu­al aboard a cruise ship, while not a par­tic­u­lar­ly long or wide one, has pro­duced a few intrigu­ing works. You may well know — and, if you’re any­thing like me, know very well indeed from count­less reread­ings — David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s essay about his sev­en-night Caribbean cruise, known as it first ran in Harper’s as “Ship­ping Out,” and lat­er in full form as the title piece of the col­lec­tion A Sup­pos­ed­ly Fun Thing I’ll Nev­er Do Again. In this envi­ron­ment of con­stant­ly replen­ished ameni­ties and unceas­ing “pam­per­ing” (a word that gen­er­ates an essay’s worth of exe­ge­sis by itself), Wal­lace comes up against the inevitable ques­tion: can a cruise line, or any oth­er form of human effort, real­ly guar­an­tee our hap­pi­ness?

This ques­tion has also proven cen­tral to the career of anoth­er writer and thinker, Alain de Bot­ton. No mat­ter the sub­ject on which his focus may come to rest — archi­tec­ture, Proust, ancient phi­los­o­phy, work — his mind nev­er strays far from the issue of what makes us hap­py, and whether any­thing can keep us that way. The 2005 doc­u­men­tary The Art of Trav­el, a com­pan­ion to his book of the same name, finds de Bot­ton aboard a cruise lin­er, ful­ly equipped with fine wines and line-danc­ing class­es, bound for Spain. Will he dis­em­bark in the Barcelona of which he has dreamed, or will an obscure French nov­el­ist con­vince him of the fool­ish­ness of actu­al­ly expe­ri­enc­ing the very places you’ve long want­ed to? (The answer may not come as a sur­prise to those famil­iar with de Bot­ton’s pro­fes­sion­al tem­pera­ment.)

But our intre­pid host does­n’t stop at cruis­ing: he takes a week­end “city break” in Ams­ter­dam, fol­lows around a World War II bunker enthu­si­ast, goes for a road trip through east Ger­many, pon­ders the dis­tinc­tive lone­li­ness found only in Edward Hop­per paint­ings; gets the grand tour of a “swingers’ hotel,” boards an all-Japan­ese Cotswolds tour bus (and teach­es his fel­low pas­sen­gers about John Ruskin); and won­ders, final­ly, whether the def­i­n­i­tion of a trav­el­er comes not from the dis­tance and fre­quen­cy of the move­ment, but from the “atti­tude of curios­i­ty and recep­tiv­i­ty” to what­ev­er cap­tures the imag­i­na­tion. Hav­ing found myself in a career that involves more and more trav­el each year, I can’t ask myself these ques­tions too often. Whether you care about get­ting to far-off places or rich­ly expe­ri­enc­ing the ones near­by, per­haps de Bot­ton will get you ask­ing them too. At the very least, he’ll save you a cruise.

More films by de Bot­ton can be found in our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Art Can Answer Life’s Big Ques­tions in Art as Ther­a­py

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Six Great Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

Socrates on TV, Cour­tesy of Alain de Bot­ton (2000)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 “Types of Mistakes” Young Writers Make

in Literature, Sci Fi, Writing | December 5th, 2014

lovecraft hp

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

H.P. Love­craft is remem­bered as a bril­liant fan­ta­sist, a cre­ator of a com­plete­ly unique uni­verse of hor­ror. He’s also remem­bered, unfor­tu­nate­ly, as a big­ot. But the author whose head—to the cha­grin of some—provided the mod­el for the World Fan­ta­sy Award is not often remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly good writer. Or rather, I should say, a par­tic­u­lar­ly good styl­ist. His writ­ing can sound sti­fling­ly archa­ic, over­stuffed with Vic­to­ri­anisms. “His prose, “writes Scott Malt­house, “can be turgid and adjec­tives suf­fo­cat­ing,” and “his char­ac­ters tend to be as thin as the paper they’re print­ed on.”

Writ­ers love him, Malt­house argues, because he was such an orig­i­nal “world builder,” not because he was a fine artist. Eliz­a­beth Bear at Tor echoes the sen­ti­ment, writ­ing that Love­craft’s work is “crit­i­cized for its style, for its pur­ple­ness and den­si­ty and fail­ures of struc­ture,” yet still evokes such a potent response that “the Love­craft­ian uni­verse must be con­sid­ered a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort at this point,” since so many writ­ers have fur­thered his “appeal­ing­ly bleak” vision. You can down­load a good part of his col­lect­ed works in ebook and audio­book for­mats here.

