Listen to Medieval Covers of “Creep,” “Pumped Up Kicks,” “Bad Romance” & More by Hildegard von Blingin’

in Comedy, History, Music | June 15th, 2020

All ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots

Best ye go, best ye go

Outrun my bow

All ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots

Best ye go, best ye go, faster than mine arrow

If bardcore is a thing—and trust us, it is right now—Hildegard von Blingin’ is the brightest star in its firmament.

The unknown vocalist, pure of throat, pays heed to the fascinating 12th-century abbess and composer Saint Hildegard of Bingen by choice of pseudonym, while demonstrating a similar flair for poetic language.

Von Blingin’s nimble lyrical reworking of Foster the People’s 2010 monster hit, “Pumped Up Kicks,” makes deft use of fellow bardcore practioner Cornelius Link’s copyright-free instrumental score and the closest medieval synonyms available.

For the record, Webster’s 1913 dictionary defines a “bully-rook” as a bully, but the term could also be used in a joshing, chops-busting sort of way, such as when The Merry Wives of Windsor’s innkeeper trots it out to greet lovable reprobate, Sir John Falstaff.

And as any fan of Game of Thrones or The Hunger Games can attest, an arrow can prove as lethal as a gun.

Songwriter Mark Foster told Billboard’s Xander Zellner last December that he had been thinking of retiring “Pumped Up Kicks,” as listeners are now convinced it’s a bouncy-sounding take on school shootings, rather than a more generalized attempt to get inside the head of a troubled—and fictional—youngster.

With school out of session since March, it’s an excellent time for von Blingin’ to pick up the torch and bear this song back to the past.

Ditto the timing of von Blingin’s ode to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”:

I want thine ugly, I want thy disease

Take aught from thee shall I if it can be free

No Celtic harp, wooden recorders, or adjustment of possessive pronouns can disguise the jolt those opening lyrics assume in the middle of a global pandemic.

(St. Hildegard escaped the medieval period’s best known plague, the Black Death, by virtue of having been born some 250 years before it struck.)

Von Blingin’s latest release is an extremely faithful take on Radiohead’s “Creep”, with just a few minor tweaks to pull it into medieval lyrical alignment:

Thou float’st like a feather

In a beautiful world

The comments section suggest that the peasants are eager to get in on the act.

Some are expressing their enthusiasm in approximate olde English…

Others question why smygel, eldrich, wyrden or wastrel were not pressed into service as replacements for creep and weirdo..

To borrow a phrase from one such jester, best get your requests in “before the tiktoks come for it.”

Listen to Hildegard Von Blingin’ on Sound Cloud and check out the bardcore sub-reddit for more examples of the form.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Help contain the plague spread with her series of free downloadable posters, encouraging citizens to wear masks in public settings. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

After MLK’s Assassination, a Schoolteacher Conducted a Famous Experiment–“Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes”–to Teach Kids About Discrimination

in Current Affairs, History | June 12th, 2020

Getting history across to young students is challenging enough, but what should a teacher do when actual history-making events happen on their watch? They have to be acknowledged, but to what extent do they have to be explained, even “taught”? Of the teachers who have turned history-in-the-making into a lesson, perhaps the most famous is Jane Elliott of Riceville, Iowa. On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassination, she divided her classroom of third-graders along color lines: blue-eyed and brown-eyed. On the first day she granted the brown-eyed students such special privileges as desks in the front rows, second helpings at lunch, and five extra minutes of recess. The next day she reversed the situation, and the blue-eyed kids had the perks.

What brought serious attention to Elliott’s small-town classroom experiment was the resulting article in the Riceville Recorder, which reported some of what her students wrote in their assignments responding to the experience. The Associated Press picked up the article and soon Elliott received a call from The Tonight Show inviting her to come chat with Johnny Carson about her “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise on national television.

