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Thursday, May 11th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:30a | Hear Aerobic Exercise: When Soviet Musicians Recorded Electronic Music for a Subversive Home Fitness Record (1984)
Last year, Josh Baines at dance music site Thump revisited the 2004 video for “Call on Me,” a dancefloor anthem built around a highly recognizable loop from Steve Winwood’s 1987 hit, “Valerie.” Drawing on the song’s inherent nostalgia factor, the video—which Baines calls, without exaggeration, “the sexiest video of all time”—stages a ridiculously lewd, sweaty aerobics class, recalling the close association during the 1980s fitness craze between sexy aerobics videos and dance music, in advertisements, TV shows, MTV, movies like Hardbodies and its even more ludicrous sequel—and, of course, John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis’s hilarious Perfect, which directly inspired “Call on Me.”
The “Call on Me” video is so salacious, in fact, that it nearly caused then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to fall off his rowing machine while watching it, a scene that would fit right in to any 80s workout sex comedy. Might we imagine similar scenes of middle-aged Soviet ministers and apparatchiks losing their cool while sweating to Russian electro and watching fitness videos like “Rhythm,” at the top? Or perhaps even the far-less-sexy morning program above from 1987, with its synthpop soundtrack, baggy sweatsuits, and what look like futon mattresses for exercise mats?
In another example of Soviet aerobics and dance music, one must rely upon imagination to get the moves right. This record, Aerobic Exercises by a collection of obscure artists, was meant for more than just home workouts, as important as they are. The record label Melodiya—the only record label in Soviet Russia—and the album’s artists managed to get 1984’s Aerobic Exercises certified by the “USSR Sports Committee,” who, writes Terry Matthew at 5 Magazine, “envisioned these records as a sort of robot replacing athletic trainers.” “I don’t know if bureaucrats dream,” writes Matthew, “but if they do, I can imagine them envisioning a whole nation of comrades in legwarmers, rhythmically jogging and touching their toes in time with some of the most fascinating Italo-sounding tracks of the era.”
There is a reason the music sounds so interesting, though some of it, Matthews admits, is “outright putrid.” Most of the artists were well-known engineers and producers recording under pseudonyms. These were people already working in a long tradition of Soviet music that stretched back to Leon Theremin but also drew influence from Europe and the U.S.—“a Funk movement in the Soviet Union, and one for Disco, and an electronic music movement too, both official & above ground and underground and somewhere in between.” Many of those artists only managed to get records made “through luck, through compromise and sometimes through subterfuge.” Records like Aerobic Exercise represent some combination of the last two categories, “ingeniously and absurdly” disguising short original tracks as fitness mood music.
You’ll notice that there’s little instruction on some of these tracks, and it’s in the vocal contributions that much of the music’s “Italo roots are exposed” notes Matthew, referring to the grand tradition of mostly nonsensical Italo-disco, a term for a variety of electronic dance music made in Italy throughout the late 70s and 80s. These tracks “abide and generally adhere to the superficial but abiding principle of Italo—that it’s less important what words mean compared to how they sound.” (Russian speakers will have to confirm this contention, though one doesn’t need to stretch to discern the commands “Left, Right, Left Right!”) If some of this music sounds strikingly modern, that’s because it draws from the same Euro-disco well as so many contemporary retro-electro acts. (I couldn’t help but think of Mira Aroyo’s Bulgarian contributions to Ladytron.)
Aerobic Exercise was a success, such that Melodiya “launched an entire series of records in the style of the album called Sport and Music,” a four LP-collection with much less focus and quality control. Moving away from the aerobics theme, the second of these albums featured “some kind of competitive skateboarder on the cover” and some “pretty dreadful Hollywood Lite incidental music. By the third volume, former jazz musicians were beating out 3rd rate riffs with vaguely electronic-sounding overtones.” As with any fad, derivative copies over several generations will always be subject to serious aesthetic degradation. But for serious fans of Soviet dance music, of 80s fitness, or, ideally, of both, Aerobic Exercise represents something truly special. via 5 Magazine, Related Content: Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Aerobic Exercise: When Soviet Musicians Recorded Electronic Music for a Subversive Home Fitness Record (1984) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 11:00a | Watch a Timelapse Film Showing How the British Library Digitized the World’s Largest Atlas, the 6-Foot Tall “Klencke Atlas” from 1660
As a way of currying favor with a monarch, Johannes Klencke’s gift to Charles II (1630-1685) was one of the most audacious and beautiful objects ever offered. Klencke was a Dutch sugar merchant and knew that the king loved maps, and hoped that his gift would land him a favorable trading deal. (It did. He got knighted.) The gift, the 1660 Klencke Atlas, is one of the world’s biggest books at nearly six feet tall and nearly seven and a half feet wide when open, and it contains 41 wall maps of various accuracy. We first posted about the Klencke Atlas back in 2015, where you can see a short BBC doc on the British Library’s care of the book. But only recently has the library been able to scan the maps so the public can now access them for free in high resolution. The above video, which the British Library posted by way of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, shows a time-lapse of the multiple day shoot, which took several people, a very large room, several lights, and a specially designed stand to hold the heavy volume. The public domain images are now part of the Library’s Picturing Places website, which holds many examples of rare maps, landscapes, and large scale technical drawings. The book itself, as huge as it might be, is actually very fragile, so now the public and scholars can fully explore these maps at leisure while the original goes back into storage. via Hyperallergic Related Content: Behold the Largest Atlas in the World: The Six-Foot Tall Klencke Atlas from 1660 Browse & Download 1,198 Free High Resolution Maps of U.S. National Parks Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Watch a Timelapse Film Showing How the British Library Digitized the World’s Largest Atlas, the 6-Foot Tall “Klencke Atlas” from 1660 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 2:30p | How Filmmakers Tell Their Stories: Three Insightful Video Essays Demystify the Craft of Editing, Composition & Color
