What could our future world look like if we continue to do nothing about climate change? That’s the question posed by a new TED ED video, written by Shannon Odell and directed by Sofia Pashaei. We are already seeing the effects of climate change. If you’re paying even a little attention, you’re feeling the hotter summers (which is reflected in the data). You’re noticing the increasing number of droughts. You’re seeing the growing number of forest fires, etc. So, “what will our world look like in the next 30 to 80 years, if we continue on the current path?” With the video above, get a glimpse of the possible world to come.
David Lynch has a variety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suffering is not among them. “This is part of the myth, I think,” he said in one interview. “Van Gogh did suffer. He suffered a lot. But I think he didn’t suffer while he was painting.” That is, “he didn’t need to be suffering to do those great paintings.” As Lynch sees it, “the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say, you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create.” This relationship between mental state and creativity is a subject he’s addressed over and over again, and the video above assembles several of those instances from over the decades. It may come as a surprise that the auteur of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, recommends meditation as the solution.
In the video below, he lays out how his favorite kind of meditation, the Transcendental variety, has the potential to drive out not just depression, but also negativity, tension, stress, anxiety, sorrow, anger, hate, and fear. These are grand promises, but not without interest to the non-meditating Lynch fan curious about the mind behind his work, both of which were once widely assumed to be deeply troubled indeed.
“Do you think you’re a genius, or a really sick person?” CBC correspondent Valerie Pringle asks him in a Blue Velvet-era interview included in the compilation at the top of the post. “Well, Valerie,” he responds, “I don’t know.” He did not, at that time, speak publicly about his meditation practice, but by the late nineties he’d begun to discuss personal matters much more freely. In one Charlie Rose interview, a clip from which appears in the video, he even tells of the time he went to therapy. The beginning of this story makes it in, but not the end: Lynch asked his new therapist “straight out, right up front, ‘Could this process that we’re going to go through affect creativity?’ And he said, ‘David, I have to be honest with you, it could” — whereupon Lynch shook the man’s hand and walked right back out the door.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, I tend to think the state of a creative individual’s mental health is a topic best left between patient and doctor.
In the case of one Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra—composer, bandleader of free jazz ensemble the Arkestra, and “embodiment of Afrofuturism”—one finds it tempting to speculate about possible diagnoses, of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example. Plenty of people have done so. This makes sense, given Blount’s claims to have visited other planets through astral projection and to himself be an alien from another dimension. But ascribing Sun Ra’s enlightening, enlivening mytho-theo-philosophy to illness or dysfunction truly does his brilliant mind a disservice, and clouds our appreciation for his completely original body of work.
In fact, Sun Ra himself discovered—fairly early in his career when he went by the name “Sonny”—that his music could perhaps alleviate the suffering of mental illness and help bring patients back in touch with reality. In the late 50’s, the pianist and composer’s manager, Alton Abraham, booked his client at a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Sun Ra biographer John Szwed tells the story:
Abraham had an early interest in alternative medicine, having read about scalpel-free surgery in the Philippines and Brazil. The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sonny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music.
Sun Ra had his faith in this endeavor rewarded by the response of some of the patients. “While he was playing,” Szwed writes, “a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out ‘Do you call that music?’” Blount—just coming into his own as an original artist—was “delighted with her response, and told the story for years afterward as evidence of the healing powers of music.” He also composed the song above, “Advice for Medics,” which commemorates the psychiatric hospital gig.
It is surely an event worth remembering for how it encapsulates so many of the responses to Sun Ra’s music, which can—yes—confuse, irritate, and bewilder unsuspecting listeners. Likely still inspired by the experience, Sun Ra recorded an album in the early sixties titled Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, a collection of songs, writes Allmusic, that “outraged those in the jazz community who thought Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane had already taken things too far.” (Hear the track “And Otherness” above.) But those willing to listen to what Sun Ra was laying down often found themselves roused from a debilitating complacency about what music can be and do.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a series of clips rolling in your mind, a highlight reel of industrial developments, political speeches, protest marches, sports victories, NASA missions, and foreign wars. But that represents just a tiny fraction of America on film, much more of which you can easily discover with a visit to the Prelinger Archives.
