Last night, Bruce Springsteen played a three-song acoustic set at a Hillary Clinton rally in Philadelphia, First came “Thunder Road,” then “Long Walk Home” and “Dancing in the Dark. At the 6:00 mark, the Boss makes his pitch for Hillary, whose candidacy is “based on intelligence, experience, preparation and an actual vision of America where everyone counts.” And the case against Donald, a “man whose vision is limited to little beyond himself, who has a profound lack of decency,” and puts his ego before American democracy itself. Amen, now let’s hear Bruce play.
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Just before his death this year, David Bowie revealed that what turned out to be his final album, Blackstar, was largely inspired by the experimental sounds of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. And just this past August, Bowie’s name appeared in the credits of the much-anticipated Blonde from Frank Ocean (as an “influence”). This melding of style and influence between rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B giants is a hallmark of 2016, but in 1975 such crossovers were rare. When David Bowie began working with Luther Vandross and Carlos Alomar on his Philly soul-inspired Young Americans album, “no other established rock musician had yet tried to do anything similar,” writes Douglas Wolk at Pitchfork, “and Bowie pulled it off in a way that not only didn’t seem crass but gave Luther Vandross his big break.”
The album’s first big single, “Fame,” (above) “landed Bowie on Soul Train,” Wolk notes, and though “he wasn’t the first white solo performer to play the show [that would be Dennis Coffey] he was damn close.” Bowie and Alomar’s hip confection later inspired George Clinton’s “Give Up the Funk,” and James Brown released an instrumental track in 1976 that was a “note-for-note duplicate of ‘Fame.’”
That kind of genuine admiration for Bowie’s deft take on funk and soul extended to ordinary fans as well. In a Q&A before his Soul Train performances, one audience member asked him “when did you actually start getting into soul music? You know, when did you start wanting to do soul music? I mean you’re doin’ it now!” Bowie gives a somewhat garbled answer, then launches into miming “Golden Years” (below).
Fansite Bowie Golden Years claims he “had been drinking to calm his nerves before his performance” and “spoke thickly with disconnected sentences.” We can see him flub a few lines as he lip-synchs. This was also the year Bowie presented the best female R&B vocal Grammy to Aretha Franklin apparently so high on coke that he didn’t remember being there afterward. A lot of Young Americans, especially “Fame,” addresses exactly the state he was in, “at a moment,” writes Wolk, “when [pop stardom] seemed likely to destroy him.” Bowie’s appearance on Soul Train coincided with the release of the “Golden Years” single from 1976’s Station to Station, the album on which he bridged his obsessions with soul music and krautrock, and adopted the persona of the Thin White Duke, “a nasty character indeed,” as he once said.
Vast numbers of Bowie fans consider his subsequent three albums, known as The Berlin Trilogy, to be the best work of the artist’s career, but for a brief moment in the mid-seventies, he was fully immersed in black American music, and those influences continued to inform his work through the decade and throughout the rest of his life. Bowie also gave back as much as he borrowed: “black radio stations that never thought twice about ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ or ‘Changes’ ate up ‘Fame’ and ‘Golden Years,’” writes Renée Graham at the Boston Globe, and artists like Clinton, Brown, and a few dozen future hip-hop DJs took note.
The quote inspired an anxious 1966 Time magazine cover, and a preachy 2016 movie franchise that works hard to inoculate the faithful against atheism’s threatening seductions: “God is Dead,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1882 book of incisive aphorisms, The Gay Science, and unwittingly coined a phrase now inseparable from 20th century culture wars. Of course, Nietzsche knew he was tossing a Molotov cocktail into the fraught culture wars of his own time, but he didn’t blow things up for the sheer pleasure of it. Instead, his blunt assertion lay at the heart of what Nietzsche saw as both a tremendous problem and a necessary realization.
To clarify, Nietzsche never meant to say that there had been some sort of god but that he had died in recent history. “Rather,” writes Scotty Hendricks at Big Think, “that our idea of one had” been rendered a relic of a pre-scientific age. The philosopher, “an atheist for his adult life,” found no place for Christian belief in a post-Enlightenment world: “Europe no longer needed God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the universe; philosophy and science were capable of doing that for us.” Accepting this brute fact can impose a heavy existentialist burden, as well as a heavy philosophical and ethical one: theological thinking is deeply embedded in Western philosophy and language, or as Nietzsche wrote, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”
A committed metaphysical naturalist, Nietzsche nonetheless saw that just as he was haunted by his strict religious upbringing, unable to easily rid himself of the traces of the Christian God, so too was European civilization haunted, particularly the bourgeois German society he often savaged. “God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!” The “shadow” of god trails our ideas about morality. Fearing to give up religious thought, we cling to it even in the absence of religion. What is to take its place, we wonder, except for widespread, destructive nihilism, a condition Nietzsche feared inevitable?
