You have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without violence even with those who have not discarded the method of violence.
The letter long precedes the first atomic bombs and Einstein’s letters to F.D.R. warning of their development and use; though often discussed only in relation to the horrific events of World War II, the physicist’s opposition to violence and war was a longstanding passion for him. Einstein called his pacifism an “instinctive feeling” based only on his “deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred,” rather than any “intellectual theory.” His politics often paralleled those of fellow intellectual giant and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell (the two collaborated on a 1955 “Manifesto” for peace).
Gandhi remained an important influence on Einstein’s life and thought. In the audio clip above from 1950, he again offers generous praise for the man known as “Mahatma” (great soul). In the recording, Einstein says of Gandhi:
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, which roughly translates as “devotion to the truth,” appealed to Einstein, perhaps, because of its principled stand against political expediency and for a kind of moral commitment that depended on self-scrutiny and inquiry into cause and effect. Like the counter-intuitive theories of Einstein and Russell, Gandhi biographer Mark Shepard writes that the concept of satyagraha is “a hard one to grasp”–Especially, “for those used to seeing power in the barrel of a gun.”
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” was one of the greatest blues musicians of all time. His songs have been covered by hundreds of artists, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin. Lead Belly is also famous for what his biography at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes as “the mythic outline of his life”:
Born circa 1885 in rural northwest Louisiana, Lead Belly rambled across the Deep South from the age of 16. While working in the fields, he absorbed a vast repertoire of songs and styles. He mastered primordial blues, spirituals, reels, cowboy songs, folk ballads and prison hollers. In 1917, Lead Belly served as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “lead boy”–i.e., his guide, companion and protégé–on the streets of Dallas. A man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength, Lead Belly spent his share of time in Southern prisons. Convicted on charges of murder (1917) and attempted murder (1930), Lead Belly literally sang his way to freedom, receiving pardons from the governors of Texas and Louisiana. The second of his releases was largely obtained through the intervention of John and Alan Lomax, who first heard Lead Belly at Angola State Prison while recording indigenous Southern musicians for the library of Congress.
In 1935 the March of Time newsreel company told the story of John Lomax’s discovery of Lead Belly in the short film above. Although the scripted film will strike modern viewers as dubious in some respects (March of Time founder Henry Luce once described the series as “fakery in allegiance to the truth”), the newsreel is nevertheless a fascinating document of Lead Belly, who was about 50 years old at the time, along with Lomax and Martha Promise, Lead Belly’s wife. At one point Lead Belly sings his classic song, “Goodnight, Irene.”
According to Sharon R. Sherman in Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture, the 1935 Lead Belly newsreel is the earliest celluloid document of American folklore. Lead Belly did work for Lomax after his second release from prison, as the newsreel says, accompanying him back East to serve as his chauffeur. In New York Lead Belly performed in Harlem and also came into contact with leftist folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Lead Belly became known as the “King of the Twelve-String Guitar.”
Three Songs by Leadbelly, the only other film known to exist of the great bluesman, was made ten years after the newsreel. The footage of Lead Belly performing was shot in 1945 by Blanding Sloan and Wah Mong Chang, and edited two decades later by Pete Seeger. The film begins with scenes of the graveyard in Mooringsport, Louisiana, where Lead Belly was buried after his death in 1949, accompanied by an instrumental version (with humming) of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Lead Belly actually performed six songs for the film, but only three could be salvaged. Seeger is quoted by Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell in The Life and Legend of Leadbelly as describing Sloan’s work as “pretty amateurish”:
I think that he recorded Leadbelly in a studio the day before, then he played the record back while Leadbelly moved his hands and lips in synch with the record. He’d taken a few seconds from one direction and a few seconds from another direction, which is the only reason I was able to edit it. I spent three weeks with a Movieola, up in my barn, snipping one frame off here and one frame off there and juggliing things around. I was able to synch up three songs: “Grey Goose,” “Take This Hammer,” and “Pick a Bale of Cotton.”
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Another year gone by. Another 1200+ cultural blog posts in the books. Which ones did you like best? We let the data decide. Below, you’ll find the 17 that struck a chord with you. Free Art Books from The Guggenheim and The Met: Way back in January, the Guggenheim made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Calder, Munch, Bacon, and Kandinsky, among others. Then, months later, The Met followed suit and launched MetPublications, a portal that now makes available 370 out-of-print art titles, including works on Vermeer, da Vinci, Degas and more.
