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Tuesday, August 13th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | An Hour-Long Collection of Live Footage Documents the Early Days of Pink Floyd (1967-1972)
Looking back on the Pink Floyd of the late 60s, the fledgling band first led by Syd Barrett can seem a bit like Britain’s answer to The Velvet Underground. Idiosyncratically druidic, mysterious, and playful, but also inspired by literature (though Barrett was much more Kenneth Graham than Delmore Schwartz), drawn to experimental film and hypnotic stage effects, inspired to turn the experience of being on specific drugs into a disorienting new way of playing music. The comparison may seem odd, especially given the Velvets reputation as the most famous band no one heard of until after they broke up and Pink Floyd’s reputation as one of the biggest-selling bands of all time. But before they filled stadiums, they were scrappy and strange and psychedelic in the earliest sense of the word. Sadly departed singer Chris Cornell remembers discovering their first record, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in the mid-80s, and meeting a very different Pink Floyd than the one he'd come to know: “It could almost have been a British indie-rock record of the time.” Indeed, Syd Barrett’s work, including the solo albums he recorded after leaving the band, left a long, lasting impression on indie rock.
The BBC’s Chris Jones put it a little more succinctly: “this is Edward Lear for the acid generation.” If all of this sounds appealing and if, somehow, like Cornell, you missed out of the earliest incarnation of Pink Floyd—with elfin savant Barrett first at the helm—you owe it to yourself to watch the hour-long compilation of footage above featuring some of the earliest live performances, first with Barrett, then a fresh-faced David Gilmour taking over for their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. As Barrett’s spidery Telecaster lines give way to Gilmour’s gritty Stratocaster riffs, you can hear a more familiar Floyd take shape. They clearly always wanted to reach an audience, but in their first several years, Pink Floyd seemed totally unconcerned with filling arenas and selling albums in numbers measured by precious metals. Songs like “Astronomy Domine” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” are all about heady atmosphere, not the gut-level hooks and brevity of pop. Though they started out in 1965 like every other British classic rock band, obsessively covering American blues songs, Pink Floyd took their rock chops to another galaxy. “If you look back at some of the great psychedelic albums that came out that year”—writes Alex Gaby in an essay tour of the band’s entire catalogue—The Piper at the Gates of Dawn “doesn’t quite sound like any of those…. It’s as if Pink Floyd were the piper and they are opening up the gates to a new dawn of psychedelia and music.” Watch the gates open live, on film, above. Related Content: Psychedelic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Early Days with Syd Barrett, 1967 Pink Floyd Plays With Their Brand New Singer & Guitarist David Gilmour on French TV (1968) Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Hour-Long Collection of Live Footage Documents the Early Days of Pink Floyd (1967-1972) 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 | View/Download the Highest Resolution MRI Scan of a Human Brain, Revealing It as We’ve Never Seen It Before
We all know what brains look like. Or in any case, we can picture something symmetrical, a bit squishy, between pink and gray in color, and with a whole lot of folds. But until a team of researchers at the Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness did their recent ultra-high resolution MRI scan of a human brain, which took over 100 hours to complete in one of the world's most advanced MRI machines, nobody had ever seen that many-splendored organ in the kind of detail — detail at a 100-micrometer level of resolution, to be precise — shown in the video above. "Thanks to an anonymous deceased patient whose brain was donated to science," writes Science Alert's Peter Dockrill, "the world now has an unprecedented view of the structures that make thought itself possible." After its extraction and "a period of preservation, the organ was transferred to a custom-built, air-tight brain holder made of rugged urethane, specially designed for the experiment's long-duration MRI scan. The holder was placed in a customized seven Tesla (7T) MRI scanner: a powerful machine offering high levels of magnetic field strength, and only approved by the FDA for use in the US in 2017." Such a machine could scan a brain still in use — that is, one inside the skull of a living, breathing human being — but only for a short period of time. The great advantage of using an ex vivo brain rather than an in vivo is that it can stay inside, completely unmoving, for as long as it takes to acquire the highest-quality scan yet seen. The team could thus record "8 terabytes of raw data from four separate scan angles," data they have released to the academic community in a compressed version, which you can view and download here.
"We envision that this dataset will have a broad range of investigational, educational, and clinical applications that will advance understanding of human brain anatomy in health and disease," write the team, who are also preparing their research for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. But even non-scientists have expressed their wonder at the unprecedentedly detailed visual journey through the brain offered by not just the video here but the two others from two different angles so far released as well. One hesitates to use, but can't quite avoid, the term "mind-boggling."
via Kottke Related Content: Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist The Science of Singing: New, High-Speed MRI Machine Images Man Singing ‘If I Only Had a Brain’ A Vintage Infographic of the Human Brain: The Wonders Within Your Head (1938) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram. View/Download the Highest Resolution MRI Scan of a Human Brain, Revealing It as We’ve Never Seen It Before 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. |
| 2:00p | Enjoy Dazzling & Dizzying 360° Virtual Tours of Los Angeles Landmarks
Remember when armchair travel meant a book, a magazine, a handful of postcards, or the occasional after-dinner slideshow of the neighbors’ vacation photos? Those were the days. The throngs of travel “influencers”—both professional and aspirant—have taken much of the fun out of living through others’ visits to far-flung locales. The focus seems to have shifted from imagining ourselves in their shoes to feeling oppressed by their highly-staged, heavily-filtered Instagram-perfect existence. Photographer Jim Newberry's dazzling, dizzying 360° photos of Los Angeles, like the views of Echo Park, Chinatown, East L.A., and Downtown, above, offer armchair travelers transportation back to those giddy pre-influencer days. (Angelinos and other LA-versed visitors will enjoy swooping through City of Angels landmarks as if rotating on the no-parallax point, too.) The Chicago transplant admits that it took a while for him to find his Los Angeles groove:
While easy-to-use "one-shot" 360 cameras exist, Newberry prefers the quality afforded by using a high-resolution non-360 camera with a wide angle lens, mounted on a panoramic tripod head that rotates it in such a way as to prevent perspective errors. With the equipment set up in the center of the room, he shoots four photos, spaced 90° apart. Another shot is aimed directly downward toward the floor. Panoramic software helps to stitch the images together for a "spherical panorama,” giving viewers an experience that’s the digital equivalent of swiveling their heads in awe. Newberry’s roving lens turns Lee Lawrie’s Zodiac Chandelier, Dean Cornwell’s California history murals, and the decorative ceiling stencils of the Central Public Library’s Grand Rotunda into a gorgeous kaleidoscope.
