We all know the name Goethe — some of us even know the full name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I’ve never lived in the renowned 18th- and 19th-century writer, politician, and cultural polymath’s homeland of Germany, but even when I lived in Los Angeles, I regularly went to my local branch of the Goethe-Institute for German cultural events. Even in Korea, where I live now, Goethe has left a wide if shallow mark: you can see The Sorrows of Young Wertherin the form of an elaborate stage musical, for instance, and buy almost all the goods you need in life from the enormous conglomerate named after the young lady on whom Werther concentrates his doomed affections, Lotte.
But why, more than 180 years after Goethe’s death, does his name still come up in so many different contexts? And given that, why do so many of us know so little about his long, varied, colorful, and highly productive life and career? This sounds like a job for the video wing of Alain de Botton’s School of Life, whose short primers continue to bring us up to speed on why the legacies of so many cultural figures (with one section given over to the literary) have endured, or should endure. “Goethe is one of the great minds of European civilisation, though his work is largely unknown outside of the German speaking countries,” says de Botton in their video on Goethe: “He deserves our renewed attention.”
To fill out the details provided in the School of Life’s video, you can read an overview of Goethe’s career (including details on the proper pronunciation of his name) in the accompanying Book of Life entry online. It tells the story of not just Young Werther’s creator, but “one of Europe’s big cultural heroes – comparable to the likes of Shakespeare, Dante and Homer,” skilled in letters, of course, but also in “physiology, geology, botany and optics,” who also spent stretches of his career as “a diplomat, fashion guru, a senior civil servant, a pornographer, the head of a university, a fine artist, an adventurous traveller, the director of a theatre company and the head of a mining company.”
We might call Goethe, insofar as he developed his own mastery, spanning so much of the human experience, a Renaissance man out of time — but one who, in his way, outdid even the actual men of the Renaissance. “We have so much to learn from him,” adds the Book of Life. “We don’t often hear people declaring a wish to be a little more like ‘Goethe.’ But if we did, the world would be a more vibrant and humane place.”
Popular entertainment has romanticized the idea of the road trip as a wholly spontaneous adventure, but for mid-century African American motorists, planning was essential. The lodgings, restaurants, and tourist attractions where they could be assured of a warm welcome were often few and far between in the era of segregation.
The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, first printed in 1936, was an invaluable resource for travelers of color, particularly when their route took them outside of urban areas. In the pre-Internet age, publisher Victor Green, a Harlem-dwelling mailman, relied on readers to supply feedback and new locations for subsequent editions:
There are thousands of first class business places that we don’t know about and can’t list, which would be glad to serve the traveler, but it is hard to secure listings of these places since we can’t secure enough agents to send us the information. Each year before we go to press the new information is included in the new edition. When you are traveling please mention the Green Book, in order that they might know how you found their place of business, as they can see that you are strangers. If they haven’t heard about this guide, ask them to get in touch with us so that we might list their place. If this guide has proved useful to you on your trips, let us know. If not, tell us also as we appreciate your criticisms and ideas in the improvement of this guide from which you benefit. There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.
1936’s premier edition is geared toward visitors spending time in and around New York City. In appearance, it resembles a church bulletin or community theater program, with business card ads for beauty salons specializing in marcel waving and restaurants serving Southern home cooking. Publisher Green extols the wonders of Coney Island, Chinatown, and the Theatrical District, even as he notes that “the colored show houses are in Harlem.” He also seeks to give readers a laugh with “How to Keep From Growing Old,” a driver-specific list that could be read aloud from the passenger seat for the merriment of everyone in the car. (“In sloppy weather, drive close to pedestrians. Dry cleaners appreciate this.”)
The Green Book soon swelled to include national listings, as tourists and business travelers heeded Green’s call to beef up the info.
1961’s 25th anniversary edition includes a history of the enterprise, a fair amount of typos, newsy updates on the staff, and a renewed promise to list the best places on the moon, should lunar travel become an option.
Starting in my Indiana hometown with sights set on Manhattan took me to the Cottage Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, the Jones Restaurant in Grafton, West Virginia, and the beautifully named Trott Inn in Philadelphia, before I finally lay my virtual head at the America Hotel. (These days, it would be the Millennium Broadway.)
