Last November Magnus Carlsen, then only 22 years old, became the Chess World Champion when he soundly defeated Viswanathan Anand in a best-of-12 series match held in Chennai, India. Carlsen won three games, tied ten, and lost none. Only the second chess champion from the West since World War II (and the first since the “eccentric genius” Bobby Fischer), Carlsen suddenly found himself a celebrity of sorts, getting airtime on TV shows. Appearing on the Scandinavian talk show, Skavlan, a few days ago, Carlsen delighted viewers when he played a game of speed chess against Bill Gates, the wunderkind of a previous generation, who co-founded Microsoft when he was only 20 years old. So how did Gates hold up? Well, let’s just say that, true to its name, it was a game of speed chess. Gates lost speedily — in 79 seconds and just nine moves.
On January 7th, Neil Young played an acoustic solo concert at Carnegie Hall and treated the audience to what Rolling Stone calls, “an absolutely jaw-dropping two hour and 20-minute show that focused largely on his golden period of 1966 to 1978.” “It was, without a doubt, one of the greatest Neil Young shows of the past decade, at least when he wasn’t playing with Crazy Horse.” Above, we have a crowdsourced concert film of that entire glorious show. It was stitched together and uploaded to Youtube by Reelife Documentary Productions. Find the 23-song setlist here.
My graduate school supervisor taught me all I know about professional email etiquette. Vague language? Poor form. Typos? Nothing worse. Run-on paragraphs? A big no-no. Spelling your recipient’s name wrong? No coming back from that one. Unfortunately, hastily composed emails and ambiguous phrasing are all too common, particularly with the high volume of emails many people send daily. Skimping on the courtesy and the proofreading, however, is likely to cost you points with your recipient. Thankfully, we’ve provided a list of correspondence best practices, compiled by an authority on letters: Lewis Carroll (who, incidentally, would have celebrated his 182nd birthday today). In 1890, Carroll began to sell a Wonderland Stamp Case, which helped its users to organize their various postage stamps. Paired with the case was a short essay, entitled “Eight Or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.”
The initial guide, of course, refers to pen and paper correspondence. In fact, Carroll’s foremost precept, which instructs one to write legibly, is no longer a concern in the digital age. Nevertheless, the remaining eight rules provide a clear and simple crib sheet for letter-writing that has stood the test of time remarkably well:
1) Start by addressing any questions the receiver previously had - “Don’t fill more than a page and a half with apologies for not having written sooner!
The best subject, to begin with, is your friend’s last letter. Write with the letter open before you. Answer his questions, and make any remarks his letter suggests. Then go on to what you want to say yourself. This arrangement is more courteous, and pleasanter for the reader, than to fill the letter with your own invaluable remarks, and then hastily answer your friend’s questions in a postscript. Your friend is much more likely to enjoy your wit, after his own anxiety for information has been satisfied.”
2)Don’t repeat yourself - “When once you have said your say, fully and clearly, on a certain point, and have failed to convince your friend, drop that subject: to repeat your arguments, all over again, will simply lead to his doing the same…”
3) Write with a level head — “When you have written a letter that you feel may possibly irritate your friend, however necessary you may have felt it to so express yourself, put it aside till the next day. Then read it over again, and fancy it addressed to yourself. This will often lead to your writing it all over again, taking out a lot of the vinegar and pepper, and putting in honey instead, and thus making a much more palatable dish of it!”
4) When in doubt, err on the side of courtesy - “If your friend makes a severe remark, either leave it unnoticed, or make your reply distinctly less severe: and if he makes a friendly remark, tending towards ‘making up’ the little difference that has arisen between you, let your reply be distinctly more friendly. If, in picking a quarrel, each party declined to go more than three-eighths of the way, and if, in making friends, each was ready to go five-eighths of the way—why, there would be more reconciliations than quarrels! Which is like the Irishman’s remonstrance to his gad-about daughter—‘Shure, you’re always goin’ out! You go out three times, for wanst that you come in!’ ”
5) Don’t try to have the last word — “How many a controversy would be nipped in the bud, if each was anxious to let the other have the last word! Never mind how telling a rejoinder you leave unuttered: never mind your friend’s supposing that you are silent from lack of anything to say: let the thing drop, as soon as it is possible without discourtesy: remember ‘speech is silvern, but silence is golden’! (N.B.—If you are a gentleman, and your friend a lady, this Rule is superfluous: you won’t get the last word!)”
