The Lost Neighborhood Buried Under New York City’s Central Park

in Architecture, History, Life, Travel | January 24th, 2020

New York City is in a con­stant state of flux.

For every Nets fan cheer­ing their team on in Brooklyn’s Bar­clays Cen­ter and every tourist gam­bol­ing about the post-punk, upscale East Vil­lage, there are dozens of local res­i­dents who remem­ber what—and who—was dis­placed to pave the way for this progress.

It’s no great leap to assume that some­thing had to be plowed under to make way for the city’s myr­i­ad gleam­ing sky­scrap­ers, but hard­er to con­ceive of Cen­tral Park, the 840-acre oasis in the mid­dle of Man­hat­tan, as a sym­bol of ruth­less gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.

Plans for a peace­ful green expanse to rival the great parks of Great Britain and Europe began tak­ing shape in the 1850s, dri­ven by well-to-do white mer­chants, bankers, and landown­ers look­ing for tem­po­rary escape from the urban pres­sures of dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed Low­er Man­hat­tan.

It took 20,000 workers—none black, none female—over three years to real­ize archi­tects Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed and Calvert Vaux’s sweep­ing pas­toral design.

A hun­dred and fifty years lat­er, Cen­tral Park is still a vital part of dai­ly life for vis­i­tors and res­i­dents alike.

But what of the vibrant neigh­bor­hood that was doomed by the park’s con­struc­tion?

As his­to­ri­an Cyn­thia R. Copeland, co-direc­tor of the Seneca Vil­lage Project, points out above, sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties were giv­en the heave ho in order to clear the way for the park’s cre­ation.

The best estab­lished of these was Seneca Vil­lage, which ran from approx­i­mate­ly 82nd to 89th Street, along what is known today as Cen­tral Park West. 260-some res­i­dents were evict­ed under emi­nent domain and their homes, church­es, and school were razed.

This phys­i­cal era­sure quick­ly trans­lat­ed to mass pub­lic amne­sia, abet­ted, no doubt, by the way Seneca Vil­lage was framed in the press, not as a com­mu­ni­ty of pre­dom­i­nant­ly African-Amer­i­can mid­dle class and work­ing class home­own­ers, but rather a squalid shan­ty­town inhab­it­ed by squat­ters.

As Brent Sta­ples recalls in a New York Times op-ed, in the sum­mer of 1871, when park work­ers dis­lodged two coffins in the vicin­i­ty of the West 85th Street entrance, The New York Her­ald treat­ed the dis­cov­ery as a baf­fling mys­tery, despite the pres­ence of an engraved plate on one of the coffins iden­ti­fy­ing its occu­pant, an Irish teenag­er, who’d been a parish­ioner of Seneca Village’s All Angels Epis­co­pal Church.

Accord­ing to his­to­ri­an Leslie Alexander’s African or Amer­i­can? Black Iden­ti­ty and Polit­i­cal Activism in New York City, 1784–1861, All Angels’ con­gre­ga­tion was unique in that it was inte­grat­ed, a reflec­tion of Seneca Village’s pop­u­la­tion, 2/3 of whom were African Amer­i­can and 1/3 of Euro­pean descent, most­ly Irish and Ger­man.

Copeland and her col­leagues kept Alexander’s work in mind when they began exca­vat­ing Seneca Vil­lage in 2011, focus­ing on the house­holds of two African-Amer­i­can res­i­dents, Nan­cy Moore and William G. Wil­son, a father of eight who served as sex­ton at All Angels and lived in a three-sto­ry wood-frame house. The dig yield­ed 250 bags of mate­r­i­al, includ­ing a piece of a bone-han­dled tooth­brush, an iron tea ket­tle, and frag­ments of clay pipes and blue-and-white Chi­nese porce­lain:

Archae­ol­o­gists have begun to con­sid­er the lives of mid­dle class African Amer­i­cans, focus­ing on the ways their con­sump­tion of mate­r­i­al cul­ture expressed class and racial iden­ti­ties. His­to­ri­an Leslie Alexan­der believes that Seneca Vil­lage not only pro­vid­ed a respite from dis­crim­i­na­tion in the city, but also embod­ied ideas about African pride and racial con­scious­ness.

