Watch Franz Liszt’s “Un Sospiro” Played with the Mesmerizing “Three-Hand Technique”

“Piano edu­ca­tion is impor­tant for teach­ing polypho­ny, improv­ing sight-read­ing, con­sol­i­dat­ing the knowl­edge of har­mo­ny and gain­ing much more musi­cal abil­i­ties,” write Turk­ish researchers in the behav­ioral sci­ences jour­nal Pro­ce­dia. The stu­dent of the piano can advance solo or with anoth­er play­er in duets, play­ing what are called “four-hand pieces.” But learn­ing “to gain the atti­tudes of duet play­ing” pos­es a chal­lenge. Researchers Izzet Yuce­tok­er and Kok­sal Apay­din­li sug­gest a pos­si­ble inter­ven­tion — over­com­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties of play­ing four-hand pieces by learn­ing to play what are called “three-hand pieces.”

How, you might won­der, does one play the piano with three hands? It does not take an extra limb or a part­ner with one hand tied behind their back. Three-hand tech­nique is a dex­trous sleight-of-hand devel­oped in the 1830s, most promi­nent­ly by pianist Sigis­mond Thal­berg, a rival of Franz Liszt who could “appar­ent­ly not only counter Liszt’s leg­endary fire and thun­der with sub­tle­ty,” Bryce Mor­ri­son writes at Gramo­phone, “but who played as if with three hands. Three hands were heard, two were vis­i­ble!” Might this some­how be eas­i­er than play­ing duets?

One con­tem­po­rary review­er of Thalberg’s play­ing described it as “myr­i­ads of notes sound­ing from one extrem­i­ty of the instru­ment to the oth­er with­out dis­turb­ing the sub­ject, in which the three dis­tinct fea­tures of this com­bi­na­tion are clear­ly brought out by his exquis­ite touch.” The Pol­ish pianist and stu­dent of Liszt Moriz Rosen­thal claimed Thal­berg adopt­ed the tech­nique from the harp. “Such leg­erde­main quick­ly had nov­el­ty-con­scious Paris by the ears,” Mor­ri­son writes, “and an ele­gant white kid-glove rather than than a mere gaunt­let was thrown down before Liszt.”

Liszt would have none of it, derid­ing three-hand tech­nique as a trick unfit for his vir­tu­os­i­ty. Nonethe­less, “in 1837, Liszt, arguably the most charis­mat­ic vir­tu­oso of all time, was chal­lenged for suprema­cy by Sigis­mond Thal­berg…. Stung and infu­ri­at­ed by what he saw as Thalberg’s aris­to­crat­ic pre­ten­sions… Liszt replied with cor­r­us­cat­ing scorn.” He agreed to meet Thal­berg, not in a duet but a duel, at “the home of Count­ess Cristi­na Bel­gio­joso — lover of Lafayette, Heine and Liszt,” notes Georg Prodota at Inter­lude.

The Count­ess “gave a char­i­ty event for the refugees of the Ital­ian war of inde­pen­dence, and the con­tem­po­rary press com­pared the con­cert to the bat­tle between Rome and Carthage.” Count­ess Bel­gio­joso her­self (as did the press) pro­nounced the out­come a draw:

Nev­er was Liszt more con­trolled, more thought­ful, more ener­getic, more pas­sion­ate; nev­er has Thal­berg played with greater verve and ten­der­ness. Each of them pru­dent­ly stayed with­in his har­mon­ic domain, but each used every one of his resources. It was an admirable joust. The most pro­found silence fell over that noble are­na. And final­ly Liszt and Thal­berg were both pro­claimed vic­tors by this glit­ter­ing and intel­li­gent assem­bly. Thus two vic­tors and no van­quished …

His­to­ry was not so kind. Liszt is now cel­e­brat­ed as “the most charis­mat­ic vir­tu­oso of all time,” while Thal­berg is hard­ly remem­bered. And some of the most cel­e­brat­ed exam­ples of pieces played with three-hand tech­nique come not from Thal­berg but from Liszt, such as “Un Sospiro” (“A Sigh”), the last of his Three Con­cert Études, com­posed between 1845 and 1849, not only as per­for­mance pieces, but — as it so hap­pens — for the gen­er­al improve­ment of a pianist’s tech­nique. Hear pianist Paul Bar­ton play three ver­sions of “Un Sospiro” above and down­load the sheet music for the piece here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Piano Played with 16 Increas­ing Lev­els of Com­plex­i­ty: From Easy to Very Com­plex

