The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Comic Book: A New Release

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | June 16th, 2016

prince comic cover

Since Prince’s death in April, writ­ers have been try­ing to sum up a life lived that was both very pri­vate and yet also felt like it exist­ed in our DNA. Much like Bowie, the Prince we knew was the one we shared and we saw and we sang. So how to get that life into a 24 page com­ic book?

Released June 7th on Prince’s birth­day, Trib­ute: Prince is a primer on the musician’s life and pass­ing writ­ten by Michael L. Frizell and illus­trat­ed by Span­ish artist Ernesto Lovera. The com­ic actu­al­ly dates from 2013, when it was released as Fame: Prince, but Ital­ian illus­tra­tor Vin­cen­zo San­sone has con­clud­ed the sto­ry of his life with three extra pages now added to the tale, which alludes to Prince’s opi­oid use, his demand­ing sched­ule, and the pub­lic reac­tion to his pass­ing.

purple rain comic

Frizell starts the tale from a fan’s per­spec­tive, as a teen girl in 1984, secret­ly enjoy­ing his music, hid­ing the fact from her par­ents. The sto­ry then jumps back to Prince’s child­hood, his strug­gle to get a record­ing con­tract, and his explo­sive fame. Read­ers will spot numer­ous allu­sions to Prince’s lyrics in the text, as well. Frizell has also writ­ten issues of Trib­ute about David Bowie and Mot­ley Crüe, and said in a pro­mo state­ment, “The sub­jects of [Prince’s] songs spoke to me in ways I did­n’t under­stand until I was old­er, but the dark poet­ry of them com­pelled me to keep lis­ten­ing. To this day, my iPod is full of his work and I lis­ten to it as I write.”

prince comic 2

The sin­gle issue com­ic is avail­able online and in stores and comes with three dif­fer­ent cov­ers by David Frizell, Vin­cen­zo San­sone, and Pablo Mar­ti­ne­na. It runs $3 or $4. If you have Kin­dle Unlim­it­ed plan, you can get it for free.

Relat­ed con­tent:

See Prince (RIP) Play Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solos On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and “Amer­i­can Woman”

Hear Aman­da Palmer’s Cov­er of “Pur­ple Rain,” a Gor­geous Stringfelt Send-Off to Prince

Prince (RIP) Per­forms Ear­ly Hits in a 1982 Con­cert: “Con­tro­ver­sy,” “I Wan­na Be Your Lover” & More

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.

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Carl Sagan Presents a Mini-Course on Earth, Mars & What’s Beyond Our Solar System: For Kids and Adults (1977)

in Education, K-12, Science | June 16th, 2016

Despite the inten­sive focus on STEM (as opposed to STEAM—a debate for anoth­er day), Amer­i­cans still find them­selves falling far behind in sci­ence edu­ca­tion. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Math and Sci­ence Ini­tia­tive, U.S. stu­dents placed 20th in sci­ence in a recent rank­ing of 34 coun­tries. “The way the U.S. teach­es sci­ence,” argues Pop­u­lar Sci­ence, “sim­ply doesn’t work…. Since sci­en­tists don’t just stand around mem­o­riz­ing stuff, stu­dents shouldn’t either.” The approach isn’t only counter to the sci­en­tif­ic method; it’s tedious and doesn’t engage that most impor­tant of intel­lec­tu­al fac­ul­ties: curios­i­ty.

The prob­lems are beyond ped­a­gogy, as we know from polls that show upwards of 42% of Amer­i­cans sub­scrib­ing to lit­er­al­ist inter­pre­ta­tions of their reli­gious texts, and active­ly reject­ing sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. These cul­tur­al road­blocks were very famil­iar to Carl Sagan, who spent a good part of his career attempt­ing to coax the pub­lic out of its belief in a “demon-haunt­ed world.” As a sci­ence edu­ca­tor, Sagan not only knew how to draw out the child­like awe in grown-ups, but also how to engage the nat­ur­al curios­i­ty of chil­dren, who—as every par­ent knows—long to know the why of every­thing.

