Today marks what would have been David Bowie’s 70th birthday. And you can commemorate that bittersweet occasion by streaming his brand new EP called No Plan. It features four tracks–the last four songs Bowie ever recorded.
Listeners might be familiar with the first track, “Lazarus.” But not so much with the remaining three–“No Plan,” “Killing a Little Time” and “When I Met You.” You can stream the EP for free on Spotify below. (If you need their software, download a copy here.) You can also purchase copies of No Plan on Amazon and iTunes. Watch the video for “No Plan” above.
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 romantic allure of the ghostly, abandoned theme park is difficult to resist. Case in point: The Land of Oz, above, a not-entirely-defunct attraction nestled atop North Carolina’s Beech Mountain.
Its road was far from smooth, even before urban explorers began filching its 44,000 custom-glazed yellow bricks, eventually forcing management to repave with painted stand issue models.
One of its two founders died of cancer six months before opening, and later a fire destroyed the Emerald City and a collection of memorabilia from the 1939 MGM film.
Crippled by the gas crisis and insurmountable competition from Disney World and its ilk, the Land of Oz closed in 1980, thus sparing it the indignities of Yelp reviews and discerning child visitors whose expectations have been formed by CGI.
Its shuttering attracted another kind of tourist: the camera-toting, fence hopping connoisseurs of what is now known as “ruin porn.”
An isolated, abandoned theme park based on the Wizard of Oz? Could there be a holier grail?
Only trouble is…the Land of Oz didn’t stay shuttered. Local real estate developers cleaned it up a bit, luring overnight visitors with rentals of Dorothy’s house. They started a tradition of reopening the whole park for one weekend every October, and demand was such that June is now Land of Oz Family Fun Month. The International Wizard of Oz Club held its annual convention there in 2011. How abandoned can it be?
And yet, unofficial visitors, sneaking onto the grounds off-season, insist that it is. I get it. The quest of adventure, the desire for beautiful decay, the bragging rights… After photographing the invariably leaf strewn Yellow Brick Road, they turn their lenses to the lumpy-faced trees of the Enchanted Forest.
Yes, they’re creepy, but it’s less from “abandonment” than a low-budget approximation by the hands of artists less expert than those of the original.
It’s safe to presume that any leaves and weeds littering the premises are merely evidence of changing seasons, rather than total neglect.
What I want to know is, where’s the sex, drugs & rock’n’roll evidence of local teens’ off-season blowouts—no spray painted f‑bombs? No dead soldiers? Security must be pretty tight.
If creepy’s what the perpetuators of the abandonment myth crave, they could content themselves with the amateur footage above, shot by a visiting dad in 1970.
Those costumes! The scarecrow and the tin man in particular… Buzzfeed would love ’em, but it’s hard to imagine a millennial tot going for that mess. Their Halloween costumes were 1000 times more accurate.
(In interviews, the one generation who can remember the Land of Oz in its prime is a loyal bunch, recalling only their long ago sense of wonder and excitement. Ah, life before Betamax…)
The documentary video below should settle the abandonment myth once and for all. It opens not in Kansas, but New York City, as a carload of young performers heads off for their annual gig at the Land of Oz. They’re conversant in jazz hands and certain Friends of Dorothy tropes, surely more so than the local players who originally staffed the park. Clearly, these ringers were hired to turn in credible impersonations of the characters immortalized by Ray Bolger, Burt Lahr, and Judy Garland. Presumably, their updated costumes also passed muster with Autumn at Oz’s savvy child attendees.
Still craving that ruin porn? Business Insider published Seph Lawless’ photos of “the crumbling park” here.
If you’d prefer to rubberneck at a truly abandoned theme park, check out the Carpetbagger’s video tour of Cave City, Kentucky’s Funtown Mountain. (Though be forewarned. It was sold at auction in April 2016 and plans are afoot to reengineer it as as “an epic playground of wonder, imagination, and dreams.”)
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.
