A quick heads up on a new open educational resource (OER) initiative…
Last week, Amazon announced that it will launch Amazon Inspire, “a free service for the search, discovery, and sharing of digital educational resources.” Once up and running this fall, Inspire will help educators quickly find resources they need in the classroom–for example, free lesson plans, teaching modules, worksheets, digital texts, and more. In large part, much of the content will be provided by schools and educators themselves. Then Amazon will use its services to organize–or even curate–the content, allowing instructors to find appropriate materials in an efficient way. In a press release, Amazon enumerated some of the services the platform will provide. It reads:
Smart search — With smart search, teachers can explore resources by grade level, standard or even from a particular district. Educators can filter search results using more than 10 criteria to find great resources that best fit their needs.
Collections — Educators can group resources into collections. They can describe the collection, curate the resources in it, recommend an order for going through the resources and share the collection with other teachers.
Simple upload — Amazon Inspire offers an easy to use and intuitive upload interface. Educators can drag and drop files they want to share, add basic metadata such as title, description, grade and subject, and publish the content on the service, all in a few minutes.
Customer reviews — Teachers can rate and review resources on Amazon Inspire, helping their colleagues around the country select the best resources for their needs.
Accessibility support — Amazon Inspire has built in accessibility features. For example, educators can navigate Amazon Inspire using popular screen readers and users are also able to indicate the accessibility features of resources they upload.
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!
The question of what an artist is willing to give up for her art is unanswerable until the moment of sacrifice arrives, and she must make a choice—safety, comfort, family, etc, or the leap into a creative endeavor whose outcome is uncertain? Then there are those artists—often just as talented and ambitious—who make these choices for other people’s art: the pop star’s dance troupe, the Broadway chorus members, and the rock and roll back-up singers, some of whom we got to know in the 2014 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, including the great Merry Clayton, who contributed her haunting gospel chops to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
For the working backup singers in the documentary, the choices between everyday security and creativity aren’t binary. They often present themselves instead as the kind of seemingly ordinary compromises we all make to some degree: do I go on this lucrative tour or attend my daughter’s recital? Do I turn down this job—and paycheck—or miss a birthday, a family dinner, a night’s sleep? Clayton had to make such a spur-of-the-moment decision late one night, while just getting ready for bed at her L.A. home. She got a call from producer Jack Nietzsche, she tells us in a clip from the documentary above, whom she remembers saying: “There’s a group of guys in town called… the Rolling… Somebodies… and they need somebody that will sing with them.”
Clayton had no idea who the Stones were, but at her husband’s urging, she took the gig. She was, after all, a pro. As Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on the Stones’ side of the story, Clayton “made her professional debut at age 14, recording a duet with Bobby Darin. She went on to work with The Supremes, Elvis Presley and many others, and was a member of Ray Charles’s group of backing singers, The Raelettes.” When she got to the studio, she had some reservations when Richards and Jagger asked her to sing “Rape, murder/It’s just a shot away,” but when the band explained the gist of the song, she said “Oh, okay, that’s cool,” and totally went for it, as you can hear in her isolated part above.
Determined to “blow them out of this room,” she did three increasingly intense takes, pitching it up an octave and pushing her voice till it cracked. The results give the song its chilling apocalyptic urgency, and they also came at a great personal cost to Clayton. Pregnant at the time of recording, “the physical strain of the intense duet with Mick Jagger,” notes the Los Angeles Times, “resulted in a miscarriage after the session.” As Mike Springer wrote in his post, the Stones’ song, and the entire Let It Bleed album, captured a particularly dark time for the band—as Brian Jones deteriorated into addiction and mental illness—and for the world, coming as it did after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedys and the escalation of the Vietnam War. “Gimme Shelter” also came to represent, Clayton told the L.A. Times, “a dark, dark period for me,” though she couldn’t have known the price she’d pay for that session when she agreed to do it.
But she “turned it around,” she says: “I took it as life, love and energy and directed it in another direction so it doesn’t really bother me to sing ‘Gimme Shelter’ now. Life is too short as it is and I can’t live on yesterday.” Watch her above take the lead in an incredibly powerful recent rendition of the song at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, CA. The performance further proves, I think, that, just as much as Richards’ guitar lines and Jagger’s lyrics, her voice played a crucial, starring role in the classic recording.