“As a child,” Sagan said of his for­ma­tive years, “it was my immense good for­tune to have par­ents and a few good teach­ers who encour­aged my curios­i­ty.” Now, whether or not kids have such par­ents or teach­ers, thanks to the inter­net, they have Carl Sagan, and specif­i­cal­ly, they have Sagan’s Roy­al Insti­tu­tion Christ­mas Lec­tures, six talks he deliv­ered in 1977 to eager, curi­ous kids. Sagan taught on his usu­al top­ic: Plan­ets, begin­ning with “The Earth as a Plan­et,” at the top of the post. As he men­tions in his intro­duc­tion, his lec­ture almost falls on the 150th anniver­sary of the first Christ­mas Lec­ture, a dis­tin­guished sci­en­tif­ic tra­di­tion begun in 1825 by Michael Fara­day at Britain’s Roy­al Insti­tu­tion.

Sagan’s first talk “explores the diver­si­ty of life on our own plan­et,” writes the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion, “and the build­ing blocks behind it.” Then, he moves on to “ques­tion­ing whether the same organ­ic chem­istry is occur­ring on plan­ets in the out­er solar sys­tem” in his sec­ond lec­ture, above. In the fol­low­ing three talks, below, Sagan takes us to Mars, a plan­et he helped explore with­out ever leav­ing the ground with his the­o­ries in the late 60s about the nature of the planet’s surface—theories lat­er con­firmed sev­er­al years lat­er by the Viking Project. Sagan’s talks below—“The His­to­ry of Mars,” “Mars Before Viking,” and “Mars After Viking”—share the lat­est research with his young audi­ence. With mod­els of the plan­et and the Viking space­craft, Sagan demon­strates in detail how NASA obtained its data.

The His­to­ry of Mars

Mars Before Viking


Mars After Viking”>Mars After Viking

In his final Roy­al Insti­tu­tion Christ­mas Lec­ture, below, “Plan­e­tary Sys­tems Beyond the Sun,” Sagan ven­tures far beyond the reach of NASA’s instru­ments (at the time) to spec­u­late on what might lie beyond the Solar Sys­tem. But first, he ori­ents us—again using mod­els and space photography—by explain­ing what a solar sys­tem is, and why oth­er sys­tems like­ly resem­ble ours. In his own sci­en­tif­ic career, Sagan was instru­men­tal in pro­mot­ing the SETI Institute—which now has a cen­ter named after him. He believed unflag­ging­ly in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extrater­res­tri­al life, which he hypoth­e­sized based on many of the obser­va­tions he shares below.

When Sagan deliv­ered these lec­tures, the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion points out, “NASA had only just begun its Voy­ager pro­gram to the fur­thest plan­ets in our solar sys­tem and no extra-solar plan­ets were known to exist. Now, over three decades lat­er, astronomers are look­ing at plan­ets that lie beyond our solar sys­tem to ask the very same ques­tion we pon­dered over Mars: is there life out there?” As you may have heard, NASA’s Kepler mis­sion has dis­cov­ered a “hab­it­able zone” of plan­ets in anoth­er solar sys­tem with two suns—a find sure to pique the curios­i­ty of kids of all ages, and one that would have excit­ed Sagan to no end.

See Sagan’s Christ­mas lec­tures with bet­ter video and audio qual­i­ty at the Roy­al Institution’s web­site, and please—whether you’re a par­ent, teacher, old­er sib­ling, etc.—share these with the kids in your life.

These lec­tures will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

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

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Download a Complete, Cover-to-Cover Parody of The New Yorker: 80 Pages of Fine Satire

in Comedy, Magazines | June 16th, 2016

jorker combo

From Andrew Lip­stein & James Fol­ta comes The Neu Jork­er, a great par­o­dy of the high-brow mag­a­zine, The New York­er. The table of con­tents, the con­trib­u­tor bios, the car­toons, the ads, the articles–they’re all imi­tat­ed in a near­ly pitch per­fect way, just tak­en one degree fur­ther into the realm of slight absur­di­ty. Down­load The Neu Jork­er in high-res for­mats via Drop­box and Scribd, and you’ll see what I mean.