12-Year-Old Piano Prodi­gy Takes Four Notes Ran­dom­ly Picked from a Hat and Instant­ly Uses Them to Impro­vise a Sonata

Acclaimed Japan­ese Jazz Pianist Yōsuke Yamashita Plays a Burn­ing Piano on the Beach

How the Clavi­chord & Harp­si­chord Became the Mod­ern Piano: The Evo­lu­tion of Key­board Instru­ments, Explained

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

A History of Punk from 1976–78: A Free Online Course from the University of Reading

From Matthew Wor­ley, pro­fes­sor of mod­ern his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Read­ing, comes the free online course Anar­chy in the UK: A His­to­ry of Punk from 1976–78. (Wor­ley is also the author of the book, No Future: Punk, Pol­i­tics and British Youth Cul­ture.) The course cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

In the late 1970s, a new youth sub­cul­ture emerged in the UK. This, of course, was punk, and a cul­tur­al revolt was under­way.

In this course, you will learn about the emer­gence of punk and its diverse range of mean­ings. You’ll use that lens to explore how youth cul­tures pro­vid­ed space for peo­ple to reimag­ine, dis­cov­er and chal­lenge the soci­ety and com­mu­ni­ties in which they were com­ing of age.

You’ll explore punk as a tool of expres­sion for young peo­ple, and how it relat­ed to pol­i­tics and events. You’ll con­sid­er punk’s rela­tion­ship with gen­der, class, race, sex­u­al­i­ty and protest, draw­ing com­par­isons with the youth cul­ture of today…

This his­to­ry course also has an empha­sis on the cre­ative side of punk. You’ll explore DIY punk design and writ­ing, epit­o­mised by fanzines. You’ll learn how to cre­ate a real-life fanzine of your own, all the way to pub­lish­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. This will help strength­en your com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and encour­age inde­pen­dent thought and cre­ativ­i­ty.

Among oth­er things, the course will cov­er:

  • The diverse mean­ings of ‘punk’, its roots and its effects on British cul­ture.
  • The orig­i­na­tors and defin­ing events that led to punk’s spread across the UK and beyond.
  • The music: how the Sex Pis­tols opened the way for a wide range of sounds and bands.
  • Why fanzines became the per­fect medi­um for punk.
  • Punk’s influ­ence on pub­lish­ing, fash­ion, art and design.
  • Punk’s impact on issues of gen­der, class, race, sex­u­al­i­ty and protest.
  • Punk’s lega­cy and con­tin­u­ing influ­ence on soci­ety.

Anar­chy in the UK: A His­to­ry of Punk from 1976–78 can be tak­en for free on the Future­Learn plat­form. The course will be added to our list: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Clash Embraced New York’s Hip Hop Scene and Released the Dance Track, “The Mag­nif­i­cent Dance” (1981)

The Sex Pis­tols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Con­certs in Dal­las, Mem­phis, Tul­sa & More

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

The Sex Pis­tols’ 1976 Man­ches­ter “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began

The Rashomon Effect: The Phenomenon, Named After Akira Kurosawa’s Classic Film, Where Each of Us Remembers the Same Event Differently

Toward the end of The Simp­sons’ gold­en age, one episode sent the tit­u­lar fam­i­ly off to Japan, not with­out resis­tance from its famous­ly lazy patri­arch. “Come on, Homer,” Marge insists, “Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon.” To which Homer nat­u­ral­ly replies, “That’s not how I remem­ber it!” This joke must have writ­ten itself, not as a high-mid­dle­brow cul­tur­al ref­er­ence (as, say, Frasi­er would lat­er name-check Tam­popo) but as a play on a uni­ver­sal­ly under­stood byword for the nature of human mem­o­ry. Even those of us who’ve nev­er seen Rashomon, the peri­od crime dra­ma that made its direc­tor Aki­ra Kuro­sawa a house­hold name in the West, know what its title rep­re­sents: the ten­den­cy of each human being to remem­ber the same event in his own way.