“We realized that an unconscious feminine electronic music Internationale has existed throughout the ages and we wondered whether a secret intuition might have gathered around shared research,” says Arandel in a translated interview. “Was their mutual desires achieved differently in different countries, with different tools in different timezones? The idea was to see what would happen if we gathered them in the same fictitious room for 45 minutes, and built a choir from all their productions.”
Arandel’s interviewer describes the musicians in the mix as coming from “very different musical horizons: we find academic learned musicians, research music composers and experimenters who used to do DIY works composed for advertising or television in a pop or easy listening context, some eccentric women like The Space Lady or Ruth White.” We also hear from famous names like Laurie Anderson and Wendy Carlos, and Delia Derbyshire. “What she accomplished is fascinating,” says Arandel of Derbyshire, “as is listening to her talk about her interesting work in documentaries,” and they’ve also included work from Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Eliane Radigue, and Pauline Oliveiros, subjects of the other documentaries we’ve posted here.
Electronic Ladyland drops you right into a retro-futuristic sonic landscape equally danceable and haunting, one with great variety as well as an unexpected consistency. It provides not just a kind of brief overview of what certain generations of female composers discovered with their new and then-strange electronic instruments and other devices, but one you may well want to keep in your library for frequent listening. It will also, according to Arandel, make you think: “There is an almost magic link between women and electronic music, from the 50’s / 60’s. Have you asked yourself the question of social, artistic, maybe magic reasons behind this link?” Hit the play button, and you may start. Find the list of tracks below.
1. Glynis Jones : Magic Bird Song (1976)
2. Doris Norton : Norton Rythm Soft (1986)
3. Colette Magny : « Avec » Poème (1966)
4. Daphne Oram : Just For You (Excerpt 1)
5. Laurie Spiegel : Clockworks (1974)
6. Pauline Oliveiros : Bog Bog (1966)
7. Megan Roberts — I Could Sit Here All Day (1977)
We’ve seen 1999 members of Choir! Choir! Choir! perform “When Doves Cry,” a moving, mass tribute to Prince. And they’re now back, 1500 strong, with Rufus Wainwright at the helm, singing Leonard Cohen’s beloved and oft-covered song, Hallelujah.” Performed at the Hearn Generating Station in Toronto, it must have been a wonderful thing to experience live in person.
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!
Everyone loves a love story—especially a love affair. We may think ourselves above a juicy scandal…, but who are we kidding? Tragically, however, for many famous people of the past—from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing to Tab Hunter—affairs could not only end careers and reputations, they could end lives. People who would much rather not have to hide their love have been forced to do so by rigid social propriety, religious moralism, and repressive law.
In other famous cases, however—like that of Virginia Woolf and her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West—an affair doesn’t end in tragedy but simply in a cooling of passions into a beautiful, lasting friendship.
While prudish outsiders may have been scandalized, neither Woolf’s nor Sackville-West’s husband found the relationship shocking. Leonard Woolf, his wife reported, regarded the affair as “rather a bore… but not enough to worry him.” Vita and her aristocratic husband Harold Nicolson, writes the Virginia Woolf blog, “were both bisexual and… had an open marriage.” Furthermore, the bohemian artistic circle in which the Woolfs moved—the Bloomsbury group—hardly troubled itself about such mundane goings-on as a steamy affair between two married women. So much for social scandal and soap-operatic theatrics.
But while their love was not forbidden, what passion they had while it lasted! One need only read their letters to each other, collected in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Many of those epistles document the heated period between the mid-1920s, when their affair began, and 1929, when it ended on amiable terms (in a friendship the letters document until Woolf’s suicide in 1941).
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” writes Sackville-West in a 1926 letter to Woolf, “You have broken down my defences. And I really don’t resent it… Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.” The brief, agonized letter captures the exquisite pangs and pinions of romantic infatuation. Woolf, in response, is the more reserved, but also the more colorful, with playful, cryptic images that hint at who knows what:
“Always, always, always I try to say what I feel,” she writes, “I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a longeared owl and ass…. Open the top button of your jersey and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same—”
In her diary, Woolf described Sackville-West on their first meeting in 1923 as “a pronounced sapphist…. Snob as I am, I trace her passions – 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.” Woolf was ten years older than Sackville-West, and seemed to feel inferior to her lover, comparing herself unfavorably in a sexy 1925 diary entry:
Vita shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks…pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung…There is her maturity and full-breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood…her in short (what I have never been) a real woman.
