Janis Joplin’s Last TV Performance & Interview: The Dick Cavett Show (1970)

The best celebri­ty inter­view­ers have the abil­i­ty to show us how the stars are not like us at all—not only because of the entourages, wardrobes, and bank accounts, but because of the tal­ent for which we revere them —and also how they’re kind of just like us after all: shar­ing the same inse­cu­ri­ties, fears, doubts, for­get­ful­ness, con­fu­sion, etc. They are, that is to say, real human beings.

Like no oth­er inter­view­er on net­work tele­vi­sion before or since, Dick Cavett could draw all of this out of his guests: both their cre­ativ­i­ty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. What seemed like sil­ly chit chat was a dis­arm­ing cam­ou­flage for inci­sive ques­tions he let casu­al­ly slip through the ban­ter.

“Cavett’s prime-time show famous­ly fea­tured a who’s who of rock stars that both per­formed and sat for loose, freeform con­ver­sa­tions,” writes Jam­base, “which brought the ethos of the hip­pie gen­er­a­tion to the homes of mil­lions.” Amongst his many rock star guests, he devel­oped a spe­cial bond with Janis Joplin who sat down with him on August 3, 1970 for her appear­ance on his show and what would turn out to be her final tele­vised per­for­mance and inter­view.

Joplin belts out “My Baby” and “Half Moon,” which you can see in her full appear­ance above, with an intro­duc­tion by Cavett. Then after both songs, she walks over the couch to hang out with the host, who greets with her warm­ly with, “Very nice to see you, my lit­tle song­bird.” Cavett poked fun at his guests, but he did­n’t talk down or kiss up. Most every­one who sat down with him found his dry wit and can­dor refresh­ing.

Joplin, who admits she doesn’t like doing inter­views, “seems total­ly at ease dur­ing this con­ver­sa­tion,” Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock points out, “a wide-rang­ing but infor­mal chat that touch­es on every­thing from her feel­ings regard­ing con­cert riots to whether or not she ever water­skis.” She is poised through­out and throws Cavett off-guard with her dead­pan humor.


They play off each oth­er in a charm­ing exchange that doesn’t go near­ly as deep as her final inter­view with the Vil­lage Voice’s Howard Smith four days before her death that Octo­ber, but which cap­tures Joplin’s thought­ful, easy­go­ing per­son­al­i­ty beau­ti­ful­ly. Cavett lat­er cred­it­ed Joplin for send­ing so many oth­er major rock stars his way after her first appear­ance on his show in 1968.

“She had done oth­er tele­vi­sion she didn’t like very much,” he remem­bered in 2016 on PBS’s Amer­i­can Mas­ters. “She told peo­ple, ‘it’s okay to do his show, he’s not a drea­ry fig­ure.’” Nei­ther, despite her trag­ic sto­ry, was Janis Joplin. “At once inse­cure yet full of con­vic­tion, opin­ion­at­ed yet con­cerned about offend­ing, fierce yet ten­der­heart­ed,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings; she was, as mil­lions of Cavett’s view­ers were delight­ed to dis­cov­er, a “com­plex per­son brim­ming with the sort of inner con­tra­dic­tions that make us human.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Janis Joplin’s Break­through Per­for­mance at the Mon­terey Pop Fes­ti­val: “One of the Great Con­cert Per­for­mances of all Time” (1967)

Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Inter­view Reborn as an Ani­mat­ed Car­toon

George Har­ri­son in the Spot­light: The Dick Cavett Show (1971)

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

How France Invented a Popular, Profitable Internet of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Minitel

“When I get back from school I basi­cal­ly bar­ri­cade myself in the apart­ment and nev­er go out at night,” says the nar­ra­tor of Michel Houelle­bec­q’s Les Par­tic­ules élé­men­taires. “Some­times I go on the Mini­tel and check out the sex sites, that’s about it.” Here those read­ing the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the nov­el (in this case Frank Wyn­ne’s, called Atom­ised) will tilt their heads: the “Mini­tel”? Though he writes more or less real­is­tic nov­els, Houelle­becq does come out with the occa­sion­al sci­ence-fic­tion­al flour­ish. But in France, the Mini­tel was a very real tech­no­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. “What the TGV was to train trav­el, the Pom­pi­dou Cen­tre to art, and the Ari­ane project to rock­etry,” writes BBC News’ Hugh Schofield, “in the ear­ly 1980s the Mini­tel was to the world of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

