Back in high school, I worked part-time at the Gap, a job that, for all its discomforts — the late-night restocking, the Sisyphean folding and re-folding, those headsets — really only left a bitter memory because of the music. Each month, the store received a new disc of background shopping soundtrack, but only an hour-long soundtrack, to be played on loop over over and over again, and so to be heard by me six or seven times per shift. Needless to say, the start of a new month, and, with this, the arrival of a new mix of bland pop hits, felt like a salvation.
This sort of programmatic musical engineering already had plenty of precedent by that point, as thoroughly documented by Mark Davis, who spent the late 1980s and early 1990s working at K‑Mart’s customer service desk and — perhaps foreseeing both the future ease of sharing audiovisual materials over the internet and the waves of nostalgia for the recent past that ease would enable — pocketed all the shoppping-soundtrack cassette tapes that passed through his hands, building the impressive collection you can see in the video above.
“Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly,” writes Davis. “Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That’s because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse.”
The highly deliberate, near-frictionless mildness; the interspersed spoken-word advertisements and their hypnotically repetitive emphasis on low, low prices; the wobble and hiss of the battered recording media; all of it adds up to a listening experience historically and aesthetically like no other. (If you enjoy this sort of thing and haven’t yet heard of the movement called “vaporwave,” hie thee to Google, look it up, and prepare for astonishment.) You can hear over 90 hours of it at Attention K‑Mart Shoppers, Davis’ digitized repository of his cassettes at the Internet Archive.
If you have any memories of shopping at K‑Mart twenty to thirty years ago, these tapes may bring on a rush of Proustian recollection. But not all of them scored the average shopping day. One, for example, came just for play on March 1st, 1992, K‑Mart’s 30th anniversary. “This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume,” a program which included “oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962.” Finally, a way to feel nostalgia for one era’s nostalgia of another era. How’s that for a 21st-century experience?
Just this week we lost Alan Rickman, one of the most beloved British actors of his generation. And like all the best beloved British actors of any generation, he could, of course, do Shakespeare the way the rest of us can tie our shoes — and not just the lines from the plays, but the sonnets. In the clip above, you can hear Rickman give a reading of the satirical Sonnet 130, which sends up the worshipful excesses of contemporary courtly sonnets with lines like “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, but no such roses see I in her cheeks.”
To properly deliver this material requires a certain sense of irony, and we could rely on Rickman to bring his own formidable yet subtle ironic capacity to the screen.
We always enjoyed seeing him pop up in a movie — no matter how impressive or mediocre the movie in question — because, I would argue, of the distinctive sense of intelligence with which he imbued all his characters, from the ghost boyfriend in Truly, Madly, Deeply to the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to Harry Potter’s Severus Snape to the bad guy in Die Hard. And naturally, he doesn’t leave it at home when assuming the role of the narrator of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, a sample of which you can hear above.
One must strike an even more complicated balance of emotions to do justice to the prose of Marcel Proust, a task to which the actor proves himself equal in his recitation just above. “I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die,” he says, using his inimitable voice for words that now sound more meaningful than ever:
Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.
But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
It’s common to feel like we know our artists, writers, musicians, actors… we want so badly to touch their lives in some way, as their lives touch ours. This overwhelming desire is responsible for a huge market share of our mass media, from the most tasteless tabloid hit jobs to the most respectful longform essays. Since David Bowie’s passing, we’ve seen no shortage of the latter, and thankfully little of the former.
Vulture has collected some of the best of these online tribute articles and obituaries, and one in particular—Judy Berman’s “We Always Knew Who David Bowie Really Was”—has resonated with me. Berman cuts through “all the clichés about how he was a chameleon or a shape-shifter or opaque or unknowable” and shows some of the ways Bowie made himself intimately available in his work.