On page 4 of the mag­a­zine, Lip­stein and Vol­ta write, “The Neu Jork­er was a labor of love… Not a sin­gle cent was spent or made on this project. We’ve done our share of research on fair use and par­o­dy law (a sol­id Wikipedia skim), and are pret­ty sure we’re good, but we do hope that the mag­a­zine-not-to-be-named under­stands that this is some­where between satire, par­o­dy, and homage.” We’re hop­ing, too, that David Rem­nick and the lawyers at Conde Nast will appre­ci­ate the effort that went into this 80 page, cov­er-to-cov­er par­o­dy.

Con­trib­u­tors to The Neu Jork­er come from The Onion, Click­Hole, The New York­er, the Late Show with David Let­ter­man, the Late Show with Stephen Col­bert, McSweeney’s, the Upright Cit­i­zens Brigade and var­i­ous oth­er fun­ny places.

Down­load the par­o­dy here. And speak­ing of The New York­er, just a quick reminder that Mal­colm Glad­well has launched a pod­cast called “Revi­sion­ist His­to­ry” today. You can hear the first episode here.

via Metafil­ter/AV Club

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

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mal­colm Glad­well Has Launched a New Pod­cast, Revi­sion­ist His­to­ry: Hear the First Episode

Al Jaf­fee, the Longest Work­ing Car­toon­ist in His­to­ry, Shows How He Invent­ed the Icon­ic “Folds-Ins” for Mad Mag­a­zine

The New York­er’s “Com­ma Queen” Mer­ci­ful­ly Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Who/Whom, Lay/Lie, Less/Fewer & Beyond

The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers

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100,000 Free Art History Texts Now Available Online Thanks to the Getty Research Portal

in Art, Books, Web/Tech | June 15th, 2016

paul klee getty portal

“I have always imag­ined that Par­adise will be a kind of library,” Jorge Luis Borges famous­ly wrote. Were he alive today, he might well regard the inter­net as becom­ing more par­a­disi­a­cal all the time, at least in the sense that it keeps not just gen­er­at­ing new texts, but absorb­ing exist­ing ones and mak­ing them avail­able free to read­ers.

And while his well-known sto­ry “The Library of Babel” envi­sions a mag­i­cal or extreme­ly high-tech library con­tain­ing all pos­si­ble texts (which the inter­net has start­ed to make a real­i­ty), recent addi­tions to the vast library of the inter­net have done him one bet­ter by incor­po­rat­ing not just pages of let­ters, but intri­cate­ly designed and lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed art texts as well.

raven matisse

Take the Get­ty Research Por­tal, which has just, for its fourth anniver­sary, unveiled a new design and a total vol­ume count sur­pass­ing 100,000. “In assem­bling a vir­tu­al cor­pus of dig­i­tized texts on art, archi­tec­ture, mate­r­i­al cul­ture, and relat­ed fields from numer­ous part­ners, the Por­tal aspires to offer a more expan­sive col­lec­tion than any sin­gle library could pro­vide,” writes project con­tent spe­cial­ist Annie Rana at the Get­ty’s blog The Iris. “Fur­ther­more, with these freely down­load­able mate­ri­als, schol­ars and researchers can now be in pos­ses­sion of copies of rare books and oth­er titles with­out hav­ing to trav­el to far-flung locales.”

OC Getty Portal Kandinsky

More than twen­ty insti­tu­tions now share their col­lec­tions at the Get­ty Research Por­tal: recent join­ers include the Art Insti­tute of Chicago’s Ryer­son and Burn­ham Libraries, the Bib­lio­the­ca Hertziana-Max Planck Insti­tute for Art His­to­ry in Rome, the Her­zog August Bib­lio­thek in Wolfen­büt­tel, the Menil Library Col­lec­tion in Hous­ton, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um Library and Archives in New York, and the War­burg Insti­tute Library in Lon­don. But wait, says Rana, there’s more, or at least more on the way: “Dia­logues with art libraries and insti­tu­tions in India, Iran, and Japan are in the works as the project also looks to increase inter­na­tion­al cov­er­age.”

