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.”
We’ve got some sad news to report. Last night Pete Seeger, one of America’s national treasures, died at the age of 94. For nearly 70 years, Seeger embodied folk music and its ideals (“communication, entertainment, social comment, historical continuity, inclusiveness”) and became a tireless advocate for social justice and protecting the environment. In recent years, Seeger made his voice heard at Occupy Wall Street and even paid a visit to the 2013 edition of Farm Aid, where he sang “This Land is Your Land”. Above you can watch a film that brings you back to Seeger’s early days. Released in 1946, To Hear Your Banjo Play is an engaging 16-minute introduction to American folk music, written and narrated by Alan Lomax and featuring rare performances by Woody Guthrie, Baldwin Hawes, Sonny Terry, Brownee McGhee, Texas Gladden and Margot Mayo’s American Square Dance Group. In the film, Seeger is only 27 years old. We’ll miss you dearly Pete.
To Hear Your Banjo Play resides in our collection of 625 Free Online Movies.
Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. Less than a week before, after the long terminally ill poet had made parting phone calls to nearly everyone in his address book, he wrote the poem above, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias).” He once called all his work extended biography, and we might call this particular work a piece of biography extended into speculation, comprising all the places (Tibet, Morocco, Los Angeles), people (composer Philip Glass, noted Tangier expat Paul Bowles, his own relatives), and things (attending concerts, teaching students, smoking various substances) he knew he would never experience again, or indeed for the first time — items left over, in short, from what we might now call Ginsberg’s bucket list. The transcript runs as follows:
Never go to Bulgaria, had a booklet & invitation
Same Albania, invited last year, privately by Lottery scammers or
recovering alcoholics,
Or enlightened poets of the antique land of Hades Gates
Nor visit Lhasa live in Hilton or Ngawang Gelek’s household & weary
ascend Potala
Nor ever return to Kashi “oldest continuously habited city in the world”
bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,
visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Bibhum take
notes tales of Khaki B Baba
Or hear music festivals in Madras with Philip
Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeeshop poets,
Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem
Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah
Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly
Nor the alleyways of Achmed’s Fez, nevermore drink mint tea at Soco
Chico, visit Paul B. in Tangiers
Or see the Sphinx in Desert at Sunrise or sunset, morn & dusk in the
desert
Ancient sollapsed Beirut, sad bombed Babylon & Ur of old, Syria’s
grim mysteries all Araby & Saudi Deserts, Yemen’s sprightly
folk,
Old opium tribal Afghanistan, Tibet — Templed Beluchistan
See Shangha again, nor cares of Dunhuang
Nor climb E. 12th Street’s stairway 3 flights again,
Nor go to literary Argentina, accompany Glass to Sao Paolo & live a
month in a flat Rio’s beaches and favella boys, Bahia’s great
Carnival
Nor more daydream of Bali, too far Adelaide’s festival to get new scent
sticks
Not see the new slums of Jakarta, mysterious Borneo forests & painted
men and women
Nor mor Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Oz on Ocean Way
Old cousin Danny Leegant, memories of Aunt Edith in Santa Monica
No mor sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, new modern American Poetics, Williams
Kerouac Reznikoff Rakosi Corso Creely Orlovsky
Any visits to B’nai Israel graves of Buda, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and
Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes
March 30, 1997, A.M.
Allen Ginsberg
As much of a final statement as it sounds like, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)” remains, in a way, a work in progress, given the manuscript’s semi-decipherable hand. “Although many of his poems’ first drafts looked like this,” say the caretakers of AllenGinsberg.org, “if anything was unclear, we could just ask. That, obviously, wasn’t an option after April 5 that year.” Ten of Ginsberg’s associates passed the paper around, Google- and Wikipedialessly trying to piece together all of his characteristically far-flung references. The Caves of Dunhuang “went incorrectly transcribed for the first edition as ‘cares of Dunhuang’, since none of us were aware these were caves,” and “when we got to the ‘antique lands of Hades Necromanteion,” we couldn’t find a single reference to it anywhere, and in the end simply stated ‘Hades Gates.’ That’s how it’s published today — still. Till the next edition that is.”
Good thing Austin-based designer Michael Yates studied abroad. Three months spent in the vicinity of Kyoto as a Texas A&M electrical engineering student ultimately inspired him to abandon the profession for which he had trained, in order to pursue woodworking. “…the sacredness of the process and attention to detail resonated with me in a way that nothing had before,” he recalls in an Apartment Therapy profile. “I’ve since learned in practice what I saw evidence of in the temples—that completely focusing on where you are will get you the best product at the end. Every step of the process is precious.”
Had he not changed horses in midstream, his grandmother would have likely stuck to the plan too, departing for the afterlife in a standard-issue coffin or urn, rather than asking Yates to build her something special. In his mind, it was a collaboration, a process documented above, at the behest of Whole Foods’ online magazine,Dark Rye.(Indicating, perhaps, that artisanal, upcycled coffins will soon be available for purchase beside bamboo cutting boards and locally sourced, grass-fed, beef jerky?)
Yate’s grandma placed her request pre-need, in the industry lingo, a move that afforded him plenty of time to study—and reject—the overly ornate vessels that have become a cultural norm. Luxurious details have no place, he feels, when the user can derive no enjoyment from them. (Guess he and Grandma weren’t considering going with the off-the-wall Ghana approach.)
