How Schools Can Start Teaching Online in a Short Period of Time: Free Tutorials from the Stanford Online High School

in Current Affairs, Education | March 12th, 2020

Image by King of Hearts, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A quick note: The Stan­ford Online High School–an inde­pen­dent high school that oper­ates ful­ly online–has cre­at­ed video tuto­ri­als designed for schools that may need to close class­rooms and piv­ot online. “All guid­ance is plat­form-agnos­tic, focus­ing on the essen­tial steps for prepar­ing to teach online in a short peri­od of time.”

In addi­tion to this videos, the Online High School will host a free webi­nar today at 2pm Cal­i­for­nia time. You can reg­is­ter here and learn more about the tran­si­tion to online teach­ing.

Note: Zoom–which pro­vides a turnkey video con­fer­enc­ing solu­tion–has made its prod­uct free for K‑12 insti­tu­tions dur­ing the COVID-19 cri­sis. This can help schools spin up online cours­es quick­ly. More on that here.

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!

 

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Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015)

in Current Affairs | March 11th, 2020

What are bil­lion­aires afraid of? A wealth tax? Uni­ver­sal health­care? Immi­grants from sev­er­al spe­cif­ic places in the world? Prob­a­bly. But if you ask one bil­lion­aire, Bill Gates—who has spent the last sev­er­al years spend­ing mon­ey to com­bat dead­ly epidemics—he’ll answer with a very detailed descrip­tion of a glob­al threat to every­one, not just the hand­ful of peo­ple in his (un)tax(ed) brack­et: Pan­demics like the 1918 Span­ish flu, as he told Vox’s Ezra Klein in the 2015 video inter­view above. The dis­ease infect­ed around 27 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and killed tens of mil­lions of peo­ple from every social class.

Such events are high­ly prob­a­ble, and we should be pre­pared for them. “I rate the chance of a wide­spread epi­dem­ic far worse than Ebo­la in my life­time at well over 50 per­cent,” he says. In fact, Gates met with the pres­i­dent two years ago to urge fed­er­al action on pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness. He was heard and ignored.

Now, as the CDC faces the spread of coro­n­avirus in major cities around the coun­try, it finds itself woe­ful­ly unpre­pared for the task. “The truth is we’ve not invest­ed, we’ve under­in­vest­ed in the pub­lic health labs,” direc­tor Robert Red­field told Con­gress in recent hear­ings. “There’s not enough equip­ment, there’s not enough peo­ple, there’s not enough inter­nal capac­i­ty….”

The sit­u­a­tion looks bleak, but Gates was “opti­mistic” despite his pre­dic­tions. And why shouldn’t he be? Klein wrote: “He’s one of the rich­est men in the world,” and he also “runs a foun­da­tion immersed in the world’s prob­lems” and “can mea­sure them get­ting bet­ter.” But a dead­ly pan­dem­ic remains “the most pre­dictable cat­a­stro­phe in the his­to­ry of the human race,” writes Klein. Maybe Gates should have urged the gov­ern­ment to pre­pare by explain­ing how it would boost the oil and hotel indus­tries.

For those who can be per­suad­ed by evi­dence of a pos­si­ble pandemic’s effect on human lives, Gates mod­eled how a dis­ease as dead­ly and infec­tious as the Span­ish flu would act today. “With­in 60 days it’s basi­cal­ly in all urban cen­ters around the entire globe,” he says. “That didn’t hap­pen with the Span­ish flu.” He explains fur­ther in the TED talk above how the “great­est risk of glob­al cat­a­stro­phe” doesn’t look like a mush­room cloud but like the spiky micro­scop­ic ball of the influen­za virus, or its equiv­a­lent. That may not be COVID-19, but what­ev­er it is, Gates has been warn­ing for years, we are not ready.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

How to Pro­tect Your­self Against COVID-19/­Coro­n­avirus

Chi­nese Muse­ums, Closed by the Coro­n­avirus, Put Their Exhi­bi­tions Online

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

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Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

in History, Travel | March 11th, 2020

Many claim Los Ange­les was “built for the car,” a half-truth at best. When the city — or rather, the city and the vast region of south­ern Cal­i­for­nia sur­round­ing it — first boomed in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, it grew accord­ing to the spread of its elec­tric rail­way net­works. But for ear­ly adopters of the auto­mo­bile (as well as the many aspi­rants close behind), its sheer size, eas­i­ly nav­i­ga­ble ter­rain, and still-low pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty made greater Los Ange­les an ide­al place to dri­ve.

