Meet Grace Hopper, the Pioneering Computer Scientist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the Historic Mark I Computer (1906–1992)

in Computer Science | August 6th, 2018


On a page for its School of Tech­nol­o­gy, Ras­mussen Col­lege lists six “Assump­tions to Avoid” for women who want to enter the field of com­put­er sci­ence. I couldn’t com­ment on whether these “assump­tions” (alleged mis­con­cep­tions like “the work envi­ron­ment is hos­tile to women”) are actu­al­ly dis­proved by the com­men­tary. But I might sug­gest a sev­enth “assump­tion to avoid”—that women haven’t always been com­put­er sci­en­tists, inte­gral to the devel­op­ment of the com­put­er, pro­gram­ming lan­guages, and every oth­er aspect of com­put­ing, even 100 years before com­put­ers exist­ed.

In fact, one of the most notable women in com­put­er sci­ence, Grace Hop­per, served as a mem­ber of the Har­vard team that built the first com­put­er, the room-sized Mark I designed in 1944 by physics pro­fes­sor Howard Aiken. Hop­per also helped devel­op COBOL, the first uni­ver­sal pro­gram­ming lan­guage for busi­ness, still wide­ly in use today, a sys­tem based on writ­ten Eng­lish rather than on sym­bols or num­bers. And she is cred­it­ed with coin­ing the term “com­put­er bug” (and by exten­sion “debug”), when she and her asso­ciates found a moth stuck inside the Mark II in 1947. (“From then on,” she told Time mag­a­zine in 1984, “when any­thing went wrong with a com­put­er, we said it had bugs in it.”)

These are but a few of her achieve­ments in a com­put­er sci­ence career that spanned more than 42 years, dur­ing which time she rose through the ranks of the Naval Reserves, then lat­er active naval duty, retir­ing as the old­est com­mis­sioned offi­cer, a rear admi­ral, at age 79.

In addi­tion to win­ning dis­tin­guished awards and com­men­da­tions over the course of her career—including the first-ever com­put­er sci­ence “Man of the Year” award—Hopper also acquired a few dis­tin­guished nick­names, includ­ing “Amaz­ing Grace” and “Grand­ma COBOL.” She may become known to a new gen­er­a­tion by the nick­name, “Queen of Code,” the title of a recent doc­u­men­tary from FiveThirtyEight’s “Sig­nals” series. Direct­ed by Com­mu­ni­ty star Gillian Jacobs, the short film, which you can watch in full here, tells the sto­ry of her “inim­itable lega­cy as a bril­liant pro­gram­mer and pio­neer­ing woman in a male-dom­i­nat­ed field,” writes Alli­son McCann at FiveThir­tyEight.

Hopper’s name may be “mys­te­ri­ous­ly absent from many his­to­ry books,” as Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls notes, but before her death in 1992, she was intro­duced to mil­lions through TV appear­ances on shows like Late Night with David Let­ter­man (top) and 60 Min­utes, just above. As you’ll see in these clips, Hop­per wasn’t just a crack math­e­mati­cian and pro­gram­mer but also an ace pub­lic speak­er whose dead­pan humor cracked up Let­ter­man and the groups of stu­dents and fel­low sci­en­tists she fre­quent­ly addressed.

The 60 Min­utes seg­ment notes that Hop­per became “one of that small band of broth­ers and sis­ters who ush­ered in the com­put­er rev­o­lu­tion” when she left her professor’s job at Vas­sar at the start of WWII to serve in the Naval Reserve, where she was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Com­pu­ta­tion Project at Har­vard. But she nev­er stopped being an edu­ca­tor and con­sid­ered “train­ing young peo­ple” her sec­ond-most impor­tant accom­plish­ment. In this, her lega­cy lives on as well.

The world’s largest gath­er­ing of women tech­nol­o­gists is called “The Grace Hop­per Cel­e­bra­tion.” And a doc­u­men­tary in pro­duc­tion called Born with Curios­i­ty (see a teas­er above) hopes that “shin­ing a light on and human­iz­ing role mod­els like Grace makes them relat­able in a way that inspires oth­ers to great­ness.” At a time when women make up the low­est enroll­ment in com­put­er sci­ence out of all of the STEM fields, Hopper’s exam­ple and encour­age­ment may be much need­ed.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence and Pro­gram­ming: A Free Course from MIT 

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

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How Steely Dan Went Through Seven Guitarists and Dozens of Hours of Tape to Get the Perfect Guitar Solo on “Peg”

in Music | August 3rd, 2018

It’s easy to call the music of Steely Dan cyn­i­cal ersatz: slick, clin­i­cal jazz-rock, with nary a hair out of place on any of their nine stu­dio albums; soul­less soul music beloved by pre­ten­tious jerks like the duo in Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s satir­i­cal Broad­way show Oh, Hel­lo, a com­ic play fea­tur­ing two sleazy 70-some­thing Upper West Side bachelors—failed artists, casu­al racists, long­time ben­e­fi­cia­ries of a rent-con­trolled apart­ment, and the two biggest Steely Dan fans you’ll ever meet. But theirs is a pure­ly affec­tion­ate homage.