“A samu­rai is found dead in a qui­et bam­boo grove,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above. “One by one, the crime’s only known wit­ness­es recount their ver­sion of the events that tran­spired. But as they each tell their tale, it becomes clear that every tes­ti­mo­ny is plau­si­ble, yet dif­fer­ent, and each wit­ness impli­cates them­selves.”

So goes “In a Grove,” a sto­ry by cel­e­brat­ed ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry writer Ryūno­suke Aku­ta­gawa. An avid read­er, Kuro­sawa com­bined that lit­er­ary work with anoth­er of Aku­ta­gawa’s to cre­ate the script for Rashomon. Both Aku­ta­gawa and Kuro­sawa “use the tools of their media to give each char­ac­ter’s tes­ti­mo­ny equal weight, trans­form­ing each wit­ness into an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor.” Nei­ther read­er nor view­er can trust any­one — nor, ulti­mate­ly, can they arrive at a defen­si­ble con­clu­sion as to the iden­ti­ty of the killer.

Such con­flicts of mem­o­ry and per­cep­tion occur every­where in human affairs: this TED-Ed les­son finds exam­ples in biol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, pol­i­tics, and media. Suf­fi­cient­ly many psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na con­verge to give rise to the Rashomon effect that it seems almost overde­ter­mined; it may be more illu­mi­nat­ing to ask under what con­di­tions does­n’t it occur. But it also makes us ask even tougher ques­tions: “What is truth, any­way? Are there sit­u­a­tions when an objec­tive truth does­n’t exist? What can dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same event tell us about the time, place, and peo­ple involved? And how can we make group deci­sions if we’re all work­ing with dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion, back­grounds, and bias­es?” We seem to be no clos­er to defin­i­tive answers than we were when Rashomon came out more than 70 years ago — only one of the rea­sons the film holds up so well still today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Old­er, and How to Slow It Down: A Sci­en­tif­ic Expla­na­tion by Neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man

How to Improve Your Mem­o­ry: Four TED Talks Explain the Tech­niques to Remem­ber Any­thing

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Won­ders If It’s Trig­gered by Par­al­lel Uni­vers­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain Performs The Clash’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go”

Over the years, we’ve fea­tured The Ukulele Orches­tra of Great Britain per­form­ing cov­ers of var­i­ous rock classics–from the Rolling Stones’ “Sat­is­fac­tion” and Bowie’s “Heroes,” to Nir­vana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” and Talk­ing Heads’ “Psy­cho Killer.” Record­ed in Lon­don back in 2005, this clip fea­tures the Orches­tra per­form­ing The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go.’  The per­for­mance is an out­take from the DVD, Anar­chy in the Ukulele, which is avail­able in dig­i­tal for­mat. Enjoy.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Seri­ous­ly Awe­some Ukulele Cov­ers of “Sul­tans of Swing,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Thun­der­struck,” and “Smells Like Teen Spir­it”

Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” Shred­ded on the Ukulele

George Har­ri­son Explains Why Every­one Should Play the Ukulele

 

 

Hear The Velvet Underground’s “Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes,” Which Showcases the Brilliance & Innovation of Lou Reed’s Guitar Playing (1969)

What was the Vel­vet Under­ground? A Kim Fow­ly-like art project that out­lived its impre­sar­i­o’s inter­est? A main vehi­cle for Lou Reed, rock’s ego­ma­ni­ac under­dog (who was no one’s ingénue)? Was it three bands? 1. The Vel­vet Under­ground and Nico; 2. The Vel­vet Under­ground with John Cale; and 3. The Vel­vet Under­ground with Doug Yule after Cale’s depar­ture. (Let’s pass by, for the moment, whether VU with­out Reed war­rants a men­tion…)

Each iter­a­tion pio­neered essen­tial under­ground sounds — dirgy Euro-folk rock, strung-out New York garage rock, junkie bal­lads, psy­che­del­ic drone, exper­i­men­tal noise — near­ly all of them chan­neled through Reed’s under­rat­ed gui­tar play­ing, which was, per­haps the most impor­tant mem­ber of the band all along. Who­ev­er taped the Vel­vets (in their sec­ond incar­na­tion) on March 15, 1969, on the last night of a three-show engage­ment at The Boston Tea Par­ty in Boston, MA, seemed to think so. “The entire set was record­ed by a fan direct­ly from Lou Reed’s gui­tar ampli­fi­er,” MetaFil­ter points out.

