John Lennon Extols the Virtues of Transcendental Meditation in a Spirited Letter Written to a Beatles Fan (1968)

in Letters, Music, Religion | April 18th, 2018

An Indi­an guru trav­els to the West with teach­ings of enlight­en­ment, world peace, and lib­er­a­tion from the soul-killing mate­ri­al­ist grind. He attracts thou­sands of fol­low­ers, some of them wealthy celebri­ties, and founds a com­mer­cial empire with his teach­ings. No, this isn’t the sto­ry of Bhag­wan Shree Rajneesh, the head of the reli­gious move­ment in Wild Wild Coun­try. There was no mirac­u­lous city in the Ore­gon wilds or fleet of Lear­jets and Rolls Royces. No stock­pile of auto­mat­ic weapons, planned assas­si­na­tions, or mass poi­son­ings. Decades before those strange events, anoth­er teacher, Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi inspired mass devo­tion among stu­dents around the world with the peace­ful prac­tice of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion.

Rolling Stone’s Claire Hoffman—who grew up in a TM com­mu­ni­ty—writes of the move­ment with ambiva­lence. For most of his dis­ci­ples, he was a “Wiz­ard of Oz-type char­ac­ter,” she says, dis­tant and mys­te­ri­ous. But much of what we pop­u­lar­ly know about TM comes from its most famous adher­ents, includ­ing Jer­ry Sein­feld, Katy Per­ry, David Lynch, the Beach Boys, and, of course, The Bea­t­les, who famous­ly trav­eled to India in 1968, med­i­tat­ed with Mia Far­row, Dono­van, and Mike Love, and wrote some of their wildest, most inven­tive music after a cre­ative slump fol­low­ing the huge suc­cess of Sgt. Pepper’s.

“They stayed in Rishikesh,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, “a small vil­lage in the foothills of the Himalayas, con­sid­ered the cap­i­tal of yoga. Immersed in this peace­ful com­mu­ni­ty and nur­tured by an inten­sive dai­ly med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, the Fab Four under­went a cre­ative growth spurt—the weeks at Rishikesh were among their most fer­tile song­writ­ing and com­pos­ing peri­ods, pro­duc­ing many of the songs on The White Album and Abbey Road.” Unlike most of the Maharishi’s fol­low­ers, The Bea­t­les got a per­son­al audi­ence. The Indi­an spir­i­tu­al teacher “helped them through the shock” of their man­ag­er Bri­an Epstein’s death, and helped them tap into cos­mic con­scious­ness with­out LSD.

They left on a sour note—there were alle­ga­tions of impro­pri­ety, and Lennon, being Lennon, got a bit nasty, orig­i­nal­ly writ­ing The White Album’s “Sexy Sadie” with the lyrics “Maharishi—what have you done? You made a fool of every­one.” But before their falling out with TM’s founder, before even the trip to India, all four Bea­t­les became devot­ed med­i­ta­tors, sit­ting for two twen­ty-minute ses­sions a day and find­ing gen­uine peace and happiness—or “ener­gy,” as Lennon and Har­ri­son describe it in a 1967 inter­view with David Frost. The next year, hap­pi­ly prac­tic­ing, and fever­ish­ly writ­ing, in India, Lennon received let­ters from fans, and respond­ed with enthu­si­asm.

In answer to a let­ter from a fan named Beth, evi­dent­ly a devout Chris­t­ian and appar­ent­ly threat­ened by TM and con­cerned for the bands’ immor­tal souls, Lennon wrote the fol­low­ing (see his hand­writ­ten reply at the top):

Dear Beth:

Thank you for your let­ter and your kind thoughts. When you read that we are in India search­ing for peace, etc, it is not that we need faith in God or Jesus — we have full faith in them; it is only as if you went to stay with Bil­ly Gra­ham for a short time — it just so hap­pens that our guru (teacher) is Indi­an — and what is more nat­ur­al for us to come to India — his home. He also holds cours­es in Europe and Amer­i­ca — and we will prob­a­bly go to some of these as well — to learn — and to be near him.

Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion is not opposed to any reli­gion — it is based on the basic truths of all reli­gions — the com­mon denom­i­na­tor. Jesus said: “The King­dom of Heav­en is with­in you” — and he meant just that — “The King­dom of Heav­en is at hand” — not in some far dis­tant time — or after death — but now.

Med­i­ta­tion takes the mind down to that lev­el of con­scious­ness which is Absolute Bliss (Heav­en) and through con­stant con­tact with that state — “the peace that sur­pass­es all under­stand­ing” — one grad­u­al­ly becomes estab­lished in that state even when one is not med­i­tat­ing. All this gives one actu­al expe­ri­ence of God — not by detach­ment or renun­ci­a­tion — when Jesus was fast­ing etc in the desert 40 days & nights he would have been doing some form of med­i­ta­tion — not just sit­ting in the sand and pray­ing — although me it will be a true Chris­t­ian — which I try to be with all sin­cer­i­ty — it does not pre­vent me from acknowl­edg­ing Bud­dha — Mohammed — and all the great men of God. God bless you — jai guru dev.

