Open Culture Blog

First you set out to smash all institutions, but then you find the institutions have enshrined you. Isn’t that always the way? It certainly seems to have turned out that way for punk rock, in any case, which vowed in the seventies to tear it all up and start over again. Now, in the 2010s, we find tribute paid to not just the music but the aesthetics, lifestyles, and personalities of the punk movement by two separate, and separately well-respected, institutions. We recently featured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Punk: Chaos to Couture. Today, you can start watching The Art of Punk, a series of documentaries from MOCAtv, the video channel of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. Its trailer, which appears at the top of the post, emphasizes its focus on, literally, the visual art of punk: its posters, its album art, its T-shirts, and even — un-punk as this may sound — its logos.

The series opens with the episode just above on Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon, designer of the band’s well-known four-bar icon. It catches up with not just him, but founding singer Keith Morris and bassist Chuck Dukowski, as well as Flea from the Red Hot Chili peppers, who grew up a fan of the greater Los Angeles punk scene from which Black Flag emerged. The episode concludes, needless to say, with Henry Rollins, who, though not an original member of the band and now primarily a spoken word performer, has come to embody their punk ethos in his own highly distinctive way. In the latest episode, just out today, The Art of Punk series takes you inside the world of Crass, the English punk band formed in 1977.

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The History of Punk Rock

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

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In October of 1933, Louis Armstrong and his “Harlem Hot Band” arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark for a series of eight shows at the Lyric Park theater. Thousands of fans mobbed the railway station, breaking through police barricades and climbing on top of train cars just to get a glimpse of the great jazz trumpeter as he stepped from his train.

Nowadays the Copenhagen visit is remembered because it was the first time Armstrong was ever filmed in concert. The Danish director Holger Madsen recruited Armstrong to appear in his feature film København, Kalundborg Og -?. Armstrong had made a cameo appearance in a 1931 film called Ex Flame, and on a sound stage the following year in two short films–a Paramount Pictures featurette and a Betty Boop cartoon–but the Copenhagen footage is the earliest of Armstrong playing live with his band.

The performance was filmed on October 21, 1933 at the Lyric Park. There was no audience in the theater during the filming. The shots of people applauding were made at a different time and spliced into the scene. Armstrong and his band play three songs: “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Dinah” and “Tiger Rag.” The nine-man band includes Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, Charles D. Johnson on trumpet, Peter DuCongé on clarinet and alto saxophone, Henry Tyree on alto saxophone, Fletcher Allen on tenor saxophone, Lionel Guimarez on trombone, Justo Baretto on piano, German Arango on bass and Oliver Tines on drums.

Armstrong is brilliant in the film. His exuberant showmanship and virtuosity are striking, and his unmistakable genius for phrasing–the way his trumpet and voice sound like two sides of the same distinctive instrument–remind us of why many people still consider Armstrong the greatest jazz musician of all time.

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Burly Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has never lost his sense of humor, even when facing harsh repression from his government. But while the idea of 55-year old Ai recording a heavy metal record might seem like a stunt, the source material for his first single, “Dumbass” (above), is anything but funny. The furiously angry, expletive-filled song is inspired by Ai’s harsh treatment during his 81-day imprisonment in 2011. He’s calling the musical project “a kind of self-therapy” and will release six tracks on June 22—the second anniversary of his release—as an album called The Divine Comedy.

Ai sings (or howls, growls, and bellows) in Chinese. As you can see from the grim images in the video above—with the artist re-enacting and re-imagining his experiences in detention—the memories of his incarceration are still raw and painful. While he’s called his music “heavy metal,” The Guardian points out that “it’s not exactly Metallica” (unless you count that Lou Reed collaboration). Ai himself says of his sound:

After I said it would be heavy metal I ran back to check what heavy metal would be like. Then I thought, oh my god, it’s quite different…. So it’s Chinese heavy metal, or maybe Caochangdi [where his studio is based] heavy metal.

Call it what you want: Chinese heavy metal, practical joke, avant garde performance piece… it’s still likely to get Ai in even further trouble with Chinese authorities. As he explained to the New York Times, however, he “wanted to do something impossible…. I wanted to show young people here we can all sing…. It’s our voice.”