Own­ing a home in Seneca Vil­lage also bestowed vot­ing rights on African Amer­i­can male heads of house­hold.

Two years before it was torn down, the com­mu­ni­ty was home to 20 per­cent of the city’s African Amer­i­can prop­er­ty own­ers and 15 per­cent of its African Amer­i­can vot­ers.

Thanks to the efforts of his­to­ri­ans like Copeland and Alexan­der, Seneca Vil­lage is once again on the public’s radar, though unlike Pig­town, a small­er, pre­dom­i­nant­ly agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ty toward the south­ern end of the park, the ori­gins of its name remain mys­te­ri­ous.

Was the vil­lage named in trib­ute to the Seneca peo­ple of West­ern New York or might it, as Alexan­der sug­gests, have been a nod to the Roman philoso­pher, whose thoughts on indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty would have been taught as part of Seneca Village’s African Free Schools’ cur­ricu­lum?

For now, there is lit­tle more than a sign to hip Park vis­i­tors to the exis­tence of Seneca Vil­lage, but that should change in the near future, after the city erects a planned mon­u­ment to abo­li­tion­ists and for­mer Seneca Vil­lage res­i­dents Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons and their daugh­ter Mar­itcha.

Learn more about this bygone com­mu­ni­ty in Copeland’s inter­view with the New York Preser­va­tion Archive Project the New York His­tor­i­cal Society’s Teacher’s Guide to Seneca Vil­lage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York: The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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When People Gave Anti-Valentine’s Day Cards: Revisit the “Vinegar Valentines” That Spread Ridicule and Contempt

in History, Life | January 16th, 2020

Krampus—the Christ­mas “half goat, half demon” of Ger­man­ic folklore—has become a fig­ure of some fas­ci­na­tion in pop­u­lar cul­ture recent­ly. We might call the appetite for this “anti-St. Nicholas… who lit­er­al­ly beats peo­ple into being nice and not naughty,” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic writes, a tes­ta­ment to a wide­spread sen­ti­ment: Hang the forced cheer, Christ­mas can be dread­ful.

How much more so can Valentine’s Day feel like a big con, cooked up by mar­keters and choco­latiers? Though estab­lished 200 years after the saint’s 3rd cen­tu­ry A.D. mar­tyr­dom, and linked with roman­tic love by Geof­frey Chaucer in the 14th cen­tu­ry, its sta­tus as a day to over­spend has more mod­ern ori­gins. Even some of us who duti­ful­ly buy jew­el­ry, flow­ers, and cards each year may wish for a Valentine’s Day Kram­pus.

If you count your­self among those hum­bugs, you’ll be hap­py to learn about a once-rich anti-Valentine’s Day tra­di­tion “dur­ing the Vic­to­ri­an era and the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry,” as Becky Lit­tle writes at Smith­son­ian, “Feb­ru­ary 14 was also a day in which unlucky vic­tims could receive ‘vine­gar valen­tines’ from their secret haters.” Like the choic­es of San­ta or Kram­pus, tricks or treats, one could make the hol­i­day about love or hate.

One schol­ar, Annebel­la Pollen, who has writ­ten on the sub­ject “says that peo­ple often ask her whether these cards were an ear­ly form of ‘trolling.’” Per­haps that’s not an entire­ly accu­rate com­par­i­son. Trolls like hoax­es, and most­ly like to wit­ness the reac­tions to their provo­ca­tions. But Valen­tines cyn­ics pro­ceed­ed with the same cru­el glee. As Atlas Obscu­ra notes, anti-Valen­tines were meant to wound and shame, Kram­pus-like. Their appeal proved prof­itable:

Vine­gar valen­tines were com­mer­cial­ly bought post­cards that were less beau­ti­ful than their love-filled coun­ter­parts, and con­tained an insult­ing poem and illus­tra­tion. They were sent anony­mous­ly, so the receiv­er had to guess who hat­ed him or her; as if this weren’t bruis­ing enough, the recip­i­ent paid the postage on deliv­ery. In Civ­il War Humor, Cameron C. Nick­els wrote that vine­gar valen­tines were “taste­less, even vul­gar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bach­e­lors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and pen­ny pinch­ers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-mind­ed valen­tines and these sour notes were split at a major New York valen­tine pub­lish­er.