With love,
John Lennon

This hard­ly sounds like the man who imag­ined no reli­gion. A fan in India wrote Lennon less to inquire and more to acquire, name­ly mon­ey for a trip around the world so that he could “dis­cov­er the ‘huge trea­sure’ nec­es­sary for achiev­ing inner peace.” Lennon respond­ed with a brief rebuke of the man’s mate­r­i­al aspi­ra­tions, then rec­om­mend­ed TM, “through which all things are pos­si­ble.” (He signs both let­ters with “jai guru dev,” or “I give thanks to the Guru Dev,” the Maharishi’s teacher. The phrase also appears as the refrain in his “Across the Uni­verse.”)

The let­ters come from an excel­lent col­lec­tion of his cor­re­spon­dence, The John Lennon Let­ters, which includes oth­er mis­sives extolling the virtues of tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion. We might take his word for it based on the strength of the cre­ative work he pro­duced dur­ing the peri­od. We could also take the word of David Lynch, who describes med­i­ta­tion as the way he catch­es the cre­ative “big fish.” Or we could go out and find our own meth­ods for expand­ing our minds and tap­ping into cre­ative poten­tial.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

The John Lennon Sketch­book, a Short Ani­ma­tion Made of Lennon’s Draw­ings, Pre­mieres on YouTube

Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Per­for­mance (1975): “Imag­ine,” “Stand By Me” & More

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

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Listen to an Archive of Recordings by Delia Derbyshire, the Electronic Music Pioneer & Composer of the Dr. Who Theme Song

in Music, Television | April 18th, 2018

Delia Der­byshire, com­pos­er of the Dr. Who theme song and musi­cal pio­neer, has not quite become a house­hold name, but read­ers of this site sure­ly know who she is, as well should every stu­dent of avant garde, elec­tron­ic, and exper­i­men­tal pop music. Along with oth­er often unsung female elec­tron­ic com­posers of the 60s and beyond—like fel­low BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop doyenne, Daphne Oram—Derbyshire brought the ear­ly elec­tron­ic tech­niques of musique con­crete and tape manip­u­la­tion to a wider audi­ence, who most­ly had no idea where the sounds they heard came from.

As part of the unit respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing the sounds of British tele­vi­sion, Derbyshire’s unusu­al instincts took her to places no com­pos­er had ever ven­tured before. In her sound work for a doc­u­men­tary called The World About Us, on the Tuareg peo­ple of the Sahara, she “used her voice for the sound of the [camels’] hooves,” writes her one­time col­league Bri­an Hodg­son at The Guardian, “cut up into an obbli­ga­to rhythm. And she added a thin, high elec­tron­ic sound using vir­tu­al­ly all the fil­ters and oscil­la­tors in the work­shop.” As Der­byshire recalls it:

My most beau­ti­ful sound at the time was a tat­ty BBC lamp­shade. It was the wrong colour, but it had a beau­ti­ful ring­ing sound to it. I hit the lamp­shade, record­ed that, fad­ed it up into the ring­ing part with­out the per­cus­sive start. I… recon­struct­ed the sound of the workshop’s famous 12 oscil­la­tors to give it a whoosh­ing sound. So the camels rode off into the sun­set with my voice in their hooves and a green lamp­shade on their backs.

What the col­or of the lamp­shade had to do with the sound, only Der­byshire could know for sure. But it clear­ly had a psy­cho­log­i­cal impact on the way she heard it. “I sup­pose in a way,” she said, “I was exper­i­ment­ing in psy­cho-acoustics.”

This was an immer­sive expe­ri­ence for her, and for every­one who heard the results, no mat­ter whether they could iden­ti­fy what it was they were hear­ing. Derbyshire’s sound design rev­o­lu­tion­ized the indus­try, but we can­not over­look her extracur­ric­u­lar work—experimental sound col­lages and musi­cal pieces made with sev­er­al close col­lab­o­ra­tors, includ­ing Hodg­son, which sound remark­ably ahead of their time.

In 1964, Der­byshire col­lab­o­rat­ed with poet and drama­tist Bar­ry Bermange on The Dreams, a work that showed her, Hodg­son writes, “at her ele­gant best.” The two put togeth­er a col­lage, with peo­ple describ­ing their dreams in snip­pets of cut-up mono­logues, backed by a puls­ing, throb­bing, buzzing, hum­ming omi­nous score. (Lis­ten to “Run­ning” fur­ther up.) In 1966, she worked with David Bowie’s favorite per­former Antho­ny New­ley on “Moogles Bloogles,” above, which Ubuweb calls “an unre­leased perv-pop clas­sic in the 1966 nov­el­ty vein.” She was not privy to what the song would become. “I’d writ­ten this beau­ti­ful inno­cent tune,” she said, “all sen­si­tive love and inno­cence, and he made it into a dirty old rain­coat song. But he was real­ly chuffed!”

