More than a quarter-century ago, Toy Story made Pixar Animation Studios into a household name. Nobody had ever seen a computer-animated feature of such high quality before — indeed, nobody had ever seen a computer-animated feature at all. Though the movie succeeded on many more levels than as a proof of technological concept, it also showed …
Google has worked with experts at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab to develop a time-lapse feature within Google Earth, which allows you to see firsthand the changes to our planet since 1984. In the biggest update to Google Earth since 2017, you can now see our planet in an entirely new dimension — time. With Timelapse …
Over the past twenty years Radiohead managed to achieve something no other rock band ever has: enduring outsider art rock credibility that shielded them from the media machinery they came to loathe at the end of the millennium, and enduring popularity that meant they could drop their last, 2016 LP, A Moon Shaped Pool “without doing …
The work of ethnomusicologist father and son team John and Alan Lomax was intended to preserve the local musical cultures of the United States and regions around the world against an encroaching mass media threatening to erase them. But the thousands of Lomax recordings, films, books, articles, and other documents not only conserved regional music; …
Do you dig songs about rainbows? The host of one of the very last episodes of The Muppet Show — Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie – does, and in 1981, she seized the opportunity to duet with Kermit the Frog on his signature tune, “The Rainbow Connection” — its only performance in the series’ five season run. Many of …
A few years ago we told you about the Wall of Sound. Not the one created in the studio by Phil Spector, but the one created by Grateful Dead tech engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley out of over 600 speakers. Before the Dead worked to revolutionize how rock concerts could sound, the speakers at live shows …
To truly appreciate the spectacle of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” played on a 1914 Hooghuys fairground organ, we recommend you read Angus Harrison’s 2016 VICE essay, “Why Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ Is the Saddest Record Ever Made“: Make no mistake. This song is about the dancing queen, but it is most definitely not sung by her. Herein lies the tragedy. Our narrator has …
Noli me tangere, says the title page of the Compendium of Demonology and Magic: “Do not touch me.” For the book’s target audience, one suspects, this was more enticement than warning. Written in Latin (its full title is Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros) and German, the book purports to come from the year …
Image by Herb Greene, via Wikimedia Commons “Once we’re done with it, the audience can have it.” — Jerry Garcia It so happens that one of the greatest things about the Internet is also one of the not-so-greatest things: you hardly ever have to leave the house anymore. Of course, for traders and collectors of …
Offered the chance to travel back in time to any city in any period, surely more than a few would choose Berlin in the 1920s. Ideally it would be Berlin in the mid-1920s: after much of the social and economic damage of the Great War had been repaired, but before the Great Depression reached Germany …