Bowie’s self-revelation by way of theatrics and costume changes resembles the less intellectual, more emotional, vulnerability of his friend and collaborator Freddie Mercury. Just as musicians around the world celebrate, and mourn, Bowie now, he performed a similar service for Mercury 24 years ago at London’s Wembley Stadium for an audience of 72,000 people, along with the remaining members of Queen and a full roster of superstars. Bowie did four songs in total, but the most poignant was certainly “Under Pressure,” which he’d composed with Mercury 11 years earlier. The song became, of course, a massive hit (twice over, thanks to Vanilla Ice’s appropriation). It’s wrenching lyrics also gave us yet more insight into Bowie’s personality: his fears, his sense, as Berman writes, “of how fleeting and insignificant one human life is in the grand scheme of the universe,” and his defiance in the face of that knowledge.
In the video at the top of the post, you can see Bowie, Annie Lennox, John Deacon, Roger Taylor, and Brian May rehearsing “Under Pressure” for the Mercury tribute, with an audience of just themselves and a few crew people. Bowie has one of his regrettably ubiquitous cigarettes in hand and an enormous grin on his face as he watches Lennox belt out Mercury’s parts. The performance on show day, above, is powerful and pitch perfect, but the loose, informal rehearsal footage is more of a treat for those of us eager for as much of the unguarded Bowie as we can get. For even more stripped-down, behind-the-scenes Bowie, listen to an a cappella version of “Under Pressure” with Mercury, and learn all about how that song came to be.
Or some lavish dish you never had a chance to taste?
What might your choice reveal about your race, regional origins, or economic circumstances?
Artist Julie Green developed a fascination with death row inmates’ final meals while teaching in Oklahoma, where the per capita execution rate exceeds Texas’ and condemned prisoners’ special menu requests are a matter of public record:
Fried fish fillets with red cocktail sauce from Long John Silver’s
Large pepperoni pizza with sausage and extra mushrooms and a large grape soda.
The latter order, from April 29, 2014, was denied on the grounds that it would have exceeded the $15-per-customer max. The prisoner who’d made the request skipped his last meal in protest.
One man got permission for his mother to prepare his last meal in the prison kitchen. Another was surprised with a birthday cake after prison staff learned he had never had one before.
Each meal Green paints is accompanied by a menu, the date, and the state in which it was served, but the prisoners and their crimes go unnamed. She has committed to producing fifty plates a year until capital punishment is abolished.
As the mourning period for David Bowie continues this week, for which I am very much taking part (my favorite Bowie is the Berlin trilogy Bowie in case you’re interested), the Internet continues through its own stages of grief. First brief news stories and anecdotes from fellow artists, then long think-pieces (some very good), then to best-of lists, and now to interesting ephemera.
For an artist who saw both sides of commercial success, Bowie’s television commercial appearances number less than a dozen over his life. Part of that comes from his mastery and control over his image–he knew when to go out, and when to stay in, to get things done, you might say–and part may come from his early history behind the scenes where the commercial sausage gets made.
In 1963, Bowie left school to go work at Nevin D. Hirst Advertising on London’s Bond Street, where he worked as a storyboard artist for about a year, a job he took to please his father. Although he was dismissive of that time doing his 9‑to‑5, it was later clear to friends, band mates, and biographers that he had picked up a lot from advertising–how to package himself, how to manipulate feeling, the power of image and words.
Jump forward to 1967 and a long haired Davy Jones makes one of his earliest appearances in this ice cream ad for Luv “The Pop Ice Cream,” directed by another up-and-comer, Ridley Scott, who had recently made his first short film, “A Boy and a Bicycle.” It’s groovy, but, as Luv’s not around any more, apparently didn’t move enough units.
And then Davy Jones turns into Major Tom and the ‘70s belonged to him. He finally agrees in 1980 to do a commercial, but only in Japan. In this minimal ad for Crystal Jun Rock Sake, Bowie looks beautiful, handsome, and sleek, right at the height of his sophisticated Lodger-era glamour. He plays a piano, gazes at a post-modern Mt. Fuji, and utters one word: “Crystal.” Bowie wrote the music, an outtake from the Lodger sessions, and it was released as a single in Japan, and a b‑side in the West. Bowie commented that “the money is a useful thing” for doing ads like this, out of sight from the West.