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

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“Wireless Philosophy,” or Wiphi, is an online project of “open access philosophy” co-created by Yale and MIT that aims to make fundamental philosophical concepts accessible by “making videos that are freely available in a form that is entertaining” to people “with no background in the subject.” To accomplish this goal, they have contracted with an impressive range of professors of philosophy from prestigious universities across the country. Wiphi is still very much a work-in-progress, but they currently feature some interesting introductions to classical philosophical issues. Currently, the site divides into several basic categories like “Critical Thinking,” “Epistemology,” “Metaphysics,” “Ethics,” and “Political Philosophy.” Much of these are still unfinished, but the few videos on the site, such as those related to the problem of free will and the existence of God, provide viewers with much to chew on.

In the video above, MIT philosophy professor Richard Holton explains the basics of the problem of free will. He divides this into two distinct problems: the metaphysical and the epistemological. The first problem states that if the laws of nature are deterministic, everything that will happen is fixed, and there is in fact no free choice (no matter how we feel about it). Holton chooses to focus on the second problem, the problem of foreknowledge. Put simply, if things are determined, then if we know all of the conditions of reality, and have adequate resources, we should be able to predict everything that is going to happen.

Holton leaves aside enormously complicated developments in physics and opts to illustrate the problem with what he calls “a simple device.” In his illustration, one must predict whether a lightbulb will turn on by turning on another lightbulb, part of a system he calls a “frustrator.” In this scenario, even if we have all the knowledge and resources to make perfectly accurate predictions, the problem of “frustrators”—or faulty observers and feedback loops—complicates the situation irrevocably

In the video above, Professor Timothy Yenter describes the Cosmological argument for the existence of God, classically attributed to Aristotle, elaborated by Islamic philosophers and Thomas Aquinas, and taken up in the Enlightenment by Leibniz as the principle of sufficient reason. One of that argument’s premises, that the cosmos (everything that exists) must have a cause, assumes that the causal circumstances we observe within the system, the universe as a whole, must also apply outside of it. Professor Yenter describes this above in terms of the “fallacy of composition,” which occurs when one assumes that the whole has the same properties as its parts. (Such as arguing that since all of your body’s atoms are invisible to the naked eye, your whole body is invisible. Try heading to work naked tomorrow to test this out.)

This brings us to the problem of infinite regress. In the second part of his introduction to the Cosmological Argument—in which he discusses the so-called Modal Argument—Professor Yenter explains the key principle of Ex nihilo nihil fit, or “out of nothing, nothing comes.” This seems like a bedrock metaphysical principle, such that few question it, and it introduces a key distinction between necessary things—which must exist—and contingent things, which could be otherwise. The most important premise in the Modal Argument is that every contingent thing must be caused by something else. If all causes are contingent (which they seem to us to be) they must proceed from a necessary, self-existent thing. Whether that thing has all or any of the properties classically ascribed to the theistic God is another question all together, but Aquinas and the classical Islamic philosophers certainly thought so.

While there may be no philosophical nutcracker large enough to crack these problems, they remain perpetually interesting for many philosophers and scientists, and understanding the basic issues at stake is fundamental to any study of philosophy. In that sense, Wiphi provides a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions.

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

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Last month we told you about The Strange Day When Bugs Bunny Saved the Life of Mel Blanc. It’s a true tale about how, back in 1971, Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and other beloved Looney Tunes characters, got into a terrible car accident in Los Angeles and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s wife and son spent two long weeks in the hospital trying to revive him, but got no response. But then, one day, Blanc’s neurologist walked into the room and said to the patient: “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?” After a pause, a voice said, “Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?” You can get more on that story here. In the meantime, we’ll amuse you with another short story. Once upon a time, an ear-nose-and-throat specialist wanted to see how Mel Blanc (1908-1989) performed all of those Looney Tunes cartoon voices. So he took a fiber optic laryngoscope, stuck it down Blanc’s throat, and here’s what he saw. Watch above.