I live in Silicon Valley, which operates on the assumption that there’s no problem that technology can’t solve. It suffuses our culture here, and sometimes we pay the price for this technocratic utopianism. Case in point: Right now, I’m sending my kid to a public school in Mountain View, CA–the home of Google–where the administrators have upended the entire sixth grade math program. Last August, they abolished the traditional math program–you know, where students get to sit in a classroom and learn from a trained and qualified math teacher. And instead the administrators asked students to learn math mainly from a computer program called Teach to One. Run by a venture called New Classrooms, Teach to One promises to let each student engage in “personalized learning,” where a computer program gauges each student’s knowledge of math, then continually customizes the math education that students receive. It all sounds like a great concept. Bill Gates has supposedly called it the “Future of Math Education.” But the rub is this: Teach to One doesn’t seem ready for the present. And our kids are paying the price.
If you read the article, here’s what you will learn. The Mountain View school district apparently budgeted $521,000 to implement and operate this new-fangled math program in two local schools (Graham and Crittenden Middle Schools). Had they adequately beta tested the program beforehand, the school district might have discovered that Teach to One teaches math–we have observed–in a disjointed, non-linear and often erratic fashion that leaves many students baffled and disenchanted with math. The program contains errors in the math it teaches. Parents end up having to teach kids math at home and make up for the program’s deficiencies. And all the while, the math teachers get essentially relegated to “managing the [Teach to One] program rather than to providing direct instruction” themselves.
By October, many parents started to register individual complaints with the school district. By December, 180 parents signed a letter meticulously outlining the many problems they found with the Teach to One program. (You can read that letter here.) When the school later conducted a survey on Teach to One (review it here), 61% of the parents “said they do not believe the program matches the needs of their children,” and test scores show that this crop of sixth graders has mastered math concepts less well than last year’s. (Note: there was a big decrease in the number of kids who say they love math, and conversely a 413% increase in the number of kids who say they hate math.) Given the mediocre evaluation, the parents have asked for one simple thing–the option to let their kids learn math in a traditional setting for the remainder of the year, until it can be demonstrated that Teach to One can deliver better results. (Teach to One would ideally continue as a smaller pilot, where the kinks would get worked out.) So far the school district, headed by Ayindé Rudolph, has continued to champion the Teach to One program in finely-spun bureaucratic letters that effectively disregard parental concerns and actual data points. But the schools have now agreed to let students spend 5o% of their time learning math with Teach to One, and the other 50% learning math from a qualified teacher. Why the impractical half measure? I can only speculate.
Update: It was announced on January 12 that the Mountain View will discontinue the Teach to One math pilot effective immediately. Patronizingly, New Classrooms has attributed the scrapping of the pilot to a communication problem. “There was a subset of parents of higher-achieving students who didn’t fully understand how Teach to One operated and how much it benefited their children,” Joel Rose is quoted as saying in The Wall Street Journal. Once again, I’d refer you back to the actual data collected by our schools. It speaks for itself.
Great Articles by The Mountain View Voice: Mountain View’s local paper has done some excellent reporting on this fiasco. I would encourage you to read them all.
A few years ago we featured The Shock of the New, respected critic Robert Hughes’ eight-part documentary series on modern art, which since its first broadcast in 1980 has stood as a signal achievement in intelligent television. But Hughes also had a hand in the development of, shall we say, unintelligent television, having two years earlier co-hosted the premier of ABC’s still-running newsmagazine show 20/20. His newly (and posthumously) published volume of essays and autobiographical writings The Spectacle of Skill devotes an entire chapter to the story of this televisual event, much ballyhooed in promos like the one just above.
“I was hired in some fit of aberration,” Hughes wrote in a 1995 New York Review of Books piece that would become the chapter’s basis. “My fellow anchor was the now, alas, late Harold Hayes, who had been a brilliant editor of Esquire but, like me, proved to have little talent for sitting in front of a TV camera with makeup all over his face and reciting lines that had been written for him by other people.” Their producer made it clear that “neither Hayes nor I was to have any say in what we would say,” that “the stories had to have an ‘interesting’ angle; mere news value would not do,” and that “the audience out there could be assumed to have the attention span of caddis flies.”