In the late six­ties, Der­byshire joined Hodg­son and bass play­er David Vorhaus to form White Noise, an exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic pop project whose “Love With­out Sound” you can hear at the top of the post (behind scenes from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée.) In 1972, Der­byshire teamed with Hodg­son and Don Harp­er, all “moon­light­ing from day jobs” at the BBC, for an album called Elec­troson­ic, a “haunt­ing batch of spare elec­tron­ic tracks.” Just above, hear “Liq­uid Ener­gy (Bub­bling Rhythm)” from that col­lec­tion.

These tracks rep­re­sent just a frac­tion of the Der­byshire music avail­able at Ubuweb’s Delia Der­byshire library, includ­ing a com­pi­la­tion of Radio­phon­ic Work­shop sound­track pieces like “Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies,” above, from 1969, as well as an audio doc­u­men­tary on her work made in 2010. Soon after her ear­ly 70s musi­cal exper­i­ments, Der­byshire retired from music to work as a radio oper­a­tor and in an art gallery and book­shop, dis­gust­ed with the state of con­tem­po­rary sound. But in her last few years, she had the plea­sure of watch­ing a new gen­er­a­tion dis­cov­er her work. As Hodg­son writes in his touch­ing eulo­gy, “the tech­nol­o­gy she had left behind was final­ly catch­ing up to her vision.”

Hear more record­ing at Ubuweb’s Delia Der­byshire library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

Meet Delia Der­byshire, the Dr. Who Com­pos­er Who Almost Turned The Bea­t­les’ “Yes­ter­day” Into Ear­ly Elec­tron­i­ca

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Exper­i­men­tal Film with Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Music Fea­tur­ing Anaïs Nin (1952)

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

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

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An Avalanche of Novels, Films and Other Works of Art Will Soon Enter the Public Domain: Virginia Woolf, Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Buster Keaton & More

in Art, Books, Film, Literature, Music | April 17th, 2018

There may be no sweet­er sound to the ears of Open Cul­ture writ­ers than the words “pub­lic domain”—you might even go so far as to call it our “cel­lar door.” The phrase may not be as musi­cal, but the fact that many of the world’s cul­tur­al trea­sures can­not be copy­right­ed in per­pe­tu­ity means that we can con­tin­ue to do what we love: curat­ing the best of those trea­sures for read­ers as they appear online. Pub­lic domain means com­pa­nies can sell those works with­out incur­ring any costs, but it also means that any­one can give them away for free. “Any­one can re-pub­lish” pub­lic domain works, notes Life­hack­er, “or chop them up and use them in oth­er projects.” And there­by emerges the remix­ing and repur­pos­ing of old arti­facts into new ones, which will them­selves enter the pub­lic domain of future gen­er­a­tions.

Some of those future works of art may even become the next Great Amer­i­can Nov­el, if such a thing still exists as any­thing more than a hack­neyed cliché. Of course, no one seri­ous­ly goes around say­ing they’re writ­ing the “Great Amer­i­can Nov­el,” unless they’re Philip Roth in the 70s or William Car­los Williams (top right) in the 20s, who both some­how pulled off using the phrase as a title (though Roth’s book does­n’t quite live up to it.) Where Roth casu­al­ly used the con­cept in a light nov­el about base­ball, Williams’ The Great Amer­i­can Nov­el approached it with deep con­cern for the sur­vival of the form itself. His mod­ernist text “engages the tech­niques of what we would now call metafic­tion,” writes lit­er­ary schol­ar April Boone, “to par­o­dy worn out for­mu­las and con­tent and, iron­i­cal­ly, to cre­ate a new type of nov­el that antic­i­pates post­mod­ern fic­tion.”

We will all, as of Jan­u­ary 1, 2019, have free, unfet­tered access to Williams’ metafic­tion­al shake-up of the for­mu­la­ic sta­tus quo, when “hun­dreds of thou­sands of… books, musi­cal scores, and films first pub­lished in the Unit­ed States dur­ing 1923” enter the pub­lic domain, as Glenn Fleish­man writes at The Atlantic. Because of the com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry of U.S. copy­right law—especially the 1998 “Son­ny Bono Act” that suc­cess­ful­ly extend­ed a copy­right law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mick­ey Mouse)—it has been twen­ty years since such a mas­sive trove of mate­r­i­al has become avail­able all at once. But now, and “for sev­er­al decades from 2019 onward,” Fleish­man points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works pub­lished 95 years ear­li­er.”