Com­bin­ing a mon­i­tor, key­board, and modem all in one beige plas­tic pack­age, the Mini­tel ter­mi­nal — known as the “Lit­tle French Box” — was once a com­mon sight in French house­holds. With it, writes Julien Mail­land in the Atlantic, “one could read the news, engage in mul­ti-play­er inter­ac­tive gam­ing, gro­cery shop for same-day deliv­ery, sub­mit nat­ur­al lan­guage requests like ‘reserve the­ater tick­ets in Paris,’ pur­chase said tick­ets using a cred­it card, remote­ly con­trol ther­mostats and oth­er home appli­ances, man­age a bank account, chat, and date.” All this at a time when, as Schofield puts it, “the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank man­ag­er or queue­ing for tick­ets at the sta­tion.” And what’s more, the French got their Mini­tel ter­mi­nals for free.

Con­ceived in the “white heat of Pres­i­dent Valery Gis­card d’Es­taing’s tech­no­log­i­cal great leap for­ward of the late 1970s,” Mini­tel appeared as one of the sig­nal efforts of a nation­wide devel­op­men­tal project. “France was lag­ging behind on telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions,” writes the Guardian’s Angelique Chrisafis, “with the nation’s homes under­served by tele­phones – par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al areas.” But soon after the roll­out of the Mini­tel, usage explod­ed such that, “at the height of its glo­ry in the mid-1990s, the French owned about 9m Mini­tel devices, with 25m users con­nect­ing to more than 23,000 ser­vices.” Ini­tial­ly pitched to the pub­lic as a replace­ment for the paper tele­phone direc­to­ry, the Mini­tel evolved to pro­vide many of the ser­vices for which most of the world now relies on the mod­ern inter­net.

Though devel­oped and imple­ment­ed by the French gov­ern­ment, Mini­tel incor­po­rat­ed ser­vices by inde­pen­dent providers. “The most lucra­tive ser­vice turned out to be some­thing no-one had envis­aged — the so-called Mini­tel Rose,” writes Schofield. “With names like 3615-Cum (actu­al­ly it’s from the Latin for ‘with’), these were sexy chat-lines in which men” — Houelle­becq-pro­tag­o­nist types and oth­er — “paid to type out their fan­tasies to anony­mous ‘dates.’ ” Not long before Minitel’s dis­con­tin­u­a­tion in 2012, when more than 800,000 ter­mi­nals were still active, “bill­boards fea­tur­ing lip-pout­ing lovelies adver­tis­ing the delights of 3615-some­thing were ubiq­ui­tous across the coun­try.” 3615, as every one­time Mini­tel user knows, were the most com­mon ini­tial dig­its for Mini­tel ser­vices, each of which had to be hand-dialed on a tele­phone before the ter­mi­nal could con­nect to it.

You can see this process in the Retro Man Cave video at the top of the post, which tells the sto­ry of the Mini­tel and shows how its ter­mi­nals actu­al­ly worked. (Retro-mind­ed Fran­coph­o­nes may also enjoy the 1985 TV doc­u­men­tary just above.) The host draws a com­par­i­son between Mini­tel and the much less suc­cess­ful Pres­tel, a sim­i­lar ser­vice launched in the Unit­ed King­dom in 1979. It might also remind Cana­di­ans of a cer­tain age of Telidon, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But no oth­er oth­er pre-inter­net video­tex sys­tem made any­where the impact of Mini­tel, which lives on in France as a cul­tur­al touch­stone, if no longer as a fix­ture of every­day life. As Valérie Schafer, co-author of the book Mini­tel: France’s Dig­i­tal Child­hood puts it to Chri­asafis, “There’s a nos­tal­gia for an era when the French devel­oped new ideas, took risks on ideas that did­n’t just look to the US or out­side mod­els; a time when we want­ed to invent our own voice.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

John Tur­tur­ro Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Inter­net

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 or on Face­book.

