Paul Simon, Then and Now: Celebrating His 70th Birthday

“Time Hur­ries on,” sings Paul Simon in this ear­ly Simon and Gar­funkel per­for­mance, “and the leaves that are green turn to brown.” The clip is from a 1966 Dutch tele­vi­sion pro­gram, “Twien.”  The duo were per­form­ing songs from their sec­ond album, Sounds of Silence. “The Leaves That Are Green” is one you don’t hear much these days, per­haps because the song’s author has, like the leaves of Octo­ber, most cer­tain­ly changed.

Today is Simon’s 70th birth­day. He was born into a fam­i­ly of Jew­ish immi­grants on Octo­ber 13, 1941 in Newark, New Jer­sey. His father was a bassist and band­leader, and his moth­er, a school teacher, was also trained in music. The fam­i­ly soon moved to Queens, New York, where Simon would meet anoth­er kid in the neigh­bor­hood, Art Gar­funkel. The two shared a pas­sion for music, and before long Simon was writ­ing songs for them to sing around the neigh­bor­hood. They released their first record, “Hey, School­girl,” while still in high school.The song made it to num­ber 49 on the pop charts.

Over the next half cen­tu­ry, both with Gar­funkel and on his own, Simon would con­tin­u­al­ly rein­vent him­self, absorb­ing a wide range of influ­ences while hold­ing tight to a song­writer’s com­mit­ment to craft. The New York Times, in its pro­file of Simon, sums it up this way:

His music stays restrained, ever taste­ful. He sings gen­tly in his own metic­u­lous pro­duc­tions, and his songs can share radio for­mats with the most sooth­ing soft-rock. But the thread run­ning through Mr. Simon’s songs is estrange­ment. From “I Am a Rock” to “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” to “You Can Call Me Al” to the cranky reflec­tions on his 2006 album “Sur­prise,” he has sung about being alien­at­ed, mis­placed, rest­less, dis­il­lu­sioned. Moments of solace or sat­is­fac­tion are far out­num­bered by mis­giv­ings and regrets. The mate­r­i­al com­forts that he rec­og­nizes are his–as a wealthy man, as a pop suc­cess, as an Amer­i­can in a wider world–don’t bring him peace of mind. Nei­ther does the finicky crafts­man­ship that has always marked his music.

You can hear that rest­less­ness and alien­ation in the fol­low­ing track from his new stu­dio album, So Beau­ti­ful or So What, where we find the 70-year-old play­ful­ly con­tem­plat­ing “The After­life”:

An Introduction to Cosmology by Sean Carroll

Note: Although you can no longer find these videos on YouTube, you can find them avail­able on this CERN web­site.

Sean Car­roll, a physics pro­fes­sor at Cal­tech, has a knack for mak­ing sci­ence pub­licly acces­si­ble. He writes reg­u­lar­ly for the blog Cos­mic Vari­ance, and you have per­haps seen him on the His­to­ry Chan­nel, Sci­ence Chan­nel, or The Col­bert Report. Yes­ter­day, he announced that five lec­tures he gave at CERN now appear online, and it all begins with an Intro­duc­tion to Cos­mol­o­gy, or the ori­gin and struc­ture of the uni­verse. Then come lec­tures on Dark Mat­terDark Ener­gyTher­mo­dy­nam­ics and the Ear­ly Uni­verse, and Infla­tion and Beyond. The lec­tures (all nice­ly pack­aged togeth­er at Cos­mic Vari­ance) will appear in the Physics Sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es Online. You may also want to vis­it two relat­ed videos recent­ly fea­tured on OC:

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Uni­verse From Noth­ing’

The Nobel Prize: Saul Perl­mut­ter & the Accel­er­at­ing Expan­sion of the Uni­verse

Marshall McLuhan on the Stupidest Debate in the History of Debating (1976)

In Sep­tem­ber 1976, Jim­my Carter and Ger­ald Ford squared off in a pres­i­den­tial debate, and the fol­low­ing day, the leg­endary com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­rist Mar­shall McLuhan appeared on the TODAY show, then host­ed by Tom Brokaw, to offer some almost real-time analy­sis of the debate. The first tele­vised pres­i­den­tial debate was famous­ly held in 1960, and it pit­ted John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon. Six­teen years lat­er, pun­dits and cit­i­zens were still try­ing to make sense of the for­mat. Was the tele­vised debate a new and vital part of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy? Or was it a care­ful­ly con­trolled act of polit­i­cal per­for­mance? For McLuhan, there was still some ide­al­is­tic sense that tele­vised debates could enhance our democ­ra­cy, assum­ing the mes­sage was suit­ed to the medi­um. But McLuhan came away dis­il­lu­sioned, call­ing the Carter/Ford spec­ta­cle “the most stu­pid arrange­ment of any debate in the his­to­ry of debat­ing” and chalk­ing up tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties (watch them here) to the medi­um rag­ing against the mes­sage.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan’s 1969 Deck of Cards, Designed For Out-of-the-Box Think­ing

Sir Ian McKellen Reads Manual for Changing Tires in Dramatic Voice

Sir Ian McK­ellen shows why he has been nom­i­nat­ed for an Acad­e­my Award not once, but two times. The actor (Lord of the RingsKing Lear) reads a tire repair man­u­al in dra­mat­ic voice  … and, of course, pulls it off — shades of Peter Sell­ers per­form­ing The Bea­t­les in Shake­speare­an mode and Richard Drey­fuss giv­ing a dra­mat­ic read­ing of the iTunes End-user license agree­ment. And, oh, let us not for­get Christo­pher Walken’s hilar­i­ous read­ing of Lady Gaga’s Pok­er Face.