Rick Prelinger founded the Prelinger Archives in 1982 with the mission of preserving “ephemeral films.” According to the program of a 2002 series he introduced at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive a couple of decades later, these are “typically educational, industrial, or amateur films,” often made to serve a “pragmatic and narrow purpose. It is only by chance that many of them survive.”
These pieces of “throwaway media” — of which the Prelinger Archives now has some 30,000 — include newsreel-type documentaries, works of political propaganda, instructional productions for use in schools and workplaces, and a great many home movies that offer candid glimpses into everyday American lives.
If you really want to see the United States, as we’ve previously said here on Open Culture, you’ve got to drive across the country. What holds true in life also holds true in film, and the Prelinger Archives’ digitization and uploading have made it possible to experience the history of the great American road trip through the eyes — or the eight-millimeter cameras — of travelers who took it in the forties, fifties, and sixties, rolling through sites of interest from the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore to the Corn Palace. If a culture is preserved most clearly through its ephemera, then there’s a whole lot more America awaiting us in the Prelinger Archives.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Pursued to any depth, the question of whether the United States of America counts as an empire becomes difficult to address with clarity. On one hand, the country has exerted a strong cultural influence on most of the world for the better part of a century, a phenomenon not unrelated to the military presence that extends far beyond its borders. (In Korea, where I live, I once met a former KATUSA, the branch of the Korean Army seconded to the US Army, who told me he’d joined because he “wanted to see what it was like to be a modern Roman soldier.”) On the other hand, we can’t quite say that it rules the known world — at least, not in the way that the Roman Empire did twenty centuries ago.
Yet the temptation to draw parallels between America and Rome remains irresistible, not least when it comes to the subject of imperial decline. In this video from Told in Stone, historian Garrett Ryan evaluates “the idea that modern America is destined to decline and fall like ancient Rome.” The arguments for this motion tend to involve “an increasingly unsettled international landscape” and “domestic division,” leading to the dissolution of Pax Americana — the successor of Pax Britannica, which itself succeeded Pax Romana. Americans, Ryan explains, “have a sense that Rome is in their political DNA. The constitution, after all, represents an attempt to create a new and perfected Roman Republic. Anxieties about Roman-style decline have been present since the beginning.”
Rome and America: each “was the greatest power of its time,” each “had a strong legal system and a society that left room for social advancement,” and each “professed to be guided by Christian principles.” Their political, economic, technological conditions could hardly be more different, of course, but when observers “say that America is falling like Rome, the underlying assumption is not that America is specifically like Rome; it’s that all empires, ancient and modern, follow a similar course from greatness to grave.” The Roman Empire fell because “Germanic tribes overcame its frontier defenses,” because “a series of ruinous civil wars sapped its strength,” because “it had lost the loyalty of provincial elites,” and for many other reasons besides — few of which are likely to play major parts in a notional American collapse.
But the fact that “the decline of Rome has no precise parallels in the twenty-first century does not mean that it has no lessons to offer modern America.” To learn those lessons, we could do worse than to turn to eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the subject of the School of Life video above. “The immense story that Gibbon tells us moves from one disaster to another, century after century,” says narrator Alain de Botton: failed reforms, institutional corruption, breakdowns in civil-military relations, plagues, poor harvests, economic collapse. And yet the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the arrival of modernity, as we know it, all lay ahead. “You aren’t going to like what comes after America,” Leonard Cohen once wrote, but maybe our descendants will like what comes a millennium or so after America.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
I doubt I need to list for you the many titles of the 18th century German savant and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but allow me to add one or two that were new to me, at least: color theorist (or phenomenologist of color) and progenitor of abstract expressionism. As a fascinating Booktryst post informs us, Goethe’s book on color, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), written in 1810, disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon. In his account, Goethe describes how he came by his views:
Along with the rest of the world, I was convinced that all the colors are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in the subject.
But how I was astonished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some darkened area, it showed some color, then at last, around the window sill all the colors shone… It didn’t take long before I knew here was something significant about color to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the Newtonian teachings were false.
