“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film.
Even resolute non-Deadheads have been passing around “Deadhead,” Nick Paumgarten’s recent New Yorker piece on “the vast recorded legacy of the Grateful Dead.” Like much of the most interesting magazine journalism, the article digs deep into and provides a primer on a subculture that goes deep. Casual Dead listeners know there exists a large and dedicated body of fervently un-casual Dead listeners, the fans who may have followed the band around on its touring days but now collect every last one of its recorded performances, official, unofficial, or otherwise. “It was denser, feverish, otherworldly,” Paumgarten describes his first experience hearing a Dead bootleg. “If you took an interest, you’d copy a few tapes, listen to those over and over, until they began to make sense, and then copy some more. Before long, you might have a scattershot collection, with a couple of tapes from each year. It was all Grateful Dead, but because of the variability in sonic fidelity, and because the band had been at it for twenty years, there were many different flavors and moods. Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal. Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or a cheese.”
Do you aspire to join those Paumgarten calls “the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud”? If so, the internet, and specifically the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead collection, has cranked the barrier to entry way down. Its 11,215 free Grateful Dead recordings should keep you busy for some time. “You can browse the recordings by year, so if you click on, say, 1973 you will see links to two hundred and ninety-four recordings, beginning with four versions of a February 9th concert at Stanford and ending with several versions of December 19th in Tampa,” writes Paumgarten. “Most users merely stream the music; it’s a hundred cassette trays, in the Cloud.” If you need a break from these concerts, in all their variable-fidelity glory, listen to Paumgarten talk matters Dead with music critic Sasha Frere-Jones on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast (listen here). And if you find the Dead not quite to your taste — guitarist Jerry Garcia famously compared their dedicated niche audience to “people who like licorice” — why not move on to the Fugazi archive?
Philosophers have often ruminated on the aesthetics of photography. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida begins with a poignant memorialization of his mother, as remembered through her photograph. Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle-Brow Artwondered why and how the medium became so widespread that “there are few households, at least in towns, which do not possess a camera.” And Jacques Derrida’s posthumous Athens, Still Remains, a travel memoir accompanied by the photographs of Jean-Francois Bonhomme, begins with the mystical phrase “We owe ourselves to death.”
For Barthes and Derrida, photography was a medium of suspended mortality—every photograph a memento mori. For another philosopher, the cryptic, polymath, and notoriously surly Ludwig Wittgenstein, photography was a concrete expression of his preferred means of perception. As he famously wrote in the Philosophical Investigations, “Don’t think, look!” For the unsentimentally cerebral Wittgenstein, a photograph is not a memorial, but a “probability.” The philosopher’s archive at the University of Cambridge includes the photograph above, a true “probability” in that it does not represent any one person but is a composite image of his face and the faces of his three sisters, made in collaboration with the “founding father of eugenics,” Francis Galton. The four separate photographs that Wittgenstein and Galton blended together are below.
Of the composite image, keeper of the Wittgenstein archives Michael Nedo writes that “Wittgenstein was aiming for different clarity expressed by the photography of fuzziness.”:
Galton wanted to work out one probability, whereas Wittgenstein saw this as a summary in which all manner of possibilities are revealed in the fuzziness.
Fuzziness is a word rarely applied to Wittgenstein’s thought—at least his early work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus where his only goal is a clarity of thought that supposedly dissolves all the “fuzzy” problems of philosophy in a series of elliptical aphorisms. The philosopher also called himself a “disciple of Freud,” in that he sought to “think in pictures,” and reach beyond language to the images produced by dreams and the unconscious, “to enable us to see things differently.” Wittgenstein’s photographs are as strangely detached and mysterious as the man himself. Salon has a gallery of the philosopher’s photographs, which includes the portrait of him (below), taken at his instruction in Swansea, Wales in 1947. It’s an iconic image; Wittgenstein half-sneers disdainfully at the camera, his steady gaze a challenge, while the blackboard behind him shows a riot of scratches and scrawls. In the upper right-hand corner, the word RAW hangs ominously above the philosopher’s head.
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.
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. And it builds steadily into a satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft. We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. Happy Thanksgiving to all who will celebrate today.
