In November 2012, the Munich Chamber Orchestra and its conductor Alexander Liebreich had the rare chance to travel to Pyongyang to work with the students of the local Kim Won Gyun Conservatory. The Goethe Institut Korea arranged the visit and invited German filmmaker Nils Clauss to shoot a documentary about this moment of cross-cultural musical cooperation. Joint orchestra rehearsals were held, but the German musicians also conducted one-on-one chamber music classes with the North Korean students. At the end of their visit, the German-Korean ensemble performed a concert at the conservatory.
Nils Clauss’s documentary shows in a beautiful and unobtrusive way how musicians from two very different worlds quickly overcame the language barriers and let only the music speak. Alexander Liebreich described in an interview with the BBC how much had changed since his last visit to North Korea in 2002.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Paul Holdengräber is the kind of cultural gadabout that makes New York one of the greatest cities to live in, since New Yorkers like him are forever tracking down the world’s best writers, thinkers, and artists and roping them into intimate, unscripted public interviews, discussions, and performances. He belongs in the company of such luminary interviewers as James Lipton or Charlie Rose, but Holdengräber does something so many curators of culture don’t—he pulls things from his subjects that you’ve never heard them say before, and he does it because he’s seemingly fearless and a consummate amateur in the best sense of the word: he’s a lover—of literature, the arts, music, philosophy, and most of all, conversation. A recent Wall Street Journal profile described Holdengraber as the “only one man in New York who possesses the complement of skills—charm, erudition, curiosity and perhaps most of all chutzpah” to pull off what appear to be casual chats–but which Holdengräber carefully prepares–with people like Pete Townshend, Colum McCann, Umberto Eco, and just about anyone else you could think of.
Holdengräber works as curator of LIVE from the NYPL, a regular event described as “Cognitive Theater” that has featured previous guests like Harold Bloom, Patti Smith, Jay‑Z, and Colm Toibin. It’s something of a variety show. Some events put two complementary figures in conversation with each other, such as this past November’s conversation between the pardoned West Memphis Three suspect Damien Echols and former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins; some feature surprising, out-of-character performances, such as a reading of the modern classic kid’s book for adults, Go the F*ck to Sleep, as deadpanned by the voice of existential despair, Werner Herzog; and sometimes LIVE takes place in traditional interview format, with Holdengräber doing what he does best, getting fascinating people to tell stories about themselves. For example, Holdengräber sat down in June, 2010 for a lengthy talk with Christopher Hitchens, who had just published his memoir, Hitch 22. Little did either of them know that Hitchens would be gone in less than two years. In the short clip above, Hitchens and Holdengräber talk about mortality, both onstage and during an intimate backstage smoke break. Watch the full video of their talk below, and find the schedule for upcoming talks here.
As if his curatorial work for the NYPL were not enough, Holdengräber also hosts The Paul Holdengräber Show, which premiered last year on YouTube’s Intelligent Channel. Here he gets the chance to flex his interview muscles away from the audiences in a small studio setting. Now nine episodes in, the show has featured an unpredictable lineup of guests such as master chef David Chang, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, Robin Hood Foundation managing director Eric Weingartner, and this past July, New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch. In their conversation below, Holdengräber and Gourevitch have a conversation that swings effortlessly from reporting on international tragedy and war to writing a piece on James Brown to Gourevitch’s love for the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Gourevitch retells the story with the intensity and vividness of an eyewitness and the incisive commentary of a Talmudic scholar. It’s a moment only Paul Holdengräber could set up.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.
Maybe you have wondered about it. Maybe you haven’t. But either way, astronaut Chris Hadfield answers the big question — how one goes to the bathroom in space.
Hadfield is currently aboard the International Space Station, where he’s actively tweeting about life in orbit. You can follow him on Twitter here (and find us here).
Both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy act only through words. Yet they are in conflict. How so? There we have the question posed to psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and world-famous public intellectual Jacques Lacan in the video above, a clip from a scripted quasi-interview called Television whose answers play like his famous lectures. Watch it, or watch our previously featured video of Lacan giving a talk, and you’ll experience one quality that made him world-famous. Few others could combine such high-flown subject matter with such theatrically emphatic oratorical ability — an ability you can sense even if you don’t understand French. Fortunately, subtitles have been provided, offering Anglophones a chance to understand what connections the man saw between the unconscious, language, Freud, sexual relations, and comedy.
“There are, insofar as the unconscious is implicated, two sides presented by the structure, the structure which is language,” Lacan begins. “The side of meaning, the first side, the side we would identify as that of analysis, which pours out a flood of meaning to float the sexual boat.” These remarks come pre-written in the script of Television, something between a conversation and a play that grew out of Jacques-Alain Miller’s failed attempt to film a traditional interview of the psychoanalytic luminary. “After every cut, when it was time to start up again, Lacan shifted a bit in his discourse,” Miller wrote in Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television. “Each time he gave an additional twist to his reflections which were unfolding there, under the spotlights, thwarting any chance of bridge-building. We stopped after two hours; I gave him in writing a list of questions; and he wrote [Television]in about two weeks’ time. I saw him every evening and he gave me the day’s manuscript pages; then he read or acted out — with a few improvised variations — the written text. He made a spring-board of this false start.”
