The History of Jazz Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a 1950s Phonograph: Features 1,000+ Musicians, Artists, Songwriters and Producers

in Design, Music | November 7th, 2022

The dan­ger of enjoy­ing jazz is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of let­ting our­selves slide into the assump­tion that we under­stand it. To do so would make no more sense than believ­ing that, say, an enjoy­ment of lis­ten­ing to records auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­mits an under­stand­ing of record play­ers. One look at such a machine’s inner work­ings would dis­abuse most of us of that notion, just as one look at a map of the uni­verse of jazz would dis­abuse us of the notion that we under­stand that music in all the vari­eties into which it has evolved. But a jazz map that exten­sive has­n’t been easy to come by until this month, when design stu­dio Dorothy put on sale their Jazz Love Blue­print.

Mea­sur­ing 80 cen­time­ters by 60 cen­time­ters (rough­ly two and half by two feet), the Jazz Love Blue­print visu­al­ly cel­e­brates “over 1,000 musi­cians, artists, song­writ­ers and pro­duc­ers who have been piv­otal to the evo­lu­tion of this ever chang­ing and con­stant­ly cre­ative genre of music,” dia­gram­ming the con­nec­tions between the defin­ing artists of major eras and move­ments in jazz.

These include the “inno­va­tors that laid the foun­da­tions for jazz music” like Scott Joplin and Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton, “orig­i­nal jazz giants” like Louis Arm­strong and Ella Fitzger­ald, “inspired musi­cians of bebop” like Char­lie Park­er, Dizzy Gille­spie, and such lead­ing lights of “spir­i­tu­al jazz” as John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, and the late Pharoah Sanders.

You prob­a­bly know all those names, even if you only casu­al­ly lis­ten to jazz. But you may not have heard of such play­ers on “the cur­rent vibrant UK scene” as Ezra Col­lec­tive, Shaba­ka Hutch­ings, Nubya Gar­cia, Koko­roko, and Moses Boyd, or those on “the explod­ing US scene” like Kamasi Wash­ing­ton, Robert Glasper, and Makaya McCraven. The map includes not only the indi­vid­u­als but also the insti­tu­tions that have shaped jazz in all its forms: clubs like Bird­land and Ron­nie Scot­t’s, record labels like Blue Note, Verve, and ECM. Even the most expe­ri­enced jazz fans will sure­ly spot new lis­ten­ing paths on the Jazz Love Blue­print. Those with an elec­tron­ic or mechan­i­cal bent will also notice that the whole design has been based on the cir­cuit dia­gram of a phono­graph: the very machine that set so many of us on the path to our love of jazz in the first place.

You can find oth­er dia­grams map­ping the his­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, Rock, Hip Hop and Alter­na­tive Music here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Linked Jazz: A Huge Data Visu­al­iza­tion Maps the Rela­tion­ships Between Count­less Jazz Musi­cians & Restores For­got­ten Women to Jazz His­to­ry

Hear 2,000 Record­ings of the Most Essen­tial Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Edu­ca­tion

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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When Medieval Manuscripts Were Recycled & Used to Make the First Printed Books

in Books, History, Technology | November 4th, 2022

“Old paint on a can­vas, as it ages, some­times becomes trans­par­ent,” play­wright Lil­lian Hell­man observed in Pen­ti­men­to, the sec­ond vol­ume of her mem­oirs. “When that hap­pens it is pos­si­ble, in some pic­tures, to see the orig­i­nal lines: a tree will show through a wom­an’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.”

Sev­en years ago, some­thing sim­i­lar start­ed hap­pen­ing with thou­sands of old books, dat­ing from the 15th to 19th cen­tu­ry.

Age, how­ev­er, did­n’t force these vol­umes to spill their secrets…at least not direct­ly.

That hon­or goes to macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try (MA-XRF) and Erik Kwakkel, a book his­to­ri­an who the­o­rized that this tech­nol­o­gy might reveal medieval man­u­script frag­ments hid­den in the bind­ings of new­er texts, much as it had ear­li­er revealed hid­den lay­ers of paint on Old Mas­ter can­vas­es.


How did this strange “hid­den library” come to be?

Books were high­ly prized objects when man­u­scripts were copied by hand, but as Kwakkel notes on his medieval­books blog, “thou­sands and thou­sands of medieval man­u­scripts were torn apart, ripped to pieces, boiled, burned, and stripped for parts” upon the advent of the print­ing press.