via VideoSift/BoingBoing

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Here’s a chance to be a patron of the arts on whatever scale you can afford. Last week Ken Berman, a San Francisco-based jazz musician (and the teacher of an excellent Bob Dylan class at Stanford) launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the recording of an album called Sound Poetry. Born out of Berman’s friendship with the late poet Eythan Klamka (1967-2011), the project builds on Klamka’s notion that “any good musician is a sound poet.” “Convinced that the finest improvisation is essentially a lyrical art,” Berman draws “inspiration from a range of diverse sources, whether Zen practitioner Thich Nhat Hanh, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes, George Gershwin, Bob Dylan, and of course the jazz greats from Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis to Bill Frisell – all of whose unique contributions continue to be guideposts and indicate the realm of possibility in improvisatory art.” To date, supporters of the Sound Poetry project have pledged $4,956 of the $11,150 goal, and the funding period still has 25 days to go. Contributions will help pay for everything from studio time, mixing and mastering, to creating cover art, manufacturing CDs & DVDs, publicity for the album, and a three continent tour. You can learn more about Sound Poetry from the video above and make your own contributions here. If you pledge $15 or more, you’ll get a copy of the album upon its completion.

You can also sample Ken’s earlier compositions here or visit his web site here. And if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’d encourage you to check out Ken’s course Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. It will be offered in July through Stanford Continuing Studies and it’s open to the public.

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The other day, a teenaged friend asked me if the war in Afghanistan is still going on. The answer is yes. Presumably, it won’t be when he reaches draft age.

In the meantime, here’s some extremely NSFW footage of Louis CK entertaining the troops at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan a few years back. Looking for a quick overview of what makes the troops laugh? Cinnabon, schlubby middle aged dudes comparing themselves unfavorably to the audience’s rock hard leanness, and the F word. The one whose non-slang definition is “a bundle of sticks.”

Given the make up of the crowd, it made me uneasy. This was most assuredly not a preaching-to-the-choir situation, though the young audience member who filmed the routine without the benefit of a tripod notes: ” I didn’t even know who he was before this set. He’s one of my top 3 favorites now. I just wanted other people to see him like I did. I wish I could have a conversation with him!”

Hopefully, by now, hero worship will have steered him to the second episode of CK’ s semiautobiographical show, in which extremely forthcoming gay comedian, Rick Crom, schools a tableful of straight poker buddies on various sexual practices. His matter-of-fact demeanor leads CK to ask how a queer crowd might react to his “faggot” routine. The fact that CK also produced and scripted this show is enough to convince me that his aim is true.

It’s worth noting that the presumably straight (watch his other videos) Youtuber who filmed and hosts this video liked ‘‘Louis CK – Laughing at Gay People” but also the Freddie Mercury Google Doodle.

Given CK’s mad respect for anyone serving in the military, perhaps this young man can convince him that it’s time to retire “retard” as a pejorative … even if he’s talking about his own kids.

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Ayun Halliday is also sick of epilepsy as punchline or shortcut. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Here’s classic footage of the Ramones in their prime, performing at a club in 1977. The film’s opening title says it was shot on June 10, 1977 at CBGB, but that is apparently not true. Singer Joey Ramone tells the audience that the band’s third album, Rocket to Russia, will be coming out “in about two weeks” as the band launches into a song from the album. But Rocket to Russia wasn’t recorded until late August of 1977, and was released on November 4. So perhaps the film was shot during one of the band’s October 1977 shows. Whatever the exact date and place, the Ramones were clearly at the top of their form when this film was made. In the two clips presented here, they burn through the following songs:

Part one (above)

1. “Blitzkrieg Bop”
2. “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”
3. “Beat on the Brat”
4. “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”

Part two (below):

1. “Rockaway Beach”
2. “Cretin Hop”
3. “Oh,Oh, I Love Her So”
4. “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World”

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I grew up with the music of Joni Mitchell often playing in the background of my home life. For me she blended with the voices of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Carole King, and other sixties folkies; my mother—who played instruments like dulcimers and autoharps and could not sing or keep time—loved these women. I will confess, I did not. Familiarity did not breed contempt so much as indifference, and I mistook the softness of the music for cheap sentimentality. This careless listening lead me wrong, especially in the case of Mitchell, whose songwriting is perhaps as poetic, complex, and yet as honest as it gets.