“There hasn’t been any good music since Steely Dan,” Mulany half-joked in a recent inter­view. “The best music is pre­cise rock-pop-jazz in a stu­dio, on a mul­ti­track.” Every take that calls Steely Dan cal­cu­lat­ing hip­ster pre­tenders and stu­dio per­fec­tion­ists isn’t wrong, exact­ly, it’s only that the band already antic­i­pat­ed and sur­passed it by couch­ing know­ing inau­then­tic­i­ty and sub­ver­sion in the most fine­ly-craft­ed pop ever cre­at­ed. It’s hard­ly an exag­ger­a­tion to say that noth­ing in pop­u­lar music has lived up to their mas­ter­piece, Aja, so arch and shiny that it’s “also kind of punk,” argues Vari­ety’s Chris Mor­ris.

Gui­tarist Wal­ter Beck­er, “the Lar­ry David of Steely Dan,” approached every­thing with irrev­er­ence except the music, writes L.A. Times pop crit­ic Mikael Wood. The same could be said of his band­mate, singer and key­board play­er Don­ald Fagen. If you think you don’t know Steely Dan, you do, from the hun­dreds of songs that have sam­pled and copied them, most nick­ing beats and hooks from Aja. One of those most-sam­pled songs, “Peg,” also serves as a mini-les­son on the duo’s exact­ing work eth­ic and metic­u­lous com­po­si­tion­al meth­ods. (See Fagen explain and demon­strate the song’s com­plex chord voic­ings below.)

In a com­mem­o­ra­tion of Aja’s for­ti­eth anniver­sary last year, Newseek’s Zach Schon­feld described Beck­er and Fagen’s “odd, neu­rot­ic approach” to record­ing “that turned the cre­ative pair into musi­cal auteurs of sorts, but made fin­ish­ing a record near­ly impos­si­ble.” As you’ll hear musi­cians like drum­mer Rick Marot­ta explain in the “Peg” mak­ing-of video at the top, the duo would bring in a crew of top-notch play­ers for a ses­sion, then scrap every per­for­mance and bring an entire­ly new band in the next day, unhap­py with vir­tu­al­ly every take. “Every track, every over­dub,” says engi­neer Elliot Schein­er, “had to be the per­fect over­dub. They didn’t set­tle for any­thing. They were always look­ing for the per­fect.”

The almost unlim­it­ed pow­er grant­ed them by “guar­an­teed sales” may have been a “license for abuse,” as “Peg” rhythm gui­tarist Steve Kahn tells Schon­field, but it also meant they nev­er had to grudg­ing­ly set­tle for “good enough.” They act­ed as cura­tors for the best musi­cians in the busi­ness, fig­ur­ing out whose dis­tinc­tive style best fit which song, a process that involved a lot of tri­al and error. The approach is most evi­dent in the leg­endary sto­ry of “Peg”’s gui­tar solo, per­formed on the record by ses­sion play­er Jay Gray­don, who made the cut after sev­en pre­vi­ous gui­tarists, includ­ing Robben Ford and Beck­er him­self record­ed hours and hours of tape.

“I’m sure that each of us walked away feel­ing real­ly good about it,” remem­bers gui­tarist Elliot Ran­dall, who had played the solo on “Reel­in’ in the Years.” But each time, Fagen and Beck­er knew it wasn’t right. “We felt sil­ly spend­ing all this mon­ey for this one brief blues solo,” Fagen says. When they final­ly recruit­ed Gray­don, he was ecsta­t­ic, as he relates in the inter­view above. “Every stu­dio gui­tar play­er want­ed to be on a Steely Dan record,” he says. Final­ly, it was a match:

For about an hour and a half, I’m play­ing my hip, melod­ic kind of jazz style. Then Don­ald says to me, “Naw, man. Try to play the blues.” I’m think­ing, if I got­ta play blues in this solo, I can’t use a B‑flat. Because B is in that chord. I can’t use an F unless it’s run­ning through the chord… So I can make it be a believ­able sev­enth chord by using the sev­enth in part of the line. I play bluesy for a while. I get melod­ic for a while. I get bluesy again. Then I get melod­ic and bluesy.

