Wynton Marsalis Takes Louis Armstrong’s Trumpet Out of the Museum & Plays It Again


Louis Arm­strong’s beloved trum­pet sits in the Smith­son­ian–a rel­ic of a grand tra­di­tion of Amer­i­can music. When it first became a muse­um piece, the brass-and-gold instru­ment, made in Paris after World War II, was­n’t in work­ing con­di­tion. Dwan­da­lyn Reece, the cul­ture cura­tor at The Smith­son­ian, notes:  “It wasn’t playable when it got here… There was a lac­quer coat­ing on it to help pre­vent tar­nish. We looked to see if there were any spots where the lac­quer impact­ed the valves. There were areas where the valves were a lit­tle sticky so we want­ed to make sure they would flow freely.” Once restored, they put the instru­ment in the right hands. Above, watch Wyn­ton Marsalis, the nine-time Gram­my win­ner, play­ing Satch­mo’s Selmer trum­pet last fall.

Marsalis lat­er com­ment­ed, “It sound­ed bet­ter than I thought it would sound.” Appar­ent­ly, it’s the first time an his­toric instru­ment from the Smith­so­ni­an’s col­lec­tion has been put back into real ser­vice.

via The Smith­son­ian/@TedGioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

1,000 Hours of Ear­ly Jazz Record­ings Now Online: Archive Fea­tures Louis Arm­strong, Duke Elling­ton & Much More

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong Per­form­ing Live in Con­cert (Copen­hagen, 1933)

Louis Arm­strong Plays Trum­pet at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids; Dizzy Gille­spie Charms a Snake in Pak­istan

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Daily Meditation Boosts & Revitalizes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Harvard Study Finds

I don’t mean to sound dra­mat­ic, but med­i­ta­tion may have saved my life. Dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing time of over­work, under­pay, and seri­ous fam­i­ly dis­tress, I found myself at dan­ger­ous, near-stroke lev­els of high cho­les­terol and blood pres­sure, and the begin­nings of near-crip­pling ear­ly-onset arthri­tis. My doc­tors were alarmed. Some­thing had to change. Unable to make stress­ful out­er cir­cum­stances dis­ap­pear, I had to find con­struc­tive ways to man­age my respons­es to them instead. Yoga and med­i­ta­tion made the dif­fer­ence.

I’m hard­ly alone in this jour­ney. The lead­ing cause of death in the U.S. is heart dis­ease, fol­lowed close­ly by stroke, dia­betes, and depres­sion lead­ing to suicide—all con­di­tions exac­er­bat­ed by high lev­els of stress and anx­i­ety. In my own case, a changed diet and dai­ly exer­cise played a cru­cial role in my phys­i­cal recov­ery, but those dis­ci­plines would not even have been pos­si­ble to adopt were it not for the calm­ing, cen­ter­ing effects of a dai­ly med­i­ta­tion prac­tice.

Anec­dotes, how­ev­er, are not evi­dence. We are bom­bard­ed with claims about the mir­a­cle mag­ic of “mind­ful­ness,” a word that comes from Bud­dhism and describes a kind of med­i­ta­tion that focus­es on the breath and body sen­sa­tions as anchors for present-moment aware­ness. Some form of “mind­ful­ness based stress reduc­tion” has entered near­ly every kind of ther­a­py, reha­bil­i­ta­tion, cor­po­rate train­ing, and pain man­age­ment, and the word has been a mar­ket­ing totem for at least a sol­id decade now. No one ever needs to men­tion the B‑word in all this med­i­ta­tion talk. As one med­i­ta­tion teacher tells his begin­ner stu­dents, “Bud­dhism can­not exist with­out mind­ful­ness, but mind­ful­ness can exist per­fect­ly well with­out Bud­dhism.”

So, no need to believe in rein­car­na­tion, renun­ci­a­tion, or high­er states of con­scious­ness, fine. But does med­i­ta­tion real­ly change your brain? Yes. Aca­d­e­m­ic researchers have con­duct­ed dozens of stud­ies on how the prac­tice works, and have near­ly all con­clud­ed that it does. “There’s more than an arti­cle a day on the sub­ject in peer-reviewed jour­nals,” says Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to psy­chi­a­trist Steven Selchen, “The research is vast now.” One research team at Har­vard, led by Har­vard Med­ical School psy­chol­o­gy instruc­tor Sara Lazar, pub­lished a study in 2011 that shows how mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion results in phys­i­cal changes to the brain.