The next time Bowie appears is in 1983, calling out for Americans to demand their MTV in a series of rotoscoped and colorized ads near the dawn of the network. (This is a badly edited compilation of Bowie’s spots).
If Bowie had yet to “sell out” it was only four years later, during the Glass Spider Tour, that he did, with this re-worded, re-recorded version of “Modern Love,” duetting with Tina Turner. At the time it felt like the end of a career that had turned Bowie into an overly coiffed parody of himself. In retrospect, if you can look past the soda, it’s a cute commercial, with the star looking a bit like “Blinded by Science”-era Thomas Dolby.
In 2004, he appears again, shilling Vittel water. Here Bowie’s in full career retrospective mode, making peace with his chameleon self and appreciating it all. Set to the Reality track “Never Get Old” (our dear wish that was not to be), it features Bowie tribute performer David Brighton trying on every outfit from the Starman’s crowded wardrobe in a house filled with incarnations.
That leaves us with his final television ad appearance in 2013, seen at the top of this post, still looking fit, and performing a baroque version of The Next Day track “I’d Rather Be High” for a Venetian ball-set ad for Louis Vuitton. Fitting to go out surrounded by beauty and glamor, but check those lyrics:
I stumble to the graveyard and I
Lay down by my parents, whisper
Just remember duckies
Everybody gets got
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Last year we told you about the importance of messy desks and walking to creativity. This year, the time has come to realize how much creativity also depends on boredom. In a sense, of course, humankind has utterly vanquished boredom, what with our modern technologies — computers, high-speed internet, smartphones — that make possible sources of rich and frequent stimulation such as, well, this very site. But what if we need a little boredom? What if boredom, that state we 21st-century first-worlders worry about avoiding more than any other, actually helps us create?
Even if we feel no boredom in our free time, surely we still endure the occasional bout of it at work. “Admitting that boredom to coworkers or managers is likely something few of us have ever done,” writes the Harvard Business Review’s David Burkus. “It turns out, however, that a certain level of boredom might actually enhance the creative quality of our work.”
He cites a well-known scientific experiment which found that volunteers did better at a creative task (like finding different uses for a pair of plastic cups) when first subjected to a boring one (like copying numbers out of the phone book) which “heightens the ‘daydreaming effect’ on creativity — the more passive the boredom, the more likely the daydreaming and the more creative you could be afterward.”
Burkus also refers to another paper documenting the performance of different subjects on word-association tests after watching different video clips, one of them deliberately boring. Who came up with the most creative associations? You guessed it: those who watched the boring video first. Boredom, the experimenters suggest, “motivates people to approach new and rewarding activities. In other words, an idle mind will seek a toy. (Anyone who has taken a long car ride with a young child has surely experienced some version of this phenomenon.)”
Writing about those same experiments, Fast Company’s Vivian Giang quotes researcher Andreas Elpidorou of the University of Louisville as claiming that “boredom helps to restore the perception that one’s activities are meaningful or significant.” He describes it as a “regulatory state that keeps one in line with one’s projects. In the absence of boredom, one would remain trapped in unfulfilling situations, and miss out on many emotionally, cognitively, and socially rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”
“Boredom is a fascinating emotion because it is seen as so negative yet it is such a motivating force,” says Dr. Sandi Mann of the University of Central Lancashire, one of the masterminds of the experiments with the phone book and the plastic cups, quoted by Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton. “Being bored is not the bad thing everyone makes it out to be. It is good to be bored sometimes! I think up so many ideas when I am commuting to and from work – this would be dead time, but thanks to the boredom it induces, I come up with all sorts of projects.” (This also manifests in her parenting: “I am quite happy when my kids whine that they are bored,” she said: “Finding ways to amuse themselves is an important skill.”)