The coffin is the most meaningful piece he’s ever created, even before it could be beta tested. It caused him to think deeply about our relationship with death and each other. The soundtrack hints that something very sad is about to happen, as do the photos of his grandmother as a vibrant, younger woman. (Such shots have become de rigeur for anyone mourning an older relative on Facebook.) Yates mentions that his grandmother, healthy when she hatched this scheme, has been diagnosed with cancer. I think we can assume where this is going, right?
At the risk of a spoiler, I’d like to commend the filmmakers for allowing some key scenes to occur off-camera. Yates remarks that after all that went into making the coffin, it would be “a terrible miss” if his grandmother did not get a chance to see it. He’s filmed loading it into his truck, but viewers are not privy to its delivery. Some things, it would seem, are still personal.
At the stroke of midnight, millions of New Year’s resolutions went into effect, with the most common ones being lose weight, get fit, quit drinking and smoking, save money, and learn something new. Unfortunately, 33% of these resolutions will be abandoned by January’s end. And upwards of 80% will eventually fall by the wayside. Making resolutions stick is tricky business. But it’s possible, and Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal has a few scientifically-proven suggestions for you.
For years, McGonigal has taught a very popular course called The Science of Willpower in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, where she introduces students to the idea that willpower is not an innate trait. Rather it’s a “complex mind-body response that can be compromised by stress, sleep deprivation and nutrition and that can be strengthened through certain practices.” For those of you who don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can also find McGonigal’s ideas presented in a recent book, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, which just came out in paperback yesterday. Below, we have highlighted 15 of Dr. McGonigal’s strategies for increasing your willpower reserves and making your New Year’s resolution endure.
Will power is like a muscle. The more you work on developing it, the more you can incorporate it into your life. It helps, McGonigal says in this podcast, to start with small feats of willpower before trying to tackle more difficult feats. Ideally, find the smallest change that’s consistent with your larger goal, and start there.
Choose a goal or resolution that you really want, not a goal that someone else desires for you, or a goal that you think you should want. Choose a positive goal that truly comes from within and that contributes to something important in life.
Willpower is contagious. Find a willpower role model — someone who has accomplished what you want to do. Also try to surround yourself with family members, friends or groups who can support you. Change is often not made alone.
Know that people have more willpower when they wake up, and then willpower steadily declines throughout the day as people fatigue. So try to accomplish what you need to — for example, exercise — earlier in the day. Then watch out for the evenings, when bad habits can return.
Understand that stress and willpower are incompatible. Any time we’re under stress it’s harder to find our willpower. According to McGonigal, “the fight-or-flight response floods the body with energy to act instinctively and steals it from the areas of the brain needed for wise decision-making. Stress also encourages you to focus on immediate, short-term goals and outcomes, but self-control requires keeping the big picture in mind.” The upshot? “Learning how to better manage your stress is one of the most important things you can do to improve your willpower.” When you get stressed out, go for a walk. Even a five minute walk outside can reduce your stress levels, boost your mood, and help you replenish your willpower reserves.
Sleep deprivation (less than six hours a night) makes it so that the prefrontal cortex loses control over the regions of the brain that create cravings. Science shows that getting just one more hour of sleep each night (eight hours is ideal) helps recovering drug addicts avoid a relapse. So it can certainly help you resist a doughnut or a cigarette.
Also remember that nutrition plays a key role. “Eating a more plant-based, less-processed diet makes energy more available to the brain and can improve every aspect of willpower from overcoming procrastination to sticking to a New Year’s resolution,” McGonigal says.
Don’t think it will be different tomorrow. McGonigal notes that we have a tendency to think that we will have more willpower, energy, time, and motivation tomorrow. The problem is that “if we think we have the opportunity to make a different choice tomorrow, we almost always ‘give in’ to temptation or habit today.”
Acknowledge and understand your cravings rather than denying them. That will take you further in the end. The video above has more on that.
Imagine the things that could get in the way of achieving your goal. Understand the tendencies you have that could lead you to break your resolution. Don’t be overly optimistic and assume the road will be easy.
Know your limits, and plan for them. Says McGonigal, “People who think they have the most self-control are the most likely to fail at their resolutions; they put themselves in tempting situations, don’t get help, give up at setbacks. You need to know how you fail; how you are tempted; how you procrastinate.”
Pay attention to small choices that add up. “One study found that the average person thinks they make 14 food choices a day; they actually make over 200. When you aren’t aware that you’re making a choice, you’ll almost always default to habit/temptation.” It’s important to figure out when you have opportunities to make a choice consistent with your goals.
Be specific but flexible. It’s good to know your goal and how you’ll get there. But, she cautions, “you should leave room to revise these steps if they turn out to be unsustainable or don’t lead to the benefits you expected.”
Give yourself small, healthy rewards along the way. Research shows that the mind responds well to it. (If you’re trying to quite smoking, the reward shouldn’t be a cigarette, by the way.)
Finally, if you experience a setback, don’t be hard on yourself. Although it seems counter-intuitive, studies show that people who experience shame/guilt are much more likely to break their resolutions than ones who cut themselves some slack. In a nutshell, you should “Give up guilt.”
If you live in the SF Bay Area, you can take Kelly’s The Science of Willpowercourse that begins on January 13. (Anyone can enroll, and yes, I know that because I help run the Continuing Studies program at Stanford.)
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