So per­haps he isn’t such a bad writer after all? In any case, he’s cer­tain­ly a very dis­tinc­tive one whose style, like Joseph Conrad’s, say, or even William Faulkner’s, endears read­ers pre­cise­ly for its fever­ish excess­es. Love­craft him­self was very self-con­scious about his craft and took writ­ing very seriously—enough to have pub­lished a lengthy, high­ly detailed essay called “Lit­er­ary Com­po­si­tion” which tack­les in sev­er­al para­graphs a host of issues the writer must con­tend with: gram­mar, “read­ing,” vocab­u­lary, “ele­men­tal phras­es,” descrip­tion, nar­ra­tion, “fic­tion­al nar­ra­tion,” “uni­ty, mass, coher­ence,” and “forms of com­po­si­tion.” We won’t recite the whole of his advice here—you can read the whole thing for your­self. But to give you some of the fla­vor of Lovecraft’s ped­a­gogy, we bring you his list of twen­ty “types of mis­takes” young writ­ers make.

See his com­plete list below.

  1. Erro­neous plu­rals of nouns, as val­lies or echos.
  2. Bar­barous com­pound nouns, as view­point or upkeep.
  3. Want of cor­re­spon­dence in num­ber between noun and verb where the two are wide­ly sep­a­rat­ed or the con­struc­tion involved
  4. Ambigu­ous use of pro­nouns.
  5. Erro­neous case of pro­nouns, as whom for who, and vice ver­sa, or phras­es like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loy­al, act prompt­ly.”
  6. Erro­neous use of shall and will, and of oth­er aux­il­iary verbs.
  7. Use of intran­si­tive for tran­si­tive verbs, as “he was grad­u­at­ed from col­lege,” or vice ver­sa, as “he ingra­ti­at­ed with the tyrant.”
  8. Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest,”
  9. Errors in moods and tens­es of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do oth­er­wise”, or “He said the earth was”
  10. The split infini­tive, as “to calm­ly ”
  11. The erro­neous per­fect infini­tive, as “Last week I expect­ed to have met”
  12. False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
  13. Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
  14. Mis­use of prepo­si­tions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unwor­thy object,” or “The gold was divid­ed between the five men.”
  15. The super­flu­ous con­junc­tion, as “I wish for you to do this.”
  16. Use of words in wrong sens­es, as “The book great­ly intrigued me”, “Leave me take this”, “He was obsessed with the idea”, or “He is a metic­u­lous”
  17. Erro­neous use of non-Angli­cised for­eign forms, as “a strange phe­nom­e­na”, or “two stratas of clouds”.
  18. Use of false or unau­tho­rised words, as bur­glarise or supremest.
  19. Errors of taste, includ­ing vul­garisms, pompous­ness, rep­e­ti­tion, vague­ness, ambigu­ous­ness, col­lo­qui­al­ism, bathos, bom­bast, pleonasm, tau­tol­ogy, harsh­ness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetor­i­cal awk­ward­ness.
  20. Errors of spelling and punc­tu­a­tion, and con­fu­sion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apos­tro­phe in the pos­ses­sive pro­noun its.

Most of this is sol­id, com­mon sense writ­ing advice. Some of it isn’t. As with all things Love­craft, you would be wise to use your dis­cre­tion. A full read of Lovecraft’s trea­tise on com­po­si­tion will give you some sense of how to begin writ­ing your own Love­craft pas­tiche. For even more of his advice on the writ­ing of fiction—particularly, as he called it, “weird fic­tion,” see his list of five tips for hor­ror writ­ing, which we fea­tured in Octo­ber.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

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

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How Bourbon is Made: The ABC’s in 9 Minutes

in Food & Drink | December 5th, 2014

Head over to Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty’s web entry on Bour­bon, and you will learn that, back in 1964, the U.S. Con­gress rec­og­nized Bour­bon Whiskey as a “dis­tinc­tive prod­uct of the Unit­ed States,” and the Fed­er­al Stan­dards of Iden­ti­ty for Dis­tilled Spir­its (27 C.F.R. 5.22) estab­lished a bunch of laws defin­ing what Bour­bon is, and isn’t. The Stan­dards read as fol­lows:

  • Only whiskey pro­duced in the Unit­ed States can be called bour­bon.
  • Bour­bon must be made of a grain mix­ture that is at least 51% corn (maize).
  • Bour­bon must be dis­tilled to no more than 160 (U.S.) proof (80% alco­hol by vol­ume).
  • Nei­ther col­or­ing nor fla­vor­ing may be added.
  • Bour­bon must be aged in new, charred oak bar­rels.
  • Bour­bon must be entered into the bar­rel at no more than 125 proof (62.5% alco­hol by vol­ume).
  • Bour­bon, like oth­er whiskeys, must be bot­tled at not less than 80 proof (40% alco­hol by vol­ume.)
  • Bour­bon that meets the above require­ments and has been aged for a min­i­mum of two years may (but is not required to) be called Straight Bour­bon.
  • Straight Bour­bon aged for a peri­od less than four years must be labeled with the dura­tion of its aging.
  • If an age is stat­ed on the label, it must be the age of the youngest whiskey in the bot­tle.