The Best Animated Films of All Time, According to Terry Gilliam: Terry Gilliam knows something about animation. For years, he produced wonderful animations for Monty Python (watch his cutout animation primer here), creating the opening credits and distinctive buffers that linked together the offbeat comedy sketches. Given these bona fides, you don’t want to miss Gilliam’s list, The 10 Best Animated Films of All Time.
Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison: Here’s another great discovery — the long lost guitar solo by George Harrison from my favorite Beatles’ song, “Here Comes the Sun.” In this clip, George Martin (Beatles’ producer) and Dhani Harrison (the guitarist’s son) bring the forgotten solo back to life. When you’re done taking this sentimental journey, also see another favorite of mine: guitarist Randy Bachman demystifying the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization: In June, we lost Ray Bradbury, who now joins Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick in the pantheon of science fiction. In this post, we revisit two moments when Bradbury offered his personal thoughts on the art and purpose of writing — something he contemplated during the 74 years that separated his first story from the last.
Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Speaking of science fiction, we brought you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web in audio, video and text formats. They include Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia,many stories by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman, and much more. Find more great works in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition: Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what Stanford researchers and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine. It’s to hard watch this short film and not shed a happy tear.
Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’: In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–Flannery O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story.
33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web: On the eve of the 2012 Academy Awards, we scouted around the web and found 33 Oscar-winning (or nominated) films from previous years. The list includes many short films, but also some long ones, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic version of War & Peace. Sit back, enjoy, and don’t forget our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, where you’ll find many great noir films, westerns, classics, documentaries and more.
The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946: Staying with movies for a second, we also showed you a very different mid-1940s Disney production – The Story of Menstruation. Made in the 1940s, an estimated 105 million students watched the film in sex ed classes across the US.
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web: We spent some time tracking down 23 free stories and essays published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975): In January 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. The lecture series is now online and free to enjoy, so please do so.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story: When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight tips on how to write a short story.
Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities: A Complete List: We gathered a list of 200 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by leading universities. Most of these free courses offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.” Many new courses start in January 2013. So be sure to check it out. Also don’t miss our other new resource collection: 200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & Beyond.
To fully experience the clip above, you’ll need to be awake and pressing play at precisely 12:04 am. What you’ll be seeing is a very small segment of The Clock, a 24-hour video assemblage that keeps time with clips culled from a century’s worth of film history. Some of these markers are in the dialogue, but most are shots of clocks and watches in which a specific time is clearly visible.
If viewing the complete piece sounds like a marathon, consider that artist Christian Marclay and a phalanx of assistants spent three years locating and placing the clips and smoothing out the resulting soundtrack. Some of these moments came preloaded with the import of a High Noon. Others were of a more incidental, background-type nature prior to being cast in Marclay’s project.
Those unable to spend quality time with The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this January can get a feel for it via philosopher and writer Alain de Botton’s brief chat with Marclay below.
- Ayun Halliday resolves to use it better in 2012. Perhaps you shouldn’t follow her on Twitter @AyunHalliday.
Stephen Colbert is one of the most refreshing comedians working today. He maintains his character’s obnoxiousness during his own show, riffing and improvising during interviews with everyone from Bill O’Reilly to Elijah Wood, building his character to deadpan heights even with Jane Fonda’s tongue in his ear.
But in the hot seat himself, as an interviewee on Letterman, Oprah or even with Playboy magazine, Colbert is authentic, candid, funny and a fast-on-his-feet smartie. In early December Colbert visited Google’s New York offices and taped an interview for At Google Talks. Colbert fans will want to check out the unedited version recently posted by Google. As a guest, Colbert is funnier than Jon Stewart and we get an honest look at the bright guy behind the buffoon. The uncut interview has its highlights, including the point when Colbert’s reaction to Eric Schmidt’s suggestion that The Colbert Report launch its own YouTube show. His answers to questions from the audience are engaging, funny and revealing. It’s wonderful to hear the personal story about the moment he realized he wanted to make people laugh.