Back in high school, I worked part-time at the Gap, a job that, for all its discomforts — the late-night restocking, the Sisyphean folding and re-folding, those headsets — really only left a bitter memory because of the music. Each month, the store received a new disc of background shopping soundtrack, but only an hour-long soundtrack, to be played on loop over over and over again, and so to be heard by me six or seven times per shift. Needless to say, the start of a new month, and, with this, the arrival of a new mix of bland pop hits, felt like a salvation.
This sort of programmatic musical engineering already had plenty of precedent by that point, as thoroughly documented by Mark Davis, who spent the late 1980s and early 1990s working at K‑Mart’s customer service desk and — perhaps foreseeing both the future ease of sharing audiovisual materials over the internet and the waves of nostalgia for the recent past that ease would enable — pocketed all the shoppping-soundtrack cassette tapes that passed through his hands, building the impressive collection you can see in the video above.
“Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly,” writes Davis. “Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That’s because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse.”
The highly deliberate, near-frictionless mildness; the interspersed spoken-word advertisements and their hypnotically repetitive emphasis on low, low prices; the wobble and hiss of the battered recording media; all of it adds up to a listening experience historically and aesthetically like no other. (If you enjoy this sort of thing and haven’t yet heard of the movement called “vaporwave,” hie thee to Google, look it up, and prepare for astonishment.) You can hear over 90 hours of it at Attention K‑Mart Shoppers, Davis’ digitized repository of his cassettes at the Internet Archive.
If you have any memories of shopping at K‑Mart twenty to thirty years ago, these tapes may bring on a rush of Proustian recollection. But not all of them scored the average shopping day. One, for example, came just for play on March 1st, 1992, K‑Mart’s 30th anniversary. “This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume,” a program which included “oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962.” Finally, a way to feel nostalgia for one era’s nostalgia of another era. How’s that for a 21st-century experience?
Or some lavish dish you never had a chance to taste?
What might your choice reveal about your race, regional origins, or economic circumstances?
Artist Julie Green developed a fascination with death row inmates’ final meals while teaching in Oklahoma, where the per capita execution rate exceeds Texas’ and condemned prisoners’ special menu requests are a matter of public record:
Fried fish fillets with red cocktail sauce from Long John Silver’s
Large pepperoni pizza with sausage and extra mushrooms and a large grape soda.
The latter order, from April 29, 2014, was denied on the grounds that it would have exceeded the $15-per-customer max. The prisoner who’d made the request skipped his last meal in protest.
One man got permission for his mother to prepare his last meal in the prison kitchen. Another was surprised with a birthday cake after prison staff learned he had never had one before.
Each meal Green paints is accompanied by a menu, the date, and the state in which it was served, but the prisoners and their crimes go unnamed. She has committed to producing fifty plates a year until capital punishment is abolished.
Most of us Open Culture writers and readers surely grew up thinking of the local public library as an endless source of fascinating things. But the New York Public Library’s collections take that to a whole other level, and, so far, they’ve spent the age of the internet taking it to a level beyond that, digitizing ever more of their fascinating things and making them freely available for all of our perusal (and even for use in our own work). Just in the past couple of years, we’ve featured their release of 20,000 high-resolution maps, 17,000 restaurant menus, and lots of theater ephemera.
This week, The New York Public Library (NYPL) announced not only that their digital collection now contains over 180,000 items, but that they’ve made it possible, “no permission required, no hoops to jump through,” to download and use high-resolution images of all of them.
You’ll find on their site “more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content,” and, if you have techier interests, “updates to the Digital Collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to NYPL’s GitHub account.” You might also consider applying for the NYPL’s Remix Residency program, designed to foster “transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data, and the public domain assets in particular.”