If a spir­it does­n’t com­ply with these rules, it ain’t Bour­bon.

In the video above, Gear Patrol takes a clos­er look at how Bour­bon is made. The pro­duc­ers toured 12 dis­til­leries in five days, and asked each to explain the Bour­bon-mak­ing process. Along the way, you will fig­ure out why so much Bour­bon comes from Ken­tucky. It comes down to geol­o­gy, not chance.

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Physics of Guin­ness Beer Demys­ti­fied

How to Open a Wine Bot­tle with Your Shoe for the DIY Con­nois­seur

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Harvard’s Free Course on Mak­ing Cakes, Pael­la & Oth­er Deli­cious Food

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Cui­sine All at Once (Free Online Course)

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The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

in Film, Music | December 4th, 2014

In 1967, Stan­ley Kubrick com­mis­sioned Spar­ta­cus com­pos­er Alex North to com­pose a score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet, while at the edit­ing bay, he fell in love with the movie’s tem­po­rary sound­track con­sist­ing of a bunch of exist­ing works of clas­si­cal music. So in an unprece­dent­ed move, he chose those works in favor of North’s com­po­si­tion. He didn’t even re-record the tracks, as was the cus­tom at the time. He just slot­ted the exist­ing works right into the mix. And, for the pieces by Hun­gar­i­an com­pos­er Györ­gy Ligeti, he didn’t even both­er to get the rights, result­ing in a law­suit.

As you might expect, this was huge­ly con­tro­ver­sial in some cir­cles. The great com­pos­er Bernard Her­rmann, who scored every­thing from Cit­i­zen Kane to Taxi Dri­ver, was appalled. “It shows vul­gar­i­ty, when a direc­tor uses music pre­vi­ous­ly com­posed! I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the height of vul­gar­i­ty in our time. To have out­er space accom­pa­nied by The Blue Danube, and the piece not even record­ed anew!”

Yet any­one who’s ever seen 2001 knows that Kubrick made the right call. Who doesn’t think of bone-wield­ing mon­key men when they hear the open­ing notes of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra? Or who doesn’t asso­ciate The Blue Danube with a zero‑G dance between space­craft and space sta­tion?

2001 might be con­sid­ered the most expen­sive (and most prof­itable) exper­i­men­tal movie ever made. It lacks a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive. It is large­ly word­less. The most mem­o­rable char­ac­ter in the movie is not a human being but a socio­path­ic com­put­er. It ends with an awe­some­ly trip­py med­i­ta­tion on humanity’s next evo­lu­tion­ary iter­a­tion. It’s not an ordi­nary movie and so music was used in an entire­ly unor­di­nary way.

Think of those mono­liths that always appear with that oth­er­world­ly ora­to­rio by Ligeti. It’s ambigu­ous whether those alien mar­ble slabs are emit­ting the music or the music is lay­ered over top the image. Yet the music is not used to tell the audi­ence how to feel. Instead, it is like a voice from the cho­rus in an ancient Greek play, announc­ing from with­out a key moment in the film.

As Roger Ebert puts it: “North’s score … would have been wrong for ‘2001’ because, like all scores, it attempts to under­line the action— to give us emo­tion­al cues. The clas­si­cal music cho­sen by Kubrick exists out­side the action.”

Tony Palmer, direc­tor of Stan­ley Kubrick: A Life in Pic­tures, put it anoth­er way. “Before Stan­ley Kubrick, music tend­ed to be used in film as either dec­o­ra­tive or as height­en­ing emo­tions. After Stan­ley Kubrick, because of his use of clas­si­cal music in par­tic­u­lar, it became absolute­ly an essen­tial part of the nar­ra­tive, intel­lec­tu­al dri­ve of the film.”

Per­haps this is the rea­son why some com­plain that Kubrick’s movies are chilly and cere­bral. It also might explain why his use of music tends to linger in the mind.