The brief solo suits the song per­fect­ly, though we might say the same if they’d cho­sen one of hun­dreds of oth­er takes. We’ll nev­er know, though we do hear a few failed con­tenders at the top, and they’re all clear­ly infe­ri­or. After four or five hours of play­ing, Gray­don him­self left the stu­dio still not know­ing if “it was a keep­er.” Then he “turned the radio on one day, and there it is.” He’s since relearned it sev­er­al times to play for oth­ers, includ­ing a 2016 doc­u­men­tary about top ses­sion play­ers and rock side­men called Hired Gun.

As for all the Youtube videos float­ing around that claim to teach the solo (see one above), Gray­don says none of them get it right. But luck­i­ly for him, some­how, he did, a lucky break, he says, that eas­i­ly could have end­ed up in the bin with the oth­er hun­dreds of hours of tape cut from the Aja ses­sions, vic­tims of the ulti­mate jazz-funk-soul-rock auteurs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

Steely Dan Cre­ates the Deadhead/Danfan Con­ver­sion Chart: A Wit­ty Guide Explain­ing How You Can Go From Lov­ing the Dead to Idol­iz­ing Steely Dan

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out

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

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Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Filmmakers: Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini, and Others

in Film | August 3rd, 2018

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, even more so than those of most revered auteurs, cre­ate a real­i­ty of their own. Watch­ing them, you might even believe that Tarkovsky him­self lived in his own real­i­ty as well, one made only of the sub­lime and the tran­scen­dent, impos­si­bly far from the mun­dan­i­ty of every­day life and com­mer­cial enter­tain­ment. Per­haps he did, to an extent, but the direc­tor of Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and Stalk­er cer­tain­ly did­n’t become and exist as a film­mak­er in iso­la­tion. He had pre­de­ces­sors in cin­e­ma who inspired him as well as col­leagues he admired, and in the clip above from the 1983 doc­u­men­tary Voy­age in Time, shot in Italy dur­ing pre-pro­duc­tion of his film Nos­tal­ghia, he reveals who they are.

“If you had to talk to today’s and yes­ter­day’s great direc­tors,” screen­writer Toni­no Guer­ra asks Tarkovsky, “for what rea­sons would you thank each of them for what you feel they gave you?” Promis­ing he won’t take long to answer the ques­tion, Tarkovsky begins with Sovi­et mon­tage pio­neer Alexan­der Dovzhenko, sin­gling out his 1930 film Earth. He then con­tin­ues on to Robert Bres­son, who “has always aston­ished and attract­ed me with his ascetics. It seems to me that he is the only direc­tor in the world that has achieved absolute sim­plic­i­ty in cin­e­ma. As it was achieved in music by Bach, art by Leonar­do. Tol­stoy achieved it as a writer.” Sim­plic­i­ty, as it emerges over the course of the con­ver­sa­tion, may well rank as Tarkovsky’s most esteemed artis­tic virtue. If that sounds iron­ic, giv­en how aes­thet­i­cal­ly com­plex Tarkovsky’s own work can seem, he also prais­es Fed­eri­co Felli­ni for the same qual­i­ty.

“I like Felli­ni for his kind­ness, for his love of peo­ple,” he says, “for his, let’s say, sim­plic­i­ty and inti­mate into­na­tion.” He describes a Felli­ni pic­ture he calls Pale Moon Tales (by which he may have meant La Dolce Vita) as “astound­ing in its sim­plic­i­ty, ele­gance, and won­der­ful noble­ness of pic­ture and act­ing.” To Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, anoth­er Ital­ian but one pos­sessed of a strik­ing­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty, he cred­its his real­iza­tion that “the mean­ing of action in cin­e­ma is rather con­di­tion­al. There’s prac­ti­cal­ly no action going on in Anto­nioni films, and this is the mean­ing of ‘action” in Anto­nioni films” — or at least in the “Anto­nioni films that I like the most.” Tarkovsky does­n’t neglect French cin­e­ma, nam­ing Jean Vigo, whom he remem­bers “with ten­der­ness and thank­ful­ness” as “the father of mod­ern French cin­e­ma,” the film­mak­er who “found­ed the French movie, and nobody has gone far­ther than him.”