6) Humor is hard to translate to writing. Be obvious. - “If it should ever occur to you to write, jestingly, in dispraise of your friend, be sure you exaggerate enough to make the jesting obvious: a word spoken in jest, but taken as earnest, may lead to very serious consequences. I have known it to lead to the breaking-off of a friendship. Suppose, for instance, you wish to remind your friend of a sovereign you have lent him, which he has forgotten to repay—you might quite mean the words “I mention it, as you seem to have a conveniently bad memory for debts”, in jest: yet there would be nothing to wonder at if he took offence at that way of putting it. But, suppose you wrote “Long observation of your career, as a pickpocket and a burglar, has convinced me that my one lingering hope, for recovering that sovereign I lent you, is to say ‘Pay up, or I’ll summons yer!’” he would indeed be a matter-of-fact friend if he took that as seriously meant!”
7) Don’t forget that attachment! — “When you say, in your letter, “I enclose cheque for £5”, or “I enclose John’s letter for you to see”, leave off writing for a moment—go and get the document referred to—and put it into the envelope. Otherwise, you are pretty certain to find it lying about, after the Post has gone!”
8) Using a postscript? Make it short — “A Postscript is a very useful invention: but it is not meant (as so many ladies suppose) to contain the real gist of the letter: it serves rather to throw into the shade any little matter we do not wish to make a fuss about.”
Casual Victorian-era “silly women!” sexism aside, Carroll’s tips are surprisingly fresh and applicable. If you’re planning on engaging in some serious snail-mail correspondence, we suggest you check out Carroll’s complete essay over at Project Gutenberg.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
If, by some stretch of the imagination, the end timers have it right, I hope artist Dennis Hlynsky will consider setting up his tripod as demons spew forth from the earth’s crust.
His small brains en masse project has me convinced that he is the perfect person to capture such an event. Have a look at how he documents the comings and goings of birds.
I’ve never experienced a starling murmuration myself, outside of the famous, shot-on-the-fly footage (right above) of Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, indie filmmakers who chanced to find themselves in the right canoe at the right time, ornithologically speaking. I admire these young women’s sang-froid. I would’ve been cowering and slashing at the air with my paddles. That funnel cloud of black wings is unnerving even from the safe remove of my living room, but a groovy soundtrack by Nomad Soul Collective encourages even the most bird-phobic amongst us (me) to see it as something gorgeous and awe-inspiring, too.
Hlynsky doesn’t attempt to lead the witness with reassuring sound cues. Instead, he amps up the creepy via “extruded time,” layering sequences of frames atop one another until the darkest pixels become tracers emphasizing flight paths. The combination of everyday sound and visual portent makes it dreadfully easy to imagine one’s truck breaking down at an intersection right around the 7 minute mark.
Perhaps I’ve seen too many zombie movies.
Or have I?
Hlynsky is obviously fascinated by nature, but he also states that “to some degree these videos are studies of mob behavior. Are these decisions instinctual or small thoughtful considerations? Does one leader guide the group or is there a common brain? Is a virus a single creature or a diffused body that we inhabit?”
Put another way, perhaps there’s a reason it’s called a murder of crows, as opposed to a brunch, hug or sweatshirt of crows. Hlynsky, who’s the type of guy to seek their company out, describes his time spent filming them to be among the most “exceptional, spooky and beautiful” moments of his life.
As for these New Jersey seagulls, “throw a french fry in the air and within 30 seconds the entire screech of birds will come.” Yikes. Here, extruded time conspires with the ambient sounds of a boardwalk amusement park, in a tour-de-force of avian-inspired psychic unrest.
Alfred Hitchcock, writes James A. Davidson in Images, “is usually mentioned in the same breath with Cornell Woolrich, the literary ‘master of suspense,’ ” not least because he adapted a novella of Woolrich’s into Rear Window (1954).” Yet Davidson himself finds in Hitchcock “a much greater affinity with that of the Russian émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he is not typically associated since there is no apparent connection” like the one between Nabokov and Stanley Kubrick, who brought Nabokov’s novel Lolita to the screen. Hitchcock and Nabokov never similarly collaborated, but not out of a lack of desire. Close historical contemporaries and mutual admirers, the writer and the director did once exchange letters discussing film ideas they might develop together. You’ll find the full text of both Hitchcock’s query and Nabokov’s interested response at the American Reader.