Thanks to Spo­ti­fy, you can lis­ten to over four hours of clas­si­cal music that Kubrick used in his movies. Find the playlist above, and a list of the clas­si­cal music in Kubrick films here. The playlist fea­tures every­thing from Beethoven (A Clock­work Orange) to Schu­bert (Bar­ry Lyn­don) to Bartók (The Shin­ing). If you need to down­load Spo­ti­fy, grab the soft­ware on this site.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Clas­si­cal Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

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Hear Dave Grohl’s First Foo Fighters Demo Recordings, As Kurt Cobain Did in 1992

in Music | December 4th, 2014

Like ‘em or lump ‘em, you should give ‘em credit—Dave Grohl’s Foo Fight­ers have kind of rede­fined the con­cept album with their lat­est, Son­ic High­ways, push­ing a tired form in a refresh­ing direc­tion. Rather than a self-con­tained nar­ra­tive, the record opens itself up to tell the sto­ries of rock ‘n’ roll itself or, as All­mu­sic puts it, “the clas­sic rock that unites the U.S. from coast to coast.” Pick­ing up where his cel­e­bra­to­ry film Sound City left off, Grohl ties in his newest release with a series of HBO doc­u­men­taries that vis­it cities from New York, to Nashville, Austin, New Orleans, L.A., Wash­ing­ton, DC., and Seat­tle to tell their musi­cal sto­ries.

Of course, the musi­cal his­to­ry of that last metrop­o­lis can­not be nar­rat­ed with­out ref­er­ence to Grohl’s for­mer band, and so, Con­se­quence of Sound informs us, “Nir­vana received heavy focus dur­ing the [Seat­tle Son­ic High­ways] episode as Dave Grohl recount­ed his time in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame out­fit. Among the biggest rev­e­la­tions was the time Kurt Cobain asked to hear solo record­ings Grohl had been work­ing on dur­ing Nirvana’s 1992 tour.”

“Kurt heard that, and kissed me on the face, as he was in a bath,” Grohl revealed. “He was so excit­ed. He was like, ‘I heard you record­ed some stuff with Bar­rett [Jones].’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He was like, ‘Let me hear it.’ I was too afraid to be in the same room as he lis­tened to it.”

At the time, Grohl intend­ed these ear­ly Foo Fight­ers record­ings as an anony­mous side project, but the demos gar­nered enough atten­tion that he lat­er [after Cobain’s death] formed a band and, well… we pret­ty much know the rest of that sto­ry, tragedy and all. But as for the demos, we can hear them too, just as Cobain did, pos­si­bly while in the bath, in ‘92. These ear­ly ver­sions of songs like “Alone + Easy Tar­get” (top), “Big Me” (above), and “Exhaust­ed” (below)—all of which even­tu­al­ly made their way onto the first, epony­mous 1995 Foo Fight­ers album—have been col­lect­ed as an unof­fi­cial release called Nir­vana: Dave’s Demo­tapes 1992–1993.

Grohl plays all the instru­ments on these record­ings (hear more here), and wrote all the lyrics, though, as he tells us in an inter­view below, writ­ing lyrics isn’t some­thing he enjoys. He also dis­cuss­es his admi­ra­tion for Cobain’s nat­ur­al writ­ing abil­i­ty, and reveals that the Nir­vana front­man liked “Exhaust­ed” and “Alone + Easy Tar­get” so much he want­ed to turn them into Nir­vana songs. The oppor­tu­ni­ty was lost, but Cobain’s encour­age­ment clear­ly had pos­i­tive effect on the future Foo Fight­er.

Becom­ing a rock frontman—and a cur­rent sto­ry­teller of rock history—may have been an evo­lu­tion­ary leap for Grohl, but drum­ming has been a con­stant before, dur­ing, and after the Nir­vana phe­nom­e­non. As a denizen of the DC punk scene, Grohl lived part of the rock his­to­ry of that city as well, play­ing with sev­er­al hard­core bands, includ­ing Dain Bra­m­age, the project that fol­lowed his first band, Mis­sion Impos­si­ble. Music blog Antiqui­et brings us that band’s 1986 demo record­ings. They’re well worth a lis­ten, show­cas­ing a clas­sic mid-80s DC sound, backed by what was even then some pro­found­ly excel­lent drum­ming from Grohl. As Dain Bramage’s singer remarked, “After you’ve spent a cou­ple years with Dave Grohl as your drum­mer it’s easy to feel like no oth­er drum­mer exists.” The charis­mat­ic but hum­ble Grohl writes some pret­ty decent songs too, even while work­ing in the shad­ow of super­fa­mous Kurt Cobain.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Live Per­for­mance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” (1991)