Schopenhauer would later write that “[Goethe] delivered in full measure what was promised by the title of his excellent work: data toward a theory of colour. They are important, complete, and significant data, rich material for a future theory of colour.” It was a theory, Schopenhauer admits, that does not “[furnish] us with a real explanation of the essential nature of colour, but really postulates it as a phenomenon, and merely tells us how it originates, not what it is.”
Another later philosophical interpreter of Goethe, Ludwig Wittgenstein—a thinker greatly interested in visual perception—also saw Goethe’s work as operating very differently than Newton’s optics—not as a scientific theory but rather as an intuitive schema. Wittgenstein remarked that Goethe’s work “is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the sort we find in [William] James’s psychology. There is no experimentum crucis for Goethe’s theory of colour.”
Yet a third later German genius, Werner Heisenberg, commented on the influence of Zur Farbenlehre, writing that “Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics. But victory, and hence influence on the research of the following century, has been Newton’s.”
I’m not fit to evaluate the relative merits of Goethe’s theory, or lack thereof, versus Newton’s rigorous work on optics. Whole books have been written on the subject. But whatever his intentions, Goethe’s work has been well-received as a psychologically accurate account that has also, through his text and many illustrations you see here, had significant influence on twentieth century painters also greatly concerned with the psychology of color, most notably Wassily Kandinsky, who produced his own “schematic outline” of the psychological effects of color titled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a classic of modernist aesthetic theory. As is usually the case with Goethe, the influence of this single work is wider and deeper than he probably ever foresaw.
What with the rise of Korean pop culture over the past decade or so — the virality of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,”BTS’ rise on the Billboard chart, Bong Joon-ho’s Academy Award for Parasite, and the worldwide Netflix phenomenon that was Squid Game — the Korean language is now avidly studied around the world. Back in the nineties, few in Korea would have imagined that possible, and fewer still in the West. I vividly remember the first day of an extracurricular computer-programming class I took in high school, whose instructor began his lecture by saying, “Look, coding is hard. I don’t expect you to learn it in two weeks any more than I’d expect you to learn Korean in two weeks.” Sure, I thought. But who would want to learn Korean?
Fast-forward 25 years, and — irony of ironies — here I am living in Seoul. Not only do I now speak Korean (with considerable room for improvement, mind you), I published a book in Korean last month. In the seemingly unending round of newspaper, radio, and television interviews I’ve subsequently had to give about it, I’ve often been asked how I managed to learn the language. There is, of course, no one perfectly effective strategy, no matter what subject you’re studying, but I do feel as if I received a lot of help early on by binge-watching a show called Let’s Speak Korean. Originally aired on Arirang, Korea’s English-language television network, it soon made its way to Youtube, where you can watch hundreds of episodes that start teaching the Korean language from the very basics onward.
The most recent Let’s Speak Korean series, which ran for five seasons in the mid-two-thousands, is available in this set of playlists. You can also watch earlier versions of the show made in 1999 and 1997, each of which has its own teaching style employing different grammatical forms and sample dialogues — as well as hosts and foreign participants in the roles of the students. I feel permanently cast in the role of the student in my real Korean life, despite residing here for the better part of a decade now, speaking Korean (and indeed writing in it) on a daily basis. It’s been a journey, and like any attempt to master a language, the end is never in sight. But at least I can look back at Let’s Speak Korean and fondly remember that there was a time when I didn’t know 은/는 from 이/가, 하면 된다 from 해도 된다, or ‑거든 from ‑더라고. (Admittedly, I still have trouble with those last.)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Gertrude Stein considered herself an experimental writer and wrote what The Poetry Foundation calls “dense poems and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue,” with the result being that “commercial publishers slighted her experimental writings and critics dismissed them as incomprehensible.” Take, for example, what happened when Stein sent a manuscript to Alfred C. Fifield, a London-based publisher, and received a rejection letter mocking her prose in return. According to Letters of Note, the manuscript in question was published many years later as her modernist novel,The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925). You can hear Stein reading a selection from the novel below.