Some vine­gar valen­tines pub­lish­ers had anoth­er thing in com­mon with mod­ern-day trolls: they cap­i­tal­ized on a hatred of fem­i­nism. “The women’s suf­frage move­ment of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry brought anoth­er class of vine­gar valen­tines, tar­get­ing women who fought for the right to vote.” These por­trayed suf­frag­ists as ugly, abu­sive, and unde­sir­able, a stereo­type found in the world of sin­cere valen­tines as well. One such card “depict­ed a pret­ty woman sur­round­ed by hearts, with a plain appeal: ‘In these wild days of suf­fragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er over­look a girl who can’t be mil­i­tant, but sim­ply loves to cook.’”

Vine­gar valen­tines (a lat­er name—they were called “com­ic valen­tines” at the time) prompt­ed all the sorts of con­cerns we’re used to see­ing. Teach­ers wor­ried about the effect of such com­mer­cial­ized emo­tion­al cru­el­ty on their stu­dents. One mag­a­zine enjoined teach­ers to make Valentine’s Day “a day for kind remem­brance than a day for wreck­ing revenge.” But where’s the fun in that? Vine­gar valen­tines, says Pollen, “were designed to expand this hol­i­day into some­thing that could include a whole range of dif­fer­ent peo­ple and a whole range of dif­fer­ent emo­tions,” includ­ing some very un-Valen­tine’s Day-like con­tempt.

Find a big col­lec­tion of Vine­gar Valen­tines at Col­lec­tor’s Week­ly.

via 41 Strange

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cel­e­brate Valentine’s Day with a Charm­ing Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion of an E.E. Cum­mings’ Love Poem

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

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

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The First & Last Time Mister Rogers Sang “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” (1968–2001)

in K-12, Life, Television | January 13th, 2020

Mr. Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood, the icon­ic tele­vi­sion series that ran from 1968 to 2001, is a major child­hood touch­stone for so many.

Raise your hand if you have a Pavlov­ian response to the famil­iar open­ing seg­ment, in which Fred Rogers opens the front door to his hum­ble liv­ing room set, heads to the clos­et, singing, to exchange his jack­et for a com­fy cardi­gan sweater, and then sits on a wood­en deacon’s bench to swap out his street shoes for a pair of can­vas sneak­ers.

As per the show’s web­site, this rou­tine was a promise of sorts to view­ers:

I care about you, no mat­ter who you are and no mat­ter what you can or can­not do… Let’s spend this time togeth­er. We’ll build a rela­tion­ship and talk and imag­ine and sing about things that mat­ter to you.

Fans of all ages—some too young to have caught the show in its orig­i­nal run—have post­ed over 28,000 grate­ful, emo­tion­al com­ments on the video, above, which teams the open­ing seg­ment of the first episode, Feb­ru­ary 19, 1968, with that of the last episode, August 31, 2001.

The biggest change seems to be the move from black-and-white to col­or.

Oth­er­wise, the tweaks are decid­ed­ly minor.

The wood­en doors are replaced with sim­i­lar mod­els sport­ing cast iron hinges.

The win­dow seat gets some pil­lows.

The shut­ters give way to cafe cur­tains, open to reveal a bit of stu­dio foliage.

A fish tank is installed near the traf­fic light that sig­naled the start of every episode.

The clos­et fills with bright sweaters, many hand knit by Mr. Rogers’ mom—at some point, these tran­si­tioned from but­tons to zip­pers, which were eas­i­er to manip­u­late and were qui­eter near his body mic.