Last year, we featured Making The Shining, the behind-the-scenes documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Stephen King-adapting horror film shot by his teenage daughter Vivian. (Find Part 1 below, and Part 2 here.) If you can’t get enough knowledge about Kubrick’s working methods — and true Kubrick aficionados never can — you’ll want to watch Staircases to Nowhereas well. This extended cut version of the film offers something of an oral history of The Shining’s production from those who toiled hard on it: a scenic artist and prop man, a camera operator, a camera technician, a continuity supervisor, and even a publicist. Those who know Kubrick’s work know that, in every aspect of filmmaking, the man had very specific ideas about what he wanted. He also had high expectations for his crew’s ability to realize them, even if that would require untested, or even yet unenvisioned, techniques and devices. One interviewee describes Kubrick as “a frustrated technician,” and indeed, this documentary fills out the image of the director as an artistic innovator willing to experiment and improvise with the physical technology of filmmaking.
The on-set stories told in Staircases to Nowhere come, so the video description puts it, as “extracts from full-length interviews with each of the contributors about their careers working at studios in Elstree and Borehamwood, and form part of ‘The Elstree Project’ — a collaboration between Elstree Screen Heritage and the University of Hertfordshire. This work has been done on a voluntary basis with student volunteers and staff giving up their own time to help preserve the legacy of the ‘British Hollywood’.” You can learn more about the project at its official site, which continues to document the English towns of Borehamwood and Elstree’s rich history of film and television production. The American-born but British-resident Kubrick certainly found something that worked for him in England. Whether that came down to a simple affinity for the country or the country’s tolerance of his uncommonly rigorous approach to craft, you can’t argue with the results today — as much as the man individually re-painting hundreds of ballroom tiles gold for lighting reasons might have felt like arguing at the time.
After a 125-day stay aboard the International Space Station, ISS Commander Sunita (Suni) Williams touched down in Kazakhstan on Monday, along with Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malanchenko. Part of what is known as Expedition 33, the three boarded their Soyuz TMA-05M on Sunday to return to Earth, but before they left, Williams downlinked an extensive tour above of the ISS orbital laboratory. Williams has given several interviews from her ISS post, so you may have already seen her floating weightless in front of the camera, a nimbus of dark hair around her face.
Here we see a number of interesting features of the station. She begins with the Japanese laboratory, then moves to the European module, “Columbus,” where many of the medical experiments take place. Interestingly, every surface is a suitable workstation; since there’s no reference for floor, walls, or ceiling, and no need for anything to stand on, one can maneuver into any position without losing a sense of direction. As Williams demonstrates the “sleep stations,” phone booth-size compartments with sleeping bags, she shows how the astronauts can also sleep in any position at all without feeling like they’re “upside-down” or disoriented in any way. There’s also a lengthy tour of the “facilities” (in case you’ve ever wondered how that works) and the “cupola,” a small transparent room like a WWII gunnery station where the astronauts can gaze out at their home planet.
So, yes, I will admit, I’ve always liked to imagine the interior of the ISS like the smooth, padded corridors of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, but the reality is still seriously cool. The Washington Post has a slideshow of Expedition 33’s touchdown near the town of Arkalyk in northern Kazakhstan, and the video below shows the small ceremony that greeted the crew hours after their arrival back on Earth.
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.
We thought that Brazenhead Books might qualify as the quirkiest bookstore we’ve encountered. After all, it’s run out of Michael Seidenberg’s apartment in New York City. But get a load of this: The Monkey’s Paw, which calls itself “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic second-hand bookshop,” has installed the Biblio-mat, a vending machine that dispenses random books for a very nominal fee — $2 per book. (If you’re looking for $0, see our lists below.) In a recent interview with QuillandQuire.com, Stephen Fowler, the bookstore’s owner, explained the story behind the Biblio-mat:
I went fishing this past summer with Craig Small, co-founder of The Juggernaut, an animation studio in Toronto. I had this idea that I would love to have a vending machine that gave out random books. I pictured it as a painted refrigerator box with one of my assistants inside; people would put in a coin and he would drop a book out. But Craig is more pragmatic and visionary then I am. He said, “You need to have an actual mechanical vending machine.” That was beyond my wildest imaginings, but not Craig’s, so he just built it for me.
Thanks to Small, you can now watch the Biblio-mat in action above. It whirrs. It vibrates. And it finally delivers a book with a satisfying clunk.
After half a century and 31 books, Philip Roth casually announced last month in an interview with a French magazine that he was calling it quits. He actually made the decision back in 2010, after the publication of his Booker Prize-winning novel Nemesis. “I didn’t say anything about it because I wanted to be sure it was true,” the 79-year-old Roth told New York Times reporter Charles McGrath last week in what he said would be his last interview. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, don’t announce your retirement and then come out of it.’ I’m not Frank Sinatra. So I didn’t say anything to anyone, just to see if it was so.”