In songs like the absolutely wrenching “Little Green” and the stunning, imagistic “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” Mitchell’s jazz-inflected compositions demonstrate these qualities in such abundance that they make me shudder. Her visual imagination is particularly on display in the latter, and that enduring quality comes from a lifelong engagement with art, her own and others. Mitchell, we learn in the 2003 CBC documentary above, had a childhood ambition to become a painter. She tells us in voice-over “I always had star eyes; I was always interested in glamour.” Music, for her, was a hobby.

Nonetheless, she made a name for herself locally in Calgary as a folk-singing art student in the sixties, “mimicking” Joan Baez and Judy Collins songs at a coffeehouse called The Depression. A pregnancy—ruinous at the time—thwarted Mitchell’s desire for an art career and, as she puts it, forced her “on the bad girl’s trail, a trail of shame and scandal.” She gave birth to a daughter (the subject of “Little Green”) and, out of desperation, began to birth her music—through an ill-considered misalliance with first husband and musical partner Chuck Mitchell. These painful early experiences pushed Mitchell to write, to “develop her own private world,” she says above. A line from “Little Green” captures the emotional nuances of that world: “You’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed.”

Watch the full documentary (with Spanish subtitles) to get more insights into Mitchell’s development as an artist and a person. Mitchell is open, lively, and reflective, as you might expect. She’s as lively as ever as a 69-year-old grande dame of folk music, as you can see in the CBC interview above, taped at her home, where she talks at length about the paintings that line her walls and her songwriting process, while unrepentantly smoking like a chimney.

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

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“‘The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,’ he said. ‘That’s how you know when it starts.’

‘Is it really?’

‘Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.’”

Most American readers surely recognize these lines, though it may take a moment to remember where they recognize them from. They open “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway that first ran in Esquire in 1936, then, two years later, appeared in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. (Find in our collection of Free eBooks.) Dealing with the memories and regrets of a writer on safari dying of a gangrenous thorn wound, the story has over the past 76 years become one of the most respected works in Hemingway’s oeuvre and an essential piece of twentieth-century American literature. As often happens with essential pieces of American literature, Hollywood got to it, adapting it into a 1952 blockbuster featuring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, and Ava Gardner. (Find in our collection of 535 Free Movies Online.)

Though the starring role of Harry, the fast-fading rough-and-tumble man of letters who sees himself as ruined by affluence and hedonism, went to Peck, I could also imagine it played by Charlton Heston. Even if you couldn’t quite place that bit of dialogue from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” you’d be immediately able to place Heston’s voice reading the story aloud in the recording available on this HarperAudio Hemingway site. Listen below and see for yourself if the actor’s delivery, so often associated with silver-screen roles meant to project a grand sternness, can also deliver the bitterness of Hemingway’s protagonist, who certainly shares with his creator the conviction that “politics, women, drink, money and ambition” bring writers truly low, down to the point where they can declare, as Harry so memorably does, “The only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity.”

• Part one: .au format (5.5 Mb), .gsm format (1 Mb), .ra format (0.6 Mb)
  
• Part two: .au format (5.5 Mb), .gsm format (1 Mb), .ra format (0.6 Mb)
  
• Part three: .au format (5.5 Mb), .gsm format (1 Mb), .ra format (0.6 Mb)
  
• Part four: .au format (5.5 Mb), .gsm format (1 Mb), .ra format (0.6 Mb)
  

Bonus: Here you can also listen to Donald Sutherland read an excerpt from Old Man and the Sea.

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

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Perhaps you live in a developed nation, or a pocket of a developing nation, where internet access is a relatively cheap commodity. Count yourself lucky. Right now, 5 billion people — or two thirds of the world’s population — lack access to an affordable and reliable Internet connection. Which means they lack access to critical information — medical information that can save lives; scientific information that can improve farming; technical information necessary to build a modern economy; and educational resources that can cultivate young minds.

With Project Loon, Google is launching an audacious experiment that will hopefully make a dent in this serious problem. The experiment involves putting a fleet of high-altitude balloons into the air. Powered solely by the wind and the sun, the balloons will fly high into the stratosphere, well above where commercial planes fly, and they’ll beam Internet access back to the ground ”at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster,” claims Google’s main blog. (The clip below explains the gist of the technology.) Right now, they’re running a small scale test in New Zealand (in Christchurch and Canterbury, to be exact) and you can monitor the progress over at Project Loon’s Google Plus page. In the meantime, we’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope the entire world can soon enjoy our collection of Free Online Courses, not to mention the other random curiosities found on the web.