OC Getty Portal The Building in Japan

Still, the selec­tion of items looks quite inter­na­tion­al already. The post high­lights a few items of high poten­tial inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven illus­trat­ed by Edouard Manet and trans­lat­ed into French by Stéphane Mal­lar­mé, as well as a mono­graph on, an exhi­bi­tion cat­a­log about the work of, and writ­ings by the Russ­ian abstract painter and art the­o­rist Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky. But even though the Get­ty Research Por­tal seems only to have plans to grow larg­er and larg­er, every­one brows­ing through it will sure­ly find some­thing suit­ed to their artis­tic inter­ests, from Paul Klee (top) to Roy Licht­en­stein to Japan­ese archi­tec­ture and every­thing in between; you have only to step through the por­tal to find it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

815 Free Art Books from World Class Muse­ums: The Met, the Guggen­heim, the Get­ty & LACMA

Down­load 448 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Read Free Dig­i­tal Art Cat­a­logues from 9 World-Class Muse­ums, Thanks to the Pio­neer­ing Get­ty Foun­da­tion

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

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.

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Explore Harvard’s Iconic Spaces with 360° Interactive Videos

in Education, Harvard, Life, Technology, Travel, Web/Tech | June 15th, 2016

For me, noth­ing cap­tures those occa­sion­al feel­ings of post-grad­u­ate yearn­ing like “I Wish I Could Go Back to Col­lege,” a N‑quite-SFW track from the Broad­way musi­cal, Avenue Q.

With all due respect, it feels like the five mem­bers of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s just-grad­u­at­ed Class of 2016 shar­ing their rec­ol­lec­tions in the inter­ac­tive 360° video project, Har­vard Stu­dents Say Farewell, left a few cru­cial details out. (Note: Youtube 360 videos only work in Chrome, Fire­fox, Inter­net Explor­er, or Opera browsers.)

It’s com­plete­ly safe for prospec­tive par­ents, not a keg or con­dom wrap­per in sight. (The project is host­ed on Harvard’s offi­cial Youtube chan­nel.)

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Har­vard appears to have been the par­tic­i­pants’ uni­ver­sal first choice of col­lege. Hasty Pud­ding per­former, Joshuah Camp­bell, above, a self-described “Black kid from the coun­try,” con­fides that it was the only place he applied to.

He may have arrived won­der­ing how he would fit in, but four years lat­er, his grub­by dorm room is one of the “icon­ic” Har­vard loca­tions view­ers can explore dig­i­tal­ly as he briefly reflects upon his expe­ri­ence.

That’s about as down and dirty as this series gets. The human sub­jects seem to have been select­ed with an eye toward diver­si­ty and humil­i­ty, rather than the clenched Boston Brah­min jaw that once defined the insti­tu­tion.

Mean­while, the libraries, quads, and the­aters through which this new breed of Har­vard men and women wan­der attest to the place’s ongo­ing exclu­siv­i­ty.

Sree­ja Kala­pu­rakkel, above, a mem­ber of the Har­vard South Asian Dance Com­pa­ny, knew what she was get­ting into, as a stu­dent at a respect­ed Boston sec­ondary school. Short­ly after grad­u­a­tion, she sung Har­vard’s prais­es some­what more frankly on her Face­book page:

Each day of my time at Har­vard was filled with every­thing that makes life beau­ti­ful: dark­ness, strug­gle, despair, lone­li­ness, friend­ship, hope, per­se­ver­ance, light. Every expe­ri­ence, every les­son, every friend trans­formed me into some­one more human and gave me some­thing new to fight for.

Har­vard, like every oth­er col­lege in the land, has relaxed its pol­i­cy on end­ing a sen­tence in a prepo­si­tion.

Ana-Maria Con­stan­tin arrived sight unseen from her native Roma­nia to pull us out onto the deck of the Smith­son­ian Astro­phys­i­cal Obser­va­to­ry.

