One of the hardest things to master as an independent musician is the art of promotion. Though many artists are extroverts and attention-seekers, many more are by nature introverted, or at least inner-directed, and disinclined to embrace the tools of the marketing trade. In days of yore, when such things as major record labels still roamed the earth at large, much of the promotion could be left up to those majestic, lumbering beasts. These days, when the majority of working musicians have to keep their day jobs and learn to do their own production, styling, booking, and PR, it’s essential to get over any squeamishness about blowing your own horn. If you’re looking for pointers, consider the example of self-invented musical genius Sun Ra, a master of self-promotion.
No one better understood what Sun Ra was up to than Sun Ra himself, and he knew how to sell his very out-there free jazz movement to a public used to more mundane presentations. As Mike Walsh at Mission Creep succinctly puts it, “nothing about Sun Ra’s six-decade musical career could be called normal.” He more or less re-invented what it meant to be a jazz musician and bandleader. It was in the 1950s that he really came into his own. After working steadily as a touring sideman for several other musicians, the man born Herman Blount changed his name first to Le Sony’r Ra, then Sun Ra, and put together his famous “Arkestra.”
His shows began to incorporate the elaborate costuming he became known for, and he would often stop the music “to lecture on his favorite subjects,” writes Jez Nelson at The Guardian, “Egyptology and space. He began to claim he had been abducted by aliens and was in fact from Saturn.” The act was both deadly serious space opera (he rehearsed his band for 12 hours at a stretch, after all) and absurdist schtick, and it both transported audiences to new worlds and made them laugh out loud.
Sun Ra’s business cards from the 50s capture this tonal spectrum between avant-garde performance art and high-concept free jazz comedy. Advertising new releases, a band-for-hire, and ongoing local Chicago residencies, they combine the strict professionalism of a working bandleader with the wordplay and silliness Ra loved: he calls his coterie “Atonites,” which psychology professor Robert L. Campbell reads as meaning both “worshippers of Aton,” Egyptian sun god, and “performers of atonal music.” Audiences are invited to “Dance the Outer Space Way. Hear songs sung the Outer Space Way by Clyde ‘Out of Space’ Williams” (onetime singer with the band). And the card at the top of the post makes perhaps the simplest, most compelling pitch of them all: “Why buy old sounds?” Indeed.
Journalist, essayist, and novelist Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, has the distinction of writing not just one, but two of the most well-known cautionary novels about totalitarian governments: 1984 and Animal Farm. You’ve likely read at least one of them, perhaps both, and you’ve likely seen either or both of the film adaptations based on these books. Were this the totality of Orwell’s legacy, it would surely be secure for many decades to come—and perhaps many hundreds of years. Who knows how our descendants will remember us; but whether they manage to fully transcend authoritarianism or still wrestle with it many generations later, the name of Orwell may forever be associated with its threatening rise.
And yet, had Orwell never written a word of fictional prose, we would probably still invoke his name as an important journalistic witness to the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts over fascism. He directly participated in the Spanish Civil War, fighting with the Marxist resistance group POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). The horrific takeover of Spain by Francisco Franco, with help from Hitler’s Luftwaffe, paralleled the Nazi’s gradual takeover of Western Europe, and the experience changed not only Orwell’s outlook, but that of Europeans generally. As he wrote in his personal account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, “People then had something we haven’t got now. They didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of….”
Orwell’s tour of duty in Spain ended in 1937 when he was shot in the throat; later he and his wife Eileen were charged with “rabid Trotskyism” by pro-Soviet Spanish communists. The Orwells retired to Morocco to recuperate. There, Orwell began keeping a diary, which he maintained until 1942, chronicling his impressions and experiences throughout the war years as he and Eileen made their way out of Morocco and back to England. You can follow their journeys in a Google Maps project here. And you can read all of Orwell’s diary entries at the website of The Orwell Prize, “Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing.” The Prize site began blogging Orwell’s entries in 2008—70 years to the day after the first entry—and continued in “real time” thereafter until 2012.