The Size of Asteroids Compared to New York City

The small­est aster­oid mea­sures 4.1 meters in diam­e­ter; the largest 939 kilo­me­ters, or 580 miles. Cre­at­ed by 3D ani­ma­tor Alvaro Gra­cia Mon­toya, the data on aster­oid sizes was all gleaned from Wikipedia…

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via Laugh­ing Squid

The Peanuts Gang Performs Pink Floyd’s Classic Rock Opera in the Mashup “Charlie Brown vs. The Wall

YouTu­ber Gar­ren Lazar has hit upon a bril­liant idea—take clips from Charles M. Schulz’s uni­ver­sal­ly beloved Peanuts car­toons and cut them togeth­er with uni­ver­sal­ly beloved (more or less) pop­u­lar anthems like “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” “Don’t Stop Believ­ing,” “Free­bird,” and “Stayin’ Alive.”

The huge emo­tions of these songs suit the over­sized feel­ings of the comic’s char­ac­ters, who were, all of them, vari­a­tions of Schulz him­self. As Jeff Kin­ney writes in his intro­duc­tion to Chip Kidd’s book, Only What’s Nec­es­sary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts, the strip and its many ani­mat­ed spin-offs con­sti­tute “per­haps the most rich­ly lay­ered auto­bi­og­ra­phy of all time.”

It’s fit­ting then that one of Lazar’s ear­li­er Peanuts mashups involved anoth­er such rich­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal work, Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall, an album full of per­son­al and col­lec­tive pain, deep fear, alien­ation, inse­cu­ri­ty, and obser­va­tions about just how oppres­sive child­hood can be. Just like… well, just like Peanuts.

Schulz’s work has always tran­scend­ed the expec­ta­tions of his form, becom­ing what might even be called com­ic strip opera. His fifty years of draw­ing and writ­ing Peanuts make it “the longest sto­ry ever told by one human being,” says cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an Robert Thomp­son.

The cre­ator him­self had great ambi­tions for his col­lec­tions of “lit­tle inci­dents,” as he called the strips. He hat­ed the name Peanuts, which was forced upon him by Unit­ed Fea­ture Syn­di­cate in the 50s. Schulz pre­ferred his orig­i­nal title Li’l Folks, which he said imbued the strip “with dig­ni­ty and sig­nif­i­cance. ‘Peanuts’ made it sound too insignif­i­cant.”

This was essen­tial human dra­ma, writ small, and it amount­ed to a whole lot more than “peanuts.” Claire Cat­ter­all, cura­tor of a Schulz exhib­it in Lon­don, insists she’s “not being iron­ic” in call­ing the strip “Great Art.” Schulz “intro­duced children—and adults alike—to some of the biggest philo­soph­i­cal ideas.” His “influ­ence on cul­ture and soci­ety is noth­ing short of seis­mic.”

Peanuts’ rich­ness emerges in grand themes that took shape over decades. Bruce Handy writes of the Peanuts’ char­ac­ters’ “nihilism,” call­ing Schulz’s world a “the­ater of cru­el­ty.” (Their unhap­pi­ness only seems to lift dur­ing musi­cal num­bers.)  Jonathan Mer­ritt describes the strip’s reli­gious mis­sion, Maria Popo­va writes of its brave Civ­il Rights stand and its cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion, and Cameron Laux com­piles a list of Peanuts philoso­phies, from Exis­ten­tial­ism to the impor­tance of friend­ship and self-reflec­tion.

Nor does Schulz escape com­par­isons to writ­ers of great literature—including sev­er­al whose names may have popped up as ref­er­ences in the strip, like­ly in the word bub­bles of the pre­co­cious­ly eru­dite Schroed­er or Linus. Kin­ney com­pares Peanuts to Shake­speare, Laux com­pares it to Sartre and Beck­ett, and Stu­art Jef­fries at The Guardian writes, “Cer­tain­ly, Ibsen and Strind­berg made a lot of sense to me as an adult because I was raised on Peanuts.”