Lis­ten to The John Bon­ham Sto­ry, a Radio Show Host­ed by Dave Grohl

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

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Jeff Bridges Narrates a Brief History of Bob Dylan’s and The Band’s Basement Tapes

in Music | December 4th, 2014

The_Big_Pink_(crop)
It’s not hard to guess what Bob Dylan will fans will be putting on their Christ­mas lists this year — either the new hard­cov­er book, The Lyrics: Since 1962, the 14-pound, 960-page book con­tain­ing all the lyrics Dylan wrote, record­ed, and per­formed through­out the years. Or the defin­i­tive edi­tion of The Base­ment Tapes, the new col­lec­tion fea­tur­ing 6‑discs and 138 tracks.


Above, actor Jeff Bridges (you know him as “The Dude” in The Big Lebows­ki) nar­rates the sto­ry behind The Base­ment Tapes, trac­ing Dylan’s jour­ney from Green­wich Vil­lage to the base­ment of “Big Pink,” the unas­sum­ing home in West Sauger­ties, New York where Dylan and The Band record­ed those famous tapes. We don’t need to rehearse the sto­ry. Bridges does a fine job of doing that. Below, you can watch him show off some of his musi­cal tal­ents, play­ing a cov­er of a Dylan song, “Ring Them Bells,” at the El Rey The­atre in LA in April 2013. He’s obvi­ous­ly a fan.

H/T Mike

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Dylan and The Grate­ful Dead Rehearse Togeth­er in Sum­mer 1987. Lis­ten to 74 Tracks.

The 1969 Bob Dylan-John­ny Cash Ses­sions: 12 Rare Record­ings

Bob Dylan and George Har­ri­son Play Ten­nis, 1969

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Scenes from Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Philosophical, Feature-Length Animated Film (2001)

in Animation, Film, Philosophy | December 4th, 2014

Richard Lin­klater’s lat­est film Boy­hood has earned quite a lot of press by accom­plish­ing the unprece­dent­ed cin­e­mat­ic feat of telling a sto­ry over a decade long with a pro­duc­tion over a decade long, fol­low­ing the same char­ac­ters, played by the same grow­ing and aging actors, the whole time through. View­ers have under­stand­ably found it a strik­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence, but most of Lin­klater’s projects do some­thing no oth­er film has done before. His 1990s “Indiewood” break­out Slack­er (watch it online), for instance, offered not just the por­trait of the so-called Generation‑X, and not just a por­trait of the then-ris­ing Amer­i­can coun­ter­cul­tur­al Mec­ca of Austin, Texas, but a form of sto­ry­telling that seemed to drift freely from one char­ac­ter to the next, cross­ing town on the winds of idle, every­day, intense, and even non­sen­si­cal con­ver­sa­tion.

And what does Wak­ing Life do? Released in 2001, Lin­klater’s first ani­mat­ed film (he would make a sec­ond, the Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, in 2006) not only fur­ther devel­ops the neglect­ed branch of ani­ma­tion known as roto­scop­ing, which involves draw­ing over live-action footage, but puts it to work for the cause of the philo­soph­i­cal film. But rather than approach­ing that enter­prise straight on, the movie inter­prets the phi­los­o­phy with which it deals through a vast cast of char­ac­ters both eccen­tric and mun­dane — intel­lec­tu­als, often, but also crack­pots, gad­flies, and just plain slack­ers. When they speak their thoughts aloud, as they do in the short clips fea­tured here, they speak on themes as var­ied, but as intrigu­ing­ly inter­con­nect­ed, as real­i­ty, free will, anar­chy, sui­cide, and cin­e­ma, all of which the ani­ma­tion vivid­ly illus­trates.

“Wak­ing Life could not come at a bet­ter time,” wrote Roger Ebert when the movie opened, less than a month after 9/11. “It cel­e­brates a series of artic­u­late, intel­li­gent char­ac­ters who seek out the mean­ing of their exis­tence and do not have the answers. At a time when mad­men think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an after­life, which is by def­i­n­i­tion unknow­able, those who don’t know the answers are the only ones ask­ing sane ques­tions. True believ­ers owe it to the rest of us to seek solu­tions that are rea­son­able in the vis­i­ble world.” Some view­ers will no doubt write off Wak­ing Life’s dia­logue — whether spo­ken by actors, pro­fes­sors, Lin­klater reg­u­lars, or utter ran­doms — as mere “dorm room con­ver­sa­tion,” but the film seems to ask an impor­tant ques­tion on that very point: are you real­ly hav­ing more inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions now than you did in the dorms?

