It makes sense that Superman would take a tolerant view of immigrants and other minorities, given that he himself arrived on Earth as a refugee from the planet Krypton.
The Man of Steel may strike you as an unlikely mouthpiece for progressive ideals, but 1950 found him on a book cover, above, engaged in conversation with a small crowd of mostly white boys:
“…and remember, boys and girls, your school – like our country – is made up of Americans of many different races, religions and national origins, so … If YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin – don’t wait: tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN. HELP KEEP YOUR SCHOOL ALL-AMERICAN!”
In other words, citizens must steel themselves to take action, because you can’t always count on a superhero to show up and make things right.
The cheap paper jacket, above, was distributed to school children by the Institute For American Democracy, an offshoot of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League.
Meanwhile, a full color version of the 66-year-old illustration has been making the rounds on social media. Let us consider it a placeholder. Eventually someone will surely take it back to the drawing board to add more girls, children with disabilities, and children of color.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Even in death we are only limited by our imagination in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ashes shot into space, or press our ashes into diamonds–I believe Superman is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, a company called And Vinyly will press your ashes into a playable vinyl record.
You like that punny company name? There’s more: the business lets the dear departed “Live on from beyond the groove.” Hear that groan? That’s the deceased literally spinning in their grave…on a turntable.
The UK-based company has been around since 2009, when Jason Leach launched it “just for fun” at first. But a lot of people liked the idea and have kept him in business.
It will cost, however. The basic service generally costs between £1000 and £3000 GBP, and it partly depends on how many vinyl records you produce. From what we can tell, you cannot use copyright-protected music to fill up the 18–22 minutes per side. So no “Free Bird” or “We Are the Champions,” unfortunately. But you can put anything else: a voice recording, or the sounds of nature, or complete silence. Get more information over at the company’s FAQ.
No doubt, the service can provide comfort and a memory trigger for those left behind. The above video, “Hearing Madge,” is a short doc about a son who took recordings of his mother and used And Vinyly to make a record out of them. It’s sweet.
“I’m sure a lot of people think that it’s creepy, a lot of people think it’s sacrilegious,” the man says. “But I know my mother wouldn’t have. She would’ve thought it was a hoot.”
Jason Leach, a musician and vinyl collector himself, talks of the immediacy of sound and what it means to many.
“Sound is vibrating you, the room, and it’s actually moving the air around you,” he says. “And that’s what’s so powerful about hearing someone’s voice on a record. They’re actually moving the air and for me that’s powerful.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Though it may have enjoyed occasional waves of pop-cultural prestige over the years, interior design remains an overlooked art. That is to say, few bother to appreciate, or even to notice, its similarities with other, more “serious” forms of human endeavor. Watch the recent Five by Ninevideo above, and even if you’ve felt reasonably content with wherever your own couch, chairs, and tables have come to rest up until now, you’ll soon find yourself considering which principles of interior design you’ve always been unknowingly violating. For our eyes “read” a room just as it would a paragraph, or even a painting, and they sense instinctively if something’s wrong — or, worse, if too much is right.
One common amateur mistake is to arrange rooms so that “everything lives on one single horizontal band that starts at the floor and ends around two and a half feet up.” With all the furniture on more or less a single level, your eye “has no reason to travel upward or into the corners,” and thus perceives a strangely flattened space.
“Placing visual interest at varying altitudes” creates a more complex visual path, which convinces the brain it’s in a more expansive (or indeed expensive) space. Mounting curtain rods well above the window frame also goes a long way toward creating this same overall effect. The use of vertical lines in general, in the form of bookcases, wall textures, or anything else, creates more “visual runways for your eyes.”
On the horizontal plane, few mistakes could be as widely committed as pushing a sofa up against the wall. Professional designers prefer to “float” their furniture, leaving “a gap that hints at hidden depth.” To better understand this phenomenon, consider how landscape painters tend clearly to separate the foreground, the middle ground, and the background: with the middle ground of the sofa flush against the background of the wall, “the brain learns to read them as a single flat plane.” Separation introduces defining shadows, a medium that can yield much greater results if manipulated with lamps and other forms of directional lighting, as opposed to overhead fixtures that flood the space with uniform light. Given the near-universality of against-the-wall sofas and fluorescent lighting cranked up to the max in Seoul, where I live, a Korean version of this video couldn’t come out too soon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving. Poor and dear companions of my life!
—Giuseppe Verdi
Is there a remedy for the isolation of old age?
What about the jolly fraternity and competitiveness of an art college dorm, as envisioned by opera composer Giuseppe Verdi?