The first entries reveal little, showing us “a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork,” and other domestic concerns. Then, from about September, 1938 on, we see “the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.” These diaries—posted with explanatory footnotes—preserve a keen eyewitness to history, one who had been tested in war and seen firsthand the danger fascism posed. Orwell’s experiences gave him material for the novels for which we best remember him. And his personal and journalistic accounts give us a gripping firsthand portrait of life under the threat of Nazi victory.
From Sir Thomas More’s 1516 philosophical novel Utopia to Disney’s 2016 adult-friendly kids’ movie Zootopia, the genre of the “-topia” has been remarkably durable. Taking Plato’s Republic as their model, the first utopian fictions flourished in an optimistic age, when political philosophy imagined a perfect union between government and science. Such fiction portrayed mostly harmonious, high-functioning civilizations as contrasts to real, imperfect societies—and yet, as modern industry began to threaten human well-being and formerly idealized forms of government acquired a tyrannical hue, the genre began to project into the future not hopes of freedom, ease, and plenty but rather fears of mass suffering, imprisonment, and misrule. In place of utopias, modernity gave us dystopias, terrifying fictions of a hellish future birthed by war, totalitarian rule, gross economic inequality, and misapplied technologies.
Before John Stuart Mill coined the word “dystopia” in 1868, pessimistic post-Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham created an earlier, perhaps even scarier, word, “cacotopia,” the “imagined seat of the worst government.” This was the term favored by Anthony Burgess, author of one of the most unsettling dystopian novels of the last century, A Clockwork Orange. Depicting a chaotic future England filled with extreme criminal violence and an unnerving government solution, the novel can be read as either, writes Ted Gioia, “a look into the morality of an individual, or as an inquiry into the morality of the State.” It seems to me that this dual focus marks a central feature of much successful dystopian fiction: despite its thoroughly grim and pessimistic nature, the best representatives of the genre present us with human characters who have some agency, however limited, and who can choose to revolt from the oppressive conditions (and usually fail in the attempt) or to fully acquiesce and remain complicit.
The rebellion of a single non-conformist generally forms the basis of conflict in dystopian fiction, as we’ve seen in recent, populist iterations like The Hunger Games series and their more derivative counterparts. And yet, in most classic dystopian novels, the hero remains an anti-hero—or an un-hero, rather: unexceptional, unimportant, and generally unnoticed until he or she decides to cross a line. A few of Burgess’s own favorites of the genre roughly follow this classic formula, including Orwell’s 1984. In the short list below, Burgess comments on five works of dystopian fiction he held in particularly high regard. Two of them, Aldous Huxley’s Island and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, break the mold, and show us two opposite extremes of civilizations perfected, and completely annihilated, by Western progress. Burgess’s first choice, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead seems not to fit at all, being an account of past atrocities rather than a speculative look into the future.
Nevertheless, Burgess seems willing to stretch the boundaries of what we typically think of as dystopian fiction in order to include books that offer, as Mailer’s novel has it, “a preview of the future.” See Burgess’s picks below, and read excerpts from his commentary on these five novels. You can read his full descriptions at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation website.
The futility of war is well presented. The island to be captured has no strategic importance. The spirit of revolt among the men is stirred by an accident: the patrol stumbles into a hornets’ nest and runs away, dropping weapons and equipment, the naked leaving the dead behind them. An impulse can contain seeds of human choice: we have not yet been turned entirely into machines. Mailer’s pessimism was to come later — in The Deer Park and Barbary Shore and An American Dream — but here, with men granting themselves the power to opt out of the collective suicide of war, there is a heartening vision of hope. This is an astonishingly mature book for a twenty-five-year-old novelist. It remains Mailer’s best, and certainly the best war novel to emerge from the United States.
This is one of the few dystopian or cacotopian visions which have changed our habits of thought. It is possible to say that the ghastly future Orwell foretold has not come about simply because he foretold it: we were warned in time. On the other hand, it is possible to think of this novel as less a prophecy than the comic joining together of two disparate things — an image of England as it was in the immediate post-war era, a land of gloom and shortages, and the bizarrely impossible notion of British intellectuals taking over the government of the country (and, for that matter, the whole of the English-speaking world).