In oth­er words, it’ll be Christ­mas all over again in Jan­u­ary every year, and while you can browse the pub­li­ca­tion dates of your favorite works your­self to see what’s com­ing avail­able in com­ing years, you’ll find at The Atlantic a short list of lit­er­ary works includ­ed in next-year’s mass-release, includ­ing books by Aldous Hux­ley, Win­ston Churchill, Carl Sand­burg, Edith Whar­ton, and P.G. Wode­house. Life­hack­er has sev­er­al more exten­sive lists, which we excerpt below:

Movies [see many more at Indiewire]

All these movies, includ­ing:

  • Cecil B. DeMille’s (first, less famous, silent ver­sion of) The Ten Com­mand­ments
  • Harold Lloyd’s Safe­ty Last!, includ­ing that scene where he dan­gles off a clock tow­er, and his Why Wor­ry?
  • A long line-up of fea­ture-length silent films, includ­ing Buster Keaton’s Our Hos­pi­tal­ityand Char­lie Chaplin’s The Pil­grim
  • Short films by Chap­lin, Keaton, Lau­rel and Hardy, and Our Gang (lat­er Lit­tle Ras­cals)
  • Car­toons includ­ing Felix the Cat(the char­ac­ter first appeared in a 1919 car­toon)
  • Mar­lene Dietrich’s film debut, a bit part in the Ger­man silent com­e­dy The Lit­tle Napoleon; also the debuts of Dou­glas Fair­banks Jr. and Fay Wray

Music

All this music, includ­ing these clas­sics:

  • “King Porter Stomp”
  • “Who’s Sor­ry Now?”
  • “Tin Roof Blues”
  • “That Old Gang of Mine”
  • “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
  • “I Cried for You”
  • “The Charleston”—written to accom­pa­ny, and a big fac­tor in the pop­u­lar­i­ty of, the Charleston dance
  • Igor Stravinsky’s “Octet for Wind Instru­ments”

Lit­er­a­ture

All these books, and these books, includ­ing the clas­sics:

  • Mrs. Dal­loway by Vir­ginia Woolf
  • Cane by Jean Toomer
  • The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
  • The Ego and the Id by Sig­mund Freud
  • Towards a New Archi­tec­ture by Le Cor­busier
  • Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wim­sey nov­el by Dorothy L. Say­ers
  • Two of Agatha Christie’s Her­cule Poirot nov­els, The Mur­der of Roger Ack­royd and The Mur­der on the Links
  • The Pris­on­er, vol­ume 5 of Mar­cel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that Eng­lish trans­la­tions have their own copy­rights)
  • The Com­plete Works of Antho­ny Trol­lope
  • George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan
  • Short sto­ries by Christie, Vir­ginia Woolf, H.P. Love­craft, Kather­ine Mans­field, and Ernest Hem­ing­way
  • Poet­ry by Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay, E.E. Cum­mings, William Car­los Williams, Rain­er Maria Rilke, Wal­lace Stevens, Robert Frost, Suku­mar Ray, and Pablo Neru­da
  • Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Whar­ton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bul­gakov, Jean Cocteau, Ita­lo Sve­vo, Aldous Hux­ley, Win­ston Churchill, G.K. Chester­ton, Maria Montes­sori, Lu Xun, Joseph Con­rad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Bur­roughs

Art

These art­works, includ­ing:

  • Con­stan­tin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space
  • Hen­ri Matisse’s Odal­isque With Raised Arms
  • Mar­cel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bach­e­lors, Even (The Large Glass)
  • Yokoya­ma Taikan’s Metempsy­chosis
  • Work by M. C. Esch­er, Pablo Picas­so, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Max Ernst, and Man Ray

Again, these are only par­tial lists of high­lights, and such high­lights…. Speak­ing for myself, I can­not wait for free access to the very best (and even worst, and weird­est, and who-knows-what-else) of 1923. And of 1924 in 2020, and 1925 and 2021, and so on and so on….

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

The Pub­lic Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

List of Great Pub­lic Domain Films 

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

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Watch Roxy Music Play Live with Brian Eno in Early Groundbreaking Performances (1972)

in Music | April 17th, 2018

Just what, exact­ly, is Roxy Music? Those encoun­ter­ing the band for the first time when their self-titled debut came out in 1972 had ques­tions. Were these 50s R&B throw­backs? Zig­gy Stardust/Slade/T‑Rex like glam rock­ers? Exper­i­men­tal art-rock-retro-futur­ists dressed like a Stax funk band on acid? Yes, yes, yes, and then some. The album, “at once post­mod­ern, strange, sen­su­al and thrilling,” writes Chica­go Tri­bune’s Greg Kot, “mapped out a new fron­tier, even as bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zep­pelin dom­i­nat­ed the rock land­scape.”