On to the lock­er room! Hock­ey cap­tain Kyle Criscuo­lo joins the Detroit Red Wings, reflect­ing that Har­vard stu­dent ath­letes enjoy no spe­cial treat­ment. In future, the uni­ver­si­ty may want to require them to lis­ten to Will Stephen’s lec­ture, “How to Sound Smart in a TED Talk.” Criscuo­lo sounds sin­cere, but also stiff, as if read­ing from a sheet of paper, or the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent there­of.

(There­of is an adverb, by the way. Not a prepo­si­tion. I checked.)

Har­vard Art Muse­ums Stu­dent Board mem­ber Rachel Thomp­son paints her­self so meek­ly, I’m tempt­ed to check with her fresh­man year room­mate. Was she real­ly so filled with self doubt? I’ve always assumed Har­vard accep­tance let­ters would puff the recip­i­ent up. Good lord, imag­ine the effect the rejec­tion let­ters must have!

Use a mouse to explore the immer­sive envi­ron­ment on your com­put­er, or the YouTube app to nav­i­gate on a mobile device. Use a vir­tu­al real­i­ty head­set and the Har­vard Crim­son staff’s vocab­u­lary list to enhance the expe­ri­ence even more.

The com­plete playlist is here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

NPR Launch­es Data­base of Best Com­mence­ment Speech­es Ever

The Har­vard Clas­sics: Down­load All 51 Vol­umes as Free eBooks

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, and a North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty grad. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music

in Music, Technology | June 15th, 2016

fairlight_cmi_03

Hang around this site long enough and you’ll learn a thing or two about elec­tron­ic music, whether it’s a very brief his­to­ry of the Moog syn­the­siz­er, or the Theremin, or an enor­mous, obscure ancient ances­tor, the Tel­har­mo­ni­um. These mini-lessons are dwarfed, how­ev­er, by the amount of infor­ma­tion you’ll find on the site 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music, where­in you can read about such strange crea­tures as the Choral­celo, the Stac­ca­tone, the Pianorad, Cellu­phone, Elec­tronde, and Vibroex­pona­tor. Such odd­i­ties abound in the very long his­to­ry of elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ments, which the site defines as “instru­ments that gen­er­ate sounds from a pure­ly elec­tron­ic source rather than elec­tro-mechan­i­cal­ly or elec­tro-acousti­cal­ly.”

clavecin_magnetique_02-6

Despite these rather strict tech­ni­cal para­me­ters, the site’s author Simon Crab admits that the bound­aries “do become blurred with, say, Tone Wheel Gen­er­a­tors and tape manip­u­la­tion of the Musique Con­crete era.” Then there are pre­cur­sor instru­ments that pre­date the dis­cov­ery and har­ness­ing of elec­tric­i­ty, such as the Clavecin Mag­ne­tique, above, invent­ed by Abbé Bertholon de Saint-Lazare in 1789, a “sim­ple instru­ment which pro­duced sounds by attract­ing met­al clap­pers to strike tuned bells by rais­ing and low­er­ing mag­nets oper­at­ed by a key­board.”

Klaviaturspharaphon

Yet the pri­ma­ry focus of 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music is a peri­od of growth and devel­op­ment from the late 1800s to the 1970s, when ear­ly dig­i­tal syn­the­siz­ers like the Fairlight (top) appeared. Thus, we should not expect here “an exhaus­tive list of recent com­mer­cial syn­the­siz­ers or soft­ware packages”—the stuff of mod­ern dance, pop, hip-hop, etc. Crab’s intent is aca­d­e­m­ic, “ency­clo­pe­dic, ped­a­gog­i­cal,” and pitched to musi­col­o­gists as well as “Syn­the­siz­er Geeks” like­ly to appre­ci­ate the niceties of the 1961 DIMI & Helsin­ki Elec­tron­ic Music Stu­dio.