(Once, Mr. Rogers but­toned his sweater wrong, but opt­ed not to reshoot. Cast mem­ber David “Mr. McFeely” Newell recalled that his friend saw the on-cam­era boo boo as an oppor­tu­ni­ty “to show chil­dren that peo­ple make mis­takes.”)

There are the framed trol­ley prints and Pic­ture Pic­ture, as con­stant and unfash­ion­able as the braid­ed rug and Bicen­ten­ni­al rock­ing chairs that were a fea­ture of my grand­par­ents’ house.

It’s such a good feel­ing, a very good feel­ing, to see how loy­al Rogers and his pro­duc­ers were to these famil­iar ele­ments through­out the decades.

Brace your­self, friends.

Mr. Rogers was kind of over these open­ers.

As his wife, Joanne Rogers, told The New York Times in 2001, a few months before the final episode aired:

He does­n’t miss the show. I think he miss­es the Neigh­bor­hood of Make-Believe because he enjoyed work­ing with peo­ple around him. He real­ly loves all of them, and he’ll keep in touch. But he did not enjoy what he called ‘inte­ri­ors,’ the begin­ning and end­ings of the pro­grams. He had got­ten where he had real­ly dread­ed it so.

It wasn’t so much the repet­i­tive nature of the greet­ing as the need to put on make­up and con­tact lens­es, a telegenic con­sid­er­a­tion that didn’t fac­tor in to the old black-and-white days. Mr Rogers said that he would have pre­ferred pre­sent­ing him­self to the camera—and to the neigh­bors watch­ing at home—exactly as he did to his friends and neigh­bors in real life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mr. Rogers’ Nine Rules for Speak­ing to Chil­dren (1977)

When Fred Rogers and Fran­cois Clem­mons Broke Down Race Bar­ri­ers on a His­toric Episode of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood (1969)

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York, The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save Available as a Free AudioBook and eBook: Features Narrations by Paul Simon, Kristen Bell & Stephen Fry

in Audio Books, e-books, Life, Philosophy | January 6th, 2020

In 2009, Prince­ton philoso­pher Peter Singer pub­lished his prac­ti­cal handbook/manifesto The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Pover­ty. Bill and Melin­da Gates called it “a per­sua­sive and inspir­ing work that will change the way you think about philanthropy”–a book that “shows us we can make a pro­found dif­fer­ence in the lives of the world’s poor­est.”

Now, on its tenth anniver­sary, Singer has released an updat­ed ver­sion of The Life You Can Save. And he’s made it avail­able as a free ebook, and also as a free audio­book fea­tur­ing nar­ra­tions by Kris­ten Bell, Stephen Fry, Paul Simon and Natalia Vodi­ano­va, among oth­ers. You can get the down­loads here.

Singer’s web­site fea­tures a page where you can find the best char­i­ties that address glob­al pover­ty. Each char­i­ty has been “rig­or­ous­ly eval­u­at­ed to help you make the biggest impact per dol­lar.” If you are look­ing for an effi­cient approach, you can also make one sin­gle dona­tion to sup­port all of the char­i­ties vet­ted and rec­om­mend­ed by Singer’s orga­ni­za­tion.

The audio ver­sion of The Life You Can Save will be added to our meta col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Life You Can Save in 3 Min­utes, by Peter Singer

Peter Singer’s Course on Effec­tive Altru­ism Puts Phi­los­o­phy Into World­ly Action

The Jour­nal of Con­tro­ver­sial Ideas, Co-Found­ed by Philoso­pher Peter Singer, Will Pub­lish & Defend Pseu­do­ny­mous Arti­cles, Regard­less of the Back­lash

Richard Dawkins’ Uncut Inter­views with Peter Singer & Big Thinkers

 

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Love the Art, Hate the Artist: How to Approach the Art of Disgraced Artists

in Art, Gender, Life | January 3rd, 2020

Hate the sin, nev­er the sin­ner. — Clarence Dar­row

As a cul­ture, we’ve large­ly stepped away from the sen­ti­ment described by the famed lawyer’s 1924 defense of mur­der­ers Leopold and Loeb.