The mic jammed in the back of Reed’s amp, a Head Her­itage review­er writes, pro­duced “a mighty elec­tron­ic roar that reveals the depth and lay­ers of Reed’s play­ing. Over and under­tones, feed­back, string buzz, the scratch of fin­gers on frets and the crack­le and hum of tube amps com­bine to cre­ate a mono­lith­ic blast of met­al machine music.” Known as the “leg­endary gui­tar amp tape” and long sought by col­lec­tors and fans, the boot­leg, which you can hear above, “serves as a tes­ta­ment to the bril­liance and inno­va­tion of Reed’s gui­tar-play­ing — both qual­i­ties that are often under­rat­ed, if not over­looked entire­ly, by crit­ics of his work,” as Richie Unter­berg­er writes.

It should be evi­dent thus far that these record­ings are hard­ly a com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­ment of the Vel­vet Under­ground in ear­ly 1969. Except for Mo Tuck­er’s glo­ri­ous, but muf­fled thump­ing and some of Ster­ling Mor­rison’s excel­lent gui­tar inter­play, the rest of the band is hard­ly audi­ble. Songs like “Can­dy Says” and “Jesus” — on which Reed does not cre­ate sub­lime swirls of noise and feed­back — chug along monot­o­nous­ly with­out their melodies. “It is frus­trat­ing,” Unter­berg­er admits, “to hear such a one-dimen­sion­al audio-snap­shot of what is clear­ly a good — if not great — night for the band” (who were far more than one of their parts). On the oth­er hand, nowhere else can we hear the nuance, feroc­i­ty, and out­right insan­i­ty of Reed’s play­ing so amply demon­strat­ed on the major­i­ty of this doc­u­ment.

The tape cir­cu­lat­ed for years as a Japan­ese boot­leg, an inter­est­ing fact, notes a Rate Your Music com­menter, “con­sid­er­ing this bears more sim­i­lar­i­ty to record­ings from the likes of [leg­endary Japan­ese psych rock band] Les Ral­lizes Dénudés than most of the Vel­vet Under­ground’s oth­er mate­r­i­al.” The record­ings may have well paved the way for the explo­sion of Japan­ese psy­che­del­ic rock to come. They also demon­strate the influ­ence of Ornette Cole­man in Reed’s play­ing, and the lib­er­at­ing phi­los­o­phy Cole­man would come to call Har­molod­ics.

“Alla that boo-ha about whether Reed real­ly was influ­enced by free jazz,” writes one review­er quot­ed on MetaFil­ter, “can be put to rest here as he pulls the kind of wail­ing hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry shapes from the gui­tar that it would take the god­dam Blue Humans to decode a cou­ple of decades lat­er.” It may well over­state the case to claim that “Lou Reed sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ed under­ground music,” but we can hear in these record­ings the seeds of every­thing from Tele­vi­sion to Son­ic Youth to Pave­ment to Roy­al Trux and so much more. See the full track­list below, a “clas­sic setlist,” notes MetaFil­ter, “from around the time of their 3rd LP.”

I Can’t Stand It
Can­dy Says
I’m Wait­ing For The Man
Fer­ry­boat Bill
I’m Set Free
What Goes On
White Light White Heat
Begin­ning To See The Light
Jesus
Hero­in / Sis­ter Ray
Move Right In
Run Run Run
Fog­gy Notion

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decid­ed to Give Up Paint­ing & Man­age the Vel­vet Under­ground Instead (1966)

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

The Vel­vet Under­ground Cap­tured in Col­or Con­cert Footage by Andy Warhol (1967)

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

Stream 160 In-Depth Radio Interviews with Clive James, Pico Iyer, Greil Marcus & Other Luminaries from the Marketplace of Ideas Archive

Would you like to to hear a long-form con­ver­sa­tion about the his­to­ry of the vinyl LP? Or about the his­to­ry of human rights? About the plight of book review­ing in Amer­i­ca? The wild excess­es of the art mar­ket? The nature of bore­dom? The true mean­ing of North Kore­an pro­pa­gan­da? What it’s like to live in Bangkok? What it’s like to go on a road trip with David Fos­ter Wal­lace? The answer to all of the above: of course you do. And now you can hear these con­ver­sa­tions and many more besides in the com­plete archive of the pub­lic radio show The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, which has just now come avail­able to stream on Youtube.