But even non-aca­d­e­mics and non-geeks can learn much from the his­to­ry of such unusu­al instru­ments as the Klaviatur­sphäraphon (above), one of sev­er­al cre­ations of Ger­man com­pos­er Jörg Mager in his pur­suit of “a new type of utopi­an ‘free’ music by means of new elec­tron­ic cath­ode-ray musi­cal instru­ments.”

Amidst the weird obscu­ri­ties and high-con­cept musi­cal the­o­ry, you’ll also find old favorites that rev­o­lu­tion­ized pop music, like the Ham­mond Organ (see a mak­ing-of pro­mo­tion­al video above), the var­i­ous iter­a­tions of Moog syn­the­siz­ers, and of course the Fairlight CMI (short for Com­put­er Musi­cal Instru­ment). Invent­ed by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel in Aus­tralia in 1979, the Fairlight is affec­tion­ate­ly known as the “moth­er of all sam­plers,” and its tech­nol­o­gy jump­start­ed the rev­o­lu­tion in com­put­er music from the 80s to today. You can see Vogel demon­strate the first ver­sion of his Fairlight in this video, or—for a slight­ly less geeky intro—see Peter Gabriel demon­strate it below (or watch Her­bie Han­cock and Quin­cy Jones show you how it’s done in a clip from Sesame Street.)

The Ham­mond, Moogs, and Fairlight aside, very few of the instru­ments fea­tured on 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music had any kind of direct impact on pop­u­lar music. But many of them, like Hugh Le Caine’s 1945 Elec­tron­ic Sack­but, influ­enced the influ­encers, and they all rep­re­sent some evo­lu­tion­ary step for­ward, or side­ways, in the devel­op­ment of the sounds we hear all around us now in every pos­si­ble genre.

Addi­tion­al­ly, Crab’s his­tor­i­cal project explores what he calls “the dichoto­my between rad­i­cal cul­ture and rad­i­cal social change,” with dis­cus­sions on the links between Bol­she­vism and the avant-garde and mod­ernism and fascism—discussions of keen inter­est to cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans and crit­i­cal the­o­rists. Oh, and the name? “The project,” Crab explains, “was begun in 1996; con­sid­er­ing elec­tron­ic music start­ed around 1880 this was quite an accu­rate title for the time.” It’s now “a bit out of date but… some­thing of a brand-name.” We’ll for­give him this minor chrono­log­i­cal inac­cu­ra­cy for the tremen­dous ser­vice his open access ency­clo­pe­dia offers to schol­ars and enthu­si­asts alike. Explore it here.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet the “Tel­har­mo­ni­um,” the First Syn­the­siz­er (and Pre­de­ces­sor to Muzak), Invent­ed in 1897

Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music: 1983 Doc­u­men­tary Offers a Fun & Edu­ca­tion­al Intro­duc­tion to Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear the Great­est Hits of Isao Tomi­ta (RIP), the Father of Japan­ese Elec­tron­ic Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

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

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Stephen Fry Hates Dancing: Watch Fry’s Rant Against Dancing Get Turned into a Wonderful Interpretative Dance

in Comedy, Dance, Film | June 15th, 2016

Danc­ing, says Stephen Fry in a vehe­ment dia­tribe, is “not so much an accom­plish­ment as an afflic­tion.” He deliv­ers this pro­nounce­ment against danc­ing in one of his “pod­grams,” as he calls them, pod­casts in which the actor/writer/comedian/media per­son­al­i­ty rants, rhap­sodizes, and ram­bles on about his favorite—and least favorite—subjects. Danc­ing falls so far afoul of Stephen Fry that he devotes near­ly an entire episode to his hatred of this uni­ver­sal form of human phys­i­cal expres­sion.

“I hate doing it myself,” he begins, “which I can’t do any­way, but I loathe and detest the neces­si­ty to try.” He would deny oth­ers the plea­sure as well, at least in his com­pa­ny, of “that sloven­ly mix­ture of sex­u­al exhi­bi­tion­ism, strut­ting con­tempt, and repel­lant nar­cis­sism.” Is Fry a dance snob? Does he hate pop­u­lar dance but love ball­room and bal­let? No. “I hate it when it’s form­less, mean­ing­less bop­ping,” he seethes, “and I hate it even more when it’s for­mal and chore­o­graphed into gen­res like ball­room and schooled dis­co. Those cavort­ings are so embar­rass­ing and dread­ful as to force my hand to my mouth.”