If you have a sub­scrip­tion to Ama­zon Prime, you can watch Wak­ing Life for free right now. A ver­sion appears on Youtube for $2.99.

It’s also worth not­ing that Wak­ing Life appears on the list we recent­ly explored, 44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tion of Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Discover the 1950s & 1960s Computer & Cut-Up Animation of Pioneering Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek

in Animation | December 3rd, 2014

Hey, lovers of ani­ma­tion and exper­i­men­tal film: do you know the name Stan Van­Der­Beek? If not, you’ll enjoy learn­ing it, for more rea­sons than that it allows you to type four cap­i­tal let­ters. End­less­ly adven­tur­ous in his quest to find new ways to craft (not to men­tion dis­play) mov­ing images, Van­Der­Beek, who in col­lege encoun­tered the likes of John Cage, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, and Robert Rauschen­berg, mobi­lized for his ani­ma­tion a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies that, in his day, peo­ple did­n’t have much of a sense of what to do with, artis­ti­cal­ly or oth­er­wise. “Every­thing that artists made art from, or with, in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, he pret­ty much touched,” this NPR piece quotes MIT LIST Visu­al Arts Cen­ter cura­tor Joao Ribas as say­ing about him. “The medi­um, what­ev­er he was work­ing with, was not ade­quate enough. Paint­ing was too sta­t­ic, and then one film was too lin­ear, and then four films were too cum­ber­some.”

You can see here some of the fruits of this dri­ve that kept Van­Der­Beek “con­stant­ly try­ing some­thing else that could get clos­er and clos­er to what he saw.” At the top, we have a 1966 exam­ple of the ani­mat­ed poet­ry he cre­at­ed with Bell Labs com­put­er graph­ics pio­neer Ken Knowl­ton, using a pro­gram­ming lan­guage of Knowl­ton’s own design and a score by jazz drum­mer Paul Mot­ian. But Van­Der­Beek built more of his rep­u­ta­tion with his mas­tery of cut-and-paste ani­ma­tion, the kind you see in action in 1959’s Sci­ence Fric­tion just above. Five years lat­er, he would put out Breathdeath below, which Tate calls “a sur­re­al fan­ta­sy based on 15th cen­tu­ry wood­cuts of The Dance of the Dead” made of “cut-up pho­tos and news­reels, reassem­bled into a black com­e­dy ded­i­cat­ed to Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton.” Does this all remind you a bit of Ter­ry Gilliam? It should. The Mon­ty Python ani­ma­tor, a notable Van­Der­Beek fan, named Breathdeath one of the best ani­mat­ed films of all time.

Find more exper­i­men­tal films in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Best Ani­mat­ed Films of All Time, Accord­ing to Ter­ry Gilliam

Watch 13 Exper­i­men­tal Short Films by Tezu­ka Osamu, the Walt Dis­ney of Japan

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rockers” (1994)

in Music | December 3rd, 2014

advicetoChrissie Hyn­de knows a few things about being a female rock­er. When at the ten­der age of 14 she saw Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels play at a fair­ground in her home­town of Akron, Ohio, the band got into a fist­fight with each oth­er dur­ing the per­for­mance. She was hooked. “I thought,” she said to The Guardian ‘That’s got to be the life!’ ”

Not long after col­lege at Kent State, where she was in a band with Devo’s Mark Moth­ers­baugh, she end­ed up in Lon­don. There she worked at Mal­colm McLaren’s noto­ri­ous store SEX along­side the future mem­bers of The Sex Pis­tols. She even asked Sid Vicious and John­ny Rot­ten to mar­ry her for the work visa. She tried to start a band with Mick Jones of The Clash, but that didn’t take. She was kicked out of the band Mas­ters of the Back­side before they changed their name to The Damned and became famous. Then in 1978, she formed the band The Pre­tenders and quick­ly became a rock icon with hit tunes like “Don’t Get Me Wrong” and “Mes­sage of Love.”

In short, Hyn­de has been rock­ing for over 40 years now and she has some advice for aspir­ing lady rock­ers, which was orig­i­nal­ly print­ed as a pro­mo for her 1994 release “Night in my Veins.”