If Schulz’s com­ic strip and car­toons can evoke these august lit­er­ary names, then why not the names Roger Waters and David Gilmour? If any­one has ever felt like just anoth­er brick in the wall, it’s Char­lie Brown. Mar­vel at Lazar’s edit­ing skills in “Char­lie Brown vs. The Wall.” The Peanuts gang, and Schulz, may have pre­ferred jazz, but one can see in their exis­ten­tial angst and fre­quent bouts of despair the same kind of dis­il­lu­sion­ment Roger Waters ham­mers home in his mas­ter­piece. Only, the for­mer “Li’l Folks” and their cre­ator had a much bet­ter sense of humor about it all.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Peanuts Rock: Watch the Peanuts Gang Play Clas­sic Rock Songs by Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jour­ney & More

The Vel­vet Under­ground as Peanuts Char­ac­ters: Snoopy Morphs Into Lou Reed, Char­lie Brown Into Andy Warhol

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

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

Judith Butler on Nonviolence and Gender: Hear Conversation with The Partially Examined Life

A new Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life inter­view with Judith But­ler, Max­ine Elliot Pro­fes­sor of Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture at UC Berke­ley, dis­cuss­es the ethics and psy­chol­o­gy of non­vi­o­lence. This fol­lows a three-part treat­ment on the pod­cast of her ear­li­er work.

For a first-hand account of her new book, you can watch two 2016 lec­tures that she gave at UC Berke­ley on ear­ly ver­sions of the text:

Watch on YouTube. Watch the sec­ond lec­ture.

But­ler has been a tremen­dous­ly influ­en­tial (and con­tro­ver­sial) fig­ure in ongo­ing intel­lec­tu­al debates about gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty. Her 1990 book Gen­der Trou­ble argues that gen­der is a “per­for­mance,” i.e. a habit­u­al group of behav­iors that reflect and rein­force social gen­der norms. Prac­tices such as dress­ing in drag sat­i­rize this per­for­mance, show­ing how even in “nor­mal” sit­u­a­tions, “act­ing fem­i­nine” is not a reflec­tion of one’s inner essence but is a mat­ter of putting on a dis­play of cul­tur­al­ly expect­ed man­ner­isms. The drag per­former (on But­ler’s analy­sis) may con­vey an absur­di­ty that decon­structs the expect­ed accord of bio­log­i­cal sex, sex­u­al pref­er­ence, and gen­der iden­ti­ty: “I’m dress­ing like a woman but am real­ly a man; also, in my every­day life, I dress like a man but am real­ly (in the way I actu­al­ly feel about myself) am a woman.” Most con­tro­ver­sial­ly, as a post-struc­tural­ist, But­ler argues that it’s not the case that there is an uncon­tro­ver­sial bio­log­i­cal fact of sex that then cul­ture con­nects gen­der behav­iors to. Instead, all of our under­stand­ing of the so-called bio­log­i­cal fact comes through the cul­tur­al lens of gen­der; we lit­er­al­ly can’t under­stand any such raw, bio­log­i­cal fact apart from its cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions. In oth­er words, it’s not just gen­der that’s a social con­struc­tion, but bio­log­i­cal sex itself.

This posi­tion has been attacked both from the posi­tion of naive, com­mon-sense sci­en­tism (of course bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences result­ing in babies isn’t just a mat­ter of what con­cepts a par­tic­u­lar soci­ety has hap­pened to devel­op) and as a moral haz­ard and exis­ten­tial threat: In 2017 while at a con­fer­ence in Brazil, far-right Chris­t­ian groups protest­ed her pres­ence and even burned her in effi­gy.

It should also be not­ed that But­ler’s take on gen­der departs from cur­rent, intu­itive expla­na­tions of the phe­nom­e­na of trans­gen­derism, i.e. that one might feel their “true gen­der” to be dif­fer­ent from what soci­ety has assigned them. For But­ler, there is no inner gen­der essence that may or may not be dis­played authen­ti­cal­ly. Instead, the “inner” is a cul­tur­al con­struc­tion, itself built out of our exter­nal per­for­mances and the dynam­ics of our psy­chic life, which she dis­cuss­es with­in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic tra­di­tion.