Apply it to one of the many male artists whose exalt­ed rep­u­ta­tions have been shat­tered by alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al impro­pri­ety and oth­er ruinous behav­iors and you won’t find your­self cel­e­brat­ed for your virtue in the court of pub­lic opin­ion.

But what of those artists’ cre­ative out­put?

Does that get bun­dled in with hat­ing both sin and sin­ner?

It’s a ques­tion that his­to­ri­an and for­mer cura­tor Sarah Urist Green is well equipped to tack­le.

Green’s PBS Dig­i­tal Stu­dios web series, The Art Assign­ment, explores art and art his­to­ry through the lens of the present.

In the episode titled Hate the Artist, Love the Art, above, Green takes a more tem­per­ate approach to the sub­ject than come­di­an Han­nah Gads­by, whose solo show, Nanette, includ­ed an incen­di­ary take­down of Picas­so:

I hate Picas­so. and you can’t make me like him. I know I should be more gen­er­ous about him too, because he suf­fered a men­tal ill­ness. But nobody knows that, because it doesn’t fit with his mythol­o­gy. Picas­so is sold to us as this pas­sion­ate, tor­ment­ed, genius, man-ball-sack. But Picas­so suf­fered the men­tal illness…of misog­y­ny.

Don’t believe me? He said, “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, you destroy the past she rep­re­sents.” Cool guy. The great­est artist of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Picas­so fucked an under­age girl. That’s it for me, not inter­est­ed.

But Cubism! He made it! Marie-Thérèse Wal­ter, she was 17 when they met: under­age. Picas­so, he was 42, at the height of his career. Does it mat­ter? It actu­al­ly does mat­ter. But as Picas­so said, “It was perfect—I was in my prime, she was in her prime.” I prob­a­bly read that when I was 17. Do you know how grim that was?

Grim.

A dif­fer­ent sort of grim than the hor­rors he depict­ed in Guer­ni­ca, still an incred­i­bly potent con­dem­na­tion of the human cost of war.

Should exemp­tions be made, then, for works of great genius or last­ing social import?

Up to you, says Green, advo­cat­ing that every view­er should pause to con­sid­er the rip­ples caused by their con­tin­ued embrace of a dis­graced artist.

But what if we don’t know that the artist’s been dis­graced?

That seems unlike­ly as cura­tors scram­ble to acknowl­edge the offender’s trans­gres­sions on gallery cards, and emer­gent artists attempt to set the record straight with response pieces dis­played in prox­im­i­ty.

Green notes that even with­out such overt cues, it’s very dif­fi­cult to get a “pure” read­ing of an estab­lished artist’s work.

Any­thing we may have gleaned about the artist’s per­son­al con­duct, whether good or ill, proven, unproven, or dis­proven, fac­tors into the way we expe­ri­ence that artist’s work. The source can be a paper of record, the Inter­net, a guest at a par­ty repeat­ing a per­son­al anec­dote…

It can also be painful to relin­quish our youth­ful favorites’ hold on us, espe­cial­ly when the attach­ment was formed of our own free will.

What would Han­nah Gads­by say to my reluc­tance to sev­er ties com­plete­ly with Gauguin’s Tahi­ti paint­ings, encoun­tered for the first time when I was approx­i­mate­ly the same age as the brown-skinned teenaged mus­es he paint­ed and took to bed?

The behav­ior that was once framed as evi­dence of an artis­tic spir­it that could not be fet­tered by soci­etal expec­ta­tions, seems beyond jus­ti­fi­ca­tion today. Still, it’s unlike­ly Gau­guin will be ban­ished from major col­lec­tions, or for that mat­ter, the his­to­ry of art, any time soon.

