Led Zeppelin — they started off making a mess of bourgeois households; now, like many of their 60s counterparts, they’re getting honored by the powers that be. This weekend, the band’s three surviving members — Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page — were honored for their cultural achievements at a festive ceremony in Washington D.C.. Looking very at ease with things, President Obama reminded us that, 30 years after the band’s last album, the “Led Zeppelin legacy lives on.” Somewhere Paul Ryan is eating his heart out.
Below we have footage of Led Zep during their heyday — a full concert recorded Live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970.
Ah, 20th-century philosophy: even a great many philosophers of the 20th century wouldn’t touch it. When you want to approach a thorny, complex, contradictory field like this, you especially value a teacher like Rick Roderick (1949–2002). Called “the Bill Hicks of Philosophy” by his fan sites, Roderick recorded a series of lectures for The Teaching Company, in the early nineties. (Though the Great Courses have grown far more slickly produced since then, the intellectual content of their older efforts, like this one, remains solid.) Above, you’ll find “The Masters of Suspicion,” the introductory lecture to “The Self Under Seige,” his video course on 20th-century philosophers. In eight segments (available in a playlist below), Roderick covers the likes of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas. Perhaps he can make sense of them for you; if not, he’ll make them into hours of entertainment.
Not having come up steeped in 20th-century philosophy during his own education, Roderick has his own opinions about how these luminaries throw into question all forms of human knowledge and identity. But he does take their ideas seriously, connecting them as he considers them to real issues and then-current events.
This reveals that he also has his own opinions, more than willingly given, about — bear in mind, the year was 1993 — Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms, political correctness, Pat Buchanan, Billy Graham, network television, Jerry Falwell, and The Big Chill. “When we do philosophy my way,” Roderick announces in his distinctive West Texas accent, “we just talk about what’s goin’ on and try to find our way about.” If that’s how you like philosophy done, visit rickroderick.org to hear much more of it.
You can find more recent philosophy courses produced by The Great Courses here.
The news the world receives from the continent of Africa is almost uniformly bad, and this is certainly an unjust situation. A recent parody ad campaign by Norwegian Erik Schreiner Evans attempts to say as much; Evans’ Africa for Norway spoof intends to send the message to “stop treating Africans like passive recipients of aid, and recognize that the continent is more than the sum of its problems.” This message may have some effect on the tendency of major news and aid organizations to capitalize on the suffering of African people, but recent stories highlighting the ingenuity and self-sufficiency of African teenagers may do more to change perceptions. First, there is the story of four Nigerian teenagers who debuted their “urine-powered generator” at the 2012 “Maker Faire Africa” in Lagos, a story that made headlines in international news. Another prodigy, from Sierra Leone, has made a splash with his ability to turn garbage into useable technology. Fifteen-year-old Kelvin Doe—a.k.a. D.J. Focus—has wowed engineers by building his own batteries, generators, and transmitters with scrounged-up spare parts and youthful resourcefulness.
The above THINKR video profiles Kelvin, with interviews from engineers like MIT doctoral student David Sengeh, also from Sierra Leone, who has used his connections to help young people like Kelvin develop their talents for the benefit of their war-torn and impoverished country. Kelvin’s a pretty amazing young guy. He explains his alter-ego “D.J. Focus” as part of his personal ethos: “I believe if you focus, you can do an invention perfectly.” Kelvin hosts his own radio show, which provided the impetus for his tech innovations. Kelvin’s story struck a chord: the short video garnered over three-million views in just ten days.
A more recent episode of THINKR’s “Prodigies” series profiles Kelvin’s mentor, David Sengah, whose research focuses on designing comfortable prosthetic limbs, an interest he developed through his own experience of the ten-year Sierra Leone Civil War, during which rebel forces amputated limbs to intimidate their opposition.
Kelvin Doe and David Sengah are extraordinary inventors, but they are only two examples of a steady stream of African tech innovators, artists, writers, and entrepreneurs dedicated to changing their countries’ fates and thereby changing the official narrative of Africans as helpless victims.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Maybe the biggest winner of the 2012 presidential election, other than Barack Obama, was Nate Silver, the young statistician who runs the 538 blog at the New York Times. As you may recall (it was only a few weeks ago), Silver gave President Obama roughly an 80% — 90% chance of winning during the final days of October. The talking heads railed against Silver, calling him an “ideologue” and a “joke.” But, just as Silver accurately predicted the outcome of every Senate race during the 2008 election cycle, so did he pretty much nail the big race of 2012. He estimated Obama would receive 313 electoral votes, a touch below the 332 the president actually received. Silver was vindicated. It was time to take a victory lap … and sell a few books.