Their pages were pressed into ser­vice as toi­let paper, bukram-like cloth­ing stiff­en­ers, book­marks, and, most tan­ta­liz­ing to a medieval book spe­cial­ist, bind­ing sup­port for print­ed books.

This prac­tice was so com­mon that the bind­ings of near­ly 150 ear­ly print­ed books in the Yale Law Library are known to con­tain pieces of medieval man­u­scripts.

These mate­ri­als may have been down­grad­ed in the lit­er­ary sense, but to Kwakkel they are “trav­el­ers in time, stow­aways in leather cas­es with great and impor­tant sto­ries to tell:”

Indeed, sto­ries that may oth­er­wise not have sur­vived, giv­en that clas­si­cal and medieval texts fre­quent­ly only come down to us in frag­men­tary form. The ear­ly his­to­ry of the Bible as a book could not be writ­ten if we were to throw out frag­ment evi­dence. More­over, while ancient and medieval texts sur­vive in many hand­some books from before the age of print, quite often the old­est wit­ness­es are frag­ments. At the very least a frag­ment tells you that a cer­tain text was avail­able at a cer­tain loca­tion at a cer­tain time. Step­ping out of their leather time cap­sules after cen­turies of dark­ness, frag­ments are “blips” on the map of Europe, express­ing “I exist­ed, I was used by a read­er in tenth-cen­tu­ry Italy!”

A few lines of a muti­lat­ed text can often be suf­fi­cient to iden­ti­fy it, as well as the loca­tion and gen­er­al tim­ing of its cre­ation:

That said, it is not easy to make sense of the remains. Binders seem to have par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed slic­ing text columns in half, as if they knew how to frus­trate future researchers best. Iden­ti­fy­ing what works these unful­fill­ing quotes come from can be a night­mare. Dat­ing and local­iz­ing the remains can cause insom­nia.

Pri­or to Kwakkel’s high tech exper­i­ments at Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty, mod­ern researchers had to con­fine them­selves to acci­dents, as when, say, an old book’s spine cracks, reveal­ing the con­tents with­in.

Macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try turns out to be well equipped to detect the iron, cop­per and zinc of medieval inks beneath a lay­er of paper or parch­ment.

But it does so at a pace that might not knock a medieval scribe’s socks off.

Pro­duc­ing a leg­i­ble scan of what lurks beneath a sin­gle vol­ume’s spine can require as much as 24 hours, and expen­sive and time con­sum­ing propo­si­tion.

With thou­sands of these bind­ings hid­ing so close to the sur­face in col­lec­tions as mas­sive as the British Library and Oxford’s Bodleian, be pre­pared to remain on your ten­ter­hooks for the fore­see­able future.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Messy Nessy 

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Join her in New York City on Novem­ber 11 to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive Kurt Von­negut Cen­ten­ni­al fanzine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Comiclopedia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Comic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to Mœbius and Hergé

in Comics/Cartoons | November 4th, 2022

Nobody inter­est­ed in comics can pass through Ams­ter­dam with­out vis­it­ing Lam­biek. Hav­ing opened in 1968 as the third com­ic-book shop in human his­to­ry, it now sur­vives as the old­est one still in exis­tence. But even those with­out a trip to the Nether­lands lined up can eas­i­ly mar­vel at one of Lam­biek’s major claims to fame: the Comi­clo­pe­dia, “an illus­trat­ed com­pendi­um of over 14,000 com­ic artists from around the world.” Dis­play­ing the same kind of pre­science that inspired him to open his store ahead of the com­ic-indus­try boom, Lam­biek’s founder Kees Kouse­mak­er launched this online ency­clo­pe­dia in 1999, more than a year before Wikipedia first went live.

The video above offers a brief illus­trat­ed his­to­ry of the Comi­clo­pe­dia, but the pro­jec­t’s ambi­tion comes across just as clear­ly in alpha­bet­i­cal­ly orga­nized index pages. Amer­i­can com­ic-book icons like Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by get exten­sive entries, of course, but so do news­pa­per com­ic-strip cre­ators from George Her­ri­man and Win­sor McCay (fea­tured on this page) to Charles Schulz and Bill Wat­ter­son (whose entry fea­tures not just Calvin and Hobbes but such ear­ly work as a pan­el pub­lished in his col­lege news­pa­per). There are even fig­ures not known pri­mar­i­ly as com­ic artists: the late Char­lie Watts, for instance, whose art­work includ­ed the back cov­er of Between the But­tons, or David Lynch, who for nine years “drew” The Angri­est Dog in the World.

