Imagine growing up in the late 1960s, witnessing at an impressionable age the heyday of the original Star Trek followed by the real-life moon landing. (If you actually did grow up in the late 1960s, just remember your childhood.) How could you not have dreamed of working on something to do with outer space, or indeed in outer space itself? It seems that both the promoters of NASA and the creators of Star Trek know that both their projects draw from the same well of wonder about the world beyond our planet. As we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, William Shatner has narrated a documentary on the space shuttle as well as a Mars landing video, and Leonard Nimoy narrated a short about NASA’s spacecraft Dawn.
Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura in the original series, also did her NASA-promoting bit — or perhaps more than her bit — by starring in the agency’s 1977 recruitment film. In the years since the end of Star Trek, she had already been volunteering with NASA’s push to recruit more women and minorities.
“I am going to bring you so many qualified women and minority astronaut applicants for this position that if you don’t choose one… everybody in the newspapers across the country will know about it,” she has since remembered telling NASA at the time. In the event, NASA chose more than a few, including astronauts like Sally Ride, Guion Bluford, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair.
“I still feel a little bit like Lieutenant Uhura on the starship Enterprise,” Nichols says at the beginning of the film. “You know, now there’s a 20th-century Enterprise, an actual space vehicle built by NASA and designed to put us in the business of space, and not merely space exploration.” NASA’s Enterprise, she explains, is “a space shuttle built to make regularly scheduled runs into space and back, just like a commercial airline,” one that “may even be used to build a space station in orbit around the Earth, and this would require the services of people with a variety of skills and qualifications.” At the very end, she emphasizes a different sense of variety: “I’m speaking to the whole family of humankind, minorities and women alike. If you qualify and would like to be an astronaut, now is the time. This is your NASA, a space agency embarked on a mission to improve the quality of life on planet Earth right now” — an even worthier mission, some might say, than boldly going where no man has gone before.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” strikes a middle point between his more surreal lyrics of the ‘60s and his more straightforward love songs, and as Polyphonic’s recent video taking a deep dive into this “musical masterpiece” shows, that combination is why so many count it as one of his best songs.
It is the opening track of Blood on the Tracks, the 1975 album that critics hailed as a return to form after four middling-at-best albums. (One of them, Self-Portrait, earned Dylan one of critic Greil Marcus’ best known opening lines: “What is this shit?”–in the pages of Rolling Stone no less.)
Blood on the Tracks is one of the best grumpy, middle-age albums, post-relationship, post-fame, all reckoning and accountability, a survey of the damage done to oneself and others, and “Tangled” is the entry point. Dylan’s marriage to Sara Lowndes Dylan was floundering after eight years–affairs, drink, and drugs had estranged the couple. Dylan would later say that “Tangled” “took me ten years to live and two years to write.”
It would also take him two studios, two cities, and two band line-ups to get working. A version recorded in New York City is slower, lower (in key), and more like one of his guitar-only folk tunes. In December of 1974, Dylan returned home to Minnesota and played the songs to his brother, who wasn’t impressed and suggested he rerecord. The version we know is faster, brighter, janglier, and as Polyphonic explains, sung at a key nearly too high for Dylan. But it’s that wild, near exasperation of reaching those notes that gives the song its lifeblood.
And he also reworked the lyrics, removing whole verses and changing others, until the finished version is, indeed, tangled. It jumps back and forth from present to past to wishful future, verse to verse, and even line to line.
The pronouns change too–the “she” is sometimes the lost love, sometimes a woman who reminds the singer of the former. The further he goes to get away from his first love, the more he meets visions of her elsewhere.
Then there’s the details of the travels and the jobs the narrator takes on, leaving fans to parse which are true and which are not (Sara Lowndes, for example, was working at a Playboy club–the “topless place”–when he met her). And even if we could know who the man is in verse six who “started into dealing with slaves”…would it make any difference?
In the end the song feels universal because it is both so specific and so intentionally confounding. “Tangled Up in Blue” affects so many of its listeners, yours truly included, because it recreates the way memories nestle in our minds, not as a linear sequence but as a kaleidoscope of images and feelings.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
It’s hardly original advice but bears repeating anyway: no one visiting New York should leave, if they can help it, before they cross the Brooklyn Bridge—preferably on foot, if possible, and at a reverential pace that lets them soak up all the Neo-gothic structure’s storied history. Walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn, then back again, or the other away around, since that’s what the bridge was built for—the commutes of a nineteenth century bridge-but-not-yet-tunnel crowd (the first NYC subway tunnel didn’t open until 1908).
In 1899, filmmakers from American Mutoscope and Biograph elected for a mode of travel for a New York century, putting a camera at “the front end of a third rail car running at high speed,” notes a 1902 American Mutoscope catalogue. They accelerated the tour to the pace of a modern machine, chosing the Manhattan to Brooklyn route. “The entire trip consumes three minutes of time, during which abundant opportunity is given to observe all the structural wonders of the bridge, and far distant river panorama below.” (See one-third of the trip just below.)
Filmmaker Bill Morrison looped excerpts of those three New York minutes and extended them to nine in his short, stereoscopic journey “Outerborough,” at the top, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and scored with original music by Todd Reynolds. Taking the 1899 footage as its source material, the film turns a rapid transit tour into a moving mandala, a fractal repetition at frighteningly faster and faster speeds, of the bridge’s most mechanical vistas—the views of its looming, vaulted arches and of the steel cage surrounding the tracks.
One of the engineering wonders of the world, the Brooklyn Bridge opened 136 years ago this month, on May 24th, 1883. The first person to walk across it was the woman who oversaw its construction for 11 of the 14 years it took to build the bridge. After designer John Roebling died of tetanus, his son Washington took over, only to succumb to the bends during the sinking of the caissons and spend the rest of his life bedridden. Emily, his wife, “took on the challenge,” notes the blog 6sqft, consulting with her husband while actively supervising the project.