Viewers who tuned in to the very first 20/20 on the evening of June 6th, 1978 were treated to cultural announcements such as that of Saturday Night Fever’s position at the top of the record charts; an interview with Flip Wilson offering “a long stretch of pushy bathos” about the comedian’s family troubles; jokes about Pet Rocks; a young Geraldo Rivera, “fired up with sympathy,” exposing the use of live rabbits to train racing greyhounds (the unmoved Hughes remembers his childhood in Australia, where “the rabbit is just an agricultural pest, a little higher on the ladder of existence than a cane toad or a cockroach”); a vocabulary-building “absurdity” after each commercial break; and, bizarrely, a clay-animation Jimmy Carter singing “Georgia on My Mind.”
“All across America the next morning there was a collective exhalation of rage from TV critics about the trivialization of news,” recalls Hughes. “In addition to being pointless, the new ABC news magazine is dizzyingly absurd,” wrote the New York Times’ John J. O’Connor. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales likened it to “being trapped for an hour at the supermarket checkout counter and having to read the front pages of blabby tabloids over and over again,” though he did praise its “slightly more respectable” examination of the then- and current California governor Jerry Brown’s bid for the White House. Carl Sagan, who in 1980 would make his own monumental contribution to intelligent television with Cosmos, also showed up as a promising presence on the correspondent roster.
Anyone watching today will, at least, appreciate the relative brevity and infrequency of the advertisements. They, along with much else seen and everything derided in 20/20’s premiere, would grow enormously more bothersome as the decades wore on, a fact that ultimately made Hughes realize that he had, “however briefly and ineptly, been part of the avant-garde of network television. The first issue of 20/20 was unquestionably one of the worst turkeys ever seen on an American network, and yet it was curiously prophetic, and critics like Tom Shales who saw in it an omen of the future of the TV news-magazine program were not wrong.”
Soon all of America, and much of the rest of the world, would find itself settling for the caliber of viewing material set by the first 20/20, with “its sentimentality, its farcical chumminess, its dismal fixation on celebrity, its kitschy mock humanism, its voyeurism, and above all its belief that reality must always take the backseat to entertainment.” Hughes, in the NYRB essay and in the new book, sums up this regrettable de-evolution with the words of Ovid. Video meliora proboque: deteriora sequor: “I see better things and approve them: I go for the worse.”
Last week we highlighted for you 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media. Little did we know that we were just scratching the surface of the free ebooks O’Reilly Media has to offer.
If you head over to this page, you can access 243 free ebooks covering a range of different topics. Below, we’ve divided the books into sections (and provided links to them), indicated the number of books in each section, and listed a few attractive/representative titles.
You can download the books in PDF format. An email address–but no credit card–is required. Again the complete list is here.
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!
In 1968, both Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, and U.S. cities erupted in riots; anti-war demonstrators chanted “the whole world is watching” as police beat and tear-gassed them in Chicago outside the Democratic convention. George Wallace led a popular political movement of Klan sympathizers and White Citizens Councils in a vicious backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights movement; and the vengeful, paranoid Richard Nixon was elected president and began to intensify the war in Vietnam and pursue his program of harassment and imprisonment of black Americans and anti-war activists through Hoover’s FBI (and later the bogus “war on drugs”).
Good times, and given several pertinent similarities to our current moment, it seems like a year to revisit if we want to see recent examples of organized, determined resistance by a very beleaguered Left. We might look to the Black Panthers, the Yippies, or Students for a Democratic Society, to name a few prominent and occasionally affiliated groups. But we can also revisit a near-revolution across the ocean, when French students and workers took to the Paris streets and almost provoked a civil war against the government of authoritarian president Charles de Gaulle. The events often referred to simply as Mai 68 have haunted French conservatives ever since, such that president Nicolas Sarkozy forty years later claimed their memory “must be liquidated.”
May 1968, wrote Steven Erlanger on the 40th anniversary, was “a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of de Gaulle took fright.” As loose coalitions in the U.S. pushed back against their government on multiple fronts, the Paris uprising (“revolution” or “riot,” depending on who writes the history) brought together several groups in common purpose who would have otherwise never have broken bread: “a crazy array of leftist groups,” students, and ordinary working people, writes Peter Steinfels, including “revisionist socialists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, surrealists and Marxists. They were anticommunist as much as anticapitalist. Some appeared anti-industrial, anti-institutional, even anti-rational.”