These selections make the NYPL’s digital collection seem strongly America-focused, and to an extent it is, but apart from hosting a rich repository of the history, art, and letters of the United States, it also contains such fascinating international materials as medieval European illuminated manuscripts; 16th-century handscrolls illustrating The Tale of Genji, the first novel; and 19th-century cyanotypes of British algae by botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, the first person to publish a book illustrated with photos. You can start your own browsing on the NYPL Digital Collections front page, and if you do, you’ll soon find that something else we knew about the library growing up — what good places they make in which to get lost — holds even truer on the internet.
Who really killed John F. Kennedy? Did America really land on the moon? What really brought down the Twin Towers? Few modern phenomena possess the sheer fascination quotient of conspiracy theories. If you believe in them, you’ll of course dig into them obsessively, and if you don’t believe in them, you surely feel a great curiosity about why other people do. Science writer and Skeptic magazine Editor in Chief Michael Shermer falls, needless to say, into the second group; so far into it that examining conspiracy theories and those who subscribe to them has become one of his best-known professional pursuits since at least 1997, the year of his straightforwardly titled book Why People Believe Weird Things.
On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Shermer wrote an article in the Los AngelesTimes about the reasons that event has drawn so many avid conspiracy theorists over the past half-decade. First: their cognitive dissonance resulting from the two seemingly incompatible ideas, that of JFK “as one of the most powerful people on Earth” and JFK “killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone loser, a nobody.” Second: their participation in a monological belief system, “a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network.” Third: their confirmation bias, or “the tendency to look for and find confirming evidence for what you already believe” — the umbrella man, the grassy knoll — “and to ignore disconfirming evidence.”
These factors all come into play with the other major American conspiracy theories as well. In the podcast clip at the top of the post, you can hear physicist Michio Kaku trying to set straight a moon landing conspiracy theorist. They argue that man has never set foot on the moon, but that the government instead hoodwinked us into believing it with an elaborate audiovisual production (directed, some theorists insist, by none other than Stanley Kubrick, who supposedly “confessed” in fake interview footage that recently made the internet rounds). Should you require further argument to the contrary, have a look at S.G. Collins’ Moon Hoax Not just above.
No higher-profile set of conspiracy-theory movement has come out of recent history than the 9/11 Truthers, who may differ on the details, but who all gather under the umbrella of believing that the events of that day happened not because of the actions of a conspiracy of foreign terrorists, but because of a conspiracy within the United States government itself. In the Q&A footage above (originally uploaded, in fact, by a believer), one such theorist stands up and asks linguist and activist Noam Chomsky to join in on the movement, pointing to a cover-up of the manner in which 7 World Trade Center collapsed — a big “smoking gun” of the larger conspiracy, in their eyes.
This prompts Chomsky to offer an explanation of how scientists and engineers actually go looking for the truth. Have they eliminated entirely their cognitive dissonance, monological belief systems, and confirmation biases? No human could ever do that perfectly — indeed, to be human is to be subject to all these distorting conditions and more — but the larger enterprise of science, at its best, frees us little by little from those very shackles. What a shame to voluntarily clap oneself back into them.
The end of 2015 has been dominated by crises. At times, amidst the daily barrage of fearful spectacle, it can be difficult to conceive of the years around the corner in ways that don’t resemble the next crop of blow-em-up action movies, nearly every one of which depicts some variation on the seemingly inexhaustible theme of the end-of-the-world. There’s no doubt many of our current challenges are unprecedented, but in the midst of anxieties of all kinds it’s worth remembering that—as Steven Pinker has thoroughly demonstrated—“violence has declined by dramatic degrees all over the world.”
In other words, as bad as things can seem, they were much worse for most of human history. It’s a long view cultural historian Otto Friedrich took in a grim survey called The End of the World: A History. Written near the end of the Cold War, Friedrich’s book documents some 2000 years of European catastrophe, during which one generation after another genuinely believed the end was nigh. And yet, certain far-seeing individuals have always imagined a thriving human future, especially during the profoundly destructive 20th century.
In 1900, engineer John Elfreth Watkins made a survey of the scientific minds of his day. As we noted in a previous post, some of those predictions of the year 2000 seem prescient, some preposterous; all boldly extrapolated contemporary trends and foresaw a radically different human world. At the height of the Cold War in 1964, Isaac Asimov partly described our present in his 50 year forecast. In 1926, and again 1935, no less a visionary than Nikola Tesla looked into the 21st century to envision a world both like and unlike our own.