How, you may won­der, did I get such ear­ly word of this inter­view tro­ve’s avail­abil­i­ty? Because, in the years before I began writ­ing here on Open Cul­ture, I cre­at­ed, pro­duced, and host­ed the show myself. The project grew, in a sense, out of my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the radio inter­views I’d been hear­ing, the vast bulk of which struck me as too brief, frag­men­tary, and pro­gram­mat­ic to be of any real val­ue.

What’s more, it was often painful­ly obvi­ous how lit­tle inter­est in the sub­ject under dis­cus­sion the inter­view­ers had them­selves. With The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, I set out to do the oppo­site of prac­ti­cal­ly every­thing I’d heard done on the radio before.

Like all worth­while goals, mine was para­dox­i­cal: to con­duct inter­views of the deep­est pos­si­ble depth as well as the widest pos­si­ble breadth. On one week the top­ic might be evo­lu­tion­ary eco­nom­ics, on anoth­er the philo­soph­i­cal quar­rel between David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on anoth­er the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can film com­e­dy, on anoth­er the lega­cy of Robert Pir­sig’s Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance, and on anoth­er still the ascent of Cal­i­forn­ian wine over French. (This prin­ci­ple also applied to the polit­i­cal spec­trum: I delight­ed in bring­ing on, say, the grand­daugh­ter of Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter as well as a for­mer mem­ber of the Weath­er Under­ground.) An inter­est­ing per­son is, as they say, an inter­est­ed per­son, and through­out the show’s run I trust­ed my lis­ten­ers to be inter­est­ing peo­ple.

The same went for my inter­vie­wees, what­ev­er their cul­tur­al domain: nov­el­ists like Alexan­der Ther­oux, Tom McCarthy, Joshua Cohen, and Geoff Dyer; sci­en­tists like David P. Barash, Alan Sokal (he of the “Sokal Hoax”), and Sean Car­roll; crit­ics like James Wood, Greil Mar­cus, Jonathan Rosen­baum, Dave Kehr, and J. Hober­man; econ­o­mists like Tyler Cowen (twice), Robin Han­son, Steven E. Lands­burg, and Tim Har­ford (twice); biog­ra­phers of Bri­an Eno, Nick Drake, and Michel de Mon­taigne;  trans­la­tors of Jorge Luis Borges, César Aira, and Robert Walser; broad­cast­ers like Peter Sagal, Robert Pogue Har­ri­son (of Enti­tled Opin­ions), Jesse Thorn, and Michael Sil­verblatt; philoso­phers like Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah and Simon Black­burn; tech­nol­o­gists like Steve Woz­ni­ak and Kevin Kel­ly; film­mak­ers like Ramin Bahrani (direc­tor of the exis­ten­tial Wern­er Her­zog-nar­rat­ed plas­tic-bag short pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), So Yong Kim, Andrew Bujal­s­ki, Aaron Katz; and musi­cians like Nick Cur­rie, a.k.a Momus (twice), Jack Hues of Wang Chung, and Chaz Bundick of Toro y Moi.