In the very same year that Bowie’s Zig­gy land­ed to re-make rock in its image, Bri­an Fer­ry and his vir­tu­oso band—including stand­outs Phil Man­zan­era on gui­tar and Bri­an Eno on synths, tape effects, and var­i­ous “treatments”—prefigured a some­how even sex­i­er, weird­er, funki­er, more dis­turb­ing future for pop, chart­ing the ter­ri­to­ry for bands like Duran Duran, the Cars, Eury­th­mics, Pulp, and too many more to name. Roxy Music was so effort­less­ly orig­i­nal that once Bowie exhaust­ed his space alien phase, he turned to Fer­ry and Eno for inspi­ra­tion.

Like Bowie, Roxy Music favored sax­o­phones, cour­tesy of Andy Mack­ay, who also played… the oboe? Manzanera’s psy­che­del­ic flights were rem­i­nis­cent of The Doors’ Rob­by Krieger, with a Latin Amer­i­can fla­vor from his ear­ly days play­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary Cuban folk songs. Paul Thompson’s rhyth­mic pound­ing and smooth, coun­try-ish grooves improb­a­bly mar­ried Moe Tuck­er and Ken­ny But­trey.

Gra­ham Simp­son played the bass with “an exu­ber­ant rush,” writes Kot.  “They were spe­cial­ists in their field,” remarks Fer­ry,” who him­self drew from the rock­ers every British child of the 50s loved, but was also obsessed with Char­lie Park­er, Lester Young, Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, Kurt Weill, the Beats, T.S. Eliot, Fred Astaire, and Cole Porter.

And Eno? “With his deep inter­est in exper­i­men­tal music,” says Fer­ry, Eno turned raunchy retro-fusion rock ‘n’ roll into sound­tracks for space­ships, his synth lines swoop­ing wild­ly and bur­bling omi­nous­ly behind Ferry’s qua­ver­ing melis­ma. “Those tex­tures,” the singer recalled recent­ly, “the synth sounds were wash­es, colours, tex­tures, mood enhancers, and so on.” Arriv­ing ful­ly-formed in 1972, they “sound­ed as if they had just beamed down from out­er space and brought along the music of the spheres,” Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher writes. “Roxy Music was the sound of the future—but we just didn’t real­ize it then. Roxy was so over­whelm­ing­ly new. No one knew what to think.”

“Try to imag­ine,” writes Gal­lagher, “how insane this TV footage looked” at the time. Imag­ine tun­ing in to Top of the Pops and catch­ing them play­ing their debut sin­gle “Vir­ginia Plain” (top), a song “named after a pack­et of cig­a­rettes.” (Read about how they record­ed those motor­cy­cle sounds.) Imag­ine see­ing Mack­ay dressed like a Flash Gor­don vil­lain, play­ing oboe over Eno’s sci-fi synth wash­es in the intro to “Ladytron” on the Old Grey Whis­tle Test, or see­ing the band con­fi­dent­ly stomp through “Re-make/Re-mod­el,” “Ladytron,” and “Grey Lagoons,” on the BBC’s Full House, fur­ther up.

In that lat­er 1972 live tele­vised per­for­mance, Roxy Music was already deliv­er­ing the sound of its future with “Grey Lagoons” from the fol­low­ing year’s bril­liant For Your Plea­sure, the final album to fea­ture Eno, who would go on to even stranger things in his solo work. Now imag­ine you hap­pened to tune in to The Old Grey Whis­tle Test in ’73 just in time to catch that album’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” a war­bly, sin­is­ter, Bal­lar­dian love song writ­ten for a blow-up doll.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bri­an Eno Discog­ra­phy: Stream 29 Hours of Record­ings by the Mas­ter of Ambi­ent Music

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

Meet the World’s Worst Orches­tra, the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, Fea­tur­ing Bri­an Eno

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

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What Made Studio Ghibli Animator Isao Takahata (RIP) a Master: Two Video Essays

in Animation, Film | April 17th, 2018

Among the many acclaimed ani­mat­ed films of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li — and indeed among recent Japan­ese ani­mat­ed films in gen­er­al — those direct­ed by the out­spo­ken, oft-retir­ing-and-return­ing Hayao Miyaza­ki tend to get the most atten­tion. But even casu­al view­ers over­look the work of the late Isao Taka­ha­ta (1935–2018), the old­er ani­ma­tor for­mer­ly of Toei with whom Miyaza­ki found­ed the stu­dio in 1985, at their per­il. Though he most often played the role of pro­duc­er at Ghi­b­li, he also direct­ed sev­er­al of its films, first and most mem­o­rably 1988’s Grave of the Fire­flies, the sto­ry of an orphaned broth­er and sis­ter’s strug­gle for sur­vival at the very end of the Sec­ond World War.