“I didn’t know how this exercise would work,” Elliott tells Jimmy Fallon on the clip from the current Tonight Show at the top of the post. “If I had known how it would work, I probably wouldn’t have done it. If I had known that, after I did that exercise, I lost all my friends, no teacher would speak to me where they could be seen speaking to me, because it wasn’t good politics to be seen talking to the town’s only ‘N‑word lover.’ ”

Elliott’s family also experienced severe blowback from her sudden fame, but it didn’t stop her from furthering the clearly resonant idea she had devised. She continued to perform Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes in class: the third time, it was filmed and became the 1970 television documentary The Eye of the Storm. (Some of the language used by her students surely wouldn’t make it to the air today.) Fifteen years later, PBS’ Frontline reunited Elliott’s third-grade class of 1970 for its Emmy Award-winning episode A Class Divided, and a decade thereafter German filmmaker Bertram Verhaag would again film Elliott performing her signature exercise for the documentary Blue Eyed. In a variety of settings across America and the world, Elliott continues, in her late eighties, to make her point. It isn’t always well received, as she reveals in this Frontline follow-up interview, and at times has even drawn threats of violence. “I can be scared, but I won’t be scared to death,” she says. “Or, at my age, of death.”

via Boing Boing

How Martin Luther King, Jr. Used Nietzsche, Hegel & Kant to Overturn Segregation in America

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

in History, Literature | June 11th, 2020

Every writer hopes to be survived by his work. In the case of James Baldwin, the 32 years since his death seem only to have increased the relevance of the writing he left behind. Consisting of novels, essays, and even a children’s book, Baldwin’s body of work offers different points of entry to different readers. Many begin with with Go Tell it on the Mountain, the semi-autobiographical debut novel in which he mounts a critique of the Pentecostal Church. Others may find their gateway in Baldwin’s fictional treatment of desire and love under adverse circumstances: among men in Paris in Giovanni’s Room, for example, or teenagers in Memphis in If Beale Street Could Talk. But unlike most novelists, Baldwin’s name continues to draw just as many accolades — if not more of them — for his nonfiction.

Those looking to read Baldwin’s essays would do well to start with his first collection of them, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son. In assembling pieces he originally published in magazines like Harper’s and the Partisan Review, the book reflects the importance to the young Baldwin of what would become the major themes of his career, like race and expatriate life.

Though resident at different times in Turkey, Switzerland, and (right up until his dying day) France, he never took his eyes off his homeland of the United States of America for long. Nor, in fact, did the United States of America take its eyes off him. “Over the course of the 1960s,” says Fordham University political science professor Christina Greer in the animated TED-Ed introduction to Baldwin above, “the FBI amassed almost 2,000 documents” as they investigated his background and activities.

That the U.S. government saw Baldwin as so politically dangerous is reason enough to read his books. But as one of America’s most prominent men of letters, he could hardly be written off as a simple firebrand. Though known for his incisive views of white and black America, he believed that everyone, whatever their race, “was inextricably enmeshed in the same social fabric,” that “people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” As he found receptive audiences for his arguments in print and on television, “his faculty with words led the FBI to view him as a threat.” But that very faculty with words — inseparable, as in all the greatest essayists, from the astuteness of the perceptions they express — has assured him a still-growing readership in the 21st century. Contending with the most volatile social and political issues of his time certainly didn’t lower Baldwin’s profile, but any given page of his prose suggests that whatever he’d chosen to write about, we’d still be reading him today.

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

James Baldwin: Witty, Fiery in Berkeley, 1979

Chris Rock Reads James Baldwin’s Still Timely Letter on Race in America: “We Can Make What America Must Become”

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How the “First Photojournalist,” Mathew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Photos from the Civil War

in History, Photography | June 9th, 2020

In her 1938 essay “Three Guineas,” Virginia Woolf wondered “whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.” Woolf half-hoped that grisly images of the dead from the Spanish Civil War might help put an end to the spreading global conflict. She recognized, writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, photography’s ability “to vivify the condemnation of war” and to “bring home, for a spell, a portion of its reality to those who have no experience of war at all.”

Mathew Brady, the man credited as the “father of photojournalism,” had no such lofty ambitions at the beginning of the Civil War. At first, he offered to photograph soldiers before they left for the battlefield, to preserve their pre-war image for posterity should they not return. (He cynically advertised his services with the line, “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late.”) Brady was already a successful photographer and had taken portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Having studied under Samuel Morse, who brought the daguerreotype technique to the U.S., Brady opened his first studio in New York in 1844 and became highly sought after. He might have safely waited out the war in the city, operating a thriving business, but, as he remembered later, “I had to go. A spirit in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.” Brady took his petition all the way to Lincoln, who approved it on the condition that Brady finance the documentation himself. “At his own expense,” notes the American Battlefield Trust, “he organized a group of photographers and staff to follow the troops as the first field-photographers.”