The Mar­ket­place of Ideas aired between 2007 and 2011, and the pas­sage of a decade since the show’s end prompt­ed me to take a look — or rather a lis­ten — back at it. So  did the fact that a fair few of its guests have since shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil: Arts & Let­ters Dai­ly founder Denis Dut­ton, film crit­ic Peter Brunette, lit­er­ary schol­ar Angus Fletch­er, doc­u­men­tar­i­an Pepi­ta Fer­rari, writer and edi­tor Daniel Menaker, cul­tur­al poly­math Clive James. That inter­view with James was a dream ful­filled, due not just to my per­son­al enthu­si­asm for his writ­ing but the ide­al of intel­lec­tu­al omniv­o­rous­ness he rep­re­sent­ed — an ide­al toward which I strove on the show, and con­tin­ue to strive in my pur­suits today.  Even more than our con­ver­sa­tion itself, I fond­ly remem­ber an exchange after we fin­ished record­ing but before we hung up the phone. He thanked me for actu­al­ly read­ing his book, and I told him I’d thought all inter­view­ers did the same. His response: “That’s the first naïve thing you’ve said all hour.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New Studs Terkel Radio Archive Will Let You Hear 5,000+ Record­ings Fea­tur­ing the Great Amer­i­can Broad­cast­er & Inter­view­er

Enti­tled Opin­ions, the “Life and Lit­er­a­ture” Pod­cast That Refus­es to Dumb Things Down

An Archive of 1,000 “Peel Ses­sions” Avail­able Online: Hear David Bowie, Bob Mar­ley, Elvis Costel­lo & Oth­ers Play in the Stu­dio of Leg­endary BBC DJ John Peel

The 135 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind: An Intro­duc­tion to Our New List

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Watch a Never-Aired TV Profile of James Baldwin (1979)

In 1979, just a cou­ple of months into his stint with 20/20, ABC’s fledg­ling tele­vi­sion news mag­a­zine, pro­duc­er and doc­u­men­tar­i­an Joseph Lovett was “beyond thrilled” to be assigned an inter­view with author James Bald­win, whose work he had dis­cov­ered as a teen.

Know­ing that Bald­win liked to break out the bour­bon in the after­noon, Lovett arranged for his crew to arrive ear­ly in the morn­ing to set up light­ing and have break­fast wait­ing before Bald­win awak­ened:

He hadn’t had a drop to drink and he was bril­liant, utter­ly bril­liant. We couldn’t have been hap­pi­er.

Pio­neer­ing jour­nal­ist Sylvia Chase con­duct­ed the inter­view. The seg­ment also includ­ed stops at Lin­coln Cen­ter for a rehearsal of Baldwin’s play, The Amen Cor­ner, and the Police Ath­let­ic League’s Harlem Cen­ter where Bald­win (and per­haps the cam­era) seems to unnerve a teen reporter, cup­ping his chin at length while answer­ing his ques­tion about a Black writer’s chances:

There nev­er was a chance for a Black writer.  Lis­ten, a writer, Black or white, doesn’t have much of a chance. Right? Nobody wants a writer until he’s dead. But to answer your ques­tion, there’s a greater chance for a Black writer today than there ever has been.

In the Man­hat­tan build­ing Bald­win bought to house a num­ber of his close-knit fam­i­ly, Chase cor­ners his moth­er in the kitchen to ask if she’d had any inkling her son would become such a suc­cess.

“No, I didn’t think that,” Mrs. Bald­win cuts her off. “But I knew he had to write.”

Bald­win speaks frankly about out­ing him­self to the gen­er­al pub­lic with his 1956 nov­el Giovanni’s Room and about what it means to live as a Black man in a nation that has always favored its white cit­i­zens:

The Amer­i­can sense of real­i­ty is dic­tat­ed by what Amer­i­cans are try­ing to avoid. And if you’re try­ing to avoid real­i­ty, how can you face it?

Near­ly 35 years before Black Lives Matter’s for­ma­tion, he tack­les the issue of white fragili­ty by telling Chase, “Look, I don’t mean it to you per­son­al­ly. I don’t even know you. I have noth­ing against you. I don’t know you per­son­al­ly, but I know you his­tor­i­cal­ly. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t swear to the free­dom of all mankind and put me in chains.”

The fin­ished piece is a superb, 60 Min­utes-style pro­file that cov­ers a lot of ground, and yet, 20/20 chose not to air it.

After the show ran Chase’s inter­view with Michael Jack­son, pro­duc­er Lovett inquired as to the delay and was told that no one would be inter­est­ed in a “queer, Black has-been”:

I was stunned, I was absolute­ly stunned, because in my mind James Bald­win was no has-been. He was a clas­sic Amer­i­can writer, trans­lat­ed into every lan­guage in the world, and would live on for­ev­er, and indeed he has. His courage and his elo­quence con­tin­ue to inspire us today.