“The first idea I have been thinking about for some time is based upon a question that I do not think I have seen dealt with in motion pictures or, as far as I know, in literature,” wrote Hitchcock to Nabokov on November 19, 1964. “It is the problem of the woman who is associated, either by marriage or engagement, to a defector.” After filling out a few details, suiting the concept perfectly to what he calls “the customary Hitchcock suspense,” he lays out a second, about a young girl who, “having spent her life in a convent in Switzerland due to the fact that she had no home to go to and only had a widowed father,” suddenly finds herself released back to the hotel run by her father and his entire family. But ah, “the whole of this family are a gang of crooks, using the hotel as a base of operations,” which would lead into the telling of an “extremely colorful story.” Replying nine days later, Nabokov admits that Hitchcock’s first idea, about the defector’s wife, “would present many difficulties for me” due to his unfamiliarity with “American security matters and methods.” The one about the criminal hotel, however, strikes him as “quite acceptable,” and he goes on to make two pitches of his own.
Nabokov’s first idea, something of a reversal of Hitchcock’s first one, involves a defector from the Soviet Union in the United States. His second focuses on a starlet “courted by a budding astronaut.” When this astronaut returns home famous from a major mission, the actress, whose “starrise has come to a stop at a moderate level,” realizes “that he is not the same as he was before his flight.” Unable to put her finger on it, she “becomes concerned, then frightened, then panicky.” Nabokov tantalizingly mentions having “more than one interesting denouement for this plot,” but alas, we’ll never see them cinematized, and certainly not by the likes of Hitchcock. “One can only imagine the kind of involuted, complex, and playful work these two men would have produced,” writes Davidson. “What is left, in the end, is the work they produced, which can be well summarized by a line the fictional John Shade wrote in Pale Fire: ‘Life is a message scribbled in the dark.’ ”
My Friend Friedrich opens on awkward, bespectacled Columbia student Nate having a heart to heart on the phone with his mother. Then, in a philosophy class, he almost succeeds in landing a date by lobbing an illustrated invitation at his love interest, Emma. All goes awry when a taller, more confident, bespectacled Columbia student cuts him off at the knees. So far, so very New York student film, but a conceit arrives to distinguish this story of Ivy League dating woes: the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche appears before Nate to guide him towards self-actualization.
In what “seems to have been a senior project at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts,” according to Critical Theory (a Vimeo upload dates the film as “circa 2003), My Friend Friedrich gives us the typical undergraduate experience of the philosopher’s voice. Nietzsche instructs our young friend to regard the flashing lights, tall buildings, and “horseless carriages” of Times Square as meaningless. “Nihilism cares about nothing” he says and urges his pupil to will himself to power. It’s not too profound a portrayal of Nietzsche—though of course it’s only played for laughs—and seems to come mainly from a surface reading of his Will to Power, an unfinished manuscript published after the philosopher’s death. (His sister fraudulently pitched a mangled edition to the Nazis as Nietzsche’s underwriting of their ideology, cutting out all of her brother’s strong remarks against anti-Semitism.)
One could argue, if it’s worth explaining the humor, that this superficial take on Nietzsche is precisely the point, since it’s the diffident Nate’s slight reading of Will to Power at the outset that produces his hallucination-slash-visitation. Nietzsche helps Nate win an intellectual pissing contest by quoting Beyond Good and Evil chapter and verse, then goads him into some awkward outbursts and eventually overstays his welcome. The screwball conclusion is ripped right out of Wes Anderson.
In recent years, many great art museums have decided to open up their collections, putting online huge troves of images that showcase the masterpieces hanging on their walls. They’ve also made available free art catalogues and books, letting you learn all about important artists and styles of painting. Now, university presses and libraries are starting to follow suit, giving readers free access to books from their archives. We’ve tried to keep you posted on these cultural developments here on Open Culture. But you’ve likely missed a great resource or two. To make sure you stay up to speed, we offer a roundup below:
If we’re missing any great collection, please let us know in the comments section below. We’re always love to discover a new storehouse of free knowledge. And we’ll make sure that readers learn about them.
Here’s a little tip. Every month the University of Chicago Press lets you download a free ebook. If you go to this page, you can put your name on an email list and they’ll let you know when a new book is available. The current free book (for January 2014) is Murder in Ancient China by Robert Van Gulik. According to the press, the book is “available on our website DRM-free in your choice of an EPUB file (for most e‑reading devices, phones, and computers), as well as in a PRC file (for the Kindle). Or, you can get Murder in Ancient China free thoughout January at leading e‑book retailers, including in the Amazon Kindle store, at Apple iBooks, and at GooglePlay.”