1. Don’t moan about being a chick, refer to fem­i­nism or com­plain about sex­ist dis­crim­i­na­tion. We’ve all been thrown down the stairs, and f—ed about, but no one wants to hear a whin­ing female. Write a loose­ly dis­guised song about it instead and clean up. ($)

2. Nev­er pre­tend to know more than you do. If you don’t know chord names, refer to the dots. Don’t go near the desk unless you plan on becom­ing an engi­neer.

3. Make the oth­er band mem­bers look and sound good. Bring out the best in them; that’s your job. Oh, and you bet­ter sound good too.

4. Do not insist in [sic] work­ing with “females.” That’s just more b.s. Get the best man for the job. If it hap­pens to a woman, great – you’ll have some­one to go to depart­ment stores with on tour instead of mak­ing one of the road crew go with you.

5. Try not to have a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with the band. It always ends in tears.

6. Don’t think that stick­ing your boobs out and try­ing to look f—able will help. Remem­ber you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not “f—me,” it’s “f—you”!

7. Don’t try to com­pete with the guys; it won’t impress any­body. Remem­ber, one of the rea­sons they like you is because you don’t offer yet more com­pe­ti­tion to the already exist­ing male egos.

8. If you sing, don’t “belt” or “screech.” No one wants to hear that sh–; it sounds “hys­ter­i­cal.”

9. Shave your legs, for chris­sakes!

10. Don’t take advice from peo­ple like me. Do your own thing always.

A lot of this is just sound advice for get­ting along at the work­place – don’t act like you know more than you do, don’t com­plain, make your work­mates look good but don’t doink them. But prob­a­bly the key points for Hyn­de is num­ber one and num­ber sev­en.

In that inter­view with the Guardian, she indeed proved to be reluc­tant to “moan” about sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion in the rock­dom. “There’s always been women doing this, just not that many,” she said. “I don’t know what the fem­i­nists have to say about it. Over the years, you’d hear, ‘We weren’t encour­aged.’ Well, I don’t think Jeff Beck­’s moth­er was say­ing, ‘Jef­frey! What are you doing up in your room? Are you rehears­ing up there?’ No one was ever encour­aged to play gui­tar in a band. But I nev­er found it hard­er because I’m a woman. If any­thing I’ve been treat­ed bet­ter. Guys will car­ry my gui­tars and stuff – who’s going to say no? Guys always tune my gui­tars, too.”

Check out the video for “Night in my Veins” below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk Lets You Watch Vin­tage Footage from the Hey­day of NYC’s Great Music Scene

The Art of Punk Presents a New Doc­u­men­tary on The Dead Kennedys and Their Grit­ty Aes­thet­ics

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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Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement

in Music, Philosophy, Politics | December 3rd, 2014

The Marx­ist Frank­furt School’s prac­tice of neg­a­tive dialec­tics put the “crit­i­cal” in crit­i­cal the­o­ry, and none of its loose band of philoso­pher-crit­ics was as inci­sive as the dour, depres­sive Theodor Adorno. Against both mys­ti­cal and mate­ri­al­ist notions of his­to­ry as progress, Adorno argued in his trea­tise Neg­a­tive Dialec­tics that, writes Peter Thomp­son, “his­to­ry is not the sim­ple unfold­ing of some pre­or­dained noume­nal realm,” but rather an open sys­tem. In oth­er words, we can nev­er know in advance where we are going, or should go, only that we live enmeshed in con­tra­dic­tions. And in the thick of late-moder­ni­ty, these are engen­dered by the log­ic of con­sumer cap­i­tal­ism. For Adorno, the ulti­mate prod­uct of this sys­tem is what he termed the “Cul­ture Indus­try”—the mono­lith­ic com­plex of Hol­ly­wood film, TV, radio, adver­tis­ing, mag­a­zines, etc.—engineered to lull the mass­es into docil­i­ty so that they pas­sive­ly accept the dic­tates of an author­i­tar­i­an state.

The anti­dote to this cul­tur­al drug­ging, Adorno argued, was to be found in the avant-garde, in dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing works of art that appeal pri­mar­i­ly to the intel­lect. In demon­stra­tion of the kind of art he meant, he even com­posed his own music, inspired by the work of Arnold Schoen­berg. It’s very tempt­ing to read Adorno’s attacks on jazz and rock ‘n’ roll as the belly­ach­ing of a can­tan­ker­ous snob, but there is sub­stance to these cri­tiques, and they deserve to be tak­en seri­ous­ly, even if in the end to be refut­ed.