This use of psy­cho­analy­sis to explain our cul­tur­al life per­sists in new­ly released book, The Force of Non­vi­o­lence: An Ethico-Polit­i­cal Bind. Though the the­o­ry of non­vi­o­lent polit­i­cal protest may seem a far-flung top­ic from gen­der stud­ies, both involve the process of defin­ing an iden­ti­ty. In the case of gen­der, one defines one­self as a par­tic­u­lar gen­der or as being of a par­tic­u­lar sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion (as opposed to leav­ing these attrib­ut­es ambigu­ous and flu­id) by grasp­ing onto a strict social divi­sion between the avail­able sex­u­al options and declar­ing that one of them is “not me.” In But­ler’s dis­cus­sion of non­vi­o­lence, she instead focus­es on what counts as “self” in the usu­al­ly excused excep­tion to non­vi­o­lence, self-defense. She’s crit­i­ciz­ing a posi­tion where most of us claim to be non­vi­o­lent (and claim that our gov­ern­ment is non­vi­o­lent) because we are not the aggres­sors: We will fight only when we are attacked or threat­ened.

It’s not that But­ler is cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly against using vio­lence to defend one­self, one’s loved ones, one’s coun­try, or any­one else who is in dan­ger of being seri­ous­ly harmed. She is, how­ev­er, argu­ing for an eth­ic of non­vi­o­lence that clear­ly under­stands our inter­re­lat­ed­ness with every­one else in the world, even and espe­cial­ly those that we might think out­side our cir­cle of con­cern. It’s too easy for us to define “self” as “peo­ple like us,” which then leaves out the rest of the pop­u­lace (and the non-human pop­u­la­tion, and the envi­ron­ment more gen­er­al­ly) from inclu­sion in our “self-defense” cal­cu­la­tions of when vio­lence might be jus­ti­fied. But­ler ana­lyzes the fear of immi­grants, for instance, as a “phan­tas­mat­ic trans­mu­ta­tion” that projects the poten­tial for vio­lence that always exists with­in our imme­di­ate social rela­tions (and even our own rage against our­selves) onto an invad­ing Oth­er. As in the case of gen­der, she wants us instead to under­stand the dynam­ics of these self-and-oth­er attri­bu­tions, to behave more ratio­nal­ly and humane­ly, and to chan­nel our unavoid­able rage con­struc­tive­ly into force­ful non-vio­lence, or what Gand­hi calls Satya­gra­ha, “polite insis­tence on the truth.” The goal of this type of polit­i­cal action is con­ver­sion, not coer­cion, and it’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion and respect­ing even a hat­ed oth­er as a griev­able equal that pro­vides a real con­trast to vio­lence. She wants us to rec­og­nize the poten­tial for vio­lence with­in each rela­tion­ship, at each moment, and to choose oth­er­wise.

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast began a dis­cus­sion of the gen­er­al con­cept of social con­struc­tion back with in Oco­to­ber with episode 227, fol­low­ing this up with appli­ca­tions of this con­cept to race (dis­cussing Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah and Charles Mills with in episode 228 with guest Cole­man Hugh­es), to the devel­op­ment of sci­ence (con­sid­er­ing Bruno Latour on episode 230 with guest Pro­fes­sor Lyn­da Olman), and to gen­der (con­sid­er­ing Simone de Beau­voir’s The Sec­ond Sex for episode 232 with Pro­fes­sor Jen­nifer Hansen. Pro­fes­sor Hansen then con­tin­ued with hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, and Dylan Casey to dis­cuss But­ler’s Gen­der Trou­ble. For fur­ther expla­na­tion of The Force of Non­vi­o­lence, see episode 236 at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Pret­ty Much Pop, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. He is a writer and musi­cian work­ing out of Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. Read more Open Cul­ture posts about The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life.

Image by Solomon Grundy.