Beck Hansen is the ultimate musical changeling. His career has taken him from early anti-folk beginnings to the lo-fi collage art of his major label debut Mellow Gold. He has perfected tongue-in-cheek white-boy funk on Midnite Vultures and sad sack country troubadourism on Sea Change. His mastery of genres and styles and ability to shift from reverent homage to irreverent parody on a dime is perhaps matched only by the sadly now-defunct Ween. But with his latest release, Song Reader, Beck leaps out of the ranks of pop chameleon and into that of the American Composer. In perhaps the greatest experiment in retro musical crowdsourcing, Beck released his last album as a book of sheet music—20 songs in all, with lyrics—and asked the fans themselves to arrange, play, sing, and record the songs.
Plenty of people have taken up the challenge. A collection of Song Reader interpretations—from simple acoustic guitar treatments to lush piano-and-strings arrangements—is available here (each with accompanying videos). Most recently, an ensemble called the Portland Cello Project has taken on Beck’s “album,” enlisting the talents of a handful of vocalists. In the video above, watch the cellists perform “Title of this Song” with Lizzy Ellison at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. You can hear the full recording of the Portland Cello Project’s Song Reader below, and listen to Beck explain the genesis of Song Reader on NPR’s “All Things Considered” here.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has, over the past decade or so, grown closely associated in the public mind with atheism, and specifically with the cause of taking down creationism. While he has no doubt courted this fame by writing books like The God Delusion (wheraeas thirty years ago he wrote books like The Selfish Gene), we forget at our own peril that Dawkins can argue for things as well or better than he can argue against them. If Dawkins’ intellectual bête noire, the notion that an intelligent designer deliberately created life on Earth, already holds no appeal for you, you’ll enjoy The Genius of Charles Darwin, his celebration of the father of evolutionary theory, all the more. Even hardcore creationists, in referring to the acceptance of evolutionary theory as “Darwinism,” acknowledge the nineteenth-century naturalist’s extensive influence. Dawkins, an even more ardent Darwin admirer than he is a creationism detractor, lays it unambiguously out at the beginning: “This series is about perhaps the most powerful idea ever to occur to a human mind. The idea is evolution by natural selection, and the genius who thought of it was Charles Darwin.”
This British Broadcast Award-winning Channel 4 documentary series comes in three parts: “Life, Darwin & Everything” (the title a nod to Dawkins’ late friend, Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy author and biology fan Douglas Adams), “The Fifth Ape,” and “God Strikes Back.” Beginning with the basics, it has Dawkins explain how, exactly, species evolve by way of natural selection, at one point to a dubious high school classroom. After taking the students on a field trip to check out the fossil record for themselves, he returns to his colonial birthplace of Nairobi, Kenya — coincidentally, the geographical origin of homo sapiens itself. He explores the religious implications of of evolution, the wrongheaded nature of what’s called “social Darwinism,” and the even wronger-headed nature of eugenics. He interviews figures like evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, Creation Research president John Mackay, and Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright. All have something to say about Darwin’s observation, whether for or against, and if against, Dawkins has a response. Call him overconfident if you must, but in a show like this, he certainly does take pains to approach his subject from every possible angle.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
From 2006 to 2009, Bob Dylan hosted the Theme Time Radio Hour on Sirius Satellite Radio. Each show featured “an eclectic mix of songs, from a wide variety of musical genres, … along with Dylan’s on-air thoughts and commentary interspersed with phone calls, email readings, contributions from special guests and an array of classic radio IDs, jingles and promos from the past.” That eclectic mix also gave us this: Dylan reading, in his distinctive, quirky way, a list of the most oft-cited New Year’s Resolutions, ones that we annually make and sometimes break.
Before the Clash, before the Sex Pistols, there were the Ramones. The motley group from Forest Hills, Queens ignited the punk movement, first in New York and later in London, with an image and sound that cut to the core of rock and roll: jeans and leather jackets and two-minute songs played one after another at breakneck speed. As the band’s biography at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website says:
The Ramones revitalized rock and roll at one of its lowest ebbs, infusing it with punk energy, brash attitude and a loud, fast new sound. When the punk-rock quartet from Queens hit the street in 1976 with their self-titled first album, the rock scene in general had become somewhat bloated and narcissistic. The Ramones got back to basics: simple, speedy, stripped-down rock and roll songs. Voice, guitar, bass, drums. No makeup, no egos, no light shows, no nonsense.
On December 31, 1977, the Ramones played a classic show at the Rainbow Theatre in North London. The music was preserved on the 1979 album It’s Alive, considered by many to be the best live album from the punk era, and a portion of the show was later included in the film Ramones: It’s Alive 1974–1996.