Final­ly, Tarkovsky ends his list as he began it, by pay­ing trib­ute to one of his Sovi­et coun­try­men. Sergei Para­janov, he says, has not just a para­dox­i­cal and poet­ic way of think­ing — words many a crit­ic has sure­ly applied to Tarkovsky him­self — but an “abil­i­ty of lov­ing the beau­ty” and the “skill of being com­plete­ly free inside his own cre­ation.” Para­janov, whom we recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, had in the 1970s endured the per­se­cu­tion of the Sovi­et author­i­ties. Nobody cham­pi­oned the cause of his lib­er­a­tion as stren­u­ous­ly as Tarkovsky, who wrote that, “artis­ti­cal­ly, there are few peo­ple in the entire world who could replace Para­janov.” Now both of these irre­place­able auteurs are gone (as are all the oth­ers named here), but in their cin­e­ma will open the path of artis­tic lib­er­a­tion for gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respect­ed Film­mak­er of All Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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Meet Ellen Rubin (aka The Popuplady) and Her Collection of 9,000 Pop-Up Books

in Art, Books, Design, History | August 2nd, 2018

It’s unusu­al to encounter a pop-up book for sale in a thrift store.

Their enthu­si­as­tic child own­ers tend to work them so hard, that even­tu­al­ly even sen­ti­men­tal val­ue is trashed.

Stuck slid­er bars and torn flaps scotch the ele­ment of sur­prise.

Scenes that once sprang to crisp atten­tion can bare­ly man­age a flac­cid 45° angle.

One good yank and Cinderella’s coach gives way for­ev­er, leav­ing an unsight­ly crust of dried glue.

Their nat­ur­al ten­den­cy toward obso­les­cence only serves to make author Ellen G. K. Rubin’s inter­na­tion­al col­lec­tion of more than 9000 pop-up and move­able books all the more aston­ish­ing.

The Popuplady—an hon­orif­ic she sports with pride—would like to cor­rect three com­mon­ly held beliefs about the objects of her high­ly spe­cial­ized exper­tise:

  1. They are not a recent phe­nom­e­non. One item in her col­lec­tion dates back to 1547.
  2. They were not orig­i­nal­ly designed for use by chil­dren (as a 1933 flip book with pho­to illus­tra­tions on how women can become bet­ter sex­u­al part­ners would seem to indi­cate.)
  3. They were once con­ceived of as excel­lent edu­ca­tion­al tools in such weighty sub­jects as math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my, med­i­cine… and, as men­tioned above, the boudoir.

A Yale trained physician’s assis­tant, she found that her hob­by gen­er­at­ed much warmer inter­est at social events than her dai­ly toil in the area of bone mar­row trans­plants.

And while paper engi­neer­ing may not be not brain surgery, it does require high lev­els of artistry and tech­ni­cal prowess. It galls Rubin that until recent­ly, paper engi­neers went uncred­it­ed on the books they had ani­mat­ed:

Paper engi­neers are the artists who take the illus­tra­tions and make them move. They are pup­pet­mas­ters, but they hand the strings to us, the read­er.

As seen in Atlas Obscu­ra’s video, above, Rubin’s col­lec­tion includes a mov­ing postage stamp, a num­ber of wheel-shaped volvelles, and a one-of-a-kind ele­phant-themed mini-book her friend, paper engi­neer, Edward H. Hutchins, cre­at­ed from ele­phant dung paper she found on safari.

She has curat­ed or served as con­sul­tant for a num­ber of pop-up exhi­bi­tions at venues includ­ing the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library, the Biennes Cen­ter of the Lit­er­ary Arts and the Smithsonian’s Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry. See a few more exam­ples from her col­lec­tion, which were dis­played as part of the latter’s Paper Engi­neer­ing: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn exhi­bi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Super­nat­ur­al Poem to 3D Paper Life

French Book­store Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cov­er Art

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Van Gogh’s Art Now Adorns Vans Shoes

in Art, Fashion | August 2nd, 2018

While muse­ums remain free for the most part in Europe and still so pop­u­lar that they are loved bet­ter than lux­u­ry brands (accord­ing to this one arti­cle), fund­ing is not what it used to be. As you might have seen with our posts on Hierony­mus Bosch on (Dr. Marten’s) Boots, wear­able clas­sic art is kind of a thing now.

The Van Gogh Muse­um in Ams­ter­dam announced a series of lim­it­ed-edi­tion Vans (Van Gogh, Vans shoes, get it?!) fea­tur­ing pat­terns based on his paint­ings: “Skull” (1887), “Almond Blos­som” (1890), “Sun­flow­ers” (1889) and van Gogh’s “Self-Por­trait as a Painter” (1887–1888). There’s even a shoe that uses writ­ing from one of his let­ters, includ­ing stamp and address, as a pat­tern.

Would ol’ Vin­cent been hap­py with this, see­ing the pub­lic want to wear his work? He was cer­tain­ly hap­py in that Doc­tor Who episode where he trav­eled for­ward in time to know he hadn’t suf­fered in vain. But would he have liked to see his art wrapped around fans’ bod­ies?