Soon after, “in 1862, Brady shocked the nation when he displayed the first photographs of the carnage of the war in his New York Studio in an exhibit entitled ‘The Dead of Antietam.’ These images, photographed by Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson, were the first to picture a battlefield before the dead had been removed and the first to be distributed to a mass public.” The New York Times responded as Woolf would seventy-six years later, writing of the photos:

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.

Shocked the nation may have been, but the war dragged on three more years. Brady and his team not only photographed the dead—they captured everything from hot-air balloons to pontoon bridges to breastworks to winter huts and wagon trains. Brady went bankrupt funding the making of over 10,000 plates, many of them harrowing depictions of the war’s brutality, before the U.S. government finally bought them for $25,000.

The Public Domain Review has another harrowing collection of Brady’s daguerreotypes—portraits he took before the war that have decayed and distorted, as have a great many of Brady’s photos of the war dead. These images “were extremely sensitive to scratches, dust, hair, etc, and particularly the rubbing of the glass cover if they glue holding it in place deteriorated.” Despite photographers’ promises to the contrary, “this fixing” of the image for posterity “was far from permanent.” See more of Brady’s Civil War photographs at the National Archives.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Imagining the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Debate That Never Happened

in History, Politics | June 9th, 2020

American history as it’s usually taught likes to focus on rivalries, and there are many involving big personalities and major historical stakes. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. These figures are set up to represent the “both sides” we expect of every political question. While the issues are oversimplified (there are always more than two sides and politics isn’t a sport) the figures in question genuinely represented very different perspectives on power and progress.

When it comes to the history of the Civil Rights movement, we are given another such rivalry, between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Their ideas and influence are pitted against each other as though they had shared a debate stage. In fact, the two leaders met only once, during Senate debates on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “King was stepping out of a news conference,” writes DeNeen L. Brown at The Washington Post, when Malcolm X, dressed in an elegant black overcoat and wearing his signature horn-rimmed glasses, greeted him.”

“Well, Malcolm, good to see you,” King said.

“Good to see you,” Malcolm X replied.

Cameras clicked as the two men walked down the Senate hall together.

“I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil rights struggle,” Malcolm X told King.

Later, King would express his disagreement with Malcolm’s “political and philosophical views—at least insofar as I understand where he now stands.” The comment allowed for an evolution in X’s thought that would, in fact, occur that year, while later events would push King in a far more radical direction. As Brown writes:

Although the two men held what appeared to be diametrically opposing views on the struggle for equal rights, scholars say by the end of their lives their ideologies were evolving. King was becoming more militant in his views of economic justice for black people and more vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War. Malcolm X, who had broken with the Nation of Islam, had dramatically changed his views on race during his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca.

“Much of America did not know the radical King—and too few know today,” writes Cornell West in his introduction to The Radical King, a collection of lesser-known speeches and writings. But “the FBI and US government did. They called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’” Malcolm X’s extremely harsh criticism of King as “a 20th-century or modern Uncle Tom” is even more unfair and unwarranted against this background, especially given the title of King’s final, undelivered, sermon: “Why America May Go to Hell.”

In the years after X’s death, King fought for labor rights and advocated for “a better distribution of wealth,” writing in 1966, “America must move toward democratic socialism.” His anti-imperialist, anti-colonial stance alienated many former supporters and enraged the government, but “he refused to silence his voice in his quest for unarmed truth and unconditional love,” West writes. Maybe Malcolm’s unrelenting criticisms played a part in King’s radicalization.

The video “debate” above—actually a 9‑minute edit of their interview discussions of each other—begins with one of Malcolm X’s withering statements about King’s nonviolent resistance, which he characterizes as “defenselessness.” One can see, given the ad hominem attacks, why King refused requests for a debate. Had it happened, however, it might have gone something like this, with questions focused solely on violence vs. nonviolence as effective and/or morally justifiable tactics for the Civil Rights struggle.