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We can thank many of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s royalty for showing us how to age with style. Mick Jagger is still a professional rocker, as disciplined and outrageous as ever. Now David Bowie has introduced a new album—his first in a decade—on the day he celebrated his 66th birthday.
Bowie’s new album The Next Day comes out in March, but a single, “Where Are We Now?,” is available to download on iTunes. The song is lovely and melancholy, as is the accompanying video, shot by artist Tony Oursler.
Bowie, officially in his late 60s, is in a nostalgic mood. The video is set in a cluttered artist’s studio dominated by projected images of Berlin in the late 1970s. The video is alternately inscrutable (who is the woman whose face shares the two-headed puppet with Bowie while he sings?) and reflective. The old Berlin footage, it turns out, is from Bowie’s old neighborhood where he once shared an apartment with Iggy Pop. Bowie moved to West Berlin in 1976 and recorded his Berlin trilogy—Low, Heroes and Lodger—with producer Tony Visconti.
The Next Page was also produced by Visconti, and that’s no coincidence. Bowie seems to be taking stock of his musical life, and that’s a lot to inventory. The continuity between the new album and one of the richest periods of his career bodes well for this latest work.
Bowie has also re-launched his website as part of the birthday celebration. He offers a new collection of videos—some never before broadcast—from his stellar stage career. As his audience we get a chance to appreciate his breadth as an artist and the amazing arc of his career. Dig the red boots in 1972’s Queen Bitch. This song endures after more than forty years. One of the best videos is an alternate take of Oh You Pretty Things from 1972. Bowie is young and brash at the piano in full Ziggy Stardust regalia. Look Back in Anger from 1979 shows the man at his rocking, operatic best. Even the less-than-stellar Let’s Dance from 1983 looks better now than it did at the time.
Watching him perform over the decades highlights just how authentic Bowie’s artistry has been and continues to be. When he flips his blond mop and croons into the microphone, he’s no poseur. He’s the real thing: a man trying on all the masks he can as a way to show all of himself to the world.
This is one birthday that won’t go forgotten. Thanks, David, for the terrific party.
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at .
Back in late November, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” had clocked 792 million times on YouTube, and the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei filmed his own Gangnam Style parody video. Now, just five weeks later, the video has logged over 1.1 billion views. That’s one view for every seven people on the planet. What has made this pop song a global phenomenon? Various critics have chalked it up to a fluke, or to the randomness that belongs to many internet memes. Such non-answers probably wouldn’t fly with Slavoj Žižek, the nose-rubbing, shirt-tugging, Slovenian philosopher who offered his own take on the Gangnam Style Phenomenon. Speaking at the University of Vermont on October 16th, 2012, Žižek attributed Gangnam’s wild popularity to modern forms of spirituality. But I’m sure that that summary is oversimplifying things. If you have 90 minutes to kill (and I do mean kill), you can watch Žižek’s complete UVM talk below. His Gangnam musings come around the 35:10 mark.
For little boys growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Muhammad Ali was more than a world boxing champion. He was a personality of almost unimaginable charisma. At recess and after school, kids would shuffle their feet in imitation of the champ, put up their dukes and joyously chant to one another, “I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see!”
So it’s funny to watch in this video as the flamboyant Ali, at the peak of his fame, pays a surprise visit to kids at an elementary school in New York. The year is 1974. Ali has recently won his re-match with Joe Frazier and is preparing for his much-hyped “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman. He plays a joke on a series of unsuspecting students at P.S. 41, in Greenwich Village, for the TV show Candid Camera. Disguised as a janitor, Ali sneaks into the room just as the kids are explaining what they would say if they ever met Muhammed Ali. When they realize the champ is standing right next to them, their reactions are priceless.
Your presence here indicates that you have an interest in culture. But what, exactly is culture? I’ve long addressed that perhaps too-broad question with a simple working definition: if Melvyn Bragg broadcasts about it, it’s probably culture. You may remember the English writer, presenter, and House of Lords member from our posts on his documentaries on Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, or from the mention of his long-running BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time. But while that show certainly has covered scientific topics — evolutionary psychology, genetic mutation, the neutrino — Bragg and his panels of experts spend even more airtime discussing subjects claimed by the humanities. Some of its most interesting moments happen at the crossover, with scientific angles on the humanistic and vice versa; “Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment” comes to mind, to name but one example. Where conversations like those can arise, I daresay we have culture at its most robust.
But I merely circle around the issue. Bragg’s five-part Radio 4 series The Value of the Culture deals with the question of culture’s nature head-on. Need we call culture anything more specific than the body of things that mankind makes? Does culture work as a force for good? What does culture look like from an anthropological perspective? Must works reach a certain standard, or display certain qualities, to count as culture? What does the gap between the sciences and the humanities mean for culture? How did “mass culture” come about, as opposed to “high culture”? And what does all this say about the culture we have today? Assembling his typically impressive range of luminaries from across the British intellectual landscape, Bragg asks these questions and many more besides, using as a point of departure ninetheenth-century poet, critic, and school inspector Matthew Arnold’s description of culture as “the best which has been thought and said” which provides life its “sweetness and light.” But much has changed in how we regard culture since the nineteenth century, and here we have just the program to get us thinking harder than ever about it.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