Jael 97 is facially overprivileged: her beauty must be reduced to a drab norm. But, like the heroes and heroines of all cacotopian novels, she is an eccentric. Seeing for the first time the west tower of Ely Cathedral, one of the few lofty structures left unflattened by the war, she experiences a transport of ecstasy and wishes to cherish her beauty. Her revolt against the regime results in no brutal reimposition of conformity — only in the persuasions of sweet reason. This is no Orwellian future. It is a world incapable of the dynamic of tyranny. Even the weather is always cool and grey, with no room for either fire or ice. The state motto is ‘Every valley shall be exalted.’ This is a brilliant projection of tendencies already apparent in the post-war British welfare state but, because the book lacks the expected horrors of cacotopian fiction, it has met less appreciation than Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Nobody is scientifically conditioned to be happy: this new world is really brave. It has learned a great deal from Eastern religion and philosophy, but it is prepared to take the best of Western science, technology and art. The people themselves are a sort of ideal Eurasian race, equipped with fine bodies and Huxleyan brains, and they have read all the books that Huxley has read.
All this sounds like an intellectual game, a hopeless dream in a foundering world, but Huxley was always enough of a realist to know that there is a place for optimism. Indeed, no teacher can be a pessimist, and Huxley was essentially a teacher. In Island the good life is eventually destroyed by a brutal, stupid, materialistic young raja who wants to exploit the island’s mineral resources.
England… after nuclear war, is trying to organize tribal culture after the total destruction of a centralized industrial civilization. The past has been forgotten, and even the art of making fire has to be relearned. The novel is remarkable not only for its language but for its creation of a whole set of rituals, myths and poems. Hoban has built a whole world from scratch.
Burgess’s list gives us such a small sampling of dystopian fiction, and with so many classic and contemporary examples about, it’s tempting to add to his list (one wonders why he chooses Huxley’s Island and not Brave New World). There’s no reason why we can’t. If you’re so inclined, tell us your favorite dystopian novels, or films, in the comments, with a brief description of their merits.
This week, we’re launching the beginning of a new, ongoing series. We’re creating guides that will teach you how to learn important subjects on your own, using free resources available on the web. Want an example? Just look below. Here you’ll find a list of free resources–online courses, instructional videos, YouTube channels, textbooks, etc.–that will teach how to code for free. If we’re missing great items, please add your suggestions in the comments below.
This collection is just a start, and it will continue to grow over time. In the meantime, if there are other guides you’d like to see us develop in the coming weeks, please let us know in the comments section too. We’re happy to get your feedback.
How to Code (Software)
Codecademy: A free site for learning everything from Making a Website to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tutorials to design projects of their own choosing. The site also makes it easy to track your progress. Other topics you can learn include: Create an Interactive Website, Ruby, Javascript, HTML & CSS, SQL and more. Register and sign up for all classes here. (See our post on Codecademy here.)
Code School: Code School courses are built around a creative theme and storyline so that it feels like you’re playing a game, not sitting in a classroom. The site offers a set of free courses covering JavaScript, jQuery, Python, Ruby and more.
Free Code Camp: An open source community that helps you learn to code. You can work through self-paced coding challenges, build projects, and earn certifications. According to Wired, the site “features a sequence of online tutorials to help the absolute beginner learn become a web developer, starting with building a simple webpage. Students move on to programming with JavaScript and, eventually, learning to build complete web applications using modern frameworks such as Angular and Node.”
The Odin Project: Made by the creators of Viking Code School, an online coding bootcamp, the Odin Project offers free coding lessons in web development. Topics include: HTML, CSS, JavaScript & jQuery, Ruby programming, Ruby on Rails. Find an introduction to the curriculum here.
Google’s Python Class: A free class (used within Google itself) for people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python. The class includes written materials, lecture videos, and lots of code exercises to practice Python coding.
Google’s C++ Course: Welcome to Google’s C++ Class. This class includes written materials, lecture videos, examples, and exercises to practice C++ coding.