Take, for exam­ple, Adorno’s take on the protest music of the six­ties. We tend to assume the impor­tance of artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (at the top, singing the spir­i­tu­al “Oh Free­dom”) to the anti-war movement—their songs, after all, pro­vide the sound­track for our doc­u­men­taries and fic­tion­al­ized films of the peri­od. But Adorno felt that pop­u­lar “protest music” was a con­tra­dic­tion in terms, giv­en its rela­tion­ship to the same Cul­ture Indus­try that man­u­fac­tured and dis­sem­i­nat­ed adver­tis­ing and pro­pa­gan­da. It’s obvi­ous­ly a prob­lem many artists, includ­ing Dylan, have grap­pled with. In the short clip above, Adorno deliv­ers his ver­dict on Baez:

I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring polit­i­cal protest togeth­er with “pop­u­lar music”—that is, with enter­tain­ment music—are for the fol­low­ing rea­son doomed from the start.  The entire sphere of pop­u­lar music, even there where it dress­es itself up in mod­ernist guise, is to such a degree insep­a­ra­ble from past tem­pera­ment, from con­sump­tion, from the cross-eyed trans­fix­ion with amuse­ment, that attempts to out­fit it with a new func­tion remain entire­ly super­fi­cial…

Put anoth­er way—whatever else protest music is, it is also inevitably a com­mod­i­ty, mar­ket­ed, like the most vac­u­ous bub­blegum pop, as enter­tain­ment for the mass­es. But it isn’t only the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of music that gets under Adorno’s skin, but also the standardization—the very thing that makes pop music pop­u­lar. Its forms are instant­ly rec­og­niz­able and easy to hum along to while per­form­ing mind­less repet­i­tive tasks. As he wrote in his essay “On Pop­u­lar Music”: “The whole struc­ture of pop­u­lar music is stan­dard­ized, even where the attempt is made to cir­cum­vent stan­dard­iza­tion, [guar­an­tee­ing] the same famil­iar expe­ri­ence.” Such for­mal stag­na­tion pre­cludes for Adorno the emer­gence of any­thing “nov­el,” and, there­fore, any­thing tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He goes on to say specif­i­cal­ly of anti-Viet­nam protest music:

And I have to say that when some­body sets him­self up, and for what­ev­er rea­son sings maudlin music about Viet­nam being unbear­able, I find that real­ly it is this song that is in fact unbear­able, in that by tak­ing the hor­ren­dous and mak­ing it some­how con­sum­able, it ends up wring­ing some­thing like con­sump­tion-qual­i­ties out of it.

The flat­ten­ing effect of mass cul­ture, Adorno sug­gests, ren­ders every ges­ture per­formed with­in it—whether of protest or acquiescence—as fun­da­men­tal­ly triv­ial… and mar­ketable. His posi­tion is irritating–it tips one of our cul­tur­al sacred cows–and it’s cer­tain­ly debat­able; Lisa Whitak­er, author of the blog Con­tex­tu­al Stud­ies takes issue with it. Oth­er writ­ers have explained his cri­tique in more nuanced terms. But what­ev­er you think of them, his argu­ments do give us a use­ful frame­work for dis­cussing the ways in which cul­tur­al move­ments seem to get instant­ly co-opt­ed and turned into prod­ucts: Every rad­i­cal ends up on a t‑shirt; every rev­o­lu­tion­ary gets reduced to pithy quota­bles on cof­fee mugs; every move­ment seems reducible to hand­fuls of quirky memes.

For an inter­est­ing engage­ment with Adorno’s pop cul­ture cri­tique vis-à-vis the work of Dylan, see this entry in the Madame Pick­wick Art Blog. And for much more of Adorno’s cranky but enlight­en­ing state­ments on pop­u­lar cul­ture, see this list of read­ings of work he pro­duced in the for­ties with Max Horkheimer, as well as a lat­er recon­sid­er­a­tion of the “Cul­ture Indus­try.” We live in an age dom­i­nat­ed by mass pop­u­lar cul­ture, and sat­u­rat­ed with protest. Adorno asks us to think crit­i­cal­ly about the rela­tion­ships between the two, and about the effi­ca­cy of using the media and mes­sag­ing of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism as a means of resist­ing the oppres­sive struc­tures cre­at­ed by cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism. But rather than Adorno’s wet blan­ket the­o­riz­ing, I’ll leave you with Joan Baez. What­ev­er the use­ful­ness of her so-called protest music, any­one who denies the beau­ty of her voice has sure­ly got tin ears.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

Wal­ter Benjamin’s Mys­ti­cal Thought Pre­sent­ed by Two Exper­i­men­tal Films

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

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