Although Roth had been privately telling friends about his retirement for two years, according to David Remnick in The New Yorker, the public announcement came as a shock for many. From his 1959 National Book Award-winning debut Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Storiesand his outrageously funny 1969 classic Portnoy’s Complaint through his remarkably prolific late period, with its steady stream of beautifully crafted novels like Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theaterand The Human Stain, it seemed as though Roth had the creative energy to keep writing until he took his last breath.
But perhaps if we’d paid closer attention we wouldn’t be so surprised. In this 2011 video, for example, which shows Roth reading a few pages from Nemesis after it won the Man Booker International Prize, he basically says it: “Coming where they do, they’re the pages I like best in Nemesis. They constitute the last pages of the last work of fiction I’ve published–the end of the line after 31 books.”
A good TED talk is like a commercial for a great idea. There might not be much meat to sink into, but like any good ad agency, TED has its own unique formula for making even the most esoteric subject grabby.
Who, after all, would have thought that a video of a British guy lecturing about how schools kill creativity would get more than 8 million hits? Evidently the folks at TED did, and were they ever right.
Good TED talks come in a few flavors. That British guy I mentioned? Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about contemporary education is one of TED’s best policy critique talks (and its most popular overall). There are also the personal stories that compel and the demonstrations of great new ideas.
This talk by actor and educator Adam Savage might fall into more than one of those buckets. In the video above, Savage—who designed models for two Star Wars movies and hosts Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel—talks plain and simple about some of humanity’s most amazing scientific discoveries. He walks us through how Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference more than 2000 years ago and how Hippolyte Fizeau measured the speed of light in the mid-1880s.
These two men used nothing more than their own brains and a few relatively simple tools to make astonishingly accurate observations. It’s stuff we already know, but in true TED style Savage makes the whole thing revelatory and inspiring.
“What happens when you think about the discoveries and what they were thinking is you understand that they were not so different from us,” Savage says. “The people who made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at. And they were a little bit more curious.”
Savage’s video is part of TEDEd’s Lessons Worth Sharing, which comes bundled with other videos and exercises that teachers can use to discuss the notion that simple ideas can lead to scientific discovery.
It’s also a very good commercial for curiosity. Seven and a half minutes promoting curiosity. Take a look. Curiosity, as Savage says, can change the world.
Now running through my speakers, even as I write this: Brian Eno’s latest album, Lux. The disc offers four pieces of ambient music, a style that, even if Eno didn’t technically invent it, he certainly took it to a new level of fascination and popularity. He composed these tracks — if “composed” is indeed the word — as generative music, a process rather than a style, but one he named and has promoted since the nineties. For a definition of generative music, I turn to Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, a book that does not leave my nightstand. “One of my long-term interests has been the invention of ‘machines’ and ‘systems,’ ” he writes, “to make music with materials and processes I specified, but in combinations and interactions I did not. My first released piece of this kind was Discreet Music (1975), in which two simple melodic cycles of different durations separately repeat and are allowed to overlay each other arbitrarily.”
In Lux, we have the latest iteration of that musical model. But even if this new record or its predecessors won’t make your playlist, there’s at least one Brian Eno composition with which you’ll already feel intimately familiar. I refer, of course, to the Windows 95 startup sound. Eno describes the musical challenge as follows: “The thing from the agency said,‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be three and one quarter seconds long.’ ”
From that list of 150 vague words, Eno crafted 84 miniature pieces of music. You may have heard the one Microsoft ultimately went with hundreds, or thousands, of times. Obviously they’ve sounded the same on every play, and this very fact displeases their creator, especially when he creates with generative systems in the first place. “What I always wanted to do was sell the system itself, so that a listener would know that the music was always unique,” Eno continues in A Year. “With computer technology I began to think there might be a way of doing it.” Computer technology, which has come a long way since the days of Windows 95, has brought us to the release of Scape, the first generative music iPad app ($5.99) from Eno and Peter Chilvers. “The idea is that you assemble pieces of music out of sonic building blocks — we call them ‘elements’ — which then respond intelligently to each other,” Eno says in the introductory video just above. Scape follows Bloom and Trope, the duo’s previous generative music apps for the iPhone. Does it strike you as strange that the man behind such an iconic Microsoft theme now releases apps only for Apple devices? It’s no big surprise: Eno even composed the Windows 95 sound on a Mac.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
.png){kind=link}