After the Sec­ond World War, the days of the Pacif­ic Elec­tric and Los Ange­les Rail­road, once among the finest urban rail sys­tems in the world, were clear­ly num­bered. Both went out of ser­vice by the ear­ly 1960s, and for the next few decades the car was indeed king. One the­o­ry holds, though with imper­fect evi­dence, that Los Ange­les lost its trains because of an automak­ers’ con­spir­a­cy.

What­ev­er the cause, the long hey­day of the auto­mo­bile and its atten­dant “car cul­ture” changed mid-20th-cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. It left its bold­est mark in the city’s archi­tec­ture, a cat­e­go­ry that must sure­ly include the swoop­ing con­crete of the free­ways, but more obvi­ous­ly includes the build­ings designed to catch the eye of a human being behind the wheel cruis­ing at speed. We notice at a dif­fer­ent scale in a car than we do on foot, and so the struc­tures along Los Ange­les’ main roads — espe­cial­ly boule­vards like Wilshire, Hol­ly­wood, and Sun­set — grew more leg­i­ble to the motorist in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

That means Los Ange­les’ archi­tec­ture grew ever big­ger, bold­er, more eye-catch­ing — or, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive, ever more gar­ish, ungain­ly, and imper­son­al. You can see this trans­for­ma­tion cap­tured in action from the car win­dow in the three videos fea­tured here. At the top of the post is a six-minute dri­ve through the down­town Los Ange­les of the 1940s, which begins on Bunker Hill, an area orig­i­nal­ly built up with state­ly Vic­to­ri­an hous­es in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. 

By the time of this film those hous­es had been sub­di­vid­ed into cheap apart­ments, and films noirs (such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Dead­ly) were using it as a typ­i­cal “bad neigh­bor­hood.” That atmos­phere also made it a tar­get for a 50-year “urban renew­al” project that, start­ing in the late 50s onward, scraped the hous­es off Bunker Hill and rebuilt it with cor­po­rate tow­ers and pres­tige cul­tur­al venues.

A through-the-wind­shield view of Los Ange­les in the 50s appears in the video sec­ond from the top, a 1957 dri­ve down Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. That street and that year stand at the inter­sec­tion of pre-war and post-war Los Ange­les, and the built envi­ron­ment reflects as much the sen­si­bil­i­ty of the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry as it does what we know think of as “mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern.”

Below that we have a dri­ve through the city so many think of when they think of Los Ange­les: the Los Ange­les of the 1960s, a seem­ing­ly lim­it­less realm of palm trees, bright­ly col­ored bill­boards, and Space Age-influ­enced tow­ers that pop out even more from their low-slung sur­round­ings when seen from the free­way — in oth­er words, the Los Ange­les Quentin Taran­ti­no recre­ates in Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood.

To get a sense of the greater sweep of change in Los Ange­les, have a look at the New York­er video above (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) that puts the down­town dri­ve from the 1940s along­side the same dri­ve repli­cat­ed in the 2010s. Pop­u­lar cul­ture may asso­ciate Los Ange­les with the will­ful era­sure of his­to­ry as much as it asso­ciates Los Ange­les with the auto­mo­bile, but traces are there for those — in a car, on foot, on a bike, or going by any form of trans­porta­tion besides — who know how to see them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Amer­i­can Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Ange­les & Detroit Look Today, Com­pared to the 1930s and 1940s

Enjoy Daz­zling & Dizzy­ing 360° Vir­tu­al Tours of Los Ange­les Land­marks

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Ange­les’ Sun­set Boule­vard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Watch 85,000 Historic Newsreel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)

in Film, History | March 11th, 2020

The “piv­ot-to-video” moment of a few years back dev­as­tat­ed writ­ers every­where with mass lay­offs as com­pa­nies scram­bled to attract pro­ject­ed mil­lions of nonex­is­tent view­ers. It’s a sto­ry about preda­to­ry media monop­o­lies and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of news, doc­u­men­tary, and opin­ion video con­tent online. While the sheer amount of video can feel over­whelm­ing, we might remem­ber that peo­ple have been get­ting their news from screens for well over a hun­dred years.