Because the Vans line doesn’t stop at shoes, it fea­tures base­ball hats, t‑shirts, hood­ies, and back­packs. There is undoubt­ed­ly a lot of detail put into them. These aren’t quick knock offs made for a tourist stall. The shoe inte­ri­ors con­tain addi­tion designs, and each prod­uct comes with infor­ma­tion about the work.

And it’s all for a good cause: a por­tion of each sale goes back to the Van Gogh Muse­um to help with fund­ing and preser­va­tion.

That’s a sight bet­ter than 2017’s Van Gogh bags designed by artist/cultural appro­pri­a­tor Jeff Koons for Louis Vuit­ton, for which he slapped some mas­ter­pieces on a $5,000 hand­bag and hung “VAN GOGH” in blocky fake-gold let­ters on the front. (If it makes you feel bet­ter, Louis Vuit­ton burns all its left­over prod­uct lest it fall into the hands of the poors.)

The Vans Van Gogh col­lec­tion store opens August 3, so we can’t even tell you how much these shoes might be. But if the Doc Marten’s are any­thing to go by, they will sell out quick.

Cool way to help fund a muse­um, or just pure com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion? Let us know below.

via This is Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Trail­er for a “Ful­ly Paint­ed” Van Gogh Film: Fea­tures 12 Oil Paint­ings Per Sec­ond by 100+ Painters

Mar­tin Scors­ese Plays Vin­cent Van Gogh in a Short, Sur­re­al Film by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

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.

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Watch the First “Interactive” TV Show: Winky Dink and You Encouraged Kids to Draw on the Screen (1953)

in History, Television | August 2nd, 2018

Near­ly every­one born with­in the past fif­teen years nat­u­ral­ly thinks of screens as both touch­able and respon­sive to touch. But smart­phones, tablets, and the oth­er devices those kids have nev­er known a world with­out will always look like tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels to their grand­par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion. Grow­ing up in the 1950s as part of one of tele­vi­sion’s most enthu­si­as­tic view­er­ships, they expe­ri­enced the rise of that then-mar­velous medi­um and the var­i­ous con­cepts it tried out before set­tling into con­ven­tion. Some may even remem­ber hap­py Sat­ur­day morn­ings with CBS’ Winky Dink and You, the show that they did­n’t just watch but actu­al­ly “inter­act­ed” with by break­ing out their crayons and draw­ing on the screen.

First aired in 1953, Winky Dink and You came host­ed by Jack Bar­ry, a famous tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty since the begin­ning of tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing. (He would remain so until his death in the mid-1980s, hav­ing bounced back from the quiz show scan­dals of the lat­er 1950s.) His ani­mat­ed side­kick, the tit­u­lar Winky Dink, was voiced by Mae Ques­tel, best known as the voice of Bet­ty Boop and Olive Oyl. “Winky Dink said he want­ed the chil­dren to mail away for a ‘Mag­ic Win­dow,’ which was actu­al­ly a cheap­ly pro­duced, thin sheet of plas­tic that adhered to the TV screen by sta­t­ic elec­tric­i­ty,” writes Winky Dink-gen­er­a­tion colum­nist Bob Greene. “Along with the plas­tic sheet that arrived in the mail were ‘mag­ic crayons.’ Chil­dren were encour­aged to place the sheet on their TV screen and watch the show each Sat­ur­day, so that Winky Dink could tell them what to do.”

Winky Dink, and Bar­ry, often told them to draw in the miss­ing parts of a pic­ture, or to con­nect dots that would reveal a cod­ed mes­sage. In the episode above, writes Pale­o­fu­ture’s Matt Novak, Bar­ry invites kids to “draw things on Winky Dink’s fam­i­ly mem­bers, like flow­ers on the but­ton hole of Uncle Slim’s jack­et, or an entire­ly new nose on the old guy. Uncle Slim sneezes in reac­tion to get­ting a nose drawn on his face, as you might expect” — by the stan­dards of 1950s chil­dren’s pro­gram­ming, “com­e­dy gold.” Dull though it may sound today, Winky Dink and You dates from an era when tele­vi­sion “was still seen as an edu­ca­tion force for good,” when “Amer­i­cans weren’t quite jad­ed enough to believe TV was a pas­sive tech­nol­o­gy that didn’t actu­al­ly stim­u­late the mind.”

And though the show man­aged to move two mil­lion mag­ic screens, con­cerns about X‑rays ema­nat­ing from pic­ture tubes (as well as the like­li­hood of impa­tient kids draw­ing right on the glass) end­ed its run in 1957. But in a sense, its lega­cy lives on: a much-cir­cu­lat­ed quote attrib­uted to Bill Gates describes Winky Dink and You “the first inter­ac­tive TV show,” and it does indeed seem to have pio­neered a kind of con­tent that has only in recent years reached full tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. Any­one who has watched young chil­dren of the 21st cen­tu­ry play on smart­phones and tablets will notice a strik­ing resem­blance to the activ­i­ties led by Winky Dink and Bar­ry. Dif­fer­ent reboots have been attempt­ed in dif­fer­ent eras, but has the time come for a Winky Dink and You app?