The paper details the results of MRI scans from 16 sub­jects “before and after they took part in the eight-week Mind­ful­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) Pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Cen­ter for Mind­ful­ness,” reports the Har­vard Gazette. Each of the par­tic­i­pants spent “an aver­age of 27 min­utes each day prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness exer­cis­es.” After the pro­gram, they report­ed sig­nif­i­cant stress reduc­tion on a ques­tion­naire, and analy­sis of their MRIs “found increased gray-mat­ter den­si­ty in the hip­pocam­pus, known to be impor­tant for learn­ing and mem­o­ry, and in struc­tures asso­ci­at­ed with self-aware­ness, com­pas­sion, and intro­spec­tion.”

The Har­vard Busi­ness Review points to a anoth­er sur­vey study in which sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia and the Chem­nitz Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy “were able to pool data from more than 20 stud­ies to deter­mine which areas of the brain are con­sis­tent­ly affect­ed. They iden­ti­fied at least eight dif­fer­ent regions.” High­light­ing two areas “of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als,” the HBR describes changes to the ante­ri­or cin­gu­late cor­tex (ACC), an area of the frontal lobe asso­ci­at­ed with self-reg­u­la­tion, learn­ing, and deci­sion-mak­ing. The ACC “may be par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant in the face of uncer­tain and fast-chang­ing con­di­tions.” Like Lazar’s Har­vard study, the researchers also iden­ti­fied “increased amounts of gray mat­ter” in the hip­pocam­pus, an area high­ly sub­ject to dam­age from chron­ic stress.

These stud­ies and many oth­ers bring mind­ful­ness togeth­er with anoth­er cur­rent psy­cho­log­i­cal buzz­word that has proven to be true: neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty, the idea that we can change our brains for the better—that we are not “hard­wired” to repeat pat­terns of behav­ior despite our best efforts. In the TEDx Cam­bridge talk at the top of the post, Lazar explains her results, and con­nects them with her own expe­ri­ences with med­i­ta­tion. She is, you’ll see right away, a skep­tic, not inclined to accept med­ical claims prof­fered by yoga and med­i­ta­tion teach­ers. But she found that those prac­tices worked in her own life, and also had “sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed ben­e­fits” in reduc­ing stress, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, and phys­i­cal pain. In oth­er words, they work.

None of the research inval­i­dates the Bud­dhist and Hin­du tra­di­tions from which yoga and med­i­ta­tion come, but it does show that one needn’t adopt any par­tic­u­lar belief sys­tem in order to reap the health ben­e­fits of the prac­tices. For some sec­u­lar intro­duc­tions to med­i­ta­tion, you may wish to try UCLA’s free guid­ed med­i­ta­tion ses­sions or check out the Med­i­ta­tion 101 ani­mat­ed beginner’s guide above. If you’re not too put off by the occa­sion­al Bud­dhist ref­er­ence, I would also high­ly rec­om­mend the Insight Med­i­ta­tion Center’s free six-part intro­duc­tion to mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion. Chron­ic stress is lit­er­al­ly killing us. We have it in our pow­er to change the way we respond to cir­cum­stances, change the phys­i­cal struc­ture of our brains, and become hap­pi­er and health­i­er as a result.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Stephen King’s The Shining Is Now an Opera, and The Tickets Are All Sold Out

As a sto­ry, The Shin­ing cer­tain­ly pass­es the test of adapt­abil­i­ty: we’ve fea­tured not just the anno­tat­ed copy of Stephen King’s orig­i­nal nov­el that Stan­ley Kubrick used to make his well-known film adap­ta­tion, but its Simp­sons par­o­dy, its reimag­ined feel-good Hol­ly­wood trail­er, its remake in minia­ture as a long-form Aesop Rock music video, and even a board game based on the book. Now The Shin­ing has tak­en its lat­est form live on stage as a pro­duc­tion of the Min­neso­ta Opera, whose dig­i­tal pro­gram you can read above.