The nuances and sickening historical ironies of the question get lost when disagreement is staged as a zero-sum prizefight, as the Rocky theme in the intro not-so-subtly suggests it is. King, X, and virtually every other civil rights leader throughout history, understood the practical importance of self-defense in a violently racist state. “Even the pacifist King was a firm advocate of black gun ownership,” writes John Merfield at Wisconsin Public Radio,” although he, like others, drew a sharp distinction between self-defense, which he saw as legitimate, and political violence, which he called folly.”

King also staunchly refused to address the question of violence outside the larger question of justice, without which, he said, there could be no peace. Movement leaders like Angela Davis who carried forward the radical, anti-imperialist analysis of both the later King and X would continue to push against the simplistic question of whether violence is justified as a response to brutal oppression. In a famous interview clip above, she demonstrates the absurdity of the idea that people subjected to racial terrorism by the authorities and groups protected by them should have to answer charges of committing political violence.

The history of racist killings is a long “unbroken line,” said Davis more recently during the Ferguson uprising. While Civil Rights leaders of the 20th century may have disagreed about the right response, all of them agreed it had to end immediately if the country is to survive and the promise of true freedom to be realized.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

David Lynch Recounts His Surreal Dream of Being a German Solider Dying on D‑Day

in Current Affairs, Film, History, Nature | June 8th, 2020

Some of last week’s major headlines:

Police forcibly remove a large number of peaceable protestors from the area in front of a Washington DC church, so a 73-year-old white man can be photographed standing there alone, holding a prop bible.

An unarmed 75-year-old white man approaches a Buffalo police officer at a protest and is shoved so forcefully that he cracks his skull open, lying unconscious and bleeding as members of the force step past him without offering assistance. But first the weather, as perceived by a 74-year-old white man peering out the window of his studio of his Hollywood Hills home (one of three), prior to sharing a dream in which he is a German soldier dying on D‑Day….

What makes this newsworthy?

The date and the identity of the self-appointed weatherman, filmmaker David Lynch.

For the record, June 6, 2020 started out cloudy and a bit chilly. The hope just off Mulholland Drive was for increased “golden sunshine” in the afternoon.

(One does wonder how much time this amateur spends outdoors.)

76 years earlier, an absolutely accurate weather forecast was essential for the Allied Invasion of France. Multiple meteorological teams contributed observations and expertise to ensure that conditions would be right, or right enough, for the invasion General Dwight D. Eisenhower envisioned.

As author William Bryant Logan details in Air: The Restless Shaper of the World:

In the end the Allies won the day because in order to predict the weather, they acted like the weather. Competing groups jostled and maneuvered, each trying to pressure the others into accepting their point of view. In just the same way, the high- and low-pressure cells fought and spun into one another over the Atlantic. The forecasters reinforced their own ideas, and none of their ideas was the winner, just as each gyre and each center of low and high pressure pressed against the others, squeezing out the future among them. The Germans, on the other hand, believing that they could conquer uncertainty by fiat, declared that weather and people would conform to their assumptions. They were proved wrong. The Allies appeared on the beaches of Normandy, just like a surprise storm.

Lynch’s D‑Day anniversary report for Los Angeles was his 27th, part of a daily project launched without explanation on May 11.

His emotional weather seems to run cool. He relays his historic life or death unconscious encounter (it involves a machine gun) in much the same tone that he uses for reporting on Southern California’s pleasant late spring temperatures. For the record, Lynch was born 593 days after D‑Day, and has no plans for a WWII feature—or any other big screen project—in the foreseeable future.

In a visit with The Guardian’s Rory Carroll, he expressed how television has become the medium best suited to the sort of long and twist‑y narratives he finds compelling—like art, life, and reincarnation:

Life is a short trip but always continuing. We’ll all meet again. In enlightenment you realize what you truly are and go into immortality. You don’t ever have to die after that.

So maybe he really was a luckless 16-year-old German soldier…

One whose current incarnation’s foundation created a fund to provide no-cost Transcendental Meditation instruction to veterans as a way of coping with Post-Traumatic Stress. Lynch named the fund in honor of Jerry Yellin, a fellow TM practitioner and peace activist who, as an American fighter pilot, flew the final combat mission of World War II on August 14, 1945.