Everyone knows that if you want to make a movie, you first have to write down its story. Many of us have tried our hands at writing movie stories ourselves — as treatments, screenplays, or whichever other forms the industry has come up with — and some have made careers out of it. But even if a film begins on the page, it doesn’t, of course, remain there; up on screen, the final product has to tell its story visually as much as it does with words, and usually even more so. Lewis Bond, the video essayist behind the cinema-analyzing Youtube channel Channel Criswell, understands that better than most, hence his three essays dedicated to the three most important elements of visual storytelling, the first chapter of which, “Colour in Storytelling,” we featured a couple months ago here on Open Culture.
The second, “Composition in Storytelling,” explores the possibilities inherent in arranging people, places, and things within a shot. “Deciding the placement of subjects through the viewfinder of a camera isn’t merely a technical decision,” says Bond, “it’s an expressive one.” Beyond showing the audience what they need to see to understand the story, filmmakers have relied on “tried and tested formulas to make an image pleasing to the eye” such as the rule of thirds, the golden ratio, and triangular composition. But beyond those basics opens up the vast creative space of composing images in order to carefully guide the audience’s attention, craft symbols and subtexts, and make the power of a scene felt — all as dependent upon what gets left out of the picture as what gets put in.
Finally, “Editing in Storytelling” covers the step of the filmmaking process widely considered one of the most important, even more so than writing the story in the first place. “Beyond the basic function of putting a film together,” says Bond, “the craftsmanship of editing can be dealt with such subtlety that it can be the foundation of a film’s pace, its atmosphere — it can even be the enriching ingredient to strengthen all the film’s themes, and you may not even notice.” Though the editor holds “total manipulation over our emotions,” deciding what we see, when we see it, and how we see it, they also labor under the responsibility of knowing the film will stand or fall on their skill. Watch Channel Criswell’s entire visual storytelling essay trilogy and you’ll notice all their techniques much more easily while watching movies — especially if you start watching them, as you might well find yourself inspired to do, with the sound off. Related Content: Alfred Hitchcock’s 7-Minute Master Class on Film Editing “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge”: a Striking Supercut of the Vivid Colors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films Wes Anderson Likes the Color Red (and Yellow) Stanley Kubrick’s Obsession with the Color Red: A Supercut Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. How Filmmakers Tell Their Stories: Three Insightful Video Essays Demystify the Craft of Editing, Composition & Color is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 4:51p | Alfred Hitchcock Recalls Working with Salvador Dali on Spellbound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!”
In 1945 Alfred Hitchcock had to explain one of Hollywood’s unwritten rules to Salvador Dalí: No, you can’t pour live ants all over Ingrid Bergman! Hitchcock had approached Dalí for help with a dream sequence in his upcoming thriller, Spellbound, starring Bergman and Gregory Peck. He was unhappy with the fuzziness of Hollywood dream sequences. “I wanted to convey the dream with great visual sharpness and clarity–sharper than film itself,” Hitchcock recalled in a 1962 interview with François Truffaut. “I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of his work. Chirico has the same quality, you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance and the converging lines of perspective. But Dali had some strange ideas. He wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it. And underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by ants! It just wasn’t possible.” The result you can watch below:
Note: This video first appeared on our site in 2011. Seeing that it’s Dali’s birthday today, we’re bringing it back! Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Salvador Dalí Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine Salvador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christmas Cards Walk Inside a Surrealist Salvador Dalí Painting with This 360º Virtual Reality Video Alfred Hitchcock Recalls Working with Salvador Dali on Spellbound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:45p | The Frida Kahlo Action Figure
Earlier this week, an organization called “Today Is Art Day” launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce the latest in a line of action figures. First came the Vincent van Gogh action figure. Now, joining him in the ‘Art History Heroes Collection,’ there will be a Frida Kahlo figure. (Yes, they’ve already raised $19,490, surpassing their $14,585 goal.) Standing 5 inches tall, made of high quality plastic, Frida will come with a monkey attached to her back, and a detachable surrealist heart. Expect delivery in September. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: 1933 Article on Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art” Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938 The Frida Kahlo Action Figure is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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