For 23 years now, the Comi­clo­pe­dia has main­tained its com­mit­ment to both includ­ing deep cuts of that kind as well as con­stant­ly widen­ing its inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive. You’d expect its robust entries on Jean Giraud, bet­ter known as Mœbius, and Georges Remi, bet­ter known as Hergé, but you’ll also find intro­duc­tions to the likes of Ser­afín Rojo Caa­maño, cre­ator of a host of char­ac­ters beloved in twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Spain (includ­ing the per­pet­u­al­ly drunk­en mar­chioness­es), and Kim Seong-hwan, whose unflap­pable old man Gob­au bore wit­ness to half a cen­tu­ry of tumul­tuous South Kore­an his­to­ry.

Nor have Lam­biek or the Comi­clo­pe­dia ignored the comics of its home­land. “Kouse­mak­er and his entourage wrote var­i­ous essays, arti­cles and books about comics,” says the page on the store’s own sto­ry, and with­out their work “much of the Nether­lands’ comics his­to­ry might oth­er­wise have remained unex­plored.” Batavo­phones can enjoy a thor­ough overview of the his­to­ry of Dutch comics here; oth­ers can read a more con­densed Eng­lish ver­sion here, or set the Comi­clo­pe­di­a’s coun­try fil­ter to the Nether­lands and sam­ple the work of the 1,045-and-counting artists cur­rent­ly in the data­base. If you do make it out to Ams­ter­dam, after all, you’re going to want to know Tom Poes from Eric de Noor­man from Kapitein Rob before­hand.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explore a Big Archive of Vin­tage Ear­ly Comics: 1700–1929

Read The Very First Com­ic Book: The Adven­tures of Oba­di­ah Old­buck (1837)

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

Free: Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Presents His Personal Synthesizer Collection

in Music | November 3rd, 2022

Mark Moth­ers­baugh’s stu­dio is locat­ed in a cylin­dri­cal struc­ture paint­ed bright green — it looks more like a fes­tive auto part than an office build­ing. It’s a fit­ting place for the icon­o­clast musi­cian. For those of you who didn’t spend your child­hoods obses­sive­ly watch­ing the ear­ly years of MTV, Mark Moth­ers­baugh was the mas­ter­mind behind the band Devo. They skew­ered Amer­i­can con­for­mi­ty by dress­ing alike in shiny uni­forms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.

In the years since, Moth­ers­baugh has segued into a suc­cess­ful career as a Hol­ly­wood com­pos­er, spin­ning scores for 21 Jump Street and The Roy­al Tenen­baums among oth­ers.

In the video above, you can see Moth­ers­baugh hang out in his stu­dio filled with syn­the­siz­ers of var­i­ous makes and vin­tages, includ­ing Bob Moog’s own per­son­al Mem­o­ry­moog. Watch­ing Moth­ers­baugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watch­ing a pre­co­cious child talk about his toys. He just has an infec­tious ener­gy that is a lot of fun to watch.

Prob­a­bly the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds back­ward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” back­wards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?

Below you can see Moth­ers­baugh in action with Devo, per­form­ing live in Japan dur­ing the band’s hey­day in 1979.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Feb­ru­ary 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

Neil Young Plays “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Devo: Watch a Clas­sic Scene from the Impro­vised Movie Human High­way (1980)

See Devo Per­form Live for the Very First Time (Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty, 1973)

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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An AI Generated, Never-Ending Discussion Between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

in Philosophy | November 3rd, 2022

From the site Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion comes an AI gen­er­at­ed, nev­er-end­ing dis­cus­sion between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek. What’s the point of this AI gen­er­at­ed con­ver­sa­tion? The cre­ator explains:

As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to pro­duce AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent that is super­fi­cial­ly good and sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resem­bling celebri­ties (com­mon­ly known as Deep­fakes) or, as in the case of the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion, speech.

This project aims to raise aware­ness about the ease of using tools for syn­the­siz­ing a real voice. Right now, any moti­vat­ed fool can do this with a lap­top in their bed­room. This changes our rela­tion­ship with the media we con­sume online and rais­es ques­tions about the impor­tance of author­i­ta­tive sources, breach of trust and gulli­bil­i­ty.