“Grave of the Fire­flies is an emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence so pow­er­ful that it forces a rethink­ing of ani­ma­tion,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2000, adding the pic­ture to his “Great Movies” canon. “When ani­me fans say how good the film is, nobody takes them seri­ous­ly. [ … ] Yes, it’s a car­toon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the great­est war films ever made.”

No West­ern crit­ic would frame it quite the same way now, with the implic­it dis­claimer about the nature of Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, thanks in no small part to what ani­ma­tors like Taka­ha­ta have done to show the entire world the true poten­tial of their medi­um since.

The quar­ter-cen­tu­ry after Grave of the Fire­flies saw Taka­ha­ta direct four more fea­tures, Only Yes­ter­day, Pom Poko, My Neigh­bors the Yamadas, and his visu­al­ly uncon­ven­tion­al, long-in-the-mak­ing final work The Tale of Princess Kaguya. You can get a sense of Taka­hata’s dis­tinc­tive sen­si­bil­i­ties and sen­si­tiv­i­ties as an ani­ma­tion direc­tor in the Roy­al Ocean Film Soci­ety video essay “Isao Taka­ha­ta: The Oth­er Mas­ter” at the top of the post. It gets into the ques­tions of why Taka­ha­ta chose to tell essen­tial­ly real­is­tic, drawn-from-life sto­ries in a form most know for its way with the fan­tas­ti­cal, and how the visu­al exag­ger­a­tions in his films some­how imbue them with a more sol­id feel of real­i­ty.

Just above, “Isao Taka­ha­ta Does­n’t Get Enough Respect (A Ret­ro­spec­tive),” by Youtu­ber Stevem, goes in oth­er direc­tions, explor­ing the direc­tor’s tech­nique as well as his career, life, and per­son­al­i­ty, draw­ing not just from his work with Ghi­b­li but the con­sid­er­able amount he did before the stu­dio’s foun­da­tion as well. Still, Grave of the Fire­flies may well remain most film­go­ers’ gate­way into his fil­mog­ra­phy for the fore­see­able future, not least because of its still-refresh­ing “anti-Hol­ly­wood” qual­i­ties. “Hol­ly­wood will have you believe that heroes are need­ed when times are tough,” says writer on Japan­ese cul­ture Roland Kelts in a recent BBC piece on the movie. “Isao Taka­ha­ta shows us the hum­ble oppo­site, that when times are tough what you need most is humil­i­ty, patience and self-restraint. That’s how one sur­vives.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Stream Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize In Music

in Music | April 17th, 2018

Yes­ter­day, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his 2017 album, DAMN, a “vir­tu­osic song col­lec­tion,” writes the Pulitzer board, “uni­fied by its ver­nac­u­lar authen­tic­i­ty and rhyth­mic dynamism that offers affect­ing vignettes cap­tur­ing the com­plex­i­ty of mod­ern African-Amer­i­can life.” This is the first time (since its incep­tion in 1943) that the prize has gone, notes NPR, “to an artist out­side of the clas­si­cal or jazz com­mu­ni­ty.” Oth­er recip­i­ents have includ­ed Aaron Cop­land, Wyn­ton Marsalis, and Ornette Cole­man. You can stream DAMN, which comes with a Parental Advi­so­ry warn­ing, on Spo­ti­fy or right below.

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.

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Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Manuscript in the World

in Books, History, Religion | April 16th, 2018

Bar­gain with the dev­il and you may wind up with a gold­en fid­dle, super­nat­ur­al gui­tar play­ing ability, or a room full of gleam­ing alchem­ized straw.

Whoops, we mis­at­trib­uted that last one. It’s actu­al­ly Rumpel­stilt­skin’s doing, but the by-morn­ing-or-else dead­line that dri­ves the Broth­ers Grimm favorite is not dis­sim­i­lar to the ulti­ma­tum posed to dis­graced medieval monk Her­mann the Recluse: pro­duce a giant book that glo­ri­fies your monastery and includes all human knowl­edge by sun­rise, or we brick you up Cask of Amon­til­la­do-style.

Why else would a book as high-mind­ed as the Codex Gigas (Latin for Giant Book) con­tain a full page glam­our por­trait of the dev­il garbed in an ermine loin­cloth and cher­ry red claws?

Per­haps it’s the 13th-cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of “sex sells.” What bet­ter way to keep your book out of the remain­der bin of his­to­ry than to include an eye-catch­ing glimpse of the Prince of Dark­ness? Hedge your bets by posi­tion­ing a splen­did vision of the Heav­en­ly City direct­ly oppo­site.

Notable illus­tra­tions aside, the Codex Gigas holds the dis­tinc­tion of being the largest extant medieval illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script in the world.

Weigh­ing in at 165 lbs, this 3‑foot tall bound whale required the skins of 160 don­keys, at the rate of two pages per don­key. (Ten pages devot­ed to St. Benedict’s rules for monas­tic life were lit­er­al­ly cut from the man­u­script at an unknown date.)