“Be realistic: Demand the impossible!” was one of the May movement’s slogans. A great many more slogans and icons appeared on “extremely fine examples of polemical poster art” like those you see here. These come to us via Dangerous Minds, who explain:
The Atelier Populaire, run by Marxist artists and art students, occupied the École des Beaux-Arts and dedicated its efforts to producing thousands of silk-screened posters using bold, iconic imagery and slogans as well as explicitly collective/anonymous authorship. Most of the posters were printed on newssheet using a single color with basic icons such as the factory to represent labor and a fist to stand for resistance.
The Paris uprisings began with university students, protesting same-sex dorms and demanding educational reform, “the release of arrested students and the reopening of the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris,” notes the Global Nonviolent Action Database. But in the following weeks the “protests escalated and gained more popular support, because of continuing police brutality.” Among the accumulating democratic demands and labor protests, writes Steinfels, was “one great fear… that contemporary capitalism was capable of absorbing any and all critical ideas or movements and bending them to its own advantage. Hence, the need for provocative shock tactics.”
This fear was dramatized by Situationists, who—like Yippies in the States—generally preferred absurdist street theater to earnest political action. And it provided the thesis of one of the most radical texts to come out of the tumultuous times, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. In a historical irony that would have Debord “spinning in his grave,” the Situationist theorist has himself been co-opted, recognized as a “national treasure” by the French government, writes Andrew Gallix, and yet, “no one—not even his sworn ideological enemies—can deny Debord’s importance.”
The same could be said for Michel Foucault, who found the events of May ’68 transformational. Foucault pronounced himself “tremendously impressed” with students willing to be beaten and jailed, and his “turn to political militancy within a post-1968 horizon was the chief catalyst for halting and then redirecting his theoretical work,” argues professor of philosophy Bernard Gendron, eventually “leading to the publication of Discipline and Punish,” his groundbreaking “genealogy” of imprisonment and surveillance.
Many more prominent theorists and intellectuals took part and found inspiration in the movement, including André Glucksmann, who recalled May 1968 as “a moment, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury.… a ‘cadaver,’ from which everyone wants to rob a piece.” His comments sum up the general cynicism and ambivalence of many on the French left when it comes to May ’68: “The hope was to change the world,” he says, “but it was inevitably incomplete, and the institutions of the state are untouched.” Both student and labor groups still managed to push through several significant reforms and win many government concessions before police and de Gaulle supporters rose up in the thousands and quelled the uprising (further evidence, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet argued this month, that “authoritarianism is the norm in France”).
The iconic posters here represent what Steinfels calls the movement’s “utopian impulse,” one however that “did not aim at human perfectibility but only at imagining that life could really be different and a whole lot better.” These images were collected in 2008 for a London exhibition titled “May 68: street Posters from the Paris Rebellion,” and they’ve been published in book form in Beauty is in the Street: A Visual Record of the May ’68 Paris Uprising. (You can also find and download many posters in the digital collection hosted by the Bibliotheque nationale de France.)
Perhaps the co-option Debord predicted was as inevitable as he feared. But like many radical U.S. movements in the sixties, the coordinated mobilization of huge numbers of people from every strata of French society during those exhilarating and dangerous few weeks opened a window on the possible. Despite its short-lived nature, May 1968 irrevocably altered French civil society and intellectual culture. As Jean-Paul Sartre said of the movement, “What’s important is that the action took place, when everybody believed it to be unthinkable. If it took place this time, it can happen again.”
“It’s nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. It was a joke. I wanted to make a parody of Jean Cocteau’s first film. That’s all. We shot it in two hours, for fun, one Sunday afternoon. It has no sort of meaning.”–Orson Welles
The Hearts of Age may have indeed been a lark when it was shot in 1934, but given that one of the two teenagers went on to direct Citizen Kane seven years later, no doubt it’s worth a second look.