The Opera Database: Find Scores, Libretti & Synopses for Thousands of Operas Free Online


It’s not espe­cial­ly hard to get inex­pen­sive tick­ets to the opera if you live in, say, New York. But it’s not so easy if you live hun­dreds of miles from a major opera house. Opera’s rar­i­ty, how­ev­er, does not make it a “more ele­vat­ed” form than, say, musi­cal the­ater, argues Antho­ny Tom­masi­ni in The New York Times. Musi­cals may have mar­ket share, and opera may bare­ly sus­tain itself from a dwin­dling pool of pri­vate donors, but the com­ic operas of Mozart once played broad­ly to mass audi­ences, “and there is no big­ger crowd pleas­er than Leoncavallo’s impas­sioned ‘Pagli­ac­ci.’”

The major for­mal dif­fer­ence between musi­cal the­ater and opera is that “in opera, music is the dri­ving force; in musi­cal the­ater, words come first. This explains why for cen­turies opera-goers have revered works writ­ten in lan­guages they do not speak,” even in a time before super­ti­tles. “As long as you basi­cal­ly know what is going on and what is more or less being said, you can be swept away by a great opera, not just by music, but by vis­cer­al dra­ma.” In order for that to hap­pen, you’ll need to see and hear much more than high­lights and great­est hits. And a lit­tle bit of con­text goes a long way.

If you don’t live in a major city or can’t get to the opera often, you can watch full-length per­for­mances online at projects like The Opera Plat­form, which not only includes filmed pop­u­lar operas like Verdi’s La Travi­a­ta, but also, as Col­in Mar­shall not­ed in an ear­li­er Open Cul­ture post, “pro­vides a host of sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als, includ­ing doc­u­men­tary and his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­als that put the month’s fea­tured opera in con­text.” If you’re ready to dig deep­er, how­ev­er, or are already a schol­ar of the form, or if you, your­self, hap­pen to be an opera singer, then you will absolute­ly want to vis­it the Opera Data­base.

The archival resource describes its pur­pose as three­fold:

  • To cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive data­base of operas.
  • To cat­a­log arias and cre­ate PDFs from Pub­lic Domain sources, for the pur­pose of broad­en­ing the opera singer’s audi­tion reper­toire and seek­ing out rarely heard pieces.
  • To cre­ate a repos­i­to­ry for oper­at­ic infor­ma­tion, includ­ing libret­ti, scores, and syn­opses.

The drop­down menus on the homepage’s search field alone give you a sense of how expan­sive the data­base is—with dozens of lan­guages, from Ara­bic and Azer­bai­jani to Uzbek and Viet­namese, dozens of nation­al­i­ties, and thou­sands of entries from over four cen­turies. Most of these works will be unknown even to life­long opera lovers who have only lis­tened to the Euro­pean clas­sics. And sev­er­al famous mod­ern com­posers, like John Adams of Nixon in Chi­na fame, have shown how rel­e­vant the form still is for con­tem­po­rary con­cerns and cos­tumes.

All that said, only a por­tion of the entries have links to syn­opses and libret­ti. Search major titles like Nixon in Chi­na or Puccini’s La boheme and you’ll find pdf scores and libret­ti trans­lat­ed into sev­er­al lan­guages. Search any­thing more obscure than these block­busters and you’ll only turn up the most basic infor­ma­tion on the com­pos­er, nation­al­i­ty, and year of com­po­si­tion. Nonethe­less the Opera Data­base has some­thing for every­one, from the opera-curi­ous to the opera-adept, with a sep­a­rate aria data­base that allows users to search voice types from bass to sopra­no in twelve lan­guages.

Whether you’re look­ing to expand your knowl­edge beyond “kill the wab­bit” par­o­dies or expand your already advanced reper­toire of mate­r­i­al, you’ll find this online opera cat­a­logue offers a wealth of infor­ma­tion for bet­ter under­stand­ing an emo­tion­al­ly engag­ing, if endan­gered, cul­tur­al form.

via Nico­la Fred­do

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Site, “The Opera Plat­form,” Lets You Watch La Travi­a­ta and Oth­er First-Class Operas Free Online

Stephen Fry Hosts “The Sci­ence of Opera,” a Dis­cus­sion of How Music Moves Us Phys­i­cal­ly to Tears

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

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

Watch the Spectacular Hieronymus Bosch Parade, Which Floats Through the Garden of Earthly Delights Painter’s Hometown Every Year