“I can’t recall an opera in which the vil­lain is a build­ing,” writes Ron Hub­bard in a review for the St. Paul Pio­neer Press, “but that’s the case with The Shin­ing, an adap­ta­tion of Stephen King’s nov­el about a haunt­ed hotel and a fam­i­ly that win­ters with­in it. While ghosts play a promi­nent role in many operas, the spir­its occu­py­ing the remote Rocky Moun­tain hotel in The Shin­ing are ser­vants to one pow­er­ful, malev­o­lent mas­ter: the build­ing itself.” Hub­bard high­lights the elab­o­rate design that recre­ates the for­bid­ding Over­look Hotel with a “state­ly set,” “swirling, spooky pro­jec­tions,” and build­ing ele­ments that “roll in and out behind screens swirling with pat­terns, cre­at­ing an unset­tling, kalei­do­scop­ic effect.”

As every opera enthu­si­ast soon finds out, no pro­duc­tion can sur­vive by design alone. But The Shin­ing, accord­ing to Hub­bard, earns full marks in oth­er areas as well, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to its “score full of dis­com­fit­ing themes that clash and col­lide to strong­ly sung and dis­arm­ing­ly believ­able por­tray­als of char­ac­ters alive and oth­er­wise.” He also empha­sizes that the source mate­r­i­al comes not from Kubrick­’s film, but King’s nov­el: “Stan­ley Kubrick took great lib­er­ties with the sto­ry, going so far as to change how the con­flict plays out and resolves. I actu­al­ly found this oper­at­ic ver­sion con­sid­er­ably creepi­er, in large part because we get to know the ghosts bet­ter.”

The nov­el and the movie are vast­ly dif­fer­ent,” says libret­tist Mark Camp­bell in the video above, though they and they opera all tell “the sto­ry of Jack Tor­rance, who, because of eco­nom­ic rea­sons, accepts a job as the win­ter care­tak­er for a hotel in remote west­ern Col­orado.” And before long, as we know whether we’ve read the book or seen the movie, Jack “sub­mits to a num­ber of his demons” before the eyes of his ter­ri­fied and increas­ing­ly endan­gered fam­i­ly. But it remains, Camp­bell says, “the sto­ry of a man who wants to do good — he just did­n’t choose the right job, and end­ed up in a sit­u­a­tion that did every­thing it could to tear him apart.”

The Shin­ing the opera comes com­mis­sioned by Min­neso­ta Oper­a’s New Works Ini­tia­tive, “designed to invig­o­rate the oper­at­ic art form with an infu­sion of con­tem­po­rary works.” Giv­en its com­plete­ly sold-out suc­cess in St. Paul, where it pre­miered, we can safe­ly say that this pro­duc­tion has accom­plished the mis­sion of draw­ing vig­or from a per­haps unex­pect­ed source, and even that it stands a chance of bring­ing its chill­ing artistry (not to men­tion its promis­ing­ly warned-about “strong lan­guage, gun­shots, sim­u­lat­ed nudi­ty, the­atri­cal haze, and strobe light­ing”) to a city near you, prefer­ably in the dead of win­ter to best suit the sto­ry — a time that, in Min­neso­ta, already counts as for­bid­ding enough.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load & Play The Shin­ing Board Game

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Watch a Shot-by-Shot Remake of Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, a 48-Minute Music Video Accom­pa­ny­ing the New Album by Aesop Rock

Watch The Simp­sons’ Hal­loween Par­o­dy of Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Behold the Kinetic, 39-Ton Statue of Franz Kafka’s Head, Erected in Prague

What does Kaf­ka mean to you? To me he has always rep­re­sent­ed the tri­umph of small­ness, which is no slight; the exem­plary fig­ure of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat­tari called “a minor lit­er­a­ture.” Kaf­ka made minu­ti­ae and triv­i­al­i­ty com­pelling, invest­ed the pet­ty strug­gles of every­day life with a dra­mat­ic inten­si­ty and meta­phys­i­cal aura that linger for days after read­ing him. Kafka’s let­ters show him caught in the grip of a crip­pling, yet deeply fun­ny, intel­lec­tu­al ambiva­lence; his sto­ries and nov­els equal­ly trade in absur­dist humor and philo­soph­i­cal seri­ous­ness. Kaf­ka haunts the small domes­tic spaces and tedi­um of office life, imbu­ing sec­u­lar moder­ni­ty with a tragi­com­ic strange­ness. He trem­bles at the con­tin­ued pow­er of a dethroned reli­gious author­i­ty, per­plexed by its empti­ness, rewrit­ing the inward­ness and self-nega­tion of reli­gious asceti­cism in para­bles absent of any god.