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In late May, The Seattle Public Library set a world record for the Longest Book Domino Chain, according to the World Record Academy. Watch as 2,131 books — all part of an upcoming book sale — fall one by one. Apparently, it took 27 volunteers seven hours — and five failed attempts — to pull off this feat for the ages. h/t Metafilter

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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Today is “Bloomsday,” the traditional day for book lovers to celebrate James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (text – audio). To mark the occasion we bring you this rare 1924 recording of Joyce reading from the Aeolus episode of the novel. The recording was arranged and financed by the author’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The first session didn’t go well. Joyce was nervous and suffering from his recurring eye troubles. He and Beach returned another day to finish the recording. In her memoir, Shakespeare & Company, Beach writes:

Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.

I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–”he lifted his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.

The passage parallels the episode in Homer’s Odyssey featuring Aeolus, god of the winds. As a pun, Joyce sets it in a newspaper office where his hero Leopold Bloom stops by to place an ad, only to be stymied by the blustery noise of the printing presses and of the various “windbags” in the office. One character tries to entertain a couple of his friends with a mocking recital of a politician’s speech printed in the day’s newspaper. Here is the passage Joyce reads:

He began:

–Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of a highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.

His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech…Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?

–And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.

From the Fathers
It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.

–Why will you jews not accept our language, our religion and our culture? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.

Nile.

Child, man, effigy.

By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.

–You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.

A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. he lifted his voice above it boldly:

–But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have led the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eteral amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor even have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.

For more of Ulysses, click here to find out how you can download it as a free audio book. And to hear a clearer recording of Joyce’s voice made five years after this one, see our 2012 post: “James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake.”

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Writer-Director Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for the gorgeousness of his feature length animations, and storylines that combine indigenous Japanese elements with supernatural whimsy. In a world of Disney princesses, let us give thanks for family entertainment in which an eccentric castle roams the countryside on chicken legs, a stink spirit wreaks havoc in a bathhouse, and a fur-lined cat bus transports passengers at top speed.

The first generation of American children to have grown up on Miyazki films – My Neighbor Totoro was released in the States in 1993 – has entered their college years. A portion of them will have eagerly sought out his latest offering, a semi-autobiographical tale directed by his son, Goro. Some will have felt themselves too mature for such fare. Being college students, both groups are likely to be horking down a fair amount of cheap packaged ramen noodles.

As evidenced above, Miyazaki has some pretty specific ideas on what to do with those. Preparing a late night workplace dinner for his Spirited Away team, the great director rivals Good Fellas‘ sliced garlic maven Paul Sorvino for culinary sang-froid. Stuffing ten blocks of the stuff into a single pot might get an ordinary mortal voted off of Top Chef, but aside from that Miyazaki’s staff meal is an excellent, instant tutorial for those interested in souping up low budget, collegiate cuisine.

Like everything else he does, the end product looks good. Even those who’ve managed to elude the dreaded Freshmen Fifteen may feel themselves in danger of reenacting one of Spirited Away’s  most notorious scenes. Oink oink!

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Ayun Halliday‘s favorite moment is when Totoro and the children make the camphor tree grow. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Did you know that the Spanish guitar intro to the Beatles’ “Bungalow Bill” was not played by George Harrison, but rather by an odd electronic instrument called a Mellotron, the same strange proto-synthesizer responsible for the flute intro to “Strawberry Fields Forever”? You’ll learn quite a bit more about the “rash breaking out all over pop music” that was the Mellotron in the audio story above, narrated by Rick Wakeman.

From the aforementioned Beatles’ songs to The Band’s “This Wheel’s on Fire” to pretty much every song in 60s pop and 70s progressive rock, as well as in 60s revivalists like Oasis, the Mellotron makes an appearance. It even shows up on Skynard’s “Freebird” of all things. Wakeman sketches the history of the oddball instrument, from its humble beginnings in the garage of California inventor Harry Chamberlin, to its popularization by salesman Bill Fransen, who took Chamberlin’s design and made it his own.