Whether paint­ing scenes of par­adise, damna­tion, or some­where in between, Hierony­mus Bosch real­ized elab­o­rate­ly grotesque visions that fas­ci­nate us more than 500 years lat­er. But no mat­ter how long we gaze upon his work, espe­cial­ly his large-for­mat altar­piece trip­tychs, most of us would­n’t want to spend our lives in his world. But a group of ded­i­cat­ed Bosch fans has made it pos­si­ble to live in it for three days a year, when the annu­al Bosch Parade floats down the Dom­mel Riv­er. Last year that small water­way host­ed “a sto­ry in motion, pre­sent­ed on 14 sep­a­rate tableaux. They shape a uni­ver­sal tale of pow­er and coun­ter­force, bat­tle and rap­proche­ment, chaos and hope. From the chaos after the bat­tle a new order shall emerge.”

All images © Bosch Parade, Ben Niehuis

In prac­ti­cal terms, writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert, that meant “a musi­cal per­for­mance played on a par­tial­ly sub­merged piano and a scene with two peo­ple strad­dling enor­mous horns,” as well as a dozen oth­er water-based vignettes that passed through the Dutch town of ‘s‑Hertogenbosch, Bosch’s birth­place and lat­er his name­sake.

Every­thing that rolled down the Dom­mel was designed by a group of artists select­ed, accord­ing to the parade’s web site, “on the basis of their com­ple­men­tary char­ac­ter­is­tics, the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines they rep­re­sent and their clear match with the Bosch Parade artis­tic ‘DNA’ in the way they work and per­form.” As you can see in the 2019 Bosch Parade’s pro­gram, the artists’ cre­ations draw on 15th-cen­tu­ry con­cep­tions of life, art, tech­nol­o­gy, and the human body while also tak­ing place unmis­tak­ably in the 21st.

Though Bosch’s paint­ings look alive even in their motion­less­ness, to appre­ci­ate a parade requires see­ing it in action. Hence the videos here of the 2015 Bosch Parade: at the top of the post is a short teas­er; just above is a longer com­pi­la­tion of some of the even­t’s most Boschi­an moments, which puts the painter’s images side-by-side with the floats they inspired. View­ers will rec­og­nize ele­ments of The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, Bosch’s sin­gle best-known work, but also of The Hay­wain Trip­tych, The Sev­en Dead­ly Sins and the Four Last Things, and The Temp­ta­tions of St. Antho­ny. As art his­to­ry buffs know, some of those paint­ings may or may not have been paint­ed by Bosch him­self, but by one of his fol­low­ers or con­tem­po­rary imi­ta­tors.

But to the extent that all these images can inspire mod­ern-day painters, sculp­tors, musi­cians, dancers, and spec­ta­cle-mak­ers, they enrich the Boschi­an real­i­ty — a real­i­ty of water and fire, bod­ies and body parts, men and mon­sters, con­trap­tions and pro­jec­tions, and even video games and the inter­net — that comes to life every sum­mer in ‘s‑Hertogenbosch. Or rather, most every sum­mer: the next Bosch Parade is sched­uled not for June of this year but June of 2021. But when that time comes around around it will last for four days, from the 17th through the 20th. That infor­ma­tion comes from the parade’s Twit­ter account, which in the run-up to the event will pre­sum­ably also post answers to all the most impor­tant ques­tions — such as whether next year will fea­ture any live but­tock music.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hierony­mus Bosch Fig­urines: Col­lect Sur­re­al Char­ac­ters from Bosch’s Paint­ings & Put Them on Your Book­shelf

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Cre­ates Stun­ning Real­is­tic Por­traits That Recre­ate Sur­re­al Scenes from Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ings

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Liv­ing Paint­ings: 13 Car­avag­gio Works of Art Per­formed by Real-Life Actors

Flash­mob Recre­ates Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in a Dutch Shop­ping Mall

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 or on Face­book.