The two had other lovers, and Woolf, “as the older woman in the relationship,” the Virginia Woolf blog writes, felt “unwanted and dowdy” as Sackville-West strayed. But though the love affair ended, it not only produced a close friendship, but a novel, Woolf’s Orlando, which Vita’s son Nigel called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
Their love and friendship will also soon produce a film, Vita and Virginia, directed by Chanya Button and written by Dame Eileen Atkins. And, if you were wondering what Vita and Virginia’s passionate exchanges would sound like in a 21st century idiom, have a look at “The Collected Sexts of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West” at The New Yorker. The eloquence of an epistolary romance may be a thing of the past, but email and text have their own efficient charms:
Vita: Hey girl Virginia: Hey Vita: Sup? Virginia: In bed Vita: Hot Virginia: Come visit? Vita: Mmm can’t. Have a toothache.
Cute. But what could ever replace one of Woolf’s last letters to her friend and former lover, written in 1940 while Britain endured German air bombardments: “there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say– except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest—let me have a line…You have given me such happiness….”
Elie Wiesel not only survived the Holocaust but went on to live a full life with a prolific career, the fruits of which included 57 books, most famously 1960’s Night, a short and formally distinctive work drawn from his experience in the concentration camps. “The only role I sought was that of witness,” he wrote in 1978. “I believed that having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life.” And even before his death this past Saturday at age 87, the Nobel Peace Prize winner had learned much about what it means to come to life’s end.
“The body is not eternal, but the idea of the soul is,” Wiesel writes in Open Heart, the 2012 memoir he wrote after undergoing another brush with death, late in life, which necessitated emergency open-heart surgery. “The brain will be buried, but memory will survive it.” Oprah Winfrey reads those words back to him in an interview from that same year, a clip from which you can see above. “Now that you’ve had all this time to think about it,” she asks, “what do you think happens when we die?”
“Somehow,” he replies, “I will become a child. Childhood, for me, is a theme in all my work. Will I meet my parents again? I want to know that.” Winfrey expresses special interest in the visions of his own family he had in the hospital, such as that of his father who had died at Buchenwald, just weeks before the camp’s liberation, and the sight of whose face he had previously glimpsed, just for a moment, during his Nobel award ceremony in 1986. His father’s second posthumous appearance made him think death might not be so bad after all, but “that is the danger. You feel it’s so good to be with the dead, then why not join them?”
But Wiesel, who had done so much already, felt he “had more and more things to do. I haven’t even begun.” Indeed, continuing in his capacity as the “Conscience of the World,” he received four more awards and honors between 2012 and 2014, made many appearances, and surely wrote pages that will see publication in the years, or even decades, to come. But for all his accomplishments, he himself found nothing more unusual, as he said to Winfrey in a previous talk sixteen years ago, than his own normality, “that I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal.”
Why not liberate yourself from the tyranny of the traditional by spending a portion of the day indoors, communicating affection to your clothing, as organizational expert, Marie Kondo, author of the best selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, does in the instructional video, above?
Most of us who dwell in small New York City apartments are already familiar with her teachings. Hers is a take-no-prisoners approach to clutter control. Any item that doesn’t “spark joy”—be it a pair of stretched-out sweatpants, a long ago graduation present, a ream of children’s artwork, or a nearly full bottle of slightly funky-smelling conditioner—must be discarded immediately.
(Note to self: ask Mom whatever became of my Spirit of ’76 watercolor. She had it framed because it won a prize. Best Bicentennial Observance by a 4th Grader or some such. Things like that don’t just vanish into thin air, unless…)
The total makeover Kondo proposes is an arduous, oft-emotional, week-long task. Don’t blow your entire July 4th holiday trying to complete the job.
Instead, take an hour or two to refold your clothes. New Yorkers’ drawers are where Kondo’s influence is felt most deeply. Whether or not we subscribe to her practice of treating each garment like a treasured friend, our underwear definitely has more room to breathe, when not on active duty.
See below for a graphic demonstration of how to best fold shirts, pants, and several species of undies, using Kondo’s Kon-Marie method.
