Podcast / LXXX

With thanks and warm regards to the labels and artists involved, this week's podcast is dedicated to the Dickson Experimental Sound Film, 17-second tour de force widely regarded as one of the top ten movies of 1894. A cinematic milestone, Dickson's stirring opus is the product of a simpler time in film history, a time when movies could deeply affect an audience without relying on cheap gimmicks like 3D, CGI, color, synchronized sound, editing, movement, dialogue, narrative, or characters. What is wrong with us, as a culture, that Dickson's endlessly imaginative fictions are no longer enough? Are we merely babies, stewing in our bath basins with our rubber ducks, bemoaning how bored we are with it all, demanding something ever-new and novel to distract us for one moment more? Life would be better, I think, were it more like Dickson's world—were it about simple pleasures, like men dancing in front of a giant phonograph recording cone. It doesn't get any better than that.