Shortly before his death, the composer donated all royalties from his operas to the construction and administration of a luxurious retreat for retired musicians, designed by his librettist’s brother, architect Camillo Boito.
Completed in 1899, Casa Verdi still serves elderly musicians today—up to 60 at a time. Residents of Casa Verdi include alumnae of the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House. Guests have worked alongside such notables as Chet Baker and Maria Callas.
Competition for residential slots is stiff. To qualify, one must have been a professional musician or music teacher. Those selected enjoy room, board, and medical treatment in addition to, writes The New York Times, “access to concerts, music rooms, 15 pianos, a large organ, harps, drum sets and the company of their peers.” Musical programming is as constant as the fine view of Verdi’s grave.
Dining tables are named in honor of Verdi’s works. Those inclined to worship do so in a chapel named for Santa Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians.
Practice rooms are alive with the sound of music and criticism. As Casa Verdi’s music therapist told the Financial Times, “They are very competitive: they are all prima donnas.”
When memory fails, residents can tune in to such documentaries as actor Dustin Hoffman’s Tosca’s Kiss, below
Get a peek inside Verdi’s retirement home for artists, compliments of Urban Sketchers here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
Incompetent people tend to see themselves as not just competent, but highly competent. So, at any rate, holds the theory of the “Dunning-Kruger effect,” previously featured here on Open Culture. But does the converse also hold: do highly competent people tend to see themselves as incompetent? That would seem to be an implication of what’s been called “impostor syndrome,” a persistent sense of inadequacy relative to one’s status or position, unsupported by any objective evidence. If you yourself have been afflicted with that condition, it may be a tad hasty to take it as a sign of your own effectiveness, but as the Harvard Business School’s Arthur C. Brooks explains in the clip above, it may nonetheless benefit you to lean into it.
“What all strivers I’ve ever met have in common is that, the higher they climb and the more success they have, the more insecure they feel in their own success because they’re not quite sure that they’ve earned it or deserve it,” Brooks says. Ironically, in his experience, “people who deserve success through hard work and merit and personal responsibility are not quite sure they deserve it, and the people who don’t deserve it are often the people who are actually most sure that they do.”
In that last group are possessors of the so-called “dark triad” traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. A “good, normal, healthy person,” by contrast, will naturally wonder if they really merit the promotions, rewards, and accolades they receive, and if they’re truly up to each task ahead.
To combat impostor syndrome, Brooks recommends you “understand it, keep up to date with it, and keep trying to get better at the things you’re not good at yet.” Humanity’s general negativity bias may keep most of us suspecting that we’ve been overestimated, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the opportunities for genuine self-improvement that such feelings present. “The truth is, if things are really, really rough for you, you’re not all weaknesses, and if things are going really well for you, you’re not all strengths.” It just happens that at some times, everyone focuses on the former, and at other times, the latter, and what’s important is not to let yourself be too heavily influenced in either case. Perhaps you can stay grounded by bearing in mind a couple of trusty old adages: that nobody’s perfect, and that you do, sometimes, have to fake it ’til you make it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Just days ago, a game came out whose unlikely premise has already drawn a good deal of attention. “Manage your very own video store in the early 90s!” exclaims the description of Retro Rewind. “Rent, sell, decorate and expand your business from the ground up and relive the golden ages of video rentals!” Those of us old enough to have relied on such establishments for our early cinematic education can all too easily remember how frustrating they could be, what with their physically limited selections, seldom-rewound tapes, and punitive late fees. Even so, younger generations aren’t wrong to imagine that some were special places where it felt like a cinephile’s dreams could come true. Just ask Quentin Tarantino.
The clip above comes from Joe Rogan’s interview with Tarantino and Roger Avary, who worked together at Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives before they co-wrote Pulp Fiction. “Working at that store, I just got caught up in the little life there,” Tarantino says. Yet he also remembers himself thinking, “Well, this isn’t my dream. This isn’t what I wanted to do working at a video store for years. I wanted to actually make movies. It’s not my dream, what I’m doing — but it’s dream-adjacent!” It turned out that getting paid to watch movies all day long (to say nothing of becoming locally famous for sheer cinephilia) without putting in any serious manual labor “put my ambitions to sleep a little bit.”
Tarantino explains that his awakening from this retail reverie began with witnessing the sudden embitterment of fellow clerks who passed the age of thirty doing the same “cool” jobs they always had. This set him on the path to undergoing a series of dark nights of the soul he called “Quentin detest fests,” during which he would make a no-excuses accounting of all the mistakes he was actively or passively making. “I would spend all night laying out everything I’m doing that’s wrong, and then I would spend the last two hours figuring out how I could change it. And as opposed to just doing it and then going to get some sleep, and then you forget about it and fall back into your routine, I decided to change my life.”