As Julia Halperin, exec­u­tive edi­tor of Art­net News observed short­ly after Nanette became a viral sen­sa­tion:

A Net­flix com­e­dy spe­cial is not going to com­pel muse­ums to throw out their Picas­sos. Nor should they! You can’t tell the sto­ry of 20th-cen­tu­ry art with­out him…. Although gloss­ing over, white­wash­ing, or shoe-horn­ing sto­ries of Picasso’s abuse into a com­fort­able nar­ra­tive about pas­sion­ate genius may be use­ful to main­tain his mar­ket val­ue and his bank­a­bil­i­ty as a tourist attrac­tion, it also does every­one a dis­ser­vice… we can under­stand Picasso’s con­tri­bu­tions bet­ter if we can hold these two seem­ing­ly incom­pat­i­ble truths in our minds at once. It’s not as uplift­ing as a straight­for­ward tale about a vision­ary cre­ative whose flaws were only in ser­vice to its genius. But it is more honest—and it might even help us under­stand the evo­lu­tion of our own cul­ture, and how we got to where we are today, a lot bet­ter.

Green pro­vides a list of ques­tions that can help indi­vid­ual view­ers who are reeval­u­at­ing the out­put of “prob­lem­at­ic” artists:

Is the work a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort?

Does the work reflect the val­ue sys­tem of the offend­er?

Are we to apply the same stan­dard to the work of sci­en­tists whose con­duct is sim­i­lar­ly offen­sive?

Who suf­fers when the offender’s work remains acces­si­ble?

Who suf­fers when the offender’s work is erased?

Who reaps the reward of our con­tin­ued atten­tion?

As Green points out, the shades of grey are many, though the choice of whether to enter­tain those shades varies from indi­vid­ual to indi­vid­ual.

Read­ers, where do you fall in this ever-evolv­ing debate. Is there an artist you have sworn off of, entire­ly or in part? Tell us who and why in the com­ments.

Watch more episodes of the Art Assign­ment here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Reviews Sal­vador Dali’s Auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Dali is a Good Draughts­man and a Dis­gust­ing Human Being” (1944)

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties (1920) by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Woody Guthrie Creates a Doodle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Resolutions (1943): Beat Fascism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hoping Machine Running

in Life | January 1st, 2020

On Jan­u­ary 1, 1943, the Amer­i­can folk music leg­end Woody Guthrie jot­ted in his jour­nal a list of 33 “New Years Rulin’s.” Nowa­days, we’d call them New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions. Adorned by doo­dles, the list is down to earth by any mea­sure. Fam­i­ly, song, tak­ing a polit­i­cal stand, per­son­al hygiene — they’re the val­ues or aspi­ra­tions that top his list. You can click here to view the list in a larg­er for­mat. Below, we have pro­vid­ed a tran­script of Guthrie’s Rulin’s.

1. Work more and bet­ter
2. Work by a sched­ule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good — fruit — veg­eta­bles — milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes — look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed cloths often
13. Read lots good books
14. Lis­ten to radio a lot
15. Learn peo­ple bet­ter
16. Keep ran­cho clean
17. Dont get lone­some
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hop­ing machine run­ning
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra mon­ey
22. Save dough
23. Have com­pa­ny but dont waste time
24. Send Mary and kids mon­ey
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance bet­ter
27. Help win war — beat fas­cism
28. Love mama
29. Love papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love every­body
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

We wish you all a hap­py 2020.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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

Note: This fine list orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site back in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sci­ence of Willpow­er: 15 Tips for Mak­ing Your New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions Last from Dr. Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal

The Top 10 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions Read by Bob Dylan

Mark Twain Knocks New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions: They’re a “Harm­less Annu­al Insti­tu­tion, Of No Par­tic­u­lar Use to Any­body”

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Go-Get­ter List of New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1955)

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Itzhak Perlman Appears on Sesame Street and Poignantly Shows Kids How to Play the Violin and Push Through Life’s Limits (1981)

in Education, Health, K-12, Life, Music, Television | December 30th, 2019

I always cham­pi­on any­thing that will improve the lives of peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties and put it on the front burn­er. — Itzhak Perl­man

At its best, the Inter­net expands our hori­zons, intro­duc­ing us to new inter­ests and per­spec­tives, forg­ing con­nec­tions and cre­at­ing empa­thy.