It’s a lot.

A Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary con­clud­ed that the sprawl­ing man­u­script would’ve required a min­i­mum of 5 years of full-time, sin­gle-mind­ed labor. More like­ly, the work was spread out over 25 to 30 years, with var­i­ous authors con­tribut­ing to the dif­fer­ent sec­tions. In addi­tion to a com­plete Bible, the “Devil’s Bible” includes an ency­clo­pe­dia, med­ical infor­ma­tion, a cal­en­dar of saints’ days, Flav­ius Jose­phus’ his­to­ries The Jew­ish War and Jew­ish Antiq­ui­ties and some prac­ti­cal advice on exor­cis­ing evil spir­its.

The actu­al let­ter­ing does seem to come down to a sin­gle scribe with very neat hand­writ­ing. Experts at Nation­al Library of Swe­den, where the Codex Gigas has come to a rest after cen­turies of adven­tures and mis­ad­ven­tures, iden­ti­fy it as car­olin­gian minus­cule, a pop­u­lar and high­ly leg­i­ble style of medieval script. Its uni­form size would’ve required the scribe to rule each page before form­ing the let­ters, after which 100 lines a day would have been a rea­son­able goal.

You can have a look for your­self on the Library’s web­site, where the entire work is view­able in dig­i­tized form.

Cer­tain­ly the dev­il is a great place to start, though his appear­ance may strike you as a bit com­i­cal, giv­en all the fuss.

For view­ers unsure of where to start, the library has com­piled a guide to the high­lights.

You’ll also find a lot of inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal detail: relo­ca­tions result­ing from the Hus­site Wars and the Thir­ty Years’ War, a close call with fire, and of course the atten­dant leg­ends.

Begin your explo­rations of the Codex Gigas here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, April 23 for the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Eminent Philosophers Name the 43 Most Important Philosophy Books Written Between 1950–2000: Wittgenstein, Foucault, Rawls & More

in Books, Philosophy | April 16th, 2018

Image by Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Faced with the ques­tion, “who are the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the 20th cen­tu­ry?,” I might find myself com­pelled to ask in turn, “in respect to what?” Ethics? Polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy? Phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, mind, sci­ence, reli­gion, race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty? Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, Fem­i­nism, Crit­i­cal the­o­ry? The domains of phi­los­o­phy have so mul­ti­plied (and some might say siloed), that a num­ber of promi­nent authors, includ­ing emi­nent phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Robert Solomon, have writ­ten vehe­ment cri­tiques against its entrench­ment in acad­e­mia, with all of the atten­dant pres­sures and rewards. Should every philoso­pher of the past have had to run the gaunt­let of doc­tor­al study, teach­ing, tenure, aca­d­e­m­ic pol­i­tics and con­tin­u­ous pub­li­ca­tion, we might nev­er have heard from some of history’s most lumi­nous and orig­i­nal thinkers.

Solomon main­tains that “noth­ing has been more harm­ful to phi­los­o­phy than its ‘pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion,’ which on the one hand has increased the abil­i­ties and tech­niques of its prac­ti­tion­ers immense­ly, but on the oth­er has ren­dered it an increas­ing­ly imper­son­al and tech­ni­cal dis­ci­pline, cut off from and for­bid­ding to every­one else.” He cham­pi­oned “the pas­sion­ate life” (say, of Niet­zsche or Camus), over “the dis­pas­sion­ate life of pure rea­son…. Let me be out­ra­geous and insist that phi­los­o­phy mat­ters. It is not a self-con­tained sys­tem of prob­lems and puz­zles, a self-gen­er­at­ing pro­fes­sion of con­jec­tures and refu­ta­tions.” I am sym­pa­thet­ic to his argu­ments even as I might object to his whole­sale rejec­tion of all aca­d­e­m­ic thought as “sophis­ti­cat­ed irrel­e­van­cy.” (Solomon him­self enjoyed a long career at UCLA and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin.)

But if forced to choose the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the late 20th cen­tu­ry, I might grav­i­tate toward some of the most pas­sion­ate thinkers, both inside and out­side acad­e­mia, who grap­pled with prob­lems of every­day per­son­al, social, and polit­i­cal life and did not shy away from involv­ing them­selves in the strug­gles of ordi­nary peo­ple. This need not entail a lack of rig­or. One of the most pas­sion­ate of 20th cen­tu­ry thinkers, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, who worked well out­side the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem, also hap­pens to be one of the most dif­fi­cult and seem­ing­ly abstruse. Nonethe­less, his thought has rad­i­cal impli­ca­tions for ordi­nary life and prac­tice. Per­haps non-spe­cial­ists will tend, in gen­er­al, to accept argu­ments for philosophy’s every­day rel­e­vance, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and “pas­sion.” But what say the spe­cial­ists?

One phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor, Chen Bo of Peking Uni­ver­si­ty, con­duct­ed a sur­vey along with Susan Haack of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi, at the behest of a Chi­nese pub­lish­er seek­ing impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal works for trans­la­tion. As Leit­er Reports read­er Tra­cy Ho notes, the two pro­fes­sors emailed six­teen philoso­phers in the U.S., Eng­land, Aus­tralia, Ger­many, Fin­land, and Brazil, ask­ing specif­i­cal­ly for “ten of the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial philo­soph­i­cal books after 1950.” “They received rec­om­men­da­tions,” writes Ho, “from twelve philoso­phers, includ­ing: Susan Haack, Don­ald M. Borchert (Ohio U.), Don­ald David­son, Jur­gen Haber­mas, Ruth Bar­can Mar­cus, Thomas Nagel, John Sear­le, Peter F. Straw­son, Hilary Put­nam, and G.H. von Wright.” (Ho was unable to iden­ti­fy two oth­er names, typed in Chi­nese.)

The results, ranked in order of votes, are as fol­lows:

1. Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions

2. W. V. Quine, Word and Object

3. Peter F. Straw­son, Indi­vid­u­als: An Essay in Descrip­tive Meta­physics

4. John Rawls, A The­o­ry of Jus­tice

5. Nel­son Good­man, Fact, Fic­tion and Fore­cast

6. Saul Krip­ke, Nam­ing and Neces­si­ty

7. G.E.M. Anscombe, Inten­tion

8. J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words

9. Thomas Kuhn, The Struc­ture of Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tions

10. M. Dum­mett, The Log­i­cal Basis of Meta­physics

11. Hilary Put­nam, The Many Faces of Real­ism

12. Michel Fou­cault, The Order of Things: An Archae­ol­o­gy of the Human Sci­ences

13. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

14. Robert Noz­ick, Anar­chy, State and Utopia

15. R. M. Hare, The Lan­guage of Morals and Free­dom and Rea­son

16. John R. Sear­le, Inten­tion­al­i­ty and The Redis­cov­ery of the Mind

17. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Lim­its of Phi­los­o­phy, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry and Moral Luck: Philo­soph­i­cal Papers 1973–1980

18. Karl Pop­per, Con­jec­ture and Refu­ta­tions

19. Gilbert Ryle, The Con­cept of Mind

20. Don­ald David­son, Essays on Action and Event and Inquiries into Truth and Inter­pre­ta­tion

21. John McDow­ell, Mind and World

22. Daniel C. Den­nett, Con­scious­ness Explained and The Inten­tion­al Stance

23. Jur­gen Haber­mas, The­o­ry of Com­mu­nica­tive Action and Between Facts and Norm

24. Jacques Der­ri­da, Voice and Phe­nom­e­non and Of Gram­ma­tol­ogy

25. Paul Ricoeur, Le Metaphore Vive and Free­dom and Nature

26. Noam Chom­sky, Syn­tac­tic Struc­tures and Carte­sian Lin­guis­tics

27. Derek Parfitt, Rea­sons and Per­sons

28. Susan Haack, Evi­dence and Inquiry

29. D. M. Arm­strong, Mate­ri­al­ist The­o­ry of the Mind and A Com­bi­na­to­r­i­al The­o­ry of Pos­si­bil­i­ty

30. Her­bert Hart, The Con­cept of Law and Pun­ish­ment and Respon­si­bil­i­ty

31. Ronald Dworkin, Tak­ing Rights Seri­ous­ly and Law’s Empire

As an adden­dum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” there­fore Prof. Chen asked Haber­mas to rec­om­mend some addi­tion­al Euro­pean thinkers, and received the fol­low­ing: “Axel Hon­neth, Kampf um Anerken­nung (1992), Rain­er Forst, Kon­texte der Cerechtigkeit (1994) and Her­bert Schnadel­bach, Kom­men­tor zu Hegels Rechtephiloso­phie (2001).”

The list is also over­whelm­ing­ly male and pret­ty exclu­sive­ly white, point­ing to anoth­er prob­lem with insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion that Solomon does not acknowl­edge: it not only excludes non-spe­cial­ists but can also exclude those who don’t belong to the dom­i­nant group (and so, per­haps, excludes the every­day con­cerns of most of the world’s pop­u­la­tion). But there you have it, a list of the most impor­tant, post-1950 works in phi­los­o­phy accord­ing to some of the most emi­nent liv­ing philoso­phers. What titles, read­ers, might get your vote, or what might you add to such a list, whether you are a spe­cial­ist or an ordi­nary, “pas­sion­ate” lover of philo­soph­i­cal thought?

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

Oxford’s Free Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: Stream 41 Lec­tures

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course 

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

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

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