The 26-minute film version (above) contains exactly half of the 28 songs on the album:
Blitzkrieg Bop
I Wanna Be Well
Glad to See You Go
You’re Gonna Kill That Girl
Commando
Havana Affair
Cretin Hop
Listen to My Heart
I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You
Pinhead
Do You Wanna Dance?
Now I Wanna Be a Good Boy
Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue
We’re a Happy Family
The set list draws on material from the band’s first three albums: Ramones, from early 1976, and Leave Home and Rocket to Russia, both released in 1977.The Ramones are still in their classic lineup here, including Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman) on vocals, Johnny Ramone (John Cummings) on guitar, Dee Dee Ramone (Douglas Colvin) on bass and Tommy Ramone (Thomas Erdelyi) on drums. Tommy Ramone quit playing drums for the group a few months later. Ramones: It’s Alive captures one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time at their absolute zenith. It’s a great way to get the New Year’s party rolling. Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!
Thinkers, creators, and imaginers of all kinds love Powers of Ten, with good cause. If you’ve never seen Charles and Ray Eames’ still-influential film on all the various scales at which one can view the universe, take nine minutes and watch it free online. Though the original power couple of modern American design produced the film 35 years ago, the short has stayed as crisp, striking, and (literally) perspective-altering as ever. We may not need a new Powers of Ten, per se, but who wouldn’t be interested in seeing how many 21st-century interpretations of its theme 40 artists can come up with? The Powers Project has taken on this very idea, inviting contributors from Los Angeles to Köln to Wellington to Kyoto to re-envision each of the distances from which the original film views humanity, from one meter away to 1024 meters away to .000001 angstroms away.
Just above, you can watch one completed segment of the Powers Project from London’s Jordi Pagès. In it, the camera moves toward the surface of a hand and into the skin, eventually finding its way into a single blood vessel. When it eventually comes available online, the finished project will include almost as many styles of filmmaking as it does scales of viewing. Open to as many techniques of and perspectives on moving image creation as its contributors could summon, the film will take the Eames’ idea, originally all about the straight-on perception of reality, into a new realm of abstraction. Who’d have guessed how much rich artistic potential remained in, as Powers of Ten’s subtitle puts it, the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero?
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Having not seen the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, I am required to withhold judgment. As a Tolkien reader from the first time I could struggle through the prose, I’ll admit, I’ve been on tenterhooks (and not all reviews fill me with hope). In any case, I plan, like many a fan, to re-read Tolkien’s fairy tale novel before seeing Jackson’s film. It was my first exposure to Tolkien, and the perfect book for a young reader ready to dive into moral complexity and a fully-realized fictional world.
And what better guide could there be through The Hobbit than Tolkien himself, reading (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 recording in two parts (part 2 is below), the venerable fantasist and scholar reads from his own work for the first time on tape. Some dutiful fan has added a background score and a slideshow of images of the author, as well as artists’ renderings of his characters (including stills from Jackson’s Rings films).
Tolkien begins with a passage that first describes the creature Gollum; listening to this description again, I am struck by how much differently I imagined him when I first read the book. No doubt Andy Serkis deserves all the praise for his portrayal, but the Gollum of The Hobbit seems somehow so much hoarier and more monstrous than the slippery creature in Peter Jackson’s films. This is a minor point and not a criticism, but perhaps a comment on how necessary it is to return to the source of a mythic world as rich as Tolkien’s, even, or especially, when it’s been so well-realized in other media. No one, after all, knows Middle Earth better than its creator.
These readings were part of a much longer recording session, during which Tolkien also read (and sang!) extensively from The Lord of the Rings. A YouTube user has collected, in several parts, a radio broadcast of that full session here, and it’s certainly worth your time to listen to it all the way through. It’s also worth knowing the neat context of the recording. Here’s the text that accompanies the video on YouTube:
When Tolkien visited a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, he was shown a “tape recorder”. Having never seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from The Hobbit, and Tolkien did so in this one incredible take.
Also, it may interest you to know what Tolkien’s posthumous editor, his youngest son Christopher, thinks of the adaptations of his dad’s beloved books, among many other things Middle Earth. Read Christopher Tolkien’s first press interview in forty years here, and watch him below reading the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com–including, for example The Hobbit? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
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