The edu­ca­tion­al chil­dren’s series Sesame Street was doing all that decades ear­li­er.

Wit­ness this brief clip from 1981, star­ring vio­lin vir­tu­oso Itzhak Perl­man and a six-year-old stu­dent from the Man­hat­tan School of Music.

For many child—and per­haps adult—viewers, this excerpt pre­sent­ed their first sig­nif­i­cant encounter with clas­si­cal musi­cal and/or dis­abil­i­ty.

The lit­tle girl scam­pers up the steps to the stage as Perl­man, who relies on crutch­es and a motor­ized scoot­er to get around, fol­lows behind, heav­ing a sigh of relief as he low­ers him­self into his seat.

Already the point has been made that what is easy to the point of uncon­scious­ness for some presents a chal­lenge for oth­ers.

Then each takes a turn on their vio­lin.

Perlman’s skills are, of course, unpar­al­leled, and the young girl’s seem pret­ty excep­tion­al, too, par­tic­u­lar­ly to those of us who nev­er man­aged to get the hang of an instru­ment. (She began lessons at 3, and told the Suzu­ki Asso­ci­a­tion of the Amer­i­c­as that her Sesame Street appear­ance with Perl­man was the “high­light of [her] pro­fes­sion­al career.”)

In the near­ly 40 years since this episode first aired, pub­lic aware­ness of dis­abil­i­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty has become more nuanced, a devel­op­ment Perl­man dis­cussed in a 2014 inter­view with the Wall Street Jour­nal, below.

Hav­ing resent­ed the way ear­ly fea­tures about him invari­ably show­cased his dis­abil­i­ty, he found that he missed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to advo­cate for oth­ers when men­tions dropped off.

Trans­paren­cy cou­pled with celebri­ty pro­vides him with a mighty plat­form. Here he is speak­ing in the East Room of the White House in 2015, on the day that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma hon­ored him with the Medal of Free­dom:

And his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Sesame Street have con­tin­ued through­out the decades, includ­ing per­for­mances of “You Can Clean Almost Any­thing” (to the tune of Bach’s Par­ti­ta for Solo Vio­lin), “Put Down the Duck­ie,” Pagli­ac­ci’s Vesti la giub­ba (back­ing up Placido Flamin­go), and Beethoven’s Min­uet in G, below.

Read more of Perlman’s thoughts on dis­abil­i­ty, and enroll in his Mas­ter Class here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Great Vio­lin­ists Play­ing as Kids: Itzhak Perl­man, Anne-Sophie Mut­ter, & More

Philip Glass Com­pos­es Music for a Sesame Street Ani­ma­tion (1979)

See Ste­vie Won­der Play “Super­sti­tion” and Ban­ter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife (1920). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Ram Dass (RIP) Offers Wisdom on Confronting Aging and Dying

in Health, Life, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion | December 24th, 2019

After his dis­missal from Har­vard for research­ing LSD with Tim­o­thy Leary, Richard Alpert left the U.S. for India in 1967. He devot­ed him­self to the teach­ings of Hin­du teacher Neem Karoli Baba and returned to the States a per­ma­nent­ly changed man, with a new name and a mes­sage he first spread via the col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly-edit­ed and illus­trat­ed 1971 clas­sic Be Here Now.

In the “philo­soph­i­cal­ly misty, stub­born­ly res­o­nant Bud­dhist-Hin­du-Chris­t­ian mash-up,” writes David March­ese at The New York Times, Ram Dass “extolled the now-com­mon­place, then-nov­el (to West­ern hip­pies, at least) idea that pay­ing deep atten­tion to the present moment—that is, mindfulness—is the best path to a mean­ing­ful life.” We’ve grown so used to hear­ing this by now that we’ve like­ly become a lit­tle numb to it, even if we’ve bought into the premise and the prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion.