Seek­ing the source of author­i­ty, Kafka’s heroes find instead unsolv­able rid­dles and mys­te­ri­ous vacan­cies. Which is why it seems odd to me that Kaf­ka should him­self be memo­ri­al­ized as a gigan­tic head in statuary—an 11 meter, 45 ton stain­less steel head, with 42 motor­ized lay­ers that move inde­pen­dent­ly, rear­rang­ing and “meta­mor­phos­ing” the author’s face.

Called “K on Sun” and cre­at­ed by Czech artist David Černý, the shim­mer­ing, mon­u­men­tal work, installed in 2014, sits near the office build­ing where Kaf­ka worked as a clerk at an insur­ance com­pa­ny and across from the Prague City Hall. The “enor­mous mir­rored bust” writes Christo­pher Job­son at This is Colos­sal, “bril­liant­ly reveals Kafka’s tor­tured per­son­al­i­ty and unre­lent­ing self-doubt.” Per­haps. Jacob Sham­sian at Busi­ness Insid­er has anoth­er inter­pre­ta­tion: “It’s meant to dis­tract peo­ple from the frus­tra­tions of deal­ing with gov­ern­ment employ­ees.”

Maybe the key to under­stand­ing “K on Sun” is by com­par­i­son with an ear­li­er piece by Černý called Metal­mor­pho­sis, which as you can see above, uses the same mon­u­men­tal, stain­less steel design to cre­ate an enor­mous, gleam­ing, con­stant­ly rear­rang­ing head. This one sits at the White­hall Tech­nol­o­gy Park in Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na, the kind of bland, homog­e­nized cor­po­rate office cam­pus that might have dri­ven Kaf­ka mad. “Černý,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra, “notes the Metal­mor­pho­sis as some­thing of a self-por­trait of his own psy­che,” say­ing “This is how I feel; it is a men­tal self-por­trait.” Can we regard “Kaf­ka in Sun” as also some­thing of a por­trait of Černý as well, imag­in­ing him­self as Kaf­ka? Per­haps.

The artist is a trick­ster char­ac­ter, known for frus­trat­ing and infu­ri­at­ing patrons and audi­ences, “a rebel­lious mix of Antony Gorm­ley and Damien Hirst,” The Guardian opines, “as con­tro­ver­sial as he is amus­ing.” One work, “Piss,” fea­tures just that, “two gyrat­ing, mechan­i­cal men uri­nat­ing on a map of the Czech Repub­lic.” Their urine spells out famous say­ings from Prague res­i­dents. Locat­ed right next to the Franz Kaf­ka muse­um, the sculp­ture mocks the idea of art as a cul­tur­al enter­prise devot­ed to the nation­al inter­est. “Kaf­ka in Sun” presents us with a much more impos­ing­ly seri­ous piece than so many of Černý’s oth­er, more whim­si­cal, works. But it’s hard to imag­ine the satir­i­cal artist had a more seri­ous, straight­for­ward inten­tion. In imag­in­ing Kaf­ka as a huge, shiny sun­lit head, he inverts the author’s small, pri­vate, self-con­tained world, turn­ing Kaf­ka into a strange­ly loom­ing, pub­lic, author­i­ta­tive pres­ence resem­bling an enor­mous met­al god.

via This is Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Metrop­o­lis II: Dis­cov­er the Amaz­ing, Fritz Lang-Inspired Kinet­ic Sculp­ture by Chris Bur­den

The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 65,000 Works of Mod­ern Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravinsky Conduct The Firebird, the Ballet Masterpiece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

The Bal­lets Russ­es, found­ed in 1909 by art crit­ic and impre­sario Sergei Diaghilev, staged some tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary pro­duc­tions on the very edge of aes­thet­ic new­ness. Diaghilev’s bal­lets coor­di­nat­ed set designs by artists like Pablo Picas­so, Hen­ri Matisse, and Gior­gio de Chiri­co, chore­og­ra­phy by such mas­ters as George Bal­an­chine and Vaslav Nijin­sky, and scores by such mod­ern com­posers as Sergei Prokofiev and Erik Satie. But of course, when we think of Diaghilev’s Russ­ian bal­lets, we sure­ly think fore­most of Igor Stravin­sky, whose Rite of Spring was so rad­i­cal it famous­ly incit­ed a riot at its 1913 Parisian pre­miere and “would go on,” writes The Verge, “to leave an indeli­ble mark on jazz, min­i­mal­ism, and oth­er con­tem­po­rary move­ments.”

