Noam Chomsky, now 88 years old, made his career studying linguistics at MIT. Harry Belafonte, 89, became the “King of Calypso,” popularizing Caribbean music in the 1950s. Yes, the two men come from different worlds, but they share something important in common–a long commitment to social justice and activism. Belafonte used his fame to champion the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr., and also helped organize the March on Washington in 1963. Chomsky protested against the Vietnam War, putting his career on the line, and has since become one of America’s leading voices of political dissent.
On Monday, these two figures appeared onstage for the first time together. Speaking at Riverside Church in NYC, before a crowd of 2,000 people, Chomsky and Belafonte took stock of where America stands after the election of Donald Trump. Naturally, neither man looks forward to what Trump has to bring. But they’re not as glum about the future as many other voters on the left. Chomsky especially reminds us that America has made great strides since 1960. The United States is a far more civilized country overall. And it’s much easier–not to mention less dangerous–to effect change today than a half century ago. It’s just a matter of getting out there and putting in the hard work. Meanwhile, Belafonte urges us to have a “rebellious heart” and leaves with this spirited reminder, “there’s still some ass kicking to be done!”
Control is actually something the Actors’ Gang Prison Project seeks to cultivate in its incarcerated participants. The Actors’ Gang’s Artistic Director, Tim Robbins, who founded the radically experimental ensemble fresh out of college, notes a well-documented connection between an inability to control one’s emotions and criminal activity.
Unchecked rage may have put these players behind bars, but exploring a wide variety of emotions behind the safety of the Actors’ Gang’s mask-like white pancake make-up has proven liberating.
The dull prison routine leaves prisoners favorably inclined toward any diverting activity, particularly those that allow for creative expression. Shakespeare has made an impact on this population. Why not commedia dell’arte-influenced improv?
It’s a truly therapeutic fit, as Actors Gang ensemble member Sabra Williams, the founder of the Prison Project, explains in her TED Talk, below.
Participants are subjected and held to the rigorous physicality and emotional honesty at the core of this group’s aesthetic. Personal connection to the visitors is limited to whatever may transpire in-the-moment, but within the prison population, relationships blossom. Both guards and prisoners speak of newfound empathy.
The emotional insights arising from these spontaneous explorations teach participants how to diffuse aggressive situations, present a more positive face to the world, and interact generously with others. In between classes, participants write in journals, with a goal of sharing aloud.
Gang signs, mimed weapons, and bodily contact are out of bounds. Wild invention often carries the day.
Participants have zero recidivism, and a waiting list in the hundreds attests to the program’s popularity.
You can learn more about the Actors’ Gang ten-year-old Prison Project here.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Media vita in morte sumus, goes the medieval line of poetry that lent the English Book of Common Prayer its most memorable expression: “In the midst of life we are in death.” The remainder of the poem extrapolates a theology from this observation, something one can only take on faith. But whatever way we dress up the mystery of death, it remains ever-present and inevitable. Yet we might think of the motto as a palindrome: In the midst of death, we are in life. The dead remain with us, for as long as we live and remember them. This is also a mystery.
Even theoretical physicists must confront the presence of the departed, and few scientists—few writers—have done so with as much poignancy, directness, eloquence, and humor as Richard Feynman, in a letter to his wife Arline written over a year after she died of tuberculosis at age 25. Feynman, himself only 28 years old at the time, sealed the letter, written in 1946, until his own death in 1988. “Please excuse my not mailing this,” he wrote with bitter humor in the postscript, “but I don’t know your new address.” Even in the midst of his profound grief, Feynman’s wit sparkles. It is not a performance for us, his posthumous readers. It is simply the way he had always written—in letter after letter—to Arline.
In the video above, Oscar Isaac, who has embodied many a wisecracking romantic, gives voice to the longing and pain of Feynman’s letter, in which the physicist confesses, “I thought there was no sense to writing.” Somehow, he could not help but do so, ending with starkly ambivalent truths he was unable to reconcile with what he colloquially calls his “realistic” nature: “You only are left to me. You are real.… I love my wife. My wife is dead.” Read the full letter below, via Letters of Note. For more from their Letters Live series, see Benedict Cumberbatch read Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to the school that banned his novel Slaughterhouse Five.
October 17, 1946
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes.
You only are left to me. You are real.
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.
PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address
Losing your virginity–it’s not a subject we’ve previously discussed much here at Open Culture. Nor is it a subject about which we’d claim to have great expertise. (After all, you lose it only once in life.)
But performance artist Marina Abramović has given the whole endeavor some serious thought. As she explains in the BBC Radio 4 video above, she waited until she was 24 years old. Having seen precocious friends make mistakes, she handled things in her own special way. A Perry Como album. A bottle of Albanian whisky. An experienced, emotionally uninvolved partner. They all figured into what she calls–now 45 years later–her “really good plan.”
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The enduring popularity of comedian Lucille Ball’s 6‑season sitcom,I Love Lucy, has resulted in so many full-color collectibles, occasional viewers may forget that the show was filmed in black and white.
More ardent fans may have tuned in for the special colorized episodes CBS aired a couple of years ago, but the only existing color footage of Lucy and her husband and co-star, Desi Arnaz, was captured by a stealthy studio audience member.