Online Computer/Coding Courses from Major Universities:
You can find dozens of free courses, covering all facets of coding, listed in our collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses. The courses come from top universities.
Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science: Get free access to Harvard’s popular introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Combines courses typically known elsewhere as “CS1” and “CS2.”
YouTube Channels for Learning Coding: Channels you might want to visit include:
Coder’s Guide: Features videos on HTML web development, cross-platform Java programming, beginner .net programming with Visual Basic and client side JavaScript web development.
Code Course: Learn to code and build things with easy to follow tutorials. A number of videos focus on PHP. Find more materials on the channel’s web site.
LearnCode.academy: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CSS Layouts, Responsive Design etc.
The New Boston: Programming, web design, networking, video game development, graphic design, etc.
The Google Developers Channel: Offers lessons, talks, the latest news & best practices in subjects like Android, Chrome, Web Development, Polymer, Performance, iOS & more.
Free Programming Textbooks from Github: Access 500+ “free programming books that cover more than 80 different programming languages on the popular web-based Git repository hosting service.”
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!
I get into a lot of conversations these days about how we used to consider technological progress good by definition, but now — despite or maybe because of the farther-progressed-than-ever state of our technology — we feel a bit wary about it all. We line up for the latest smartphone, but as we do we reflect upon how it increasingly looks we’ll never line up for the jetpacks, flying cars, and moon colonies we dreamed of in childhood. We enjoy our phones, but we resent them as well, remembering those long-ago assurances that technology would increase our leisure, not fill it with anxiety about insufficiently rapid responses, nagging leftover work, and missed-out-on information of every kind. When did the trust between our tech and ourselves break down?
Not so recently, it turns out — or rather, not just recently. The human-technology relationship goes through its good times and its bad patches, and at any given time some of us like the direction its progress looks to be moving in more than others do. You may have heard of one particularly well-known technological critic of the early twentieth century, a cartoonist by the name of Rube Goldberg. More likely, you’ve heard of the preposterously elaborate machines he drew in his cartoons.
One representative example, an “automatic suicide device for unlucky stock speculators,” involves the ring of a phone (“probably a message from your broker saying you are wiped out”) which wakes up a dozing office manager whose stretching hits a lever which launches a toy glider which hits a dwarf whose jumping up and down in pain works a jack which lifts up a pig to the level of a potato, and when he eats the potato… well, in any case, the process ends up, some time later, pulling the trigger of a gun mounted right over the tickertape machine. “If the telephone call is not from your broker,” Goldberg notes, you’ll never find out the mistake because you’ll be dead anyway.
“The surrealism of Goldberg’s cartoon inventions,” writes Brendan O’Connor at The Verge, while meant to entertain, “also reveals a dark skepticism of the era in which they were made. The machines were symbols, Goldberg wrote, of ‘man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.’ ” They had a strong appeal in that “era of increasing automation, and increasing concern about automation, exemplified in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times. One of the film’s dystopian curiosities, the Billows Feeding Machine, invented by Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, has a distinctly Rube Goldbergian quality to it — this is likely no coincidence, as Goldberg and Chaplin were friends.”
In the clip at the top, we see the Billows Feeding Machine in action, not quite fulfilling its promise to “eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead.” The disappointed higher-ups render their verdict: “It’s no good — it isn’t practical.” A modern-day J. Widdecombe Billows would know better how to respond to them: it’s still in beta.
To me the question was not, “Would I cook this as a native would?” but rather, “How would a native cook this if he had my ingredients, my kitchen, my background?” It’s obviously a different dish. But as Jacques Pépin once said to me, you never cook a recipe the same way twice, even if you try. I never maintained that my way of cooking was the “best” way to cook, only that it’s a practical way to cook. (I’m lazy, I’m rushed, and I’m not all that skillful, and many people share those qualities.)
If you’ve made it to adulthood without learning how to cook, or for that matter, how to eat for the good of your body and the planet, Bittman is your man.
With the exception of his baroque, James Beard-inspired scrambled eggs, his recipes are swift and simple, and his well documented flexibility makes him a good fit for any number of palates and dietary restrictions.