(via Pale­o­fu­ture)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Duck and Cov­er: The 1950s Film That Taught Mil­lions of School­child­ren How to Sur­vive a Nuclear Bomb

1950 Super­man Poster Urged Kids to Defend All Amer­i­cans, Regard­less of Their Race, Reli­gion or Nation­al Ori­gin

1950s Bat­man Car­toon Tells Kids: “Don’t Believe Those Crack­pot Lies About Peo­ple Who Wor­ship Dif­fer­ent­ly”

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Before Mad Men: Famil­iar and For­got­ten Ads from 1950s to 1980s Now Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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How Carol Kaye Became the Most Prolific Session Musician in History

in Music | August 1st, 2018

They don’t spend their lives on tour bus­es, per­form­ing for hun­dreds or thou­sands of fans. They don’t make music videos or appear on album cov­ers and late-night TV show couches—all the things musi­cians are sup­posed to do in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. But they con­stant­ly com­pose, play, and record music. And their work may get heard far more than that of most aspir­ing stars, though we may nev­er know their names.

They are ses­sion musi­cians, the sea­soned play­ers that song­writ­ers, singers, and pro­duc­ers call on when it’s time to get into the stu­dio and get seri­ous. And Car­ol Kaye may be the most pro­lif­ic of them all, “with a career span­ning more than half a cen­tu­ry and appear­ances on an esti­mat­ed 10,000 record­ings,” as the Poly­phon­ic video pro­file above notes.

Name a clas­sic rock, pop, R&B, or soul album and there’s a very good chance Kaye’s bass appears on it. The Beach Boys, Neil Young, Frank Zap­pa, Lou Rawls, Ike & Tina Turn­er, Dusty Spring­field, Love, The Mon­kees, Ray Charles, The Right­eous Broth­ers, Wayne New­ton, and on and on.

She start­ed as a gui­tar prodi­gy at the age of 13. Soon, she was teach­ing the instru­ment and play­ing jazz clubs at night. At 25, she caught the atten­tion of band­leader “Bumps” Black­well, who recruit­ed her for her debut ses­sion gig, play­ing on Sam Cooke’s “Sum­mer­time.” Her rhythm gui­tar work can also be heard on Richie Valens’ “La Bam­ba” and sev­er­al Son­ny & Cher hits.

But it’s Kaye’s work on the bass that made her most renowned, the result of a “hap­py acci­dent” when the bass play­er in a record­ing ses­sion failed to show up. Kaye took over and loved it so much that she stuck with the instru­ment, say­ing in one inter­view that she found in the bass “my own lit­tle spot. I knew what to do and what to invent.”

Invent she did, on both gui­tar and bass, con­tribut­ing her taste­ful play­ing to so many clas­sics that the his­to­ry of mod­ern music can­not be told with­out her. She has influ­enced count­less bass play­ers, from Gene Sim­mons to Tina Wey­mouth and writ­ten some of the most icon­ic grooves of all time. How’s that for a musi­cian who nev­er made a video?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Car­ol Kaye, the Unsung Bassist Behind Your Favorite 60s Hits

Car­ol Kaye, 81-Year-Old Pio­neer of Rock, Gives Kiss’ Gene Sim­mons a Bass Les­son

7 Female Bass Play­ers Who Helped Shape Mod­ern Music: Kim Gor­don, Tina Wey­mouth, Kim Deal & More

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

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How Charlie Kaufman Goes Deep into the Human Condition in Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Other Movies

in Film | August 1st, 2018

We all remem­ber our ear­ly encoun­ters with the work of Char­lie Kauf­man, though few of us knew at the time — or even know now — that it was the work of Char­lie Kauf­man. Now acclaimed as a screen­writer and the direc­tor of the films Synec­doche, New York and Anom­al­isa, he brought his pen­chant for the inter­sec­tion of the philo­soph­i­cal and sur­re­al even to the first projects he worked on. These include episodes of tele­vi­sion shows like Get a Life, the ear­ly-1990s sit­com known pri­mar­i­ly for its weird­ness, and the more sub­tly askew Ned and Stacey a few years lat­er. But only at the end of the 1990s did Hol­ly­wood and its audi­ences taste Kauf­man’s writ­ing in its purest form in Being John Malkovich.