Ram Dass dis­cov­ered that mind­ful aware­ness was not part of any self-improve­ment project but a way of being ordi­nary and aban­don­ing excess self-con­cern. “The more your aware­ness is expand­ed, the more it becomes just a nat­ur­al part of your life, like eat­ing or sleep­ing or going to the toi­let” he says in the excerpt above from a talk he gave on “Con­scious Aging” in 1992. “If you’re full of ego, if you’re full of your­self, you’re doing it out of right­eous­ness to prove you’re a good per­son.”

To real­ly open our­selves up to real­i­ty, we must be will­ing to put desire aside and become “irrel­e­vant.” That’s a tough ask in a cul­ture that val­ues few things more high­ly than fame, youth, and beau­ty and fears noth­ing more than aging, loss, and death. Our cul­ture “den­i­grates non-youth,” Ram Dass wrote in 2017, and thus stig­ma­tizes and ignores a nat­ur­al process every­one must all endure if they live long enough.

[W]hat I real­ized many years ago was I went into train­ing to be a kind of elder, or social philoso­pher, or find a role that would be com­fort­able as I became irrel­e­vant in the youth mar­ket. Now I’ve seen in inter­view­ing old peo­ple that the minute you cling to some­thing that was a moment ago, you suf­fer. You suf­fer when you have your face lift­ed to be who you wish you were then, for a lit­tle longer, because you know it’s tem­po­rary.

The minute you pit your­self against nature, the minute you pit your­self with your mind against change, you are ask­ing for suf­fer­ing.

Old­er adults are pro­ject­ed to out­num­ber chil­dren in the next decade or so, with a health­care sys­tem designed to extract max­i­mum prof­it for the min­i­mal amount of care. The denial of aging and death cre­ates “a very cru­el cul­ture,” Ram Dass writes, “and the bizarre sit­u­a­tion is that as the demo­graph­ic changes, and the baby boomers come along and get old, what you have is an aging soci­ety and a youth mythology”—a recipe for mass suf­fer­ing if there ever was one.

We can and should, Ram Dass believed, advo­cate for bet­ter social pol­i­cy. But to change our col­lec­tive approach to aging and death, we must also, indi­vid­u­al­ly, con­front our own fears of mor­tal­i­ty, no mat­ter how old we are at the moment. The spir­i­tu­al teacher and writer, who passed away yes­ter­day at age 88, con­front­ed death for decades and helped stu­dents do the same with books like 2001’s Still Here: Embrac­ing Aging, Chang­ing, and Dying and his series of talks on “Con­scious Aging,” which you can hear in full fur­ther up.

“Record­ed at the Con­scious Aging con­fer­ence spon­sored by the Omega Insti­tute in 1992,” notes the Ram Dass Love Serve Remem­ber Foun­da­tion, the con­fer­ence “was the first of its kind on aging. Ram Dass had just turned six­ty.” He begins his first talk with a joke about pur­chas­ing his first senior cit­i­zen tick­et and says he felt like a teenag­er until he hit fifty. But jok­ing aside, he learned ear­ly that real­ly liv­ing in the present means fac­ing aging and death in all its forms.

Ram Dass met aging with wis­dom, humor, and com­pas­sion, as you can see in the recent video above. As we remem­ber his life, we can also turn to decades of his teach­ing to learn how to become kinder to our­selves and oth­ers (a dis­tinc­tion with­out a real dif­fer­ence, he argued), as we all face the inevitable togeth­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Wis­dom of Ram Dass Is Now Online: Stream 150 of His Enlight­ened Spir­i­tu­al Talks as Free Pod­casts

You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Har­vard Psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Langer Shows How Men­tal Atti­tude Can Poten­tial­ly Reverse the Effects of Aging

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Inter­ests Grad­u­al­ly Wider and More Imper­son­al”

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

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