In late September, Silver shrewdly published a new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t. The book tour eventually, if not inevitably, brought him to Google, where the celebrity statistician fielded questions from data-loving Googlers for an hour. A grand old time was had by all.
Today is the birthday of the writer Joseph Conrad. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzniowski on December 3, 1857 in Berdichev, in the Polish Ukraine. As a young man he traveled the world as a merchant sailer, an experience that furnished material and inspiration for his English-language books, which include such classics as Nostromo, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
To mark the occasion we bring you a recording of Orson Welles reading (listen to it here) Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer” in 1985 as one of his selections for The Orson Welles Library. “I think I’m made for Conrad,” Welles once said. “I think every Conrad story is a movie.” Conrad wrote “The Secret Sharer” in 1909. The story is told by the captain of a ship. One night, while on watch in waters near the Gulf of Siam, the captain discovers a naked swimmer clinging desperately to the side of the ship. He helps the mysterious man aboard and learns his story. The captain is then faced with a dilemma: Should he help the man, or turn him over to the people who are looking for him?
Hey, hoarders, think you’re the only ones who see potential in a single crutch, an empty Scotch bottle, the jagged remains of a skateboard? Not so. Musician, artist, and all-around visionary Ken Butler has been turning such trash into treasure since 1978, when he fitted an ax with a tail piece, fingerboard and contact mic and snuggled it inside a 3/4 size violin case. Chop a cherry tree with it, or play it just like Buddy Guy plays his ax. Like most of the hybrids Butler creates in his Brooklyn studio, it’s a functioning musical instrument, though he’s quick to point out that for him, the sound is immaterial. What really counts is the poetic coupling of unlikely materials.
Things really get cookin’ at the 4:20 mark, when Butler plays a few licks on a three-stringed shovel before moving on to a bowable, electrified tennis racket. The results are far lovelier than the master would lead you to believe.
- Ayun Halliday can stumble her way through the Entertainer if there’s a piano handy.
If books figure into your holiday gift-giving plans, then we’ve got a little something for you — a meta list of the best books of 2012. It’s now December, the final month of the year, which means that newspapers and magazines can start taking stock of 2012 and declare their favorites.
You can find more good reads with “Best of” lists created by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Esquire, HuffPo and The Guardian. And if you’re looking for a deal, don’t miss this: Amazon.com is now offering 40% off books appearing on its list of 2012 Editors’ Picks. Meanwhile Audible.com has produced its own list of favorites, and it’s worth highlighting if only because, when you sign up for a Free Trial, you can download one of their selections (or pretty much any other audiobook you want) for free. Learn more and initiate the free download here.
Now my dear fellow readers, it’s your turn. We want to hear what books (published in 2012) left the strongest impression on you. Give us your thoughts in the comments section below and we’ll publish the Open Culture Best of 2012 list later this week. We look forward to hearing your picks!
But the collection also lets you sort ads thematically. So, for example, you can jump into the U.S. Get a Mac campaign, where you’ll get plenty of John Hodgman. Also find versions of the same campaign from the UK and Japan. Finally, Apple ads featuring celebrities — from Bob Dylan to Zooey Deschanel to Spike Lee — are all neatly packaged together too. H/T @coudal
“This is my dream job,” Conan O’Brien says while in conversation with presidential biographer Edmund Morris. He didn’t say it when he brought Morris onto Conan, his late-night talk show on TBS. He says it on Serious Jibber-Jabber, an altogether different operation. On Conan, he talked to Morris for seven minutes; on Serious Jibber-Jabber, they talk for 47 minutes. Officially described as a web series wherein “Conan O’Brien has lengthy, uninterrupted conversations with interesting people on topics which fascinate him,” the show casts the icon of Gen‑X irreverence not as a purveyor of intelligent silliness, but as a conversationalist in the mold of Charlie Rose. In any case, he does it practically on the set of Charlie Rose: a table, chairs, a background of purest black, and no further distractions. (If you’re going to borrow, they say, borrow from the best.) O’Brien’s followers may not know he has a fervent interest in presidential history, but after watching his interview with the man who wrote three volumes on Theodore Roosevelt and one on Ronald Reagan, they’ll certainly have found out.