The delay also affords those of us who live here ample time to stockpile the offending substance for future homemade musical instruments.
If you’re fretting over a relative lack of instrument building experience, relax.Three minutes is more than enough time for John Bertles, composer, arts educator and founder of Bash the Trash, to show you how you can make beautiful music from (mostly) scavenged materials. (Entirely scavenged, should you luck into a supply of giant rubber bands. I presume you have access to the more advanced version’s paper clips and leftover chopsticks. That alone justifies your soon-to-be Styro-free Panda Express delivery habit.)
If you’ve been building rubber band guitars since nursery school, Bertles’ video lesson still merits a listen, to hear how the sort of sounds practiced fingers are able to coax from these humble materials.
PS: Lest we get hung up on technicalities: Styrofoam is a trademarked polystyrene product of Dow Chemical. To quote Bertles, who has genuine claims on giving it a meaningful second life, “great material for building musical instruments…terrible for the earth.”
I’ve always had the impression of John Lennon as an aloof figure, and I’ve sometimes had difficulty reconciling the give peace a chance persona with the angry young man and his acid tongue. Motorhead’s Lemmy once called him “the asshole of the band,” saying, “if you read his books, he’s not the peace-loving nice guy that you heard about.” That may be partly true (his first wife Cynthia might agree), but it needn’t negate his ideals nor his activism and charity. Lennon was complicated, and probably not an easy person to get close to. On the other hand, he may be the most self-revealing of all the Beatles (literally). Perhaps—as Lennon says in voice-over narration above—his life, like his experimental 8mm films, was “self-edited.”
Though not shot by Lennon himself (and not technically “home movies” as the YouTube uploader describes them), the candid films above and below show a relaxed and playful Lennon at his 31st birthday party on October 9, 1971, goofing off with Yoko and several other well-known figures (the same day, an exhibition of Lennon and Ono’s art opened in Syracuse). Allen Ginsberg, Ringo Starr, and Phil Spector bob in and out of the shaky frame below.
Above, Miles Davis hangs out with the couple and plays basketball with Lennon. Keener eyes than mine may spot other legendary celebrities. Avant-garde filmmaker and onetime Warhol cameraman Jonas Mekas shot the footage, calling it “Happy Birthday to John.” Mekas describes the audio track as “a series of improvised songs, sung by John, Ringo, Yoko Ono, and their friends—not a clean studio recording, but as a birthday singing, free and happy.” In a 2002 interview, he conveyed his impressions of Lennon:
John was very open and curious, a very quick sort of person, who caught on immediately. He did a lot of 8mm filming himself. At the beginning of Happy Birthday John, you will hear him talking about what he was trying to do.
The above video brings together two things that few people of my generation can resist. The first hardly needs an introduction: at the risk of angering Coen Brothers fans with the comparison, their 1998 cult hit The Big Lebowski has generated at least as many endlessly quotable lines as Caddyshack did almost 20 years earlier, and it appeals to a similar contingent of slacker wiseasses. The movie gave Jeff Bridges—son of Lloyd, brother of Beau, and certainly a star in his own right before he played The Dude—the kind of cachet most actors only dream of. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have won his 2009 best actor Oscar for Crazy Heart without Lebowski, but I’m not saying that he would have either. And then, of course, there was the renewed interest in the “sport” of bowling, Hollywood weirdo and self-identified gun nut John Milius (who inspired John Goodman’s character), and the creamy vodka cocktail.
The second thing: the 8‑bit video games that, believe it or not, represented a revolution in home gaming, and gave us the first Nintendo and Sega systems and games that, true confession, used to keep me up all night, like the various versions of Megaman (which you can play online here). The games now have legendary status and their definitively colorful, blocky aesthetic has been—or was at least a few years ago—the ultimate in geek nostalgia chic, along with a new wave of “chiptune” music made with, or inspired by, the 8‑bit chips of the games of our youth. So what, I ask, could be more fun than bringing Lebowski and 8‑bit gaming together for a 3‑minute bowling game? Very little. As C‑Net describes the video above, it’s “an experience we only wish we’d had back in the 90’s.” Made by CineFix, who have previously animated Pulp Fiction, The Hunger Games, Blade Runner and a string of other hits as 8‑bit shorts, the 8‑Bit Cinema Big Lebowski isn’t actually playable, but it should be. Regardless, it’s as fun to watch as you might imagine a mash-up of the Coen Brothers and Super Mario World would be. Get your nostalgia on.
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