H/T @matthiasrascher

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Ian McK­ellen Stars in King Lear

Sir Ian McK­ellen Puts on a Daz­zling One-Man Shake­speare Show

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

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Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occupy Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz teach­es at the Colum­bia Busi­ness School and Columbi­a’s Depart­ment of Eco­nom­ics and, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics in 2001.

The mon­ey quote from his appear­ance had less to do with eco­nom­ics per se and more with democ­ra­cy: “We have too many reg­u­la­tions stop­ping democ­ra­cy, and not enough reg­u­la­tions stop­ping Wall Street from mis­be­hav­ing.” No bull­horns, are you seri­ous?

You prob­a­bly know Lawrence Lessig because of his work found­ing Cre­ative Com­mons and pro­mot­ing “Free Cul­ture.” (Watch his final speech on Free Cul­ture here.) Sev­er­al years ago, Lessig moved from Stan­ford to Har­vard, where he took up a new focus — gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion. That’s what he grap­ples with in his new book, Repub­lic, Lost and this relat­ed video. Giv­en Lessig’s focus on how cor­po­rate mon­ey cor­rupts our polit­i­cal sys­tem, it’s not sur­pris­ing that he would have some­thing to say about the poten­tial of the Wall Street protests.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

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Ai Weiwei and the Seeds of Freedom

In the state-con­trolled pro­pa­gan­da art of rev­o­lu­tion­ary Chi­na, sun­flow­ers car­ried a blunt sym­bol­ism: Mao Zedong was the sun and the Chi­nese peo­ple were the sun­flow­ers, all fac­ing one direc­tion to receive the nour­ish­ing rays.

A gen­er­a­tion lat­er, in the work of Chi­nese artist Ai Wei­wei, the sym­bol­ism is a bit more sub­ver­sive. In 2010 Ai launched a show called Sun­flower Seeds, where a riot of indi­vid­ual porce­lain seeds–more than a hun­dred mil­lion of them, all hand-painted–were spread across the floor of a large hall at the Tate Mod­ern in Lon­don. Ai want­ed vis­i­tors to move freely across the instal­la­tion, pick­ing the seeds up, mov­ing them around, doing what­ev­er they want­ed — all shown in the video above.

As a cham­pi­on of free­dom and an out­spo­ken crit­ic of Chi­na’s human rights record, Ai has come under heavy pres­sure from the Chi­nese regime. Ear­ly this year his Shang­hai stu­dio was demol­ished and he was lat­er arrest­ed and detained at secret loca­tions for 81 days. Now he is for­bid­den from giv­ing inter­views or using the Inter­net. But before he was arrest­ed, Ai was able to send a video­taped speech to the TED con­fer­ence, out­lin­ing his views. You can watch it below. To learn more about the extra­or­di­nary Sun­flower Seeds 2010 exhib­it, you can watch the “TateShots” film above.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Leymah Gbowee Talks @Google

Last Wednes­day, Liber­ian peace activist Leymah Gbowee paid a vis­it to Google to talk about her mem­oir, Mighty Be Our Pow­ers: How Sis­ter­hood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. Two days lat­er, she was award­ed the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Ellen John­son Sir­leaf and Tawakkol Kar­man. The Googlers pro­vide a quick intro­duc­tion to her activism before the con­ver­sa­tion begins.…

via Google Book Blog

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The Power of Conformity

This vin­tage stunt from a 1962 episode of Can­did Cam­era makes for a good laugh. But it also cap­tures some­thing impor­tant about human psy­chol­o­gy — some­thing that social psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bar­do, famous for his Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment, describes on a web­site relat­ed to his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Under­stand­ing How Good Peo­ple Turn Evil. He writes:

One of the most pop­u­lar sce­nar­ios in the long his­to­ry of Alan Fun­t’s inge­nious Can­did Cam­era pro­grams is “Face The Rear.” An ele­va­tor is rigged so that after an unsus­pect­ing per­son enters, four Can­did Cam­era staff enter, and one by one they all face the rear. The doors close and then reopen; now reveal­ing that the pas­sen­ger had con­formed and is now also fac­ing the rear. Doors close and reopen, and every­one is fac­ing side­ways, and then face the oth­er way. We laugh that these peo­ple are manip­u­lat­ed like pup­pets on invis­i­ble strings, but this sce­nario makes us aware of the num­ber of sit­u­a­tions in which we mind­less­ly fol­low the dic­tates of group norms and sit­u­a­tion­al forces.

Often times, the mind­less sub­mis­sion to group norms has entire­ly innocu­ous results. But, in oth­er cas­es, it can lead to “good peo­ple engag­ing in evil actions.” Wit­ness what hap­pened with­in the con­trolled envi­ron­ment of the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment. Or, worse, the dev­as­tat­ing abus­es at Abu Ghraib, which brought oth­er­wise aver­age peo­ple to com­mit atro­cious acts. For more read The Lucifer Effect.

H/T Sci­ence Dump

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.