Bear in mind, as we enter the world of Mellotronics, that the instrumental bits you hear throughout Wakeman’s story were played by someone, sometime. The sounds made by this keyboard-like thing are in fact actual parts from live orchestras and sundry other musical arrangements, recorded onto tape loops and configured in an ingenious way so that they correspond to a standard keyboard and a variety of presets and knobby-dially-things. You might even call it an analog sampler. The more technically-minded among you may wish to read this Sound on Sound article for specs. For you enthusiasts, keyboardist Mike Pindar of the Moody Blues—whose “Nights in White Satin” would never have been without the Mellotron—demonstrates the instrument’s inner workings in the short video above.

Inventor Harry Chamberlin originally designed the Mellotron (which he called, of course, the Chamberlin) to re-create the sound of an orchestra at home, or in the local lodge or cabaret, presumably. This is the use Paul McCartney divines in the funky demonstration of his Mellotron above. Sir Paul, in a cabaret setting, does a goofy lounge singer act, then plays the “Strawberry Fields” intro.

Digital synthesizers and computers overtook the Mellotron, as they did all analog electronics. But like all things old, it’s new again, in simulated form, available to iPhone users via the Manetron app (Mellotron also makes a physical, digital version of their vintage instrument). The story and sound of the Mellotron recently inspired a full documentary treatment in the 2010 film Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie, now out on DVD, which may be the most compelling documentary about a pioneering electronic instrument ever made (far better than 2004’s disappointing Moog). As former Beach Boy Brian Wilson says in the film, “the Mellotron stays cool.” And indeed, it does.

via Coudal

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

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Bertrand Russell was one of the most important logicians and mathematical philosophers of the early 20th century. He was also a tireless campaigner for peace and social progress. Born into an aristocratic British family, Russell believed that the social and political ills of the world could be lessened if people of all social classes had a better grasp of knowledge and critical reasoning. To this end, he devoted a great deal of his time to writing popular books on moral and intellectual matters. He was also a regular presence on BBC radio during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Most of Russell’s surviving radio programs have been locked away in the archives for all these years. But in January of 2012, producers at BBC Radio 4 assembled some interesting excerpts from the philosopher’s many radio appearances for a retrospective. Bertrand Russell: The First Media Academic? (above, in its entirety) is a fascinating overview of Russell’s life as a public intellectual. Hosted by comedian and writer Robin Ince, the program includes commentary from two of Britain’s current crop of media academics: physicist and former pop musician Brian Cox and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who currently holds Richard Dawkins’s old seat as the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. There are excerpts from vintage interviews with people who knew Russell, including his son Conrad and his second wife, Dora Black Russell. But the best contributions are from the philosopher himself. Even the most devoted fan of Russell will find something new and interesting to listen to in this excellent assemblage of rare audio clips.

Note: You can download a finely-polished recording of Bertrand Russell: The First Media Academic? from Audible.com. And you could always get it for free by taking advantage of Audible’s 30-day Free Trial. Find details on that here. Whenever a reader signs up for a free trial with Audible, it helps support Open Culture.

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In the 1950s, Mick Jagger (then still called “Mike Jagger”) was a middle class kid growing up in Dartford, Kent, England. His mother, Eva, was a hairdresser; his father, Joe, a PE teacher. Together, they lived in a nice, orderly home, with more than enough money to pay the bills. (His neighbor, Keith Richards, couldn’t say the same.) In 1957, the elder Jagger began consulting on a weekly TV show called Seeing Sport, which promoted the virtues of sports to British children. During the coming years, Mick and his brother Chris made regular appearances on the show, showing viewers how to build a tent, or master various canoeing skills. In the 1959 clip above, Mick shows off the footwear needed for rock climbing. Nothing too fancy. No mountaineering boots or anything like that. Just a pair of “ordinary gym shoes … like the kind Mike is wearing.”  The episode was shot in a spot called “High Rocks,” near Tunbridge Wells. This background info comes to us via Philip Norman’s 2012 biography of Mick Jagger.