Attachment to his job was a big part of the problem. “I’ve got to just move to Hollywood, I’ve got to get involved there, I’ve got to meet other people that are in the business,” he realized. “I shouldn’t be making money until I’m making money doing what I want to do.” Not long after relocating from the South Bay to Koreatown — still well south of Hollywood, but close enough — he started making connections in the low-budget horror world. “Well, if these guys can do it, I can do it,” he came to believe, and within a year and a half he was making a living as a screenwriter. The video rental industry has long since collapsed, but Quentin Tarantino is still going strong as a filmmaker. If he takes a break from working on what may be his last picture to play Retro Rewind, we’d surely all be interested in hearing what memories it brings back. Maybe he and Avary can discuss it on their Video Archives Podcast.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
For many of us, Jane Goodall was one of those cultural figures who seemed always to have been around, and on some level, made us feel like she always would be. But of course, no human being lives forever, no matter how widely admired. Goodall made her own departure last fall, in the middle of an American speaking tour, at the age of 91. Just two days thereafter, she appeared as the guest on the premiere of Netflix’s Famous Last Words, a program consisting of interviews conducted expressly to air only after the interviewee’s death. In the clip above, the show’s host, TV writer-director-producer Brad Falchuk, asks her an outwardly simple question: “Who would you say you were?”
Goodall describes herself as “somebody sent to this world to try to give people hope in dark times, because without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing, and in the dark times that we are living in now, if people don’t have hope, we’re doomed. How can we bring little children into this dark world we’ve created and let them be surrounded by people who’ve given up? So even if this is the end of humanity as we know it, let’s fight to the very end. Let’s let the children know that there is hope, if they get together. And even if it becomes impossible for anybody, it’s better to go on fighting to the end than just to give up and say, ‘Okay.’ ” These are fine words, though it may surprise some of us that they make no mention of chimps.
Though she became famous as a primatologist, and specifically as an expert on chimpanzees, Goodall devoted much energy in her later decades to taking action on broader causes. These included environmental conservation and the security of life on Earth itself, which she saw as imperiled by the actions of certain governments and political actors. When Falchuk asks who she doesn’t like, she expresses her desire to send permanently into space Elon Musk, Donald Trump and “some of his real supporters,” Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and “his far-right government.” That answer may get us wondering whether the resulting power vacuums would be filled by more or less savory characters. The entire interview will leave us with another, perhaps more troubling question: who, today, could be suited to assume the place in public life left behind by Jane Goodall?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Advice on how to grow old frequently comes from such banal or bloodless sources that we can be forgiven for ignoring it. Public health officials who dispense wisdom may have good intentions; pharmaceutical companies who do the same may not. In either case, the messages arrive in a form that can bring on the despair they seek to avert. Elderly people in well-lit photographs stroll down garden paths, ballroom dance, do yoga. Bulleted lists punctuated by dry citations issue gently-worded guidelines for sensible living. Inoffensive blandness as a prescription for living well.
At the other extreme are profiles of exceptional cases—relatively spry individuals who have passed the century mark. Rarely do their stories conform to the model of abstemiousness enjoined upon us by professionals. But we know that growing old with dignity entails so much more than diet and exercise or making it to a hundred-and-two. It entails facing death as squarely as we face life. We need writers with depth, sensitivity, and eloquence to deliver this message. Bertrand Russell does just that in his essay “How to Grow Old,” written when the philosopher was 81 (sixteen years before he eventually passed away, at age 97).
Russell does not flatter his readers’ rationalist conceits by citing the latest science. “As regards health,” he writes, “I have nothing useful to say…. I eat and drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake.” (We are inclined, perhaps, to trust him on these grounds alone.) He opens with a drily humorous paragraph in which he recommends, “choose your ancestors well,” then he issues advice on the order of not dwelling on the past or becoming a burden to your children.
But the true kernel of his short essay, “the proper recipe for remaining young,” he says, came to him from the example of a maternal grandmother, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was growing old.” “If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective,” Russell writes. “you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.”
Such interests, he argues, should be “impersonal,” and it is this quality that loosens our grip. As Maria Popova puts it, “Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger.” The idea is familiar; in Russell’s hands it becomes a meditation on mortality as ever-timely as the so-often-quoted passages from Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” Philosopher and writer John G. Messerly calls Russell’s concluding passage “one of the most beautiful reflections on death I have found in all of world literature.”
The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
Read Russell’s “How to Grow Old” in full here. And see many more eloquent meditations on aging and death—from Henry Miller, André Gide, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Grace Paley—at The Marginalian.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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