Just three years ear­li­er, how­ev­er, Stravin­sky was most­ly unknown. Still work­ing under the shad­ow of his teacher, Rim­sky-Kor­sakov, he was giv­en his first big break by Diaghilev only after sev­er­al oth­er com­posers refused the job. That com­mis­sion turned out to be one of the works for which Stravin­sky is best known—the score for The Fire­bird, a bal­let based on a Russ­ian folk tale about a prince who frees a mag­i­cal bird held cap­tive by a sor­cer­er. Fit­ting­ly, giv­en the mon­strous nature of the story’s antag­o­nists, Stravinsky’s score turns on a very sin­is­ter-sound­ing musi­cal inter­val, the tri­tone, whose dis­so­nance caused ear­li­er com­posers to dub it “the Devil’s Inter­val” and to avoid it entire­ly in reli­gious music. Just above, you can see Stravin­sky him­self, at age 82, con­duct “The Lul­la­by Suite” from the bal­let.

Stravinsky’s score built on Claude Debussy’s use of the tri­tone twen­ty years ear­li­er in the eerie Pre­lude to an After­noon of a Faun, and the net effect of the inter­val in these two pieces lead to its dark, moody sound becom­ing “the cen­ter of mod­ern music.” So says Carnegie Hall’s Jef­frey Gef­fen in the short video intro­duc­tion to Stravinsky’s Fire­bird. Gef­fen goes on to tell us that Debussy and Stravin­sky “looked to what was con­sid­ered the most dis­so­nant inter­val of the past 200 years and turned it into into some­thing that becomes exot­ic and per­fumed.” Although The Fire­bird’s sto­ry and many of its musi­cal themes are dis­tinct­ly Russ­ian in ori­gin (as you can see in the Khan Acad­e­my video below), the music “would not have been pos­si­ble,” says Carnegie Hall’s David Robert­son, “with­out the influ­ence of Debussy and that of his friend Mau­rice Rav­el.”

Stravin­sky’s music proved polar­iz­ing even before the riots of Rite of Spring. When leg­endary dancer Anna Pavlo­va heard the Fire­bird score, she declared it “noise” and refused to dance to it, forc­ing Diaghilev to cast Tama­ra Karsav­ina in the title role. But the pro­duc­er believed in his new com­pos­er, remark­ing to Karsav­ina on the bal­let’s pre­miere that Stravin­sky was “a man on the eve of celebri­ty.” Even the for­ward-look­ing Diaghilev could­n’t have pre­dict­ed how much influ­ence Stravin­sky would have on the next 100 years of mod­ern music. Since its first incar­na­tion in 1910, The Fire­bird has been restaged and rearranged sev­er­al times. The suite Stravin­sky con­ducts at the top of the post comes from the 1945 arrange­ment. Two years after this filmed per­for­mance, Stravin­sky con­duct­ed his very last record­ing for Colum­bia Records. He again chose to return, for the last time, to the bal­let that first made him famous, The Fire­bird.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 46 Ver­sions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Min­utes: A Clas­sic Mashup

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion for Its 100th Anniver­sary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How to Build Stuff: A Free Short Course on Making Prototypes by Entrepreneur Dan Gelbart

Dan Gel­bart, a Van­cou­ver-based elec­tri­cal engi­neer, helped cre­ate a com­pa­ny called Creo, which Kodak bought in 2005 for rough­ly $1 bil­lion. If you read Gel­bart’s short auto­bi­og­ra­phy here, you can learn about the arc of his career: About how, dur­ing his ear­ly years, he start­ed work­ing for a tech com­pa­ny that pro­duced high-speed film recorders. And about how Gel­bart told the com­pa­ny that he could build a bet­ter film recorder, at a cheap­er price. And he could do it in the base­ment of his home. He explains:

After a crash course in optics, I changed the design [of the recorder], but sur­pris­ing­ly man­aged to deliv­er a ship­pable pro­to­type in 12 months with only one per­son work­ing with me. I had a small met­al­work­ing work­shop at home, many of the machines home-built, and this allowed me to fab­ri­cate most of the parts for the pro­to­type myself.