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Americans sometimes complain that, unlike the currency of many other countries, which feature portraits of artists, scientists, and writers, U.S. dollar bills don’t tend to feature intellectuals. But one could, I think, make the case for Benjamin Franklin, who must certainly count as a man of letters, and did illustrate an important physics lesson when he flew that kite with a key on it. Still, that doesn’t exactly make him a physicist, as residents of Austria, New Zealand, Scotland, and Croatia, all of whom have used bills emblazoned with the faces of physicists, well know.

It does, however, get Franklin a place on University of Maryland physicist Edward F. Redish’s page “Physicists on the Money,” which was featured on Jason Kottke’s site yesterday. Redish highlights 24 bills bearing portraits of noted figures throughout the history of physics, including, at the top of the post, the Danish 500-kroner note that pictures quantum theorist Niels Bohr. Just above we have the universally recognizable dishevelment of Albert Einstein, who found his way onto Israel’s five-pound note by, among other achievements, coming up with the general theory of relativity. Below you’ll see a physicist you may not have heard of, let alone spent: tenth-century scholar Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, pictured on Kazakhstan’s one-tenge note. Redish’s delightfully retro site also offers a collection of physicists on stamps, and links to a page with more scientist- and mathematician-bearing banknotes.

via Kottke

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

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The camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is an instrument of intuition and spontaneity — “the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.” Like a Zen archer, Cartier-Bresson viewed his métier as a way of being in the world. Photography for him was an “artless art,” best approached by forgetting technique and opening oneself to the unconscious. “To take photographs,” he said, “means to recognize–simultaneously and within a fraction of a second–both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Pen, Brush and Camera (above) is an excellent overview of the great photographer’s life and work. Directed and narrated by Patricia Wheatley, the film was produced for the BBC in 1998, the year four major exhibitions were held in London to celebrate Cartier-Bresson’s 90th birthday. The film traces the photographer’s extraordinary life, from his early training as a painter and his infatuation with Surrealism to his later work as a globe-trotting photojournalist and his decision, after 40 years of work in the medium, to give up photography and dedicate the last decades of his life to drawing. The film includes rare footage of Cartier-Bresson at work, along with interviews by Magnum photographer Eve Arnold and others. Best of all, Wheatley was able to film extensive interviews with the notoriously shy photographer, both in London and in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.

To learn more about Cartier-Bresson and to see a wonderful slide show of his photography narrated by the man himself, please see our earlier piece, “Henri Cartier Bresson and the Decisive Moment.”

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A year ago the European Union launched a campaign to attract more young women into the scientific professions. In Europe, women lag behind men in science and engineering, making up only a third of science researchers. But the video the EU made was laughable.

You may recall. It was called, Science: It’s a Girl Thing! and featured three young fashionistas parading around in high heels while a male scientist peers quizzically at them over his microscope.

Along comes science journalist Kerstin Hoppenhaus to set the record straight. Hoppenhaus’s new series for the German science site SciLogs is called Significant Details: Conversations with Women in Science. The interviews are fresh, informative, and accessible.

It’s inspiring to see such a range of women explain their research and walk us through their process for doing it.

A recent interview featured Dr. Kristen Panfilio (above), an American biologist on faculty at the University of Cologne. Panfilio’s work focuses on insect extraembryonic development, which means she studies how insect tissues develop into the bug’s ultimate shape by comparing the process in two insects: the milkweed bug and the red flour beetle.

Each conversation begins with a “significant detail” of the woman’s work. With the wry humor and precision of a true scientist, Panfilio demonstrates how she prepares her favorite tool, a glass stick, by softening the end with a cigarette lighter.

Panfilio’s specific field is evolutionary developmental genetics. Along with her lab assistants she studies how embryonic cells know what role they should play in forming a specific organism shape. How does a bone cell know it’s a bone cell?

The interview is about as much like Science: It’s a Girl Thing! as Meryl Streep is like Lindsay Lohan. This is a real person talking about how she has built her career (she wanted to be an artist when she was a teenager and studied ancient Chinese history at a small liberal arts college) and explaining her highly specialized work.

She also touches on one of the most wonderful things about scientific research: Some of the most exciting moments are when the results don’t align at all with expectations.

Best of all, it’s just one of the wonderful interviews in Hoppenhaus’s series.

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Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Follow her on Twitter @mskaterix and visit her website to learn more.

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