Though the show’s title contains the word Serious and O’Brien speaks with genuine curiosity throughout, it also contains the words Jibber-Jabber, and I doubt he has it in him not to crack jokes. This is welcome, and a reason why I’d like to see him direct all of Team Coco’s considerable resources to these interviews from now on. He even gets into the subject of presidential senses of humor — evidently presidents aren’t allowed to have them anymore — which he picks up again in the show’s second interview, with comedy writer and filmmaker Judd Apatow. Though we get a warning that O’Brien will only tape more of these conversations “whenever time and fate allow,” I personally await the next one with bated breath. Somehow, the man who gave the world the Horny Manatee, the Coked-Up Werewolf, and the immortal Masturbating Bear realized the most important thing about viewers like you and me: we’d much rather watch two people discuss enthusiastically and at length subjects that interest them rather than swiftly mangle subjects they guess might interest us.
Having seen Radiohead a few times since their post-2000 Kid A transformation, I can tell you firsthand that while their last several records have trended toward bedroom rock, the live show is still a full-on experience. No twiddling behind laptops and drum machines. And if you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing them perform since their break with noisy alt-rock, now you can, thanks to the fans who produced the above film, shot at NYC’s Roseland Ballroom and the second of only three shows the band played in 2011 in support of The King of Limbs.
Edited together from the YouTube footage of ten different fans, the video is a remarkable example of crowdsourced dedication. Radiohead generously donated the audio straight from the soundboard, providing stellar sound, and the fan-editors obtained at least two camera angles for every song, giving this production the look of a professional concert film. It’s quite an achievement overall (and not the first time this has been done).
Finally, in the spirit of fan collaboration, YouTube user MountainMan1092 helpfully typed up and posted the tracklist below:
0:00:58 Bloom 0:07:23 Little By Little 0:12:07 Staircase 0:17:02 The National Anthem 0:22:03 Feral 0:26:20 Subterranean Homesick Alien 0:31:24 Like Spinning Plates 0:34:50 All I Need 0:39:06 True Love Waits/ Everything In Its Right Place 0:44:49 15 Step 0:49:04 Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi 0:55:08 Lotus Flower 1:00:55 Codex 1:06:43 The Daily Mail 1:10:33 Good Morning Mr. Magpie 1:16:22 Reckoner 1:24:00 Give Up The Ghost 1:29:19 Myxomatosis 01:33:24 Bodysnatchers 1:41:28 Supercollider 1:47:17 Nude
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, some of the figures we consider Rock and Roll icons were near or at the nadir of their popularity. With Duran Duran, The Police and Michael Jackson at the top of the charts, artists like George Harrison, Bob Dylan and even David Bowie had put out their last great records and were waiting for the nostalgia wheel to turn.
Enter Joe Smith, recording industry executive and former disc jockey. Over two years in the late 80s, while president of Capitol Records/EMI, Smith recorded nearly 240 hours of interviews with a catalog of major musical artists from Mick Jagger, Bowie and Paul McCartney to Yoko Ono, George Harrison and Linda Ronstadt.
Smith used excerpts of the interviews for the book Off the Record, published in 1988. Now retired, he has donated the archive of unedited audio interviews to the Library of Congress. The Joe Smith Collection will feature talks with more than 200 artists. As an industry insider Smith had extraordinary access. It’s not that these artists aren’t already heavily interviewed and documented. It’s the intimate tone of the conversations that pleases and surprises.
In a leisurely conversation with Smith, David Bowie (above) talks about taking classes from Peter Frampton’s father in art school. Yoko Ono, interviewed in late 1987, comes across as still living in the shadow of her late husband. By now, Ono has a bigger reputation as an artist in her own right. Linda Ronstadt, who Smith signed to a recording contract, reflects on her years performing at L.A.’s Troubadour nightclub during the rise of country rock.
By now each of these superstars has written his or her memoir and the golden era of major labels has been dissected by musical diggers. So listening to these interviews from the 1980s takes on a nostalgic feel of its own. Smith’s questions sound naive now. Isn’t it amazing, he remarks to the legendary producer George Martin, that the Beatles were so heavily influenced by African-American blues?! It’s sweet to hear legendary artists and an industry insider stumble upon observations like that one, which have now been so thoroughly digested.
Smith transitioned from broadcast radio to record promotions, eventually rising to executive ranks as president of Warner Brothers, Elektra/Asylum and Capitol Records/EMI. He signed the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Van Morrison, so it’s no surprise that Mickey Hart is interviewed, sharing an intimate story about his father.
So far, audio for only 25 interviews is available on the library’s site. More interviews will be uploaded over time, including one with Smith himself in which he talks dirt about his relationship with former business partner Frank Sinatra.
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.
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