Will this tech­nol­o­gy lead to a mas­sive pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub-opti­mal-qual­i­ty con­tent? Should we sim­ply dis­trust any­thing we see online? As new tools are devel­oped to help iden­ti­fy gen­er­at­ed con­tent, I rec­om­mend main­tain­ing a skep­ti­cal stance, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the source/channel of infor­ma­tion does­n’t seem reli­able and when the claims seem pre­pos­ter­ous or out­ra­geous.

Ulti­mate­ly, I don’t see this as a tech­ni­cal prob­lem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to edu­cate the com­ing gen­er­a­tions about the new par­a­digm while focus­ing on form­ing com­pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­als who would not mis­use these awe­some pow­ers.

As an AI opti­mist, I remain hope­ful that we will be able to reg­u­late our­selves, and that we will take exper­i­ments such as the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion for what they are: a play­ful way to help us imag­ine what our favorite peo­ple would do, if we had unlim­it­ed access to their minds. Art and Phi­los­o­phy, here exem­pli­fied by Bavar­i­an direc­tor Wern­er Her­zog and Sloven­ian philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek, can guide us while nav­i­gat­ing these treach­er­ous waters.

Lis­ten to the end­less Her­zog-Žižek con­ver­sa­tion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Slavoj Žižek: What Ful­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates the Touch­ing, Exis­ten­tial Jour­ney of a Plas­tic Bag

 

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Bruce Springsteen Performs Moving Acoustic Versions of “Thunder Road,” “The Rising” & “Land of Hope & Dreams” on the Howard Stern Show

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

After try­ing for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show final­ly land­ed an inter­view with Bruce Springsteen–an inter­view that last­ed 2 hours and 15 min­utes and cov­ered a tremen­dous amount of ground. Along the way, Spring­steen talked about his song-writ­ing process and the ori­gins of his clas­sic songs, and then per­formed some acoustic ver­sions, alter­nat­ing between gui­tar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stir­ring per­for­mances of  “Thun­der Road,” “The Ris­ing,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”

Those who have the Sir­ius XM app can watch the entire per­for­mance online. For those who don’t, you can always sign up for a free tri­al to the ser­vice.

Land of Hope and Dreams

The Ris­ing


Tougher Than the Rest

Born to Run

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Bruce Spring­steen and the E Street Band Impro­vis­es and Plays, Com­plete­ly Unre­hearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Nev­er Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

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Michael Pollan, Sam Harris & Others Explain How Psychedelics Can Change Your Mind

in Psychology | November 2nd, 2022

You may nev­er have tried psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. You may nev­er have had an inter­est in try­ing psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. But if you’re read­ing this, you do have a mind, and you’ve almost cer­tain­ly felt some curios­i­ty about how that mind works. As any engi­neer knows, one of the short­est routes to under­stand­ing how a machine works is to dis­rupt its nor­mal oper­a­tions. Psy­che­delics do just that for your brain, shift­ing your con­scious­ness into a new per­spec­tive that can offer insights into your very per­cep­tions of real­i­ty. Or at least they do it in the view of Michael Pol­lan, Sam Har­ris, Jacob Sil­va, Ben Goertzel, and Matthew John­son.

The more famil­iar you are with cur­rent psy­che­delics research, the more of those names you’ll know. Pol­lan, who made his name writ­ing about food, stars in the Big Think video above about the sci­en­tif­ic renais­sance of mind-alter­ing drugs. “The brain is a hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tem, and the default mode net­work appears to be at the top,” he explains. That net­work is “the orches­tra con­duc­tor or cor­po­rate exec­u­tive. You take that out of the pic­ture, and sud­den­ly you have this upris­ing from oth­er parts of the brain and you have net­works that don’t ordi­nar­i­ly com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er sud­den­ly strik­ing up con­ver­sa­tions.”

Psy­che­del­ic sub­stances do this, mean­ing that when they’re in use, “you might have the visu­al cor­tex talk­ing to the audi­to­ry sys­tem, and sud­den­ly you’re see­ing music.” Any music-lover would feel at least some desire for the same expe­ri­ence. And even those with­out any inter­est in music would sure­ly like to enjoy for them­selves what Sam Har­ris describes feel­ing dur­ing one of his own psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences: “There was a whole veneer of fear, frankly, that I did­n’t know was there that got stripped away,” leav­ing a “naked aware­ness of the present moment.”