A Tribute to NASA’s Katherine Johnson (RIP): Learn About the Extraordinary Mathematician Who Broke Through America’s Race & Gender Barriers

We don’t call it a tragedy when a renowned per­son dies after the cen­tu­ry mark, espe­cial­ly if that per­son is bril­liant NASA math­e­mati­cian Kather­ine John­son, who passed away yes­ter­day at the ven­er­a­ble age of 101. Her death is a great his­tor­i­cal loss, but by almost any mea­sure we would con­sid­er reach­ing such a fin­ish line a tri­umphant end to an already hero­ic life.

A prodi­gy and pio­neer, John­son joined the all-black “human com­put­ing” sec­tion at NASA’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Nation­al Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee for Aero­nau­tics, in 1953. She would go on to cal­cu­late the launch win­dows and return tra­jec­to­ries for Alan Shepard’s first space­flight, John Glenn’s first trip into orbit, and the Apol­lo Lunar Module’s first return from the Moon.

All this with­out the ben­e­fit of any machine com­put­ing pow­er to speak of and—as Hid­den Fig­ures dra­ma­tizes through the pow­er­ful per­for­mance of Tara­ji P. Hen­son as Johnson—while fac­ing the dual bar­ri­ers of racism and sex­ism her white male boss­es and co-work­ers blithe­ly ignored or delib­er­ate­ly upheld.

John­son and her fel­low “com­put­ers,” with­out whom none of these major mile­stones would have been pos­si­ble, had to fight not only for recog­ni­tion and a seat at the table, but for the basic accom­mo­da­tions we take for grant­ed in every work­place.

Her con­tri­bu­tions didn’t end when the space race was over—her work was crit­i­cal to the Space Shut­tle pro­gram and she even worked on a mis­sion to Mars. But John­son her­self kept things in per­spec­tive, telling Peo­ple mag­a­zine in the inter­view above from 2016, “I’m 98. My great­est accom­plish­ment is stay­ing alive.” Still, she lived to see her­self turned into the hero of that year’s crit­i­cal­ly laud­ed film based on the best­selling book of the same name by Mar­got Lee Shetterly—decades after she com­plet­ed her most ground­break­ing work.

Shetterly’s book, writes his­to­ri­an of tech­nol­o­gy Marie Hicks, casts John­son and her fel­low black women math­e­mati­cians “as pro­tag­o­nists in the grand dra­ma of Amer­i­can tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry rather than mere details.” By its very nature, a Hol­ly­wood film adap­ta­tion will leave out impor­tant details and take lib­er­ties with the facts for dra­mat­ic effect and mass appeal. The fea­ture treat­ment moves audi­ences, but it also soothes them with feel-good moments that “keep racism at arm’s length from a nar­ra­tive that, with­out it, would nev­er have exist­ed.”

The point is not that John­son and her col­leagues decid­ed to make racism and sex­ism cen­tral to their sto­ries; they sim­ply want­ed to be rec­og­nized for their con­tri­bu­tions and be giv­en the same access and oppor­tu­ni­ties as their white male col­leagues. But to suc­ceed, they had to work togeth­er instead of com­pet­ing with each oth­er. Despite its sim­pli­fi­ca­tions and gloss­es over Cold War his­to­ry and the depth of prej­u­dice in Amer­i­can soci­ety, Hid­den Fig­ures does some­thing very dif­fer­ent from most biopics, as Atlantic edi­tor Leni­ka Cruz writes, telling “a sto­ry of bril­liance, but not of ego. It’s a sto­ry of strug­gle and willpow­er, but not of indi­vid­ual glo­ry… it looks close­ly at the remark­able per­son in the con­text of a com­mu­ni­ty.”

Kather­ine John­son lived her life as a tremen­dous exam­ple for young women of col­or who excel at math and sci­ence but feel exclud­ed from the estab­lish­ment. On her 98th birth­day, she “want­ed to share a mes­sage to the young women of the world,” says the nar­ra­tor of the 20th Cen­tu­ry Stu­dios video above: “Now it’s your turn.” And, she might have added, “you don’t have to do it alone.” Hear Hid­den Fig­ures author Shet­ter­ly dis­cuss the crit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions of Kather­ine and her extra­or­di­nary “human com­put­er” col­leagues in the inter­view below, and learn more about John­son’s life and lega­cy in the fea­turette at the top and at her NASA biog­ra­phy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

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

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