I now have a won­der­ful CNC machine shop at home, but I don’t have the bound­less enthu­si­asm of those days. How­ev­er, I still build all my pro­to­types myself, find­ing it to be faster than send­ing out draw­ings and wait­ing for parts.

Above, you can watch what Gel­bart calls “A Short Course on How to Build Stuff,” a series of 18 videos designed for stu­dents and sci­en­tists who want to build pro­to­types very quick­ly, using machines that are easy to mas­ter. Writes Make mag­a­zine, the “series begins by demon­strat­ing how to use and mod­i­fy his favorite shop tools, and reveals all kinds of enlight­en­ing short­cuts that make com­pli­cat­ed assem­blies triv­ial to pro­duce. There is a true art to uncom­pli­cat­ing things, a rar­i­ty for some engi­neers.”

You can access the com­plete playlist here. Indi­vid­ual top­ics include:

1. Intro­duc­tion
2. Safe­ty
3. Water­jet
4. Bend­ing
5. Spot Weld­ing
6. Coat­ings
7. Press­work
8. Enclo­sures
9. Mate­ri­als
10. Flex­ures
11. Non-met­als
12. Plas­tics Form­ing and Cast­ing
13. Large Struc­tures
14. Braz­ing
15. Mill and Lathe
16. Machin­ing
17. High Accu­ra­cy
18. Design

Gel­bart’s course will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Metafil­ter

Hunter S. Thompson Writes a Blistering, Over-the-Top Letter to Anthony Burgess (1973)

Thompson Burgess Letter

We know Antho­ny Burgess for hav­ing writ­ten A Clock­work Orange, but in total, accord­ing to Shaun Ush­er’s More Let­ters of Note: Cor­re­spon­dence Deserv­ing of a Wider Audi­ence (a book based on the well-known blog), he “pub­lished 33 nov­els, 25 non­fic­tion titles, pro­duced poet­ry, short sto­ries and screen­plays, com­posed three sym­phonies, wrote hun­dreds of musi­cal pieces, and spoke nine lan­guages flu­ent­ly.” Yet even such a “pro­lif­ic, ver­sa­tile, and high­ly intel­li­gent” man of let­ters faces writer’s block now and again.

Take the Rolling Stone think­piece Burgess could­n’t man­age to write in 1973. Con­ced­ing defeat — “things are hell here,” he wrote of his life in Rome at the time — he offered the mag­a­zine “a 50,000-word novel­la I’ve just fin­ished, all about the con­di­tion humaine, etc.” in its place. Sure­ly his edi­tor would under­stand? Alas, unluck­i­ly for Burgess, his edi­tor turned out to be one Hunter S. Thomp­son, who fired back the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly blunt but elo­quent­ly vit­ri­olic reply you see here:

Dear Mr. Burgess,

Herr Wen­ner has for­ward­ed your use­less let­ter from Rome to the Nation­al Affairs Desk for my exam­i­na­tion and/or reply.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we have no Inter­na­tion­al Gib­ber­ish Desk, or it would have end­ed up there.

What kind of lame, half-mad bull­shit are you try­ing to sneak over on us? When Rolling Stone asks for “a think­piece”, god­damnit, we want a fuck­ing Think­piece… and don’t try to weasel out with any of your limey bull­shit about a “50,000 word novel­la about the con­di­tion humaine, etc…”

Do you take us for a gang of brain­less lizards? Rich hood­lums? Dilet­tante thugs?

You lazy cock­suck­er. I want that Think­piece on my desk by Labor Day. And I want it ready for press. The time has come & gone when cheap­jack scum like you can get away with the kind of scams you got rich from in the past.

Get your worth­less ass out of the piaz­za and back to the type­writer. Your type is a dime a dozen around here, Burgess, and I’m fucked if I’m going to stand for it any longer.