First came the news­reels. Thou­sands were pro­duced from the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry into the 1960s, when TV became the dom­i­nant screen of choice. These were ephemer­al, often frag­men­tary films, not usu­al­ly pre­served in the way of great cin­e­ma.

But while “the news­reel may be his­to­ry,” notes the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, “vast col­lec­tions of it remain, much of it unseen.” One such col­lec­tion resides at the archives of British Pathé, “a trea­sure trove of 85,000 films unri­valed in their his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.”

British Pathé has dig­i­tized their col­lec­tion and made all of it—including more than 136,000 items from the Reuters his­tor­i­cal collection—freely avail­able online at their web­site and on YouTube. You’ll find there exact­ly the kind of vari­ety Richard Eder described in The New York Times in 1977, a year when peo­ple also felt “flood­ed” by news:

Most of the time [news­reels] were patchy views of a rather scat­ter­brained real­i­ty. Sneez­ing con­tests would alter­nate with politi­cians cut­ting rib­bons and South Amer­i­cans rioting.But once in a while there was some­thing unfor­get­table: the Hin­den­burg float­ed lofti­ly into sight and sud­den­ly set­tled on the ground like burn­ing tin­sel; a mid­dle-aged French­man wept at Toulon when the fleet was scut­tled. The news­reel cam­eras and the big screen pro­vid­ed an author­i­ty to these things that tele­vi­sion equip­ment could­n’t man­age. Also there was the effect of wait­ing a day or two to see a dis­as­ter you had read of. World events were dis­crete, indi­vid­ual, weighty. They did not flood us.

British Pathé pro­duced short doc­u­men­tary films on every pos­si­ble sub­ject around the world from 1910 to 2008 and might lay claim to cap­tur­ing more unfor­get­table his­tor­i­cal moments than most any oth­er news­reel ser­vice of the era. A tiny sam­pling of news­reels in their mas­sive dig­i­tal archive includes the Beat­nik makeover from 1963 at the top; a very brief film on Tol­stoy; a longer fea­turette on the Titan­ic, with inter­views from sur­vivors; and a short on the psy­che­del­ic Mel­lotron.

Among the many “British Pathé Unis­sued” videos, we find the filmed inter­view clip below with H.G. Wells in the 1930s, in which he pro­pos­es dis­ar­ma­ment, inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion, full pub­lic employ­ment, and the nation­al­iza­tion of indus­try as anti­dotes to the ris­ing tides of World War and dev­as­tat­ing social inequal­i­ty. The inter­view was “unused by Pathé edi­tors and not screened in cin­e­mas,” explains a title added at the begin­ning. One sig­nif­i­cant shift from the news­reel to the dig­i­tal age is the unprece­dent­ed abil­i­ty to bypass the cen­sors.

“Before tele­vi­sion” and the inter­net, as the archive descrip­tion points out, “peo­ple came to movie the­atres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the fore­front of cin­e­mat­ic jour­nal­ism, blend­ing infor­ma­tion with enter­tain­ment to pop­u­lar effect.” If this blend sounds some­what akin to the mass media world we inhab­it today—one filled with pro­lif­er­at­ing video explain­ers, short doc­u­men­taries, talk­ing head con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists and every oth­er pos­si­ble use of the form—perhaps it’s use­ful to remem­ber that we’ve been liv­ing in that world a very long time. It has pro­duced many thou­sands of arti­facts that can tell us where we’ve been over the past 120 years or so, if not quite how we got to where we are now.

Enter the British Pathé col­lec­tion on YouTube or their web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000,000 Min­utes of News­reel Footage by AP & British Movi­etone Released on YouTube

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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

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Why New Diseases Like COVID-19 Keep Appearing in China

in Health | March 11th, 2020

From Vox comes a short explain­er that delves into why virus­es like COVID-19 have often first tak­en off in Chi­na. They write:

As of ear­ly March 2020, a new coro­n­avirus, called COVID-19, is in more than 70 coun­tries and has killed more than 3,100 peo­ple, the vast major­i­ty in Chi­na. That’s where the virus emerged back in Decem­ber 2019. This isn’t a new phe­nom­e­non for Chi­na; in 2003, the SARS virus also emerged there, and under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances, before spread­ing around the world and killing near­ly 800.