Nietzsche even saw scientific discourse as haunted by ideas of divine agency. “Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature,” he writes in The Gay Science, “There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word ‘accident’ have a meaning.” Far from pulling away the source of human meaning, however, Nietzsche seeks to liberate his readers from the idea that “death is opposed to life”—or that losing a cherished belief is a catastrophe.
On the contrary—as philosopher Simon Critchley aptly paraphrases in a brief video at Big Think— Nietzsche thought that belief in God made us “cringing, cowardly, submissive creatures,” and profoundly unfree. He believed we would continue to be so until we accepted our place in nature—no easy feat in an age so steeped in god-think. “When will we be done with our caution and care?” Nietzsche wondered, “When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? When will we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?”
For Nietzsche, the mass of people may never do so. He reserves his redemption for “the kind of people who alone matter; I mean the heroic.” Failing to become heroes, ordinary people in modernity are fated to go the way of “the Last Man,” a figure, writes Hendricks, “who lives a quiet life of comfort, without thought for individuality or personal growth.” A passive consumer. We can read Nietzsche’s philosophy as thoroughgoing elitism, or as a call to the reader to personal heroism. Either way, the anxiety he tapped into has persisted for 134 years, and shows little sign of abating for many people. For others, the nonexistence of a supreme being has no effect on their psychological health.
For billions of Daoists and Buddhists, for example, the problem has never existed. Nietzsche knew perhaps as much about Eastern religion as his contemporaries, much of his knowledge tainted by Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic take on Buddhism. “Compared to [Schopenhauer’s] world view,” writes Peter Abelson, “which is very severe, Buddhism seems almost cheerful.” Nietzsche could be equally severe, often as a matter of polemic, often as matter of mood, sometimes dismissing other religious systems with only slightly less contempt than he did Christianity. But he sums up one of his key atheistic values in a supposed quote from the Buddha: “Don’t flatter your benefactors! Repeat this saying in a Christian church, and it will instantly clear the air of everything Christian.” To live without belief in god, he suggests over and over, is to be fully free from servitude, and fully responsible for oneself.
On a road trip across America last year, I made a stop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and thus had the chance to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Though I’d already known something of the influential American painter’s life and work, I hadn’t understood the depth of her connection to, and the extent of the inspiration she drew from, the American Southwest. “This is O’Keeffe country,” says Gene Hackman, narrator of the thirteen-minute documentary Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art that screens perpetually at the museum but which you can also watch just above, “a land the painter made indelibly her own. Northern New Mexico transformed the artist’s work and changed her life.”
“As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” says the artist herself. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. There’s something in the air; it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.”
I have to agree with her; my own great American road trip showed me not only that the states really do look different from each other, but that New Mexico — which at first struck me as a Krazy Kat landscape come to life — looks most different of all. O’Keeffe first went to New Mexico for a year and a half in 1929, in her early forties, and returned each year over the next two decades, moving there permanently in 1949 and dying in Santa Fe in 1986, at the age of 98.
Though she remains best known in art history for her paintings of flowers that make their viewers see them in a way they’ve never seen flowers before, New Mexico introduced a whole new sensibility into O’Keeffe’s body of work. This holds especially true of her time at Ghost Ranch, whose location in an area called Piedra Lumbre, or “Shining Rock,” provided the painter with the strikingly colored cliffs and other almost unreal-looking natural forms that made their way into her equally sublime landscapes. “The best place in the world,” she called it, and if we can measure places by what they move human beings to create, her words hardly sound like an exaggeration.
The stunt, entitled “Face the Rear,” was pulled off by a handful of “agents”—a phrase coined by Improv Everywhere’s founder Charlie Todd to describe the poker-faced participants conjuring a secretly agreed upon alternate reality to confound (and not always delight) its target subject, along with unsuspecting bystanders.
It succeeds on our tacit understanding of what constitutes proper elevator behavior when others passengers are present. Left to our own devices, we can sing, dance, and let the mask of propriety slip in any number of ways. Once others enter? We share the space and face forward.
But what if everyone who enters inexplicably faces the back wall?
What would you do?
As hypotheticals go, this one’s not nearly so weighty as considering whether you’d have followed the script of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments or put your own family at risk by hiding Anne Frank.
Still…
For the subjects of Candid Camera’s elevator gag, the pressure to succumb to group think quickly overruled years of learned physical behavior.
I know a psychologist who works with teenagers who have autism who—he uses encouraging to learn skills that will allow them to be independent in the world to get out on their own. And one of his lessons with some of the teenagers is what to do in an elevator because he says that the typical kid that he works with, when the door is opened, and he’s been told that he should step inside, will step inside and face the back wall because nobody has told him that everybody else in the elevator is going to turn around and face the front doors…
Candid Camera’s stunts were always framed as comedy, though its creator, Funt, was well versed in psychology, having served as child psychologist Kurt Lewin’s research assistant at Cornell University.