Direct­ed by Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich, a film about a pup­peteer who dis­cov­ers a tun­nel into the mind of the tit­u­lar actor, launched a cin­e­mat­ic explo­ration of Kauf­man’s sig­na­ture themes: con­trol, con­nec­tion, iden­ti­ty, mor­tal­i­ty. That explo­ration would con­tin­ue in Kauf­man and Jonze’s next film, Adap­ta­tion, as well as in his col­lab­o­ra­tions with direc­tor Michel Gondry, Human Nature and Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. “Writ­ing with Hon­esty,” the Chan­nel Criswell video essay above, shows us how Kauf­man has approached those themes in the films he has writ­ten for oth­er direc­tors as well as for him­self.

In Kauf­man’s work, says Chan­nel Criswell cre­ator Lewis Bond, “the craft and strug­gle of the writer is ever-present with the raw sin­cer­i­ty with which the angst of every per­son is put on dis­play.” This has required Kauf­man not just to break long-estab­lished rules of screen­writ­ing but to put him­self into his screen­plays in unusu­al­ly direct ways (as evi­denced by Adap­ta­tion’s depic­tion of screen­writ­ing guru Robert McK­ee and use of a screen­writer main char­ac­ter named Char­lie Kauf­man). His “explo­ration of the human con­di­tion” neces­si­tates “plac­ing his own anx­i­eties at the cen­ter of his work. His naked ego is com­plete­ly exposed to the audi­ence, to the point of unbri­dled self-scruti­ny.” In oth­er words, “the fur­ther he probes into his char­ac­ters, the deep­er he actu­al­ly delves into him­self.”

This may sound self-indul­gent — and nobody acknowl­edges that more than Kauf­man him­self — but Bond describes the process as “test­ing his own per­sona as he’s plac­ing him­self in sit­u­a­tions that he does­n’t know how to over­come. He watch­es oth­ers watch­ing him­self, giv­ing him the lib­er­ty to write as he dis­cov­ers.” He dis­cov­ers, as his writ­ing takes him into the realms of the abstract, the metaphor­i­cal, and the sym­bol­ic, that he and his view­ers share an inner self. “Por­tals to the head of John Malkovich, a fake twin broth­er he writes as real, a the­ater the size of a city tak­ing pri­or­i­ty over the end of the world: all these are clear peeks into the soul of Kauf­man, his attempts to rec­on­cile his per­son­al foibles, and through this we rec­og­nize our own frail­ties and anx­i­eties in his.” Hence, per­haps, the mem­o­ra­bil­i­ty of our encoun­ters with Kauf­man’s work: they’re also encoun­ters with our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

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Prince Plays Guitar for Maria Bartiromo: It’s Awkward (2004)

in Music, Television | August 1st, 2018

This uncom­fort­able scene played out on CNBC in 2004.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Sum­mer­time” in a Can­did, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Apply to Become an Archivist Over­see­ing Prince’s Arti­facts & Archival Mate­ri­als: Appli­ca­tions Are Being Accept­ed Now

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Discover Hilma af Klint: Pioneering Mystical Painter and Perhaps the First Abstract Artist

in Art | July 31st, 2018

In a post last year, Col­in Mar­shall wrote of the Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint, who “devel­oped abstract imagery,” notes Sweden’s Mod­er­na Museet, “sev­er­al years before” con­tem­po­raries like Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, and Kaz­imir Male­vich. Much like Kandin­sky, who artic­u­lat­ed his the­o­ries in the trea­tise Con­cern­ing the Spir­i­tu­al in Art, af Klint “assumed that there was a spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion to life and aimed at visu­al­iz­ing con­text beyond what the eye can see.” Influ­enced by spir­i­tu­al­ism and theos­o­phy, she “sought to under­stand and com­mu­ni­cate the var­i­ous dimen­sions of human exis­tence.”

Born in 1862 and raised in the Swedish coun­try­side, af Klint began her stud­ies at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Stock­holm after her fam­i­ly relo­cat­ed to the city. “After grad­u­at­ing and until 1908,” Mod­er­na Museet writes, “she had a stu­dio at Kungsträdgår­den in cen­tral Stock­holm.

She paint­ed and exhib­it­ed por­traits and land­scapes in a nat­u­ral­ist style.” But as a result of her expe­ri­ences in séances in the late 1870s, af Klint became inter­est­ed in “invis­i­ble phe­nom­e­na.”

In 1896, Hilma af Klint and four oth­er women formed the group “De Fem” [The Five]. They made con­tact with “high mas­ters” from anoth­er dimen­sion, and made metic­u­lous notes on their séances. This led to a def­i­nite change in Hilma af Klint’s art. She began prac­tis­ing auto­mat­ic writ­ing, which involves writ­ing with­out con­scious­ly guid­ing the move­ment of the pen on the paper. She devel­oped a form of auto­mat­ic draw­ing, pre­dat­ing the sur­re­al­ists by decades. Grad­u­al­ly, she eschewed her nat­u­ral­ist imagery, in an effort to free her­self from her aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing. She embarked on an inward jour­ney, into a world that is hid­den from most peo­ple.