On June 24, Joseph Lovett will mod­er­ate James Bald­win: Race, Media, and Psy­cho­analy­sis, a free vir­tu­al pan­el dis­cus­sion cen­ter­ing on his 20/20 pro­file of James Bald­win, with psy­cho­an­a­lysts Vic­tor P. Bon­fil­io and Annie Lee Jones, and Baldwin’s niece, author Aisha Kare­fa-Smart. Reg­is­ter here.

H/T to author Sarah Schul­man

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why James Baldwin’s Writ­ing Stays Pow­er­ful: An Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

Watch the Famous James Bald­win-William F. Buck­ley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

James Baldwin’s One & Only, Delight­ful­ly-Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book, Lit­tle Man Lit­tle Man: A Sto­ry of Child­hood (1976)

Lis­ten to James Baldwin’s Record Col­lec­tion in a 478-track, 32-Hour Spo­ti­fy Playlist

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch an Accurate Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Computer, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, from Start to Finish

There’s noth­ing like an ancient mys­tery, espe­cial­ly one as seem­ing­ly insol­u­ble as the ori­gins of “the world’s first com­put­er,” the Antikythera mech­a­nism. Dis­cov­ered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the cor­rod­ed col­lec­tion of gears and dials seemed fake to sci­en­tists at first because of its inge­nious­ness. It has since been dat­ed to 100 to 150 BC and has inspired decades of research and spec­u­la­tive recon­struc­tion. Yet, no one knows who made it, and more impor­tant­ly, no one knows how it was made.

“The dis­tance between this device’s com­plex­i­ty and oth­ers made at the same time is infi­nite,” says Adam Woj­cik, a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don. “Frankly, there is noth­ing like it that has ever been found. It’s out of this world.”

The expres­sion should not make us think of ancient aliens — the Antikythera mech­a­nism con­tains more than enough evi­dence of human lim­i­ta­tion, show­ing a geo­cen­tric mod­el of the cos­mos with the only five plan­ets its mak­er would have known.

The 2,000-plus year-old device con­tin­ues to reveal its secrets, includ­ing hid­den inscrip­tions found dur­ing CT scans of the object, as Smith­son­ian report­ed in 2015. The mech­a­nism is “sim­i­lar in size to a man­tel clock, and bits of wood found on the frag­ments sug­gest it was housed in a wood­en case. Like a clock, the case would’ve had a large cir­cu­lar face with rotat­ing hands. There was a knob or han­dle on the side, for wind­ing the mech­a­nism for­ward or back­ward. And as the knob turned, trains of inter­lock­ing gear­wheels drove at least sev­en hands at var­i­ous speeds. Instead of hours and min­utes, the hands dis­played celes­tial time.”

If the Antikythera mech­a­nism is a “celes­tial clock,” who bet­ter to design and build its recon­struc­tion than a clock­mak­er? That is exact­ly what we see in the videos above, cre­at­ed for the clock­mak­ing YouTube chan­nel Click­spring. Using the best sci­en­tif­ic mod­el of the mech­a­nism to date — pub­lished this year by Dr. Tony Freeth and col­leagues of the Antikythera Mech­a­nism Research Project — Click­spring shows how the device might have fit togeth­er and makes edu­cat­ed guess­es about the right place­ment of its dozens of small parts.

You can see a pre­view of the Antikythera recon­struc­tion project at the top, watch the full project above, and see indi­vid­ual episodes show­cas­ing dif­fer­ent phas­es of con­struc­tion on YouTube. The mod­el “con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence,” Freeth writes, “and match­es the descrip­tions in the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself.” What no one can fig­ure out, how­ev­er, is just how the ancient Greek arti­sans who made it shaped pre­ci­sion met­al parts with­out lath­es and oth­er mod­ern tools of the machine-mak­ers trade. Researchers, and clock­mak­ers, may have pieced togeth­er the Antikythera puz­zle, but the mys­tery of how it came into exis­tence at all remains unsolved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

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

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.