Both SARS and COVID-19 are in the “coro­n­avirus” fam­i­ly, and both appear to have emerged from ani­mals in Chi­na’s noto­ri­ous wildlife mar­kets. Experts had long pre­dict­ed that these mar­kets, known to be poten­tial sources of dis­ease, would enable anoth­er out­break. The mar­kets, and the wildlife trade that sup­ports them, are the under­ly­ing prob­lem of these pan­demics; until Chi­na solves that prob­lem, more are like­ly to emerge.

Days ago, Chi­na’s wildlife-farm­ing indus­try was per­ma­nent­ly shut down by Chi­nese offi­cials.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

Chi­nese Muse­ums, Closed by the Coro­n­avirus, Put Their Exhi­bi­tions Online

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The Allure of Puzzlement: Pretty Much Pop #34 w/ Adal Rifai on Escape Rooms and Other Puzzling Pastimes

in Games, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | March 11th, 2020

The com­ic and the trag­ic are well-estab­lished modes with­in enter­tain­ment, but what about the puz­zling? Rid­dles may have been a chief pas­time in days of yore (well, they’re fea­tured in Oedi­pus and The Hob­bit, any­way), but does this way of being enter­tained have a place in today’s age of mass media?

Impro­vis­er and pod­cast­er Adal Rifai joins Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss his love of escape rooms, rid­dles, and oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for puz­zle­ment. We dis­cuss lat­er­al vs. algo­rith­mic think­ing, group dynam­ics, com­par­isons to impro­vi­sa­tion and triv­ia, rid­dle types, video games, and more. Some puz­zle-rel­e­vant films we touch on include Escape Room, Cube, The Game, and Mid­night Mad­ness.

Some resources we used to pre­pare include:

Adal’s two oth­er pod­casts are Hel­lo From the Mag­ic Tav­ern and Sib­lings Pec­u­lar. Fol­low him @adalrifai. He per­forms reg­u­lar­ly on Whirled News Tonight at Chicago’s IO The­ater.

Every Pret­ty Much Pop episode includes bonus, post-episode dis­cus­sion, and this time Adal stayed around for a lit­tle more on escape rooms (can they engage all five sens­es?) and quite a bit more on pod­cast­ing, includ­ing the paraso­cial rela­tion­ships that lis­ten­ers may have with pod­cast hosts. This was suf­fi­cient­ly fun that we’d like to share it with all of you, in hopes that you might then want to hear this for all our our episodes by sup­port­ing us at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.

This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast (prettymuchpop.com) is curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

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See How Traditional Japanese Carpenters Can Build a Whole Building Using No Nails or Screws

in Architecture | March 10th, 2020

If it came down to it, most of us could ham­mer basic shel­ter togeth­er with enough wood and nails. But what if we just had the wood? And what if we need­ed to make not just a hut, but a full-fledged build­ing: a liv­able house, or even a house of wor­ship? That may well sound like an impos­si­ble task — unless, of course, you’ve trained as a miyadaiku (宮大工), the class of Japan­ese car­pen­ter tasked with build­ing and main­tain­ing build­ings like shrines and tem­ples. With­out a sin­gle nail or screw, miyadaiku join wood direct­ly to wood — a method of join­ery know as kanawat­su­gi (金輪継)  â€” and in so doing man­age to build some of the world’s longest-last­ing wood­en struc­tures, just as they’ve done for cen­turies upon cen­turies.

Back when this style of car­pen­try first devel­oped in Japan more than a mil­len­ni­um ago, “it was dif­fi­cult to acquire iron.” And so “peo­ple tried to build build­ings only with wood,” mak­ing up for what they lacked in tools with sheer skill. So says Takahi­ro Mat­sumo­to, a miyadaiku car­pen­ter based in the city of Kamaku­ra, in the Great Big Sto­ry video above. 

Japan’s de fac­to cap­i­tal from the late 12th to ear­ly 14th cen­tu­ry, Kamaku­ra is still filled with Bud­dhist tem­ples and Shin­to shrines, some built more than 1,200 years ago. To build new tem­ples and shrines, or to pro­vide the exist­ing ones with the repairs they need every cen­tu­ry or two, a miyadaiku must mas­ter a host of dif­fer­ent­ly shaped wood­en joints, each of them devel­oped over gen­er­a­tions to hold as tight­ly and solid­ly as pos­si­ble.