The Taoist Thien Hau Temple in Chinatown is a more recent attraction, founded in the 1980s in a former Christian church. Community members raised funds to build the larger temple, above, dedicating it in 2006 as a shrine to Mazu, the goddess of the sea, protector of fisherman and sailors. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, a self-described “educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” served as Newberry’s point of entry, when management okayed his request to shoot 360° photos there:
(In return for permission to shoot the museum’s Fauna of Mirrors murals, rooftop courtyard, and Tula Tea Room, Newberry agreed to maintain its mysterious aura by limiting the publication of those photos to his Panoramic Eye site. Feast your eyes here.) The photographer is looking forward to working with more museums, creating 3-dimensional documentation of exhibits.
His interest in the ephemeral has also spurred him to create virtual tours of local landmarks on the verge of being torn down. Entries in the ongoing Lost Landmarks series include Los Feliz’s Good Luck Bar (RIP), Tom Bergin's Pub (above, spared at the last minute when the Los Angeles Conservancy declared it an Historic-Cultural Monument), and the Alpine Village, currently for sale in neighboring Torrance. Begin your explorations of Jim Newberry’s Panoramic Eye 360° virtual tours of Los Angeles, including the Griffith Park Observatory, the St. Sophia Cathedral, and the Everything Is Terrible! store here. Related Content: Take a 360° Virtual Tour of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Personal Home & Studio Five Cultural Tours of Los Angeles Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, including No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Lateand the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, September 9 for another season of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Enjoy Dazzling & Dizzying 360° Virtual Tours of Los Angeles Landmarks 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. |
| 4:44p | Watch Animated Scores of Eric Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1”
In an NPR interview, Caitlin Horrocks, author of a novel about Erik Satie called The Vexations, remembers the first time she encountered the composer’s work. “As a piano student, my teacher assigned me one of the ‘Gymnopiedies.’ And as a kid, I just immediately loved it.” Yet when Horrocks dug deeper into Satie’s catalogue, “very quickly I was running into things like ‘Flabby Preludes (For a Dog)’ or ‘Dried Embryos,’ one of which contains essentially lines of dialogue from the point of view of a sea cucumber. And as an aspiring pianist, I was annoyed. I was disappointed.” Horrocks essentially describes the way Satie has been remembered by popular culture—as the composer of the extraordinarily popular “Gymopedies” and “Gnossiennes,” and a lot of other strange pieces of music few people care to listen to. (The title of Horrocks novel comes from a Satie composition meant to be played 840 times in succession.) He wrote ballets, stage, orchestral, and choral pieces, chamber music, and, several compositions for solo piano—and he would perhaps be a little annoyed by his legacy: music he composed in his early twenties has defined his entire career, though “Satie’s later output… is arguably more ‘important,’” writes Meurig Bowen at The Guardian. Satie was “a torchbearer for the avant-garde in his later years.” Described by his contemporaries Ravel and Debussy as a “precursor"--a label that fits perfectly given how much he came to influence composers like John Cage--Satie did not fit in his time, and he does not fit in ours. The preference for what Bowen calls “easy on the ear” music persists, and for good reason. We intuitively respond to melody and harmony, to music with narrative-like structure and stirring emotional content. We so often come to music for exactly these qualities: to be liberated from thinking and give ourselves over to feeling.
Satie understood this, and his genius in his most famous pieces was to make music that appealed to both the intellect and the emotions, not slighting one in favor of other. The animated scores above for “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1” make this point vividly, with colors and shapes illustrating the duration and pitch of each note played by pianist Stephen Malinowski. These delicate, abstract, short pieces may have reached the level of “pop classics” as Bowen writes, but our familiarity with them masks how revolutionary they were. “Gymnopedie No. 1,” is a “piece that relies heavily on how sympathetic a musician you are,” Classic FM explains, since “there are hardly any notes!” The invented names “Gymnopedies” and “Gnossiennes” signal that Satie is inventing new forms of music, mostly without time signatures or bar divisions, and with some very esoteric sources of inspiration. Their haunting, wistful qualities are evoked as much by the absence of musical convention as by the presence of pleasingly melodic lines and chords. In these animated scores, the few notes Satie did write become bursts of floral patterns and decorative shapes, and the silences become negative spaces, pregnant, like the long shadows in Giorgio de Chirico's paintings, with inexpressible longings and gnostic mysteries. Related Content: The Velvet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vexations on I’ve Got a Secret (1963) Hear the Very First Pieces of Ambient Music, Erik Satie’s Furniture Music (Circa 1917) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. Watch Animated Scores of Eric Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1” 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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