Anyone who’s suffered through the hell of growing out a short style or spent a pre-awards show afternoon getting sewn into extensions will appreciate the brisk pace of London-based illustrator Gary Card’s “Prince Hair Chart” slideshow.
It’s only 15 seconds long, but seriously, can you name another Prince with coiffures amorphous enough to merit such prolonged gaze? Certainly, not Charles, or even the compellingly flame-haired Harry.
As this chronological speed-through of 35 years of hairdos attests, musical chameleon Prince (aka Love Symbol #2,Prince Rogers Nelson)has never shied from standing out in a crowd. Thirty-six looks shimmer and writhe atop his lavender pate, as he stares cooly ahead, more mantis than Medusa.
Not all of them worked. If we were playing Who Wore It Better, I’d have to go with Liza Minelli (1985) and Jennifer Aniston (1990), but the slideshow is richer (and a couple of fractions of a second longer) due to such silliness.
Doubtless Prince will have rearranged his locks before the doves can cry again. His latest look, as evidenced by a recent guest cameo opposite Zooey Deschanel on the TV comedy, ‘New Girl’, is a return to roots, a la 1978.
Web series might have a reputation for being amateurish, but that’s not entirely fair. High Maintenance, created by husband and wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, for instance, is a highly polished web series, featuring subtle characterizations, wry humor and some of the tightest writing this side of Louis C.K.’s series Louie.
Each episode, which generally runs between five and fifteen minutes, is about a new character — generally a young professional Brooklynite — who is wrestling with life’s small problems. The one common denominator is their nameless put-upon pot dealer, played by Sinclair. The show operates on the same world of neurosis, self-absorption and loneliness as does Louie and Lena Dunham’s Girls. Marijuana is the thing that makes their urban woes a little more palatable.
Sinclair recently described his series to the New Yorker:
The thing about weed is, we didn’t want to use it as a punch line. Instead, it’s this substance that, like chocolate, causes people to expose their own foibles. People become so human in pursuit of this thing. And the interaction they have with the person bringing it is often tragic, because there are a lot of lonely people out there who order it and then that is their human interaction for the day.
The story of each episode hinges on the character’s interaction with the dealer. In the episode titled “Heidi” (above) – one of my favorites – the dealer tells a guy that the vivacious lass he has fallen for after meeting her on OK Cupid has a dark secret.
The episode “Brad Pitts” operates in an entirely different tone. A woman suffering from cancer is feeling too nauseated to eat until her middle-aged friend calls up Sinclair. The results are not quite what anyone expected.
In “Rachel,” an author, played by Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, struggles with both creative and identity issues.
And finally, “Olivia” is about two of the most awful, toxic twits you would ever care to (not) meet:
You can watch all of the episodes here. And at some point this month (probably 4/20) three new episodes are slated to premiere.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific columnist and writer, with an impressive list of clips produced both during FDR’s tenure in the White House and afterwards. George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Projecttallies up her output: 8,000 columns, 580 articles, 27 books, and 100,000 letters (not to mention speeches and appearances). Many of those columns and articles can be found on their website.
Their archive offers every one of Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns, which ran through United Features Syndicate from 1936–1962. These short pieces acted like a daily diary, chronicling Roosevelt’s travels, the books she read, the people she visited, her evolving political philosophy, and, occasionally, her reflections on such topics as education, empathy, apathy, friendship, stress, and the scourge of excessive mail (“I love my personal letters and I am really deeply interested in much of my mail, but when I see it in a mass I would sometimes like to run away! I just closed my eyes in this case and went to bed!”)
The “My Day” archive is a little difficult to navigate—you have to browse by year, or search by keyword—but the archive’s short list of selected longer articles is a bit simpler to survey. Some of my favorites:
“In Defense of Curiosity” (Saturday Evening Post, 1935): Roosevelt often drew fire for her insatiable interest in all areas of national life—a characteristic that people thought of as unladylike. This article argues that women, too, should be curious, and that curiosity is the basis for happiness, imagination, and empathy.
“How to Take Criticism” (Ladies Home Journal, 1944): Roosevelt had a lot of haters. This longer piece mulls over the different types of criticism that she received during her public career, and asks how one should distinguish between worthy and unworthy critiques.
“Building Character” (The Parent’s Magazine, 1931): An editorial on the importance of providing children with challenges, clearly meant to reassure parents worried about the effects of the Depression on their kids.
“Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education” (Pictorial Review, 1930): Much of this piece is about the importance of fair compensation for good teachers. “There are many inadequate teachers today,” Roosevelt wrote. “Perhaps our standards should be higher, but they cannot be until we learn to value and understand the function of the teacher in our midst. While we have put much money in buildings and laboratories and gymnasiums, we have forgotten that they are but the shell, and will never live and create a vital spark in the minds and hearts of our youth unless some teacher furnishes the inspiration. A child responds naturally to high ideals, and we are all of us creatures of habit.”
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
After the infant Herzog survived a bombing that covered him in rubble, his mother, understandably fearing for her children’s safety, fled to the mountains. The remoteness of his upbringing sheltered him in some ways (“I did not even know that cinema existed until I was 11”) and not, in others. (“At age four, I was in possession of a functioning submachine gun and my brother had a hand grenade.”)
When he says that hunger was a prevailing theme, I dare you to disagree.
Dire predictions, and yet he fills me with cheer every time he opens his mouth. I swear it’s not just that marvelous, much imitated voice. It’s also a comfort to know we’ve got a prolific artist remaining at his outpost from a sense of duty, gloomy yet stout as a child in his belief that an ecstasy of truth lies within human grasp.