“Nearly the Weekend,” by David Feltkamp. Creative Commons image
How to make use of all this? “Taken together,” Burkus writes, “these studies suggest that the boredom so commonly felt at work could actually be leveraged to help us get our work done better,” perhaps by “spending some focused time on humdrum activities such as answering emails, making copies, or entering data,” after which “we may be better able to think up more (and more creative) possibilities to explore.” In the words of Dr. Mann herself, “Boredom at work has always been seen as something to be eliminated, but perhaps we should be embracing it in order to enhance our creativity.” And so to an even more interesting question: “Do people who are bored at work become more creative in other areas of their work – or do they go home and write novels?”
David Foster Wallace took on the relationship between boredom and creativity in an ambitious way when he started writing The Pale King, his unfinished novel (which he privately called “the Long Thing”) set in an Internal Revenue Service branch office in mid-1980s Peoria. The papers related to the project he left behind included a note about the book’s larger theme:
It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
This, as well as the more everyday suggestions about working more creatively by doing the boring bits first, would seem to share a basis with the ancient tradition of meditation. If indeed humanity has gone too far in its mission to alleviate the discomfort of boredom, it has produced the even more pernicious condition in which we all feel constantly and unthinkingly desperate for new distractions (which Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew B. Crawford memorably called “obesity of the mind”) while knowing full well that those distractions keep us from our important work, be it designing a scientific experiment, coming up with a sales strategy, or writing a novel.
Maybe we can undo some of the damage by deliberately, regularly shutting off our personal flow of interesting sensory input for a while, whether through meditation, data entry, phone-book copying, of whichever method feels right to you. (WNYC’s Manoush Zomorodi even launched a project last year called “Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out,” which challenged listeners to minimize their phone-checking and put the time gained to more creative use.) But we all need some high-quality stimulation sooner or later, so when you feel ready for another dose of it, you know where to find us.
It’s sometimes called “Einstein’s Riddle” because, according to legend, Einstein invented it as a child. Others say that the puzzle was actually designed by Lewis Carroll, best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Carroll was also a logician.) Where did this brain teaser originate? We’re not really sure. Perhaps it was a 1962 issue of Life International magazine.
In any event, “Einstein’s Riddle” is a good test of your mental agility. They say that only 2% of the population can solve the problem. The TED-Ed video above will walk you through one version of the riddle. If you don’t want any assistance, you can find other versions online.
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!
Americans like to pride ourselves on the numerous ways our pop culture penetrated the Soviet Union and seduced its youngsters, sending them to bed with dreams of Mickey Mouse, Billie Holiday, Elvis, and Star Wars. Whether it’s jazz in the early decades after the revolution, or rock and roll in the 50s and after, Soviet youth so craved the ways of the West, it seems, that they famously bootlegged American music on used X‑rays, with results of widely varying degrees of quality. That’s all well and good, but we rarely ask what Soviet cultural exports we were missing while we trumpeted our superiority. (I mean, besides Ayn Rand or the comedy of Yakov Smirnoff.)
A few of those exports have become high watermarks of creative innovation and aesthetic beauty, such as the filmmaking of Dziga Vertov and Andrei Tarkovsky. At least one Soviet export, the Theremin, radicalized music with its haunting electronic whine. Much less well-known, however, are the fascinating developments in animation and illustration (such as these outer space utopias). Now—thanks to the New York Public Library’s hugely expansive, free digital image archive—we can view and download 650 examples of Soviet book cover design between the years 1917 and 1942 (most date from the 30s). Many of these covers are as unremarkably vanilla as some of their American counterparts, but no small number offer unique looks into avant-garde Soviet design trends.
Additionally, the archive gives us a broad overview of the kinds of books that were published in the Soviet Union during these pre-Cold War years. It’s unlikely many of these titles saw translation into English and unlikely many of them ever will. In some cases, the author and title of the book represented have been lost to history (as with the colorful cover second from the top). Each of the images here links to a page on the NYPL’s online database, where you can see publication info and download high-resolution scans. Browse, and download, hundreds more pre-War Soviet book cover designs at the NYPL’s “Scrapbook of Russian Bookjackets, 1917–1942,” or see a few more choice selections at The Paris Review, who drew our attention to this wonderful online collection.
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.