We get it, Stephen, give it a rest! But no, he isn’t done. He goes on, for eleven whole min­utes, in the anti-danc­ing harangue above, excerpt­ed from his “Bored of the Dance.” How could one pos­si­bly respond to such a tor­rent of dis­gust and dis­dain? By danc­ing to it, of course. In the video at the top of the post, that’s exact­ly what L.A.-based dancer and film­mak­er Jo Roy does, for near­ly two and half minutes—enough time, I’m sure, to make Stephen Fry die of embar­rass­ment.

Maybe Fry has the good humor to appre­ci­ate this offen­sive rejoin­der, but I doubt he could stand to watch Roy twist, twirl, hop, pop, lock, and ges­ture expres­sive­ly to his vicious attack on the dance.

But there’s much more to Fry’s hatred of dance than cur­mud­geon­ly prud­ery. His anti-danc­ing man­i­festo is almost a digres­sion, real­ly, in the scope of his longer “pod­gram,” which you can read in full at his web­site. What he’s get­ting at is why he prefers clas­si­cal music to modern—and it is not, he insists, because of snob­bery, but because pop­u­lar music—“country, blues, rock and roll, gospel, zyde­co, jazz, swing, Tin Pan Alley, roots, blue­grass, hill­bil­ly… funk, soul, mo’town, rap, hip-hop, house, R and B”—is dance music. And Stephen Fry hates danc­ing. He is “aller­gic” to danc­ing.

“Clas­si­cal music,” on the oth­er hand, he says, “is there to be lis­tened to. It doesn’t make it bet­ter. I real­ly, real­ly mean that I do not believe that it makes it bet­ter, and I despise the snob­bery and igno­rance that is con­vinced oth­er­wise. But it does make it bet­ter suit­ed to Stephens.” As he says, quot­ing Riv­er Phoenix’s char­ac­ter in Sid­ney Lumet’s Run­ning on Emp­ty, “You can’t dance to Beethoven.” And that’s just fine with Stephen. By the end of his pro­lix apol­o­gy for his clas­si­cal pref­er­ence (not snobbery!)—which ranges in ref­er­ence from Lumet to Led Zep­pelin and Abba to Jane Austen—we believe him.

Stephen Fry hates danc­ing, per­haps more than any­one has ever hat­ed danc­ing. See him go on record again in the clip above from the BBC’s The One Show, and imag­ine how appalled he would be, if he could bring him­self to watch it, by the dance-off response at the top.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

Stephen Fry Launch­es Pin­dex, a “Pin­ter­est for Edu­ca­tion”

Stephen Fry Explains Human­ism in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos: Hap­pi­ness, Truth and the Mean­ing of Life & Death

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

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The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

in Animation, Education, History, Online Courses | June 14th, 2016

Not since the six­ties and sev­en­ties, with the black pow­er move­ment, flow­er­ing of Afro­cen­tric schol­ar­ship, and debut of Alex Haley’s Roots, nov­el and mini-series, has there been so much pop­u­lar inter­est in the his­to­ry of slav­ery. We have seen Roots remade; award-win­ning books like Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Nev­er Been Told climb best­seller lists; and The Freedman’s Bureau Project’s dig­i­ti­za­tion of 1.5 mil­lion slav­ery-era doc­u­ments gives cit­i­zen-schol­ars the tools to research the his­to­ry on their own.

In addi­tion to these devel­op­ments, Slate mag­a­zine has designed a mul­ti­part, mul­ti­me­dia course, “The His­to­ry of Amer­i­can Slav­ery,” as part of its online edu­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive, “Slate Acad­e­my.” Host­ed by Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and Rebec­ca Onion and fea­tur­ing guest his­to­ri­ans like Bap­tist, Hen­ry Louis Gates, Jr., Annette Gor­don-Reed, Eric Fon­er and more, this thor­ough sur­vey con­sists of a nine-part pod­cast, with copi­ous sup­ple­men­tary essays, book excerpts, and oth­er resources draw­ing on pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments and arti­facts. One sup­ple­ment, the ani­ma­tion above, shows us the “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Min­utes.”