The ubiquity of smart phones have made unauthorized celebrity shots commonplace, but consider that this regular Joe managed to smuggle a 16mm movie camera into the bleachers of producer Jess Oppenheimer’s tightly controlled set. This covert operation on October 12, 1951 shed light on the true colors of both the Tropicana nightclub and Ricardo apartment sets.
Oppenheimer’s son, Jess, eventually obtained the footage, inserting it into the appropriate scenes from “The Audition,” the episode from which they were snagged.
The Harpo Marx-esque Professor character Lucy plays is a holdover from both the pilot and the vaudeville show she and Arnaz created and toured nationally in 1950, in an attempt to convince CBS that audiences were ready for a comedy based on a “mixed marriage” such as their own.
In addition to Arnaz’ unbridled conga playing, the home movie, above, contains a lovely, unguarded moment at the 2:40 mark, of the stars calmly awaiting slating, side by side on the soundstage.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
His death prompted a post-election outpouring from his already crestfallen fans, who sought catharsis by sharing the myriad ways in which his music had touched their lives.
Music is like bread. It is one of the fundamental nourishments that we have available, and there are many different varieties and degrees and grades. A song that is useful, that touches somebody, must be measured by that utility alone. ‘Cheap music’ is an uncharitable description. If it touches you, it’s not cheap. From a certain point of view, all our emotions are cheap, but those are the only ones we’ve got. It’s loneliness and longing and desire and celebration.
Ditto the “Sisters of Mercy.” Turns out they really “weren’t lovers like that.” Cohen varied the facts a bit over the years, when called upon to recount this song’s origin story. The location of the initial meeting was a moving target, and early on, vanity, or perhaps a reputation to uphold, caused him to omit a certain critical detail regarding the night spent with two young women he bumped into in snowy Edmonton.
The 1974 radio interview with Kathleen Kendel, above—straight from the horse’s mouth, and freshly animated for PBS’ Blank on Blank series—brings to mind that pillar of young male sex comedy, the close-but-no-cigar erotic encounter.
PBS’ Blank on Blank animator, Patrick Smith, wisely employs a lightly humorous touch in depicting Cohen’s wild imagining of the delights Barbara and Lorraine had in store for him. Whether or not they looked like the Doublemint Twins is a question for the ages.
The animation kicks off with a reading of his 1964 poem, “Two Went to Sleep,” an elliptical journey into the realm of the unconscious, a setting that preoccupied Cohen the poet. (See the far less platonic-seeming “My Lady Can Sleep” and “Now of Sleeping” for starters…)
You can hear the interview Blank on Blank excerpted for the above animation in its entirety here.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, Leonard Cohen fan and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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.
“…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.
(Perhaps President Elect was too young to receive a copy. The back of the cover includes a grid for filling in one’s class schedule and he was but four years old at the time.)
Superman could not survive Doomsday, but the Anti-Defamation League, planet Krptyon to the illustration’s original distributer, continues to uphold the values he promotes above.
Already there have been troubling signs of a spike in hate crimes in the days after the election. As we look ahead, ADL will be vigilant against extremism and relentlessly hold the new administration accountable. You can expect ADL to be unwavering in its commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. We will monitor developments and speak out.
And wherever and whenever Jews, minority groups, immigrants, and others are marginalized or our civil liberties are threatened, ADL vigorously will defend those rights … We will not shrink from the fight ahead regardless of where it takes us.
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.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Dave Chappelle hosted SNL last nightand gave us the comic relief we needed. And also a few heartfelt thoughts about what a Trump presidency means for our imperiled nation. The most poignant part comes at the very end:
You know, before I go, I do want to say one thing, and this is not a joke. But I think it’s important that I say this, ’cause they’re marching up the street right now as we speak.
A few weeks ago I went to the White House for a party. It was the first time I’ve been there in many years and it was very exciting. And BET sponsored the party, so everyone there was black. And it was beautiful. I walked through the gates — you know, I’m from Washington, so I saw the bus stop, or the corner where the bus stop used to be, where I used to catch the bus to school and dream about nights like tonight.
It was a really, really beautiful night. At the end of the night everyone went into the West Wing of the White House and it was a huge party. And everybody in there was black — except for Bradley Cooper, for some reason.
And on the walls were pictures of all the presidents, of the past. Now, I’m not sure if this is true, but to my knowledge the first black person that was officially invited to the White House was Frederick Douglass. They stopped him at the gates. Abraham Lincoln had to walk out himself and escort Frederick Douglass into the White House, and it didn’t happen again, as far as I know, until Roosevelt was president. Roosevelt was president, he had a black guy over and got so much flack from the media that he literally said, “I will never have a n—-r in this house again.”
I thought about that, and I looked at that black room, and saw all those black faces, and Bradley, and I saw how happy everybody was. These people who had been historically disenfranchised. It made me feel hopeful and it made me feel proud to be an American and it made me very happy about the prospects of our country.
So, in that spirit, I’m wishing Donald Trump luck. And I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too. Thank you very much.
And for any educated white liberal, this skit will surely hit home:
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