Subscribe to Lynch’s YouTube channel to stay abreast of his daily weather reports, like the installment from June 3, below, which finds him voicing his support for Black Lives Matter.

David Lynch Releases an Animated Film Online: Watch Fire (Pozar)

David Lynch Teaches an Online Course on Film & Creativity

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her daily art-in-isolation project is closely tied to the weather in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Sir Isaac Newton’s Cure for the Plague: Powdered Toad Vomit Lozenges (1669)

in Health, History, Science | June 8th, 2020

Nearly 300 years after his death, Isaac Newton lives on as a byword for genius. As a polymath whose domain encompassed astronomy, physics, and mathematics, he mastered and expanded the domain of scientific knowledge available to 17th-century Europe. But if we remember him as a one-man engine of the scientific revolution, we should also bear in mind his contrasting intellectual frailties: Newton was no financial genius, as evidenced by his loss of $3 million in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and though his inquiries into alchemy may be fun to re-enact today, we wonder now why he didn’t see them as a dead end even then. And then we have his forays into medicine, one of which involves toad vomit.

“Two unpublished pages of Newton’s notes on Jan Baptist van Helmont’s 1667 book on plague, De Peste, are to be auctioned online by Bonham’s this week,” reported The Guardian’s Alison Flood earlier this month. “Newton had been a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, when the university closed as a precaution against the bubonic plague, which killed 100,000 people in London in 1665 and 1666. When the polymath returned to Cambridge in 1667, he began to study the work of Van Helmont,” a famous Belgian physician. While some of the conclusions Newton drew from his study of Van Helmont’s work remain practical today — “places infected with the plague are to be avoided,” for instance — his suggested cures may not hold up to scrutiny.

In the “best” plague treatment observed by Newton, “a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison.” Learning how, exactly, Newton found his way to such a procedure will inspire enthusiastic collectors to bid on these papers, which remain on the Bonham’s online auction block until June 10th. Newton may, as we recently noted here on Open Culture, have had some of his most groundbreaking ideas during the era of the plague, but even a mind as formidable as his by its very nature missed a few times, sometimes wildly, for every hit. Yet as the world’s scientific-industrial complex races to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, we might consider what unorthodox solutions have gone overlooked in our Newton-less era.

Videos Recreate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alchemy Experiments: Watch Silver Get Turned Into Gold

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Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Mythical ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Digitized & Put Online (Along with His Other Alchemy Manuscripts)

How Isaac Newton Lost $3 Million Dollars in the “South Sea Bubble” of 1720: Even Geniuses Can’t Prevail Against the Machinations of the Markets

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ava DuVernay’s Selma Is Now Free to Stream Online: Watch the Award-Winning Director’s Film About Martin Luther King’s 1965 Voting-Rights March

in Current Affairs, Film, History | June 6th, 2020

Ava DuVernay made her award-winning documentary 13th free to stream online. Now comes her film Selma. The 2014 film chronicles Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s campaign to secure equal voting rights with an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. Ava DuVernay writes on Twitter: “Paramount Pictures is offering SELMA for free rental on all US digital platforms for June, starting today. We’ve gotta understand where we’ve been to strategize where we’re going. History helps us create the blueprint. Onward.” You can watch Selma on YouTube/Google Play, Apple, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms listed here. The trailer appears above.

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Watch Free Films by African American Filmmakers in the Criterion Collection … and the New Civil Rights Film, Just Mercy

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Listen to Medieval Covers of “Creep,” “Pumped Up Kicks,” “Bad Romance” & More by Hildegard von Blingin’

After MLK’s Assassination, a Schoolteacher Conducted a Famous Experiment–“Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes”–to Teach Kids About Discrimination

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

How the “First Photojournalist,” Mathew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Photos from the Civil War

Imagining the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Debate That Never Happened

David Lynch Recounts His Surreal Dream of Being a German Solider Dying on D‑Day

Sir Isaac Newton’s Cure for the Plague: Powdered Toad Vomit Lozenges (1669)

Ava DuVernay’s Selma Is Now Free to Stream Online: Watch the Award-Winning Director’s Film About Martin Luther King’s 1965 Voting-Rights March

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