Visu­al­iz­ing 315 years—“from the trade’s begin­ning in the 16th cen­tu­ry to its con­clu­sion in the 19th”—the ani­ma­tion dis­plays slave ships as increas­ing num­bers of black dots zip­ping across the Atlantic to the Amer­i­c­as from the African coasts. The dots “also cor­re­spond to the size of each voy­age. The larg­er the dot, the more enslaved peo­ple on board.” The Youtube video above pro­vides only a par­tial rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this impres­sive graph­ic. The full ani­ma­tion at Slate allows users to pause, click on indi­vid­ual dots, and get detailed infor­ma­tion, when avail­able, about the name of the ship, num­ber of enslaved peo­ple trans­port­ed, and points of ori­gin and entry in the New World.

In all, we see ani­mat­ed “more than 20,000 voy­ages cat­a­logued in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data­base.” And though we typ­i­cal­ly, with typ­i­cal U.S. solip­sism, think of Amer­i­can slav­ery as a most­ly North Amer­i­can phe­nom­e­non, the truth is quite the con­trary:

Of the more than 10 mil­lion enslaved Africans to even­tu­al­ly reach the West­ern Hemi­sphere, just 388,747—less than 4 per­cent of the total—came to North Amer­i­ca. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 mil­lion brought to Span­ish Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, the 4 mil­lion brought to British, French, Dutch, and Dan­ish hold­ings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 mil­lion brought to Brazil.

Ear­ly slave expe­di­tions were con­duct­ed by the Span­ish and Por­tuguese. “In the 1700s,” writes Bouie, “Span­ish trans­port dimin­ish­es and is replaced (and exceed­ed) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activ­i­ty. This hun­dred years—from approx­i­mate­ly 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Euro­peans send more than 7.2 mil­lion peo­ple to forced labor, dis­ease and death in the New World.” Sur­pris­ing­ly, Por­tu­gal remained one of the lead­ing nations among enslavers for most of the slave-trade’s his­to­ry.

The ani­ma­tion and short explana­to­ry essay by Bouie show us the stag­ger­ing his­tor­i­cal scope of the immense­ly prof­itable and pro­found­ly inhu­mane enter­prise that shaped not only the Unit­ed States, but also—in many ways more so—Central and South Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean. There is no his­to­ry of the Amer­i­c­as, and no growth of many of the colonies into wealthy, world-his­tor­i­cal nations, with­out slav­ery, nor can the wealth of Europe be in any way divorced from the prof­its of the slave trade and slave indus­try. Bouie and Onion explain in the short video above why they decid­ed to pro­duce the course.

For a sense of how his­to­ri­ans’ and the public’s under­stand­ing of slav­ery have changed over many decades—for all kinds of ide­o­log­i­cal reasons—read this excerpt from Baptist’s ground­break­ing book. As he says in an inter­view with Salon, most his­to­ries and recre­ations of the peri­od of enslave­ment attempt to hide the facts: “The resis­tance to reck­on­ing with the role of slav­ery in the tra­jec­to­ry that makes the U.S. the most pow­er­ful nation on earth, that’s real; that’s very, very deep…. What­ev­er we say about the role of the U.S. in glob­al his­to­ry, it’s absolute­ly clear to me that slav­ery is essen­tial to the rise of U.S. pow­er.” Slate’s series goes a long way toward telling us the true his­to­ry of slav­ery, from the mouths of writ­ers and schol­ars who engage with it dai­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

The “Slave Bible” Removed Key Bib­li­cal Pas­sages In Order to Legit­imize Slav­ery & Dis­cour­age a Slave Rebel­lion (1807)

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

Crowd­sourced Data­base Will Locate the Bur­ial Sites of For­got­ten US Slaves

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

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