Having introduced the world to the idea of eating “vegan before six,” he ditched his cushy New York Times columnist gig to start a plant-based meal kit service in San Francisco. The Purple Carrot’s stated goal is not to get people to give up meat, but rather to up their intake of home cooked dishes that are good for their health as well as the environment.
Ergo, he’s likely not too chagrinned that this collection of Bittman’s “most-loved recipes,” in a career spanning more than 1500 bylines at the New York Times, includes such ingredients as chorizo, mayonnaise, chicken, and eggs.
Below you can find a selection (a baker’s dozen) of favorite Bittman recipes for chefs at all levels, including absolute beginners, to try. (The complete list is here.) Their ingredients are fairly straightforward, though Holly Golightly types who store books in the oven, may have to upgrade the kitchen with some ramekins and a pastry cutter.
Classic Scones [top]: Those without a food processor can do as my grandma, an excellent, unfussy farm cook did, and cut the butter into the dough with two forks.
Vegetable Soup: This one presumes a microwave. You can do it the old fashioned way by adding some water or boxed vegetable stock to a stovetop pot. See? Cooking is easy!
Sautéed Shrimp With Capers and Olives: Unless your veganism is shaping up to be a 24/7 commitment, you’re gonna have to learn how to devein shrimp sometime, pal.
Grilled Corn: You don’t even have to have a working kitchen! Just a hibachi and a bowl!
Mexican Chocolate Tofu Pudding: If one might frame a vegan dessert in terms of killing birds, this is the stone that will polish off your fear of tofu, ramekins…and vegan desserts!
Champagne Cocktail: Congratulations! You’re a chef! Toast your accomplishments.
Find all of Bittman’s New York Times recipes here. And even more on his website.
What with the lavish attention he and his collaborators pay to art, design, costuming, framing, composition, and editing — and especially considering the pains he and his collaborators take to reference and adapt pieces of the art of cinema that came before them — who does it surprise that Wes Anderson become such a fruitful subject for video essayists? His films, from the humble feature debut Bottle Rocket and sophomore breakout Rushmore to more recent extensions of his project like Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, can seem made especially for cinephiles handy with Final Cut to take apart, and put back together again.
Zhou also includes three in-depth blog posts by film scholar David Bordwell on Anderson’s shot-consciousness, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Moonrise Kingdom. “Now, never ask me about Wes Anderson again,” having already re-emphasized that he does not, in any case, take video essay requests. But if you’d like to continue seeing him make video essays on whichever subjects he does choose going forward, have a look at Every Frame a Painting’s Patreon page to find out how you can support his always-stimulating examinations of never-Anderson auteurs.
(And if you still can’t do without more Anderson, spend some time with the related content below.)
Spend five minutes recording yourself recapping everything you know about Japanese history.
(International Studies majors and Japanese citizens, please sit this one out.)
Most of us will wind up with a pastiche that’s heavy on pop culture and relatively recent events. The average Japanese schoolchild should have no difficulty identifying the glaring holes and factual errors in our narratives.
If this idea amuses you, you’ll likely enjoy American History, above, South Park creator Trey Parker’s early animated short, a 1993 Student Academy Award silver medalist.
He also remembers the Alamo, proving one Reddit wag’s hypothesis: If there’s one thing people remember about the Alamo, it is to remember the Alamo…
And then….
Parker and another classmate, Chris Graves, his soon-to-be DP on Cannibal: The Musical, animated the results using the most rudimentary of paper cut outs. It’s easy to spot the fledgling South Park style, as well as Python animator Terry Gilliam’s influence. This may be American history, but the anonymous top hatted hordes bear an awfully close resemblance to South Park’s resident Canadians, Terrance and Phillip.
If the phonetic spellings of non-native speaker Nishimura’s pronunciation makes you uncomfortable, it’s worth noting that he not only worked as an animator on South Park, but also represented his country by playing “President” Hirohito on the extremely funny (and NSFW) “Chinpokomon” episode.
American History will be added to the Animation section of our 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.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3629700/76_suicide_copy.0.png){kind=link}