1. Steam power, already on the wane, will rapidly disappear: “In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world’s machinery).”
2. “[T]he traveler of the future… will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside.”
3. “The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel… a steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings….”
4. Edison also predicted that steel reinforced concrete would replace bricks: “A reinforced concrete building will stand practically forever.” By 1941, he told Cosmopolitan, “all constructions will be of reinforced concrete, from the finest mansions to the tallest skyscrapers.”
5. Like many futurists of the previous century, and some few today, Edison foresaw a world where tech would eradicate poverty: “Poverty was for a world that used only its hands,” he said; “Now that men have begun to use their brains, poverty is decreasing…. [T]here will be no poverty in the world a hundred years from now.”
6. Anticipating agribusiness, Edison predicted, “the coming farmer will be a man on a seat beside a push-button and some levers.” Farming would experience a “great shake-up” as science, tech, and big business overtook its methods.
7. “Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes.”
8. Machines, Edison told Cosmopolitan, “will make the parts of things and put them together, instead of merely making the parts of things for human hands to put together. The day of the seamstress, wearily running her seam, is almost ended.”
9. Telephones, Edison confidently predicted, “will shout out proper names, or whisper the quotations from the drug market.”
10. Anticipating the logic of the Cold War arms race, though underestimating the mass destruction to precede it, Edison believed the “piling up of armaments” would “bring universal revolution or universal peace before there can be more than one great war.”
11. Edison “sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. ‘Gold,’ he says, ‘has even now but a few years to live. They day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel.’”
He then went on, astonishingly, to echo the pre-scientific alchemists of several hundred years earlier: “’We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same matter, though combined in different proportions.’”
Excited by the future abundance of gold, the Miami Metropolis piece on Edison’s predictions breathlessly concludes, “In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing rooms.”
In reading over the predictions from shrewd thinkers of the past, one is struck as much by what they got right as by what they got often terribly wrong. (Matt Novak’s Paleofuture, which brings us the Miami Metropolis article, has chronicled the checkered, hit-and-miss history of futurism for several years now.) Edison’s tone is more strident than most of his peers, but his accuracy was about on par, further suggesting that neither the most confident of techno-futurists, nor the most baleful of doomsayers knows quite what the future holds: their clearest forecasts obscured by the biases, technical limitations, and philosophical categories of their present.
Producer David Merrick pulled the plug on a 1966 musical adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s starring Mary Tyler Moore long before its official opening night, thus sparing the drama critics and the public “an excruciatingly boring evening.”
And then there is 1970’s Big Time Buck White, activist Oscar Brown, Jr.’s adaptation of Joseph Dolan Tuotti’s play. It featured Muhammad Ali—temporarily benched from boxing for draft evasion—in the titular role of a militant lecturer, delivering a Black Power message to a character named Whitey.
The primarily white Broadway-going audience that embraced the countercultural “Tribal Love-Rock Musical” Hairtwo years earlier withheld its love. In a colorblind world, we might be able to chalk that up to the champ’s sub-par singing chops or some clunky lyrics, but it would be a mistake to turn a blind eye to the political climate.
(Eight years later, Ain’t Misbehavin’, a tribute to Fats Waller and the Harlem Renaissance was a bonafide hit.)
Big Time Buck White ran for just seven performances, posting its closing notice well in advance of its January 18th appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, above.
These days, the producers would probably scramble to find a replacement, but Sullivan, a staunch supporter of Civil Rights, honored the booking, commanding his studio audience to give the costumed players “a fine reception.”
Afterward, the champ thanked Sullivan for inviting him and “the group” so that viewers who didn’t get a chance to could see “what type of play i was participating in.”
A bit of trivia. Playbill credits actor Donald Sutherland, in the role of Black Man. He may be a movie star, but he’s something of a Broadway flop himself, his only other credit that of Humbert Humbert in 1980’s Lolita, People Magazine’s Bomb of the Year.
Above is another scene from the musical, shared by Ali’s admirer, Mike Tyson.
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