For anoth­er view of kanawat­su­gi, have a look at The Join­ery, a library of explana­to­ry ani­ma­tions pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. You can see exact­ly how each of these joints are cut and assem­bled for real-life projects — as well as every oth­er aspect of how miyadaiku put togeth­er a build­ing — at the Youtube chan­nel Japan­ese Archi­tec­ture: Wis­dom of Our Ances­tors. The chan­nel is apt­ly named, for only with a high regard for the car­pen­try knowl­edge grad­u­al­ly built up, test­ed, and refined by their pre­de­ces­sors could today’s miyadaiku do their work. â€śAdvanced skills are need­ed, but we work with the old build­ings built by our ances­tors,” says Mat­sumo­to. “Today, we also learn from the ances­tors’ skills, since the old build­ings them­selves are stand­ing doc­u­ments of those skills.” Each and every one tes­ti­fies to how, for want of a nail, some of the most admired archi­tec­ture in the world was born.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Meet the Liverbirds, Britain’s First Female (and Now Forgotten) Rock Band

in Gender, Music | March 10th, 2020

We nev­er ever got as famous as the Bea­t­les. But we start­ed as friends, and we end­ed as friends. —Sylvia Saun­ders, The Liv­er­birds’ drum­mer

John Lennon (a mem­ber of a band who in a par­al­lel uni­verse might’ve been billed as the male Liv­er­birds) announced that the all-female quar­tet would fail, a deeply inac­cu­rate pre­dic­tion.

The band got a lot of atten­tion, toured with The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, dis­missed Bri­an Epstein when he pooh-poohed their desire to play in Ham­burg, reject­ed an offer to play top­less in Las Vegas, and were sought out by Jimi Hen­drix, owing to their bassist’s joint-rolling skills.

They also learned how to play the instru­ments they had opti­misti­cal­ly pur­chased after see­ing The Bea­t­les in Liverpool’s famed Cav­ern Club.

Respect to any grand­moth­er with brag­ging rights to hav­ing seen The Bea­t­les live, but it’s heart­en­ing that these 16-year-old girls imme­di­ate­ly pic­tured them­selves not so much as fans, but as play­ers.


As bassist and for­mer-aspi­rant-nun Mary McGlo­ry recalls in Almost Famous: The Oth­er Fab Four, Ben Proud­foot’s New York Times’ Op-Doc, above:

“Oh my god!” I said to my cousins, “We’re going to be like them. And we’re going to be the first girls to do it.”

Mis­sion accom­plished, in trousers and neat­ly tucked-in shirts, but­toned all the way to their col­lars.

It’s not ter­ri­bly hard to guess what put an end to their six-year-run.

Moth­er­ly, wife­ly duties…

Sylvia Saun­ders, who became drum­mer by default because sticks were a bet­ter fit with her small hands than frets, got preg­nant, and recused her­self due to com­pli­ca­tions with that preg­nan­cy.

Valerie Gell, the Liv­er­birds’ late gui­tarist and most accom­plished musi­cian, mar­ried a hand­some fan who’d been en route to Ham­burg to pro­pose when he was par­a­lyzed in a car acci­dent, devot­ing her­self to his care for 26 years.

The oth­er two mem­bers car­ried on for a bit, play­ing a Japan­ese tour with a cou­ple of female musi­cians they’d met in Ham­burg, but the chem­istry couldn’t com­pare.

The dream was over, but for­tu­nate­ly rock and roll star­dom was not their only dream.

Unlike the fourth Liv­er­bird, Pam Birch, who descend­ed into addic­tion after the band broke up, nei­ther Saun­ders nor McGlo­ry seems angry or regret­ful over what could have been, smil­ing as they men­tion their long, hap­py mar­riages, chil­dren, and grand­chil­dren.

They were awful­ly tick­led by Girls Don’t Play Gui­tars, a recent West End musi­cal that tells the sto­ry of the Liv­er­birds.

And McGlo­ry is admirably san­guine about Lennon’s famous diss, reveal­ing to the Liv­er­pool Echo that:

He had a smile on his face when he said it—he wasn’t being mali­cious. But it would have been nice to have bumped into him a few years lat­er and for him to say, “Well done, you proved me wrong,” which I’m sure he would have been hap­py to do.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Record­ings by Great Female Jazz Musi­cians

Ven­er­a­ble Female Artists, Musi­cians & Authors Give Advice to the Young: Pat­ti Smith, Lau­rie Ander­son & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY., play­ing at The Tank NYC through March 28 Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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