This may sound sim­i­lar to the kind of state com­mon­ly ascribed to inten­sive med­i­ta­tion, and indeed, Har­ris — him­self a prac­ti­tion­er and advo­cate of med­i­ta­tive prac­tice — acknowl­edges it as anoth­er path to the same des­ti­na­tion. But for some peo­ple, Har­ris says, “tak­ing a drug is the only way they’re going to notice that it’s pos­si­ble to have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of the world.” Even if we’re not so “lumpen and un-inquis­i­tive,” we still may not have seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered the range of ben­e­fits psy­che­delics could offer human­i­ty. “Many of the dis­or­ders that psy­che­delics appear to treat well are man­i­fes­ta­tions of a stuck brain,” Pol­lan says, “a mind that’s telling itself destruc­tive sto­ries like, ‘I can’t get through the day with­out a cig­a­rette,’ ‘I’m unwor­thy of love,’ ‘My work is shit.’ ”

The Unit­ed States was actu­al­ly con­duct­ing research into psy­che­del­ic drugs up until the ear­ly 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s admin­is­tra­tion made them ille­gal due to their poten­tial to sap the will of the men who were sup­posed to fight the Viet­nam War. (“He may well have been right,” Pol­lan acknowl­edges.) But now our soci­ety has found itself in a “men­tal health cri­sis,” as John­son, a psy­che­del­ic-sub­stance researcher at Johns Hop­kins, puts it in the brief explain­er just above, we’ll have to explore all pos­si­ble avenues — even pre­vi­ous­ly closed ones — in order to change our minds.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Pro­gram That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Con­trol (1953–1973)

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

The mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploit­ed a few years lat­er by This Is Spinal Tap. Their fall into frac­tious­ness and bloat began when Roger Waters firm­ly estab­lished him­self as cap­tain on 1977’s Ani­mals, his trib­ute album for George Orwell. Stage shows became even more grandiose, lead­ing key­boardist Richard Wright to wor­ry they were “in dan­ger of becom­ing slaves to our equip­ment.” Cer­tain moments dur­ing the 1977 In the Flesh tour in sup­port of the album seem right out of a Christo­pher Guest brain­storm.

One night in Frank­furt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost com­plete­ly obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Com­fort­ably Numb. Fans threw bot­tles. Crowds felt fur­ther alien­at­ed when Waters start­ed wear­ing head­phones onstage, try­ing to sync the music and visu­als. Dur­ing a five-night run at London’s Wem­b­ley Empire Pool, “offi­cials from the Greater Lon­don Coun­cil descend­ed on the venue to check that the band’s inflat­able pig had been equipped with a safe­ty line” (due to a minor pan­ic caused by an ear­li­er escaped pig). “Roger Waters over­saw the inspec­tion, bark­ing orders to the pig’s oper­a­tors… “ ‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’ ”

Moments like these could have added lev­i­ty to Alan Parker’s 1982 film of The Wall, star­ring Bob Geld­of as the main char­ac­ter, dis­af­fect­ed rock star Pink. Waters hat­ed the movie at the time, though lat­er said, “I’ve actu­al­ly grown quite fond of it, though I very much regret there’s no humour in it, but that’s my fault. I don’t think I was in a par­tic­u­lar­ly jol­ly state.” A pris­on­er of his own suc­cess, Waters resent­ed ine­bri­at­ed fans who were (under­stand­ably) dis­tract­ed by stage shows that threat­ened to over­whelm the music. See­ing fans singing along in the front row instead of lis­ten­ing intent­ly sent him into a rage, lead­ing to the infa­mous spit­ting inci­dent, as recalled by tour­ing gui­tarist Snowy White: “It was a fun­ny gig. It was a real­ly weird vibe… to look across the stage and see Roger spit­ting at this guy at the front… It was a very strange gig. Not very good vibes.”

This is still only back­sto­ry for the album and tour to come — the mak­ing of which you can learn all about in the three-part Vinyl Rewind video series here. Waters based the jad­ed Pink on him­self and for­mer Pink Floyd front­man Syd Bar­rett, who did not return from his own onstage melt­down. Waters found him­self wish­ing he could build a wall between him­self and the fans. The band liked his demo ideas and vot­ed to move for­ward with the project. Then things real­ly went sour. Pink Floyd began to fall apart dur­ing the record­ing ses­sions. As engi­neer James Guthrie remem­bers, at the start, “they were still play­ing togeth­er, rather than one guy at a time, which is the way we end­ed up record­ing in France.” Frac­tures between Waters and Richard Wright would even­tu­al­ly lead to Wright’s fir­ing from the band.