Sin­cere­ly,

Hunter S Thomp­son

“The desired think­piece nev­er appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone,” writes the Inter­na­tion­al Antho­ny Burgess Foun­da­tion’s Gra­ham Fos­ter, “but the essay referred to in these let­ters, ‘The Clock­work Con­di­tion’, was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in the New York­er in 2012.” In it, Burgess recalls the ori­gins of his best-known nov­el and con­sid­ers the caus­es of the soci­etal con­for­mi­ty he took as one of his themes, arriv­ing at the Orwellian notion that “the bur­den of mak­ing one’s own choic­es is, for many peo­ple, intol­er­a­ble. To be tied to the neces­si­ty of decid­ing for one­self is to be a slave to one’s will.”

That goes for “where to eat, whom to vote for, what to wear” — and, of course, for what to write a think­piece about as well as how to write it. “It is eas­i­er to be told,” Burgess writes. “Smoke Hale — nine­ty per cent less tar; read this nov­el, sev­en­ty-five weeks on the best-sell­er list; don’t see that movie, it’s art­sy-shmart­sy.” He even remem­bers, with a cer­tain fond­ness, his time in the army: “At first I resent­ed the dis­ci­pline, the removal of even min­i­mal lib­er­ty,” but “soon my reduc­tion to a piece of clock­work began to please me, soothe me.” Fair to say, though, that no mat­ter how demand­ing the offi­cers above him, the expe­ri­ence did­n’t pre­pare Burgess for a supe­ri­or like Thomp­son.

via More Let­ters of Note and Esquire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Read 18 Lost Sto­ries From Hunter S. Thompson’s For­got­ten Stint As a For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ball­sy & Hilar­i­ous Job Appli­ca­tion Let­ter (1958)

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters from Hunter S. Thomp­son

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

478 Dorothea Lange Photographs Poignantly Document the Internment of the Japanese During WWII

Lange 1

“This is what we did. How did it hap­pen? How could we?” –Dorothea Lange

The idea sounds coun­ter­in­tu­itive giv­en the vio­lence we read about dai­ly, but it is per­haps pos­si­ble that human soci­eties are slow­ly out­grow­ing xeno­pho­bia and war, as Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist and lin­guist Steven Pinker has argued exten­sive­ly. It’s also pos­si­ble that Pinker’s view is an “arti­cle of faith” rather than fact. In any case, we can at least be heart­ened by one thing: If we do become bet­ter at learn­ing from the past than repeat­ing it, the pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments will not have dis­ap­peared into a mem­o­ry hole. The very same tech­nolo­gies that spread fear, big­otry, and dis­in­for­ma­tion across the globe also enable us to unearth humanity’s long his­to­ry of bad deci­sion-mak­ing and pre­serve the evi­dence in wide­ly-acces­si­ble online archives.

Lange 5

One such archive, the Den­sho Dig­i­tal Repos­i­to­ry, con­tains “his­toric pho­tographs, doc­u­ments, news­pa­pers, let­ters and oth­er pri­ma­ry source mate­ri­als” from the his­to­ry of the Japan­ese in America—including, of course, a par­tic­u­lar­ly regret­table his­tor­i­cal episode, the intern­ment of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans dur­ing WWII, a grim polit­i­cal expe­di­ent that offers lessons today to those who choose to learn them. Promi­nent among the archives’ many doc­u­ments from the peri­od is the Dorothea Lange Col­lec­tion, almost 500 images tak­en by the famous pho­tog­ra­ph­er of “the many dif­fer­ent stages of mass removal and incar­cer­a­tion” of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans in Cal­i­for­nia. The pho­tographs (recent­ly high­light­ed on Kottke.org) fea­ture orig­i­nal cap­tions writ­ten by Lange that con­tex­tu­al­ize the sub­jects and some­times pro­vide their names and a few bio­graph­i­cal details.

Lange 3

The lives of Japan­ese internees were in fact doc­u­ment­ed by not one, but two famous Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­phers, Lange and Ansel Adams. How­ev­er, Adams—whose pho­to­graph­ic series we fea­tured in a pre­vi­ous post—gained access to an intern­ment camp in the foothills of the Sier­ra Nevadas on his own, through a friend­ship with the camp’s war­den. Lange, on the oth­er hand, snapped sev­er­al hun­dred pho­tographs while on offi­cial assign­ment with the War Relo­ca­tion Author­i­ty. In 1942, the gov­ern­ment hired her to doc­u­ment the removal and impris­on­ment of over 100,000 Japan­ese Amer­i­cans in camps across the state.