Kudos to cartoonist Flash Rosenberg for having the huevos to illustrate cult film icon John Waters’ remarks at the New York Public Library in real time before a live audience. The first half minute of this animated Conversation Portrait had me worried on her behalf. What a relief when the the coiled lump she was swabbing with brown watercolor turned out to be a cinnamon roll, and not the substance Divine (the director’s muse) famously ate—for real—in 1972’s Pink Flamingos.
It’s a very free associative process. The topic under discussion turns out to be not baked goods, but rather role models. (Roll models, get it?)
As to who the Sire of Sleaze chooses to elevate in this capacity:
Crooner Johnny Mathis, whose heavenly pipes Waters prescribes as a potential remedy for bipartisan ugliness.
And, touchingly, his parents, whom Rosenberg draws with arms encircling their pencil-mustached tot, a sweet Three Is a Magic Number tableau. (In non-animated life, Waters is one of four children.)
The Prince of Puke modestly deflects interviewer Paul Holdengräber’s assertion that he himself is a role model, advising his fans to pick ten flawed individuals from whom they’ve learned something and “let them know how much you mean to them.” (He may have meant “let them know how much they mean to you,” but it might be a fun sort of exercise to follow his instructions as uttered.)
And if on some far off evening, you’re moved to have sex on his grave, know that this role model’s ghost will rest content.
On Sunday, 23 February 2014, Alice Herz-Sommer, thought to be the oldest Holocaust survivor, died in London. She has been an inspiration to many people as the story of her life is shown in the Oscar-nominated documentary called “The Lady in Number 6″ (the video above is the official trailer).
Alice was born in Prague – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – in 1903. She started playing the piano as a child and took lessons with Conrad Ansorge, a student of Liszt. At 16, she attended the master class at Prague’s prestigious German musical academy. Later, Alice became a respected concert pianist in Prague. Through her family, she also knew Franz Kafka. All of this changed when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Along with other Jews living in Prague, Alice was initially forced to live in Prague’s ghetto before being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, along with her five-year-old son Raphael. Eventually her whole family, including her husband, cellist Leopold Sommer, and her mother, was sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Dachau, where they were killed.
Alice and her son survived Theresienstadt because the Nazis used this particular concentration camp to show the world how “well” the inmates were treated. A propaganda film by the Nazis was shot and a delegation from the Danish and International Red Cross was shown around in 1943. To boost morale, Alice and many other imprisoned musicians regularly performed for the inmates. Despite the unimaginable living conditions, Alice and her son survived. They moved to Israel after the war, where she taught music. In 1986, she moved to London. Her son died in 2001 (obituary here).
The way Alice dealt with those horrible times is particularly inspiring. She says about the role of music: “I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope … it’s a sort of religion actually. Music is … is God. In difficult times you feel it, especially when you are suffering.” When asked by German journalists if she hated Germans, she replied: “I never hate, and I will never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.”
Extra material:
Art Therapy Blog has a transcript of the trailer, memorable quotes by Alice and two BBC Radio interviews with her.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
”All of us who do creative work,” says Ira Glass, creator This American Life, quite possibly the most respected program on public radio, “we get into it because we have good taste.” Yet despite this discernment, or indeed because of it, “there’s a gap: for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. [ … ] Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.” For this reason, Glass argues, the tasteful often fail at their creative endeavors entirely. “Most everybody I know who does interesting creative work,” he continues, “they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.” This astute diagnosis of a “totally normal” syndrome comes extracted from Glass’ talk on the craft of storytelling, previously featured here on Open Culture.
Fortunately for those of us struggling with the very taste-ability mismatch Glass describes, a solution exists. If you want a quick fix, though, prepare for disappointment. “Do a lot of work,” he flatly advises. “Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap.” These words have proven inspiring enough that they’ve surely spurred listeners on to plow paths of sheer production through their chosen rocky yet fertile creative fields. Two listeners in particular, David Shiyang Liu and Frohlocke, apparently found themselves immediately galvanized to work with the words themselves, resulting in the typographically focused video interpretations above. Only one question remains: how large a volume of typographically focused video interpretations of Ira Glass’ words did they have to create before they could make ones this impressive?
Noam Chomsky is a pretty unlikely celebrity. As a preeminent anarchist theorist, his political writing is full of passionate intensity, but in his numerous public appearances, he conforms much more to images associated with his day job as a preeminent academic and linguist. He’s very soft-spoken—I’ve never heard him raise his voice above the register of polite coffee-shop conversation—and frumpy in that elder scholar kind of way: uncombed gray hair, an endless supply of sweaters and corduroy jackets…
So, yes, it’s amusing when, in the short clip above, a young Chomsky fan asks the 85-year-old “father of modern linguistics” for advice on how to talk to women. Chomsky’s nonplussed response is honest and heartfelt. He has nothing to offer in this regard, he says: “I got out of that business 70 years ago.” If it seems like Chomsky’s math is a little off—he was married in 1949—consider that he and his wife Carol met when they were both just five years old.
Theirs was a quietly charming romance. Chomsky, who has always possessed an extraordinary ability to keep his personal, political, and professional lives separate, did not speak much of their marriage until after Carol’s death in 2008. In the excerpt above from a Big Think interview shortly after, Chomsky tells a story of group of peasants in Southern Columbia who planted a forest in his wife’s memory. He’s also asked to define love. This time, he has a much more interesting response than his reply to the would-be pick up artist above: “I just know it’s—has an unbreakable grip, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s just life’s empty without it.”
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