Exposing basic human weaknesses such as ignorance or vanity
Using the element of surprise
Fulfilling fantasies
Placing something in a bizarre or inappropriate setting
“Face the Rear” was a case where conformity born of an unexpected reversal in normal procedure yielded laughs, at the gentle expense of a series of unsuspecting subjects, whose solo rides were disrupted by a bunch of Candid Camera operatives.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Just last month, the U.K. announced the so-called “Turing Law,” a policy U.K.’s justice minister Sam Gyimah describes as pardoning “people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of any crime today.” The law is named for Alan Turing, the brilliant gay computer scientist whose work on A.I. gave the artificial intelligence test its name.
Turing was also instrumental in breaking the Nazi Enigma code, and the Ministry of Justice’s press release identifies Turing only as an “Enigma codebreaker,” suggesting that his patriotic duty may have made him something of an official martyr; Turing was one thousands of men unjustly convicted over many decades. But “does pardoning those men unlucky enough to get caught,” asks Jonathan Cooper, “actually address the trauma to which the British state subjected LGBT people?”
I couldn’t possibly say. But the “unlucky ones” who were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for crimes of “gross indecency” have left often poignant records of their mistreatment, and of the psychological toll it took on them. Turing wrote a very pained letter to a friend, Norman Rutledge, after his conviction (hear Benedict Cumberbatch read it here).
Around sixty years earlier, an even more well-known convict, one of the first to be convicted of “gross indecency” laws, Oscar Wilde, left an even more profound expression of his emotional turmoil. Called De Profundis (from the depths) and addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, the hundred-page document, with its lengthy digressions and ruminations, cannot solely be read as a letter, although it contains a wealth of tender and angry expressions for Douglas.
De Profundis, writes Colm Tóibín, “cannot be read for its accurate account of their relationship, nor taken at its word.” This is in part because Wilde had no other choice but to write a letter, or write nothing at all. The succession of prisons in which he was held between 1895 and 1897 allowed no writing of plays, novels, or essays.
Over the last four months of Wilde’s incarceration, he and the governor of Reading prison came up with a scheme. Since “regulations did not specify how long a letter should be,” Wilde would be given pen and ink each day and be allowed compose correspondence as long as he liked. The letter would then be his personal property when he left. Despite its literary density, the letter remains, writes Tóibín, “one of the greatest love letters ever written.”
Reading prison has just been opened to the public for the first time this year. Since July, artists, writers, and performers have gathered with audiences inside the prison to celebrate and commune with the spirit of Wilde. Among the events have been readings of De Profundis by Tóibín, who read the letter in its entirely last month, as did Patti Smith.
At the top of the post, you can see an excerpt of Smith’s reading. “The edited version of De Profundis” from which she reads “was the first one to be published in 1905, in a limited edition of 200, five years after Wilde’s death.” In-between clips of her reading, there are interviews with a Reading prison caretaker and others, and voice-over narration telling us Wilde’s tragic story of imprisonment, as well as the general outlines of those who left no record of their persecution.
If you’ve kept up with Open Culture for a while, you know that Kurt Vonnegut could write a good letter, whether home from World War II, to high school students, to other writers, to John F. Kennedy, or to the future. You also know that Benedict Cumberbatch can give a good reading, whether of literature like The Metamorphosisand Moby Dickor more directly personal words from Alan Turing or a Guantánamo prisoner. It must have seemed like only a matter of time, then, before this master reader of letters (in the broad sense) took on the work of a master letter-writer, and here we have a clip of Cumberbatch at the Hay Festival 2014 reading a Vonnegut letter — and a particularly impassioned Vonnegut letter at that.
“I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school,” Vonnegut writes to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board at North Dakota’s Drake High School, who in 1973 ordered its copies of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and other novels burned for their “obscene language.” “Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.”
After assuring McCarthy that “my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news,” Vonnegut goes on to describe himself not as one of the “ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people” that McCarthy may imagine, but as a “large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work.”
And as for the products of that labor, “if you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.” Vonnegut acknowledges the school’s right to decide what books its students should read, “but it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.”
More that forty years have passed, and hardly anywhere does Slaughterhouse-Five now count as controversial reading material. But Vonnegut’s words to McCarthy, which you can read in full at Letters of Note web site (or in the Letters of Note book), still bear not just repeating but breathing new life into by a performer like Cumberbatch, one of the most respected of his generation. At the Letters Live Youtube channel, you can see his interpretation of more letters originally written by Sol LeWitt, William Safire, and other people known primarily for their work, but the reading of whose letters make them, in Vonnegut’s words, “very real.”
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