Lange 11

Lange’s pho­tographs, writes Densho’s blog, have helped shape “the col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of Japan­ese Amer­i­can removal.” Despite the restric­tions placed on her by the authorities—Lange could not shoot images of barbed wire, bay­o­nets, or guard towers—“she man­aged to pro­duce a body of work that at once cap­tured the inhu­mane actions of the U.S. gov­ern­ment and the human­i­ty of the indi­vid­u­als being forced to leave their lives behind for the ‘crime’ of Japan­ese ances­try.”

Lange 13

Her pho­tographs are “seem­ing­ly unstaged and unlight­ed,” writes Dini­tia Smith in a New York Times review of Impound­ed, a book fea­tur­ing many of the close to 800 pho­tographs Lange took, most of which were only recent­ly dis­cov­ered at the Nation­al Archives, “where they had lain neglect­ed for a half-cen­tu­ry after hav­ing been impound­ed by the gov­ern­ment.” Best known for her pho­tos of Dust Bowl farm work­ers, Lange, writes schol­ar Megan Asa­ka at Den­sho, “was an odd choice, giv­en her left­ist pol­i­tics and strong sym­pa­thy for vic­tims of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.” She was “appalled by the forced exile” and “con­fid­ed to a Quak­er pro­test­er that she was guilt strick­en to be work­ing for a fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that could treat its cit­i­zens so unjust­ly.” She took on the assign­ment “to accu­rate­ly record what the Japan­ese Amer­i­cans were under­go­ing,” but apart from “a few pho­tos that reached the pub­lic,” most of her work didn’t see the light of day for decades.

Lange 8

“What the mil­i­tary want­ed from her,” explains his­to­ri­an Lin­da Gor­don in a PBS doc­u­men­tary on Lange’s assign­ment, “was a set of pho­tographs to illus­trate that they weren’t per­se­cut­ing or tor­tur­ing these peo­ple who they evac­u­at­ed.” Gor­don, who co-edit­ed Impound­ed, notes in the book that the pho­tos “tell us that con­di­tions in the camps were much worse than most peo­ple think.” It’s hard not to be remind­ed of anoth­er, more har­row­ing, forced removal hap­pen­ing a con­ti­nent away as we see Lange’s images of Japan­ese Amer­i­can fam­i­lies forced to aban­don their homes and stores, fill out reg­is­tra­tion paper­work, gath­er their belong­ings in suit­cas­es, and board trains and bus­es en masse with num­bered tags around their necks.

Lange 10

What await­ed the internees at the camps were mil­i­tary-style bar­racks, libraries, rudi­men­ta­ry schools, and “tar-paper shacks where they endured bru­tal heat and bit­ter cold, filth, dust and open sew­ers,” writes Smith. Some internees were housed in for­mer horse stalls and many endured cav­i­ty search­es and oth­er humil­i­at­ing indig­ni­ties, as well as dai­ly fear and anx­i­ety about their even­tu­al fates. Lange’s pho­tographs, how­ev­er, “pow­er­ful­ly con­test the gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da and hate­ful rhetoric aimed at vil­i­fy­ing Japan­ese Amer­i­cans,” writes Den­sho: “Often shot from a low angle, Lange places her sub­jects on a visu­al pedestal. She restores some dig­ni­ty in a moment when, many admit, they felt they had none.”

Lange 4

Unlike Ansel Adams’ fas­ci­nat­ing pho­tos, which are restrict­ed to the con­fines of one camp, Lange’s doc­u­ment the internees entire jour­ney from free­dom to impris­on­ment, as well as the respons­es of many Japan­ese Amer­i­cans to their new sta­tus as inter­nal ene­mies of the state. One shop own­er, “a Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia grad­u­ate of Japan­ese descent,” Lange not­ed, placed the sign you see above on his closed store­front.

lange4-780x350

All of the pho­tographs in the Den­sho archive are now in the pub­lic domain and can be freely used for any pur­pose. Lange, I imag­ine, would hope they force us to reflect on the futile insan­i­ty of demo­niz­ing entire pop­u­la­tions and turn­ing on fel­low cit­i­zens in times of war, xeno­pho­bic fer­vor and polit­i­cal oppor­tunism.

Lange 9

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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