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In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov consisting mostly of compositions by Renaissance composer John Dowland. This was regarded by some as rather eccentric, but to listeners familiar with the early music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it would have been almost too obvious a choice. For Dowland had long since been rediscovered as one of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century’s musical superstars, thanks in part to the recordings of classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream.
“When I was a kid, I went to the public library in Fairport, New York, where I’m from, and I got this Julian Bream record,” says music producer and popular Youtuber Rick Beato (previously featured here on Open Culture) in the video above. Beato describes Bream as “one of the greatest classical guitarists who ever lived” and credits him with having “popularized the classical guitar and the lute and renaissance music.” The particular Bream recording that impressed the young Beato was of a John Dowland composition made exotic by distance in time called “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” a performance of which you can watch on Youtube.
Half a century later, Beato’s enjoyment for this piece seems undiminished — and indeed, so much in evidence that this practically turns into a reaction video. Listening gets him reminiscing about his early Dowland experiences: “I would put on this Julian Bream record of him playing lute, just solo lute, and I would sit there and I would putt” — his father having been golf enthusiast enough to have installed a small indoor putting green — and “imagine living back in the fifteen-hundreds, what it would be like.” These pretend time-travel sessions matured into a genuine interest in early music, one he pursued at the New England Conservatory of Music and beyond.
What a delight it would have been for him, then, to find that Sting had laid down his own version of “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” sometimes otherwise known as “Can She Excuse My Wrongs.” In one especially striking section, Sting takes “the soprano-alto-tenor-bass part” and records the whole thing using only layers of his own voice: “there’s four Stings here,” Beato says, referring to the relevant digitally manipulated scene in the music video, “but there’s actually more than four voices.” Songs from the Labyrinth may only have been a modestly successful album by Sting’s standards, but it has no doubt turned more than a few middle-of-the-road pop fans onto the beauty of English Renaissance music. If Beato’s enthusiasm has also turned a few classic-rock addicts into John Dowland connoisseurs, so much the better.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Founded in 1577, Kobaien remains Japan’s oldest manufacturer of sumi ink sticks. Made of soot and animal glue, the ink stick—when ground against an inkstone, with a little water added—produces a beautiful black ink used by Japanese calligraphers. And, often, a 200-gram ink stick from Kobaien can cost over $1,000.
How can soot and animal glue command such a high price? As the Business Insider video above shows, there’s a fine art to making each ingredient—an art honed over the centuries. Watching the artisans make the soot alone, you immediately appreciate the complexity beneath the apparent simplicity. When you’re done watching how the ink gets made, you’ll undoubtedly want to watch the artisans making calligraphy brushes, an art form that has its own fascinating history. Enjoy!
More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different listeners will evaluate differently the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some scholars have it, four years old). It’s not unknown, even today, for precocious, musically inclined children of that age to sit down and put together simple melodies, or even reasonably complete songs. But how many of them can write something like Mozart’s “Minuet in G Major”?
The video above, which traces the evolution of Mozart’s music, begins with that piece — naturally enough, since it’s his earliest known work, and thus honored with the Köchel catalogue number of KV 1. Thereafter we hear music composed by Mozart at various ages of childhood, youth, adolescence, and adulthood, accompanied by a piano roll graphic that illustrates its increasing complexity.
And as with complexity, so with familiarity: even listeners who know little of Mozart’s work will sense the emergence of a distinctive style, and even those who’ve barely heard of Mozart will recognize “Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major” when it comes on.
Mozart composed that piece when he was 32 years old. It’s also known as the “Sonata facile” or “Sonata semplice,” despite its distinct lack of easiness for novice (or even intermediate) piano players. It’s now cataloged as KV 545, which puts it toward the end of Mozart’s oeuvre, and indeed his life. Three years later, the evolutionary listening journey of this video arrives at the “Requiem in D minor,” which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for its extensive cinematic use to evoke evil, loneliness, desperation, and reckoning. The piece, KV 626, contains Mozart’s last notes; the unanswerable but nevertheless irresistible question remains of whether they’re somehow implied in his first ones.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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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