Most of the per­son­al dis­putes were already estab­lished before The Wall. Cer­tain­ly Roger’s rela­tion­ship with Rick, but things did dete­ri­o­rate fur­ther on that lev­el dur­ing the mak­ing of the album. There were some very dif­fi­cult moments, but I don’t think there was ever a ques­tion of Roger not fin­ish­ing the album. He’s a very strong per­son. Not eas­i­ly deterred from his path. If every­one else had walked out, he would still have fin­ished it.

Waters would have toured the album by him­self as well — as he did after he left the band fol­low­ing 1983’s The Final Cut, a Pink Floyd album in name only. As it was, The Wall tour end­ed up send­ing the band into debt. Only Richard Wright made a prof­it, play­ing with the band as a salaried musi­cian. For all the stage mishaps and inter­per­son­al feuds — despite it all — Pink Floyd did what they set out to do. “We knew when we were mak­ing it,” says David Gilmour, in rec­ol­lec­tions mel­lowed by time and age, “that it was a good record.” It still stands, some forty-three years lat­er, as one of the greats. Learn how it earned the dis­tinc­tion, and what that great­ness cost the band that made it.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm into Their 1977 Con­cept Album, Ani­mals (a Cri­tique of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, Not Stal­in)

Pink Floyd’s First Mas­ter­piece: An Audio/Video Explo­ration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

Pink Floyd’s Entire Stu­dio Discog­ra­phy is Now on YouTube: Stream the Stu­dio & Live Albums

Pink Floyd Releas­es Its First New Song in 28 Years to Help Sup­port Ukraine

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Making Sense of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal with Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #136

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | November 2nd, 2022

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Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er con­vene an emer­gency pod­cast record­ing to react to this mind-bend­ing, pos­si­bly immoral HBO com­e­dy docuseries, where­in Field­er helps ordi­nary peo­ple rehearse dif­fi­cult per­son­al con­fronta­tions, but this plan goes off the rails after 1.5 episodes out of the six that made up its first sea­son.

This series builds upon Fielder’s pre­vi­ous show where he comed­ical­ly tried to help busi­ness­es, Nathan for You, whose ground-break­ing finale (“Find­ing Frances”) dis­cov­ered The Rehearsal‘s for­mat. Is Nathan him­self the main butt of the joke, or is he punch­ing down? Are there bet­ter ways to show the fail­ings of real­i­ty TV? How does this kind of embar­rass­ment humor dif­fer from Borat and its ilk? Maybe the show is not as much about these peo­ple going through their rehearsals as an exam­i­na­tion of the process of rehears­ing itself that Field­er has devised.

Feel free to lis­ten to us to find out what it’s all about, but you will be best served by watch­ing this inde­scrib­able show your­self before expe­ri­enc­ing this episode.

A few rel­e­vant arti­cles also con­sid­er­ing the show include:

Fol­low us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Kierkegaard on Why We All Misunderstand the True Meaning of Love: An Animated Explanation

in Life, Philosophy | November 1st, 2022

Søren Kierkegaard died in 1855, but if he’d glimpsed our mod­ern-day land­scape of dat­ing apps, he prob­a­bly would’ve under­stood it. “Peo­ple who oth­er­wise pride them­selves on their lack of prej­u­dice will apply ter­ri­fy­ing­ly strict cri­te­ria to their choice of part­ner,” says Alain de Bot­ton in the ani­mat­ed School of Life video above. “They want some­one with just a cer­tain sort of face or income or sense of humor. They think of them­selves as kind and tol­er­ant, but when it comes to love, they have all the broad-mind­ed­ness of a believ­er in ‘a caste sys­tem where­by men are inhu­man­ly sep­a­rat­ed through the dis­tinc­tions of earth­ly life.’ ”

Kierkegaard noticed these human ten­den­cies even in his day, and to his mind, they had noth­ing at all to do with love — true Chris­t­ian love, that is, which he spent a good bit of his philo­soph­i­cal career try­ing to elu­ci­date. He insist­ed, de Bot­ton explains, “that most of us have no idea what love is, even though we refer to the term inces­sant­ly.”