And don’t be tempted to decamp to the backyard barbecue when you run across challenges like overalls or baby onesies. Watch below as Kondo tackles a shirt with kimono sleeves, a pair of Edo-style mata hike pants, and a sweater with a marked resemblance to a Thneed.
If you aren’t seriously disturbed, even alarmed, that we in the U.S. have a presidential candidate from a major political party who succeeds by whipping up xenophobic fervor and telling us the country must not only reinstitute torture, but must do “the unthinkable”… well…. I don’t really know what to say to you. Perhaps more symptom than cause of a global turn toward tribal hatred, the GOP candidate has lent his name to a phenomenon characterized by cultish devotion to an authoritarian strongman, serial falsehood, and easy, uncritical scapegoating. We needn’t look far back in time to see the historical analogues, whether in the early 20th century, at the end of the 19th, or during any number of historical moments before and after.
We also needn’t look very far back to find a history of resistance to authoritarian bigotry, and not only from Civil Rights campaigners and leftists, but also, as you can see above, from the U.S. War Department. In 1947, the Department released the short propaganda film, “Don’t Be a Sucker!”, aimed at middle-class American Joes. Shot at Warner Studios, the film opens with some typical noirish crime scenarios, complete with convincingly noir lighting and camera angles, to visually set up the character of the “sucker” who gets taken in by sinister but seductive characters—“people who stay up nights trying to figure out how to take away” what the everyman has. What do naïve potential marks in this analogy have to lose? American plenty: “plenty of food, big factories to make things a man can use, big cities to do the business of a big country, and people, lots of people.”
“People,” the narrator says, working the farms and factories, digging the mines and running the businesses: “all kinds of people. People from different countries with different religions, different colored skins. Free people.” Is this disingenuous? You bet. We’re told this aggregate of people is “free to vote”—and we know this to be largely untrue in practice for many, necessitating the Voting Rights Act almost twenty years later. Free to “pick their own jobs”? Employment discrimination, segregation, and sexism effectively prevented that for millions. But the sentiments are noble, even if the facts don’t fully fit. As our average Joe wanders along, contemplating his advantages, he happens upon a reactionary streetcorner demogague haranguing against foreigners, African-Americans, Catholics, and Freemasons (?) on behalf of “real Americans.” Sounds plenty familiar.
The voice of reason comes from a naturalized Hungarian professor who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin and who explains to our everyman the strategy of fanatics and fascists—divide and rule. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” says the wise professor, “always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody’s going to get something out of it. And it isn’t going to be you.” The remainder of the film mostly consists of the Hungarian professor’s recollections of how the Nazis won over ordinary Germans.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” uses a clever rhetorical strategy, appealing to the self-interest and vanity of the everyman while couching that appeal in egalitarian values. The very recent historical example of fascist Europe carries significant weight, where too often today that history gets treated like a joke, turned into crude and muddled memes. This film would have had real impact on the viewing audience, who would have seen it before their feature in theaters across the country.
It’s worth noting that this film came out during a period of increasing American prosperity and comparative economic equity. The jobs “Don’t Be a Sucker!” lists with pride have disappeared. Today’s everyman, we might say, has even more reason for susceptibility to the demagogue’s appeals. The Internet Archive notes an irony here “in the light of Cold War anti-Communist politics, which really came into their own in the year this film was made.” The streetcorner populist calls to mind people like Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover (and he looks like George Wallace)—powerful government authorities who cast suspicion on every movement for Civil Rights and social equality.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” may seem like an outlier, but it’s reminiscent of another piece of patriotic, anti-racist-and-religious-bigotry propaganda—the Superman cartoon above, which first appeared in 1949, distributed to school children as a book cover by something called The Institute for American Democracy. You may have seen versions of a full-color poster, reprinted in subsequent years. Here, Superman expresses the same egalitarian values as “Don’t Be a Sucker!” only instead of calling racism a con-job, he calls it “Un-American,” using the favorite denunciation of HUAC and other anti-Communist groups.
History and the present moment may often prove otherwise—showing us just how very American racism and bigotry can be, but so too are numerous counter-movements on the left and, as these examples show, from more conservative, establishment corners as well.
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.
#/media/File:Sprit_of_%2776.2.jpeg){kind=link}