Dur­ing one such séance, in 1904, af Klint report­ed that she had “received a ‘com­mis­sion,’” Kate Kell­away writes at The Guardian, “from an enti­ty named Amaliel who told her to paint on ‘an astral plane’ and rep­re­sent the ‘immor­tal aspects of man.’” From 1906 to 1915, she pro­duced 193 paint­ings, “an aston­ish­ing out­pour­ing,” which she called “Paint­ings for the Tem­ple.”

Hers is a strange sto­ry. Even in a time when many famous con­tem­po­raries, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, pro­fessed sim­i­lar beliefs and spir­i­tu­al prac­tices, not many claimed to be tak­ing dic­ta­tion direct­ly from spir­its in their work. The ques­tion af Klint rais­es for art his­to­ri­ans is whether she was “a quirky out­sider” or “Europe’s first abstract painter, cen­tral to the his­to­ry of abstract art.” Her mys­ti­cal eccen­tric­i­ties con­sti­tute a large part of the rea­son she has remained obscure for so long. Rather than seek fame and acclaim for her orig­i­nal­i­ty, af Klint stip­u­lat­ed when she died in 1944 at age 81 that “her work—1,200 paint­ings, 100 texts and 26,000 pages of notes—should not be shown until 20 years after her death.”

Still, it took a fur­ther 22 years before her work was seen in pub­lic, at a 1986 Los Ange­les show called “The Spir­i­tu­al in Art.” While her peers devel­oped large fol­low­ings in their life­times and took part in influ­en­tial move­ments, af Klint cul­ti­vat­ed a pri­vate, insu­lar world all her own, not unlike that of William Blake, who also remained most­ly obscure dur­ing his life, though not nec­es­sar­i­ly by choice. Her choice to hide her work came out of an ear­ly encounter, Dan­ger­ous Minds notes, with Rudolf Stein­er, “who was sim­i­lar­ly fol­low­ing a path towards cre­at­ing a syn­the­sis between the sci­en­tif­ic and the spir­i­tu­al” and who told her “these paint­ings must not be seen for fifty years as no one would under­stand them.”

Now that af Klint’s work has been exhib­it­ed in full, most recent­ly by the Mod­er­na Museet, cura­tors like Iris Müller-West­er­mann believe, as Kellawy notes, “that art-his­tor­i­cal wran­gles should not get in the way of work that needs to be seen.” Although af Klint may not have played an inte­gral his­tor­i­cal role in the devel­op­ment of abstract paint­ing, her expan­sive body of work will like­ly inspire artists, schol­ars, and eso­teric seek­ers for cen­turies to come.

Learn more about af Klint’s work at Mod­er­na Museet, the Hilma af Klint Foun­da­tion web­site, The Art Sto­ry and Dan­ger­ous Minds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

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

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The Believer Magazine Has Put Its Entire Archive Online for Free

in Magazines, Media | July 31st, 2018

Found­ed in 2003, The Believ­er mag­a­zine gained a rep­u­ta­tion for being an off-beat lit­er­ary mag­a­zine with a com­mit­ment “to jour­nal­ism and essays that are fre­quent­ly very long, book reviews that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly time­ly, and inter­views that are inti­mate, frank and also very long.” Found­ed by authors Vendela Vida, Ed Park and Hei­di Julav­its, and orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s, The Believ­er has fea­tured con­tri­bu­tions by Nick Horn­by, Anne Car­son, William T. Voll­mann; columns by Amy Sedaris and Greil Mar­cus; and also interviews–like this one where direc­tor Errol Mor­ris talks with film­mak­er Wern­er Her­zog.

Now pub­lished by the Black Moun­tain Insti­tute at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Neva­da, Las Vegas, The Believ­er has entered a new era. It has launched a brand new web site and made its 15-year archive freely avail­able online. It’s a first for the pub­li­ca­tion. Enter the archive of the “high­brow but delight­ful­ly bizarre” mag­a­zine here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter “The Mag­a­zine Rack,” the Inter­net Archive’s Col­lec­tion of 34,000 Dig­i­tized Mag­a­zines

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Heavy Met­al, the Influ­en­tial “Adult Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine” That Fea­tured the Art of Moe­bius, H.R. Giger & More

Read 1,000 Edi­tions of The Vil­lage Voice: A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Icon­ic New York City Paper

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

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