Whether in Europe of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry or most any­where in the world today, we believe in roman­tic love, which involves “the ven­er­a­tion and wor­ship of one very spe­cial per­son with whose soul and body we hope to unite our own.” But this, Kierkegaard argued, results in “a nar­row and impov­er­ished sense of love should actu­al­ly be.”

The ver­sion of Chris­t­ian love for which Kierkegaard advo­cat­ed “com­mands us to love every­one, start­ing, most ardu­ous­ly, with all those who we by instinct con­sid­er to be unwor­thy of love.” In this con­cep­tion, those we believe are “mis­tak­en, ugly, irri­tat­ing, venal, wrong-head­ed, or ridicu­lous” are exact­ly the peo­ple to whom we should “extend our com­pas­sion,” iden­ti­fy­ing and under­stand­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties that made them what they are and offer­ing our kind­ness and for­give­ness accord­ing­ly. The ulti­mate goal, accord­ing to Kierkegaard, is to “love every­one with­out excep­tion,” which may well sound like an unrea­son­able demand. But how much less rea­son­able is it than the check­lists with which so many of us screen our poten­tial match­es?

To delve deep­er, read Kierkegaard’s book, Works of Love.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed, Mon­ty Python-Style Intro­duc­tion to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist

Søren Kierkegaard: A Free Online Course on the “Father of Exis­ten­tial­ism”

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

Dear Immanuel — Kant Gives Love Advice to a Heart­bro­ken Young Woman (1791)

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch World War II Unfold Day by Day: An Animated Map

in History | November 1st, 2022

In the sto­ry of World War II we all know, a hand­ful of mur­der­ous vil­lains and flawed yet capa­ble defend­ers of democ­ra­cy dri­ve the nar­ra­tive. The authors of a Kings Col­lege Lon­don project argue that this con­ven­tion­al his­to­ry shows “a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of states­men.…. Above all else, the debate about war in 1939 revolves around per­son­al­i­ties.” But there is anoth­er way to see the caus­es of war: through the esca­lat­ing arms race of the 1930s, despite the glob­al push for dis­ar­ma­ment fol­low­ing World War I’s dev­as­ta­tion.

The lead­ers of Ger­many, Italy and Japan want­ed war, yet their abil­i­ty to wage it, and the ways in which that war played out, came down to logis­ti­cal con­tests between war machines. “First in Berlin, then in Rome and final­ly in Tokyo,” writes his­to­ri­an Joseph Maio­lo, “the ebb and flow of arms com­pe­ti­tion com­pelled lead­ers to make now-or-nev­er deci­sions about war.” Such deci­sions pro­duced a wealth of unin­tend­ed con­se­quences, and led to cat­a­stroph­ic loss­es of life. Air, sea, and land pow­er cre­at­ed at an unheard-of indus­tri­al scale turned war into an assem­bly line-like process that “would see humans as no more than pieces of a larg­er mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al machine,” as the­o­rist of war Manuel De Lan­da writes.

Thus, we see the enor­mi­ty of the casu­al­ties of WWII. Mil­lions of sol­diers were fed to the front lines in “the need to pre­pare for future total wars that would demand sweep­ing mobi­liza­tion,” writes Maio­lo. Wars for glob­al suprema­cy demand­ed all of the state’s cap­i­tal, espe­cial­ly its human resources. The ani­mat­ed map above tells that sto­ry in raw num­bers: “WWII Every Day with Army Sizes.” Begin­ning with Ger­many’s dec­la­ra­tion of war on Poland on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1939, the map cov­ers the entire­ty of the war, show­ing num­bers — some­times in the tens of mil­lions — fluc­tu­at­ing wild­ly along the front lines of every the­ater.

1939 may be the only log­i­cal start­ing point for this pre­sen­ta­tion. Yet when it comes to under­stand­ing why World War II claimed more lives than any oth­er war in his­to­ry, the expla­na­tion must begin sev­er­al years ear­li­er with arms deal­ers and gen­er­als seek­ing big­ger and big­ger bud­gets for more sophis­ti­cat­ed weapon­ry. As tech­ni­cal prob­lems increased so too did the human costs, until the strug­gle for glob­al suprema­cy dur­ing WWII became a pro­lif­er­at­ing race toward mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion after the war’s end.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

The Stag­ger­ing Human Cost of World War II Visu­al­ized in a Cre­ative, New Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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