Like all things Welles, his 19-year-old life was much more fantastic than most high school grads. Though he and school chum William Vance shot the film at their alma mater, the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, Welles had graduated three years earlier. According to Senses of Cinema, Welles
had spurned a scholarship to Harvard University, visited Ireland on a sketching tour only to talk his way into performing for the Dublin Gate Theatre, written detective stories for pulp magazines, and travelled through London, Paris, the Ivory Coast, Morocco and Seville, where he spent an afternoon as a professional bullfighter. After returning to America in 1933, introductions to Thornton Wilder and Alexander Wolcott led to a position in Katherine Cornell’s touring repertory company. Welles toured with the Cornell company from November 1933 to June 1934, appearing in three plays and making his New York debut as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.
Back in Woodstock to sponsor a theater festival at the school, Welles and Vance borrowed a camera from their old principal and shot this eight minute short.
William Vance, Welles’ friend and co-director, kept the only copy until he donated it to the Greenwich Public Library, where film historian and writer Joseph McBride discovered it in 1969. McBride then wrote about it in Film Quarterly and the secret juvenilia of Welles was out of the closet. (“Why did Joe have to discover that film?” Welles was quoted as telling his cameraman).
Never entered into copyright, it’s a public domain film and so has been available on various platforms for years. (I saw it in the ‘90s as part of a “before they were famous” short film festival with student work by Lynch, Scorsese, and Spielberg).
The short indeed looks like a parody of surrealist film, a bit like Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet as Welles intended, but with a bit of René Clair’s Entr’Acte and some good ol’ Eisensteinian montage thrown in.
Welles appears in heavy stage makeup as a rich, older man in a top hat and cane, looking not too far from the elderly Charles Foster Kane. His then girlfriend and future first wife Virginia Nicholson plays an old hag who rides forlornly back and forth on a bell. There’s a clown in blackface played by Paul Edgerton, an Indian in a blanket (co-director William Vance in a cameo) and a Keystone cop, which some websites say is also Nicholson. But Charles “Blackie” O’Neal is also credited as a performer without a role and he indeed may be the actor playing the Keystone Cop. (O’Neal, by the way, would later be father to Ryan O’Neal.)
Although he dismissed the film, Welles’ preoccupations with death are here, right at the beginning of his career, with suicides, coffins, skulls, and gravestones featuring prominently. And though it’s no masterpiece and honestly a bit of a mess, it shows a director interested in experimenting with film, with humor, and the wonders of makeup.
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.
“Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. ‘It is possible,’ says the gatekeeper, ‘but not now.’ ” So begins Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a short story first published in 1915 but still resonant just over a century later.
It takes no great intimacy with the work of the man who also wrote the likes of “The Metamorphosis” and The Castle, which ultimately drove his name into the lexicon as a byword for absurdly intransigent bureaucracy and the irony of struggling against it, to figure out whether the man ever does get to see the law. Most readers now first encounter the text of “Before the Law” when they read a priest telling it to Josef K, protagonist of Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel The Trial. Some see it before they read it in the form of thepinscreen animation (by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, the masters of that recherché art) that precedes Orson Welles’ polarizing cinematic adaptation of the book.
A few years ago, the Barcelona-based animator Alessandro Novelli created his own update of the parable, The Guardian. Using a mixture of two- and three-dimensional animation in a stark, line-drawn-looking black and white, it envisions the man (sporting a thoroughly modern beard and pair of severely tapered pants) and his journey through mountains, woods, and cities to the gate. Once he reaches it, his lifelong standoff with the gatekeeper opens up a number of unexpected visual realms, taking us atop a chessboard, inside an alarm clock, beside falling dominos, deep underwater, and up into the night sky.
Unlike Alexeieff and Parker’s straight adaptation, The Guardian extends the story: Kafka’s stern sentinel and his utterly impassable portal turn into a challenge aimed more at the man’s fortitude. “Wherever it is you go to now,” says the gatekeeper after he has finally given the aged and weakened protagonist his chance, “remember this gate, and that this gate existed and was opened just for you. Yet you never found the strength to cross it.” In Kafka’s original, when the gate closes, it closes with an existential finality; in Novelli’s it re-opens “for the ones who will come. For the ones who will be brave.”
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.