She “studied mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, strengths of materials and the intricacies of cable construction.” On its opening day, Emily walked the bridge’s 1,595 feet, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, “her long skirt billowing in the wind as she showed [the crowd] details of the construction,” writes David McCullough in The Great Bridge. Six days later, an accident caused a panic and a stampede that killed twelve people. Some months later, P.T. Barnum’s Jumbo led a parade of 21 elephants over the bridge in a stunt to prove its safety.
Barnum’s theatrics were surprisingly honest—the bridge may have needed selling to skeptical commuters, but it needed no hype. It outlived most of its contemporaries, despite the fact that it was built before engineers understood the aerodynamic properties of bridges. The Roeblings designed and built the bridge to be six times stronger than it needed to be, but no one could have foreseen just how durable the structure would prove.
It elicited a fascination that never waned for its palpable strength and beauty, yet fewer of its admirers chose to document the journey that has taken millions of Brooklynites over the river to lower Manhattan, by foot, bike, car, and yes, by train. Leave it to that futurist for the common man, Thomas Edison, to film the trip. See his 1899 footage of Brooklyn to Manhattan by train just above.
Even if you don’t care about high fashion or high society — to the extent that those two things have a place in the current culture — you probably glimpsed some of the coverage of what attendees wore to the Met Gala earlier this month. Or perhaps coverage isn’t strong enough a word: what most of the many observers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute annual fundraising gala did certainly qualified as analysis, and in not a few cases tipped over into exegesis. That enthusiasm was matched by the flamboyance of the clothing worn to the event — an event whose co-chairs included Lady Gaga, a suitable figurehead indeed for a party that this year took on the theme of camp.
But what exactly is camp? You can get an in-depth look at how the world of fashion has interpreted that elaborate and entertaining but nevertheless elusive cultural concept in the Met’s show Camp: Notes on Fashion, which runs at the Met Fifth Avenue until early September.
“Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on ‘Camp’provides the framework for the exhibition,” says the Met’s web site, “which examines how the elements of irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration are expressed in fashion.” But for a broader understanding of camp, you’ll want to go back to Sontag’s and read all of the 58 theses it nailed to the door of the mid-1960s zeitgeist.
According to Sontag, camp is “not a natural mode of sensibility” but a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” It offers a “way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.” Most anything manmade can be camp, and Sontag’s list of examples include Tiffany lamps, “the Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.,” Aubrey Beardsley drawings, and old Flash Gordon comics. Elevating style “at the expense of content,” camp is suffused with “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” Camp is not irony, but it “sees everything in quotation marks.” The essential element of camp is “seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Camp “asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.”
“When Sontag published ‘Notes on Camp,’ she was fascinated by people who could look at cultural products as fun and ironic,” says Sontag biographer Benjamin Moser in a recent Interview magazine survey of the subject. And though Sontag’s essay remains the definitive statement on camp, not everyone has agreed on exactly what counts and does not count as camp in the 55 years since its publication in the Partisan Review. “Camp to me means over-the-top humor, usually coupled with big doses of glamour,” says fashion designer Jeremy Scott in the same Interview article. “To be interesting, camp has to have some kind of political consciousness and self-awareness about what it’s doing,” says filmmaker Bruce Labruce, challenging Sontag’s description of camp as apolitical.
And what will become of camp in the all-digitizing 21st century, when many eras increasingly coexist on the same culture plane? Our time “has cannibalized camp,” says cultural history professor Fabio Cleto, “but to say that it’s no longer camp because its aesthetics have gone mainstream is an overly simplistic reading. Camp has always been mourning its own death.” Even so, some of camp’s most high-profile champions have cast doubt on its viability. The phrase “good taste of bad taste” brings no figure to mind more quickly than Pink Flamingos and Hairspray director John Waters (who speaks on the origin of his good taste in bad taste in the Big Think video above). But even he speakspessimistically to Interview about camp’s future: “Camp? Nothing is so bad it’s good now that we have Trump as president. He even ruined that.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
When we admire a famous artist from the past, we may wish to know everything about their lives—their private loves and hates, and the inner worlds to which they gave expression in canvases and sculptures. A biography may not be strictly necessary for the appreciation of an artist’s work. Maybe in some cases, knowing too much about an artist can make us see the autobiographical in everything they do. Frida Kahlo, on the other hand, fully invited such interpretation, and made knowing the facts of her life a necessity.
She can hardly “be accused of having invented her problems,” writes Deborah Solomon at The New York Times, yet she invented a new visual vocabulary for them, achieving her mostly posthumous fame “by making her unhappy face the main subject of her work.”
Her “specialty was suffering”—her own—“and she adopted it as an artistic theme as confidently as Mondrian claimed the rectangle or Rubens the corpulent nude.” Kahlo treated her life as worthy a subject as the respectable middle-class still lifes and aristocratic portraits of the old masters. She transfigured herself into a personal language of symbols and surreal motifs.
This means we must peer as closely into Kahlo’s life as we are able if we want to fully enter into what Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe called “her construction of a theater of the self.” But we may not feel much closer to her after reading her wildly-illustrated diary, which she kept for the last ten years of her life, and which was locked away after her death in 1954 and only published forty years later, with an introduction by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. The diary was then republished by Abrams in a beautiful hardcover edition that retains Fuentes’ introduction.
If you’re looking for a historical chronology or straightforward narrative, prepare for disappointment. It is, writes Kathryn Hughes at The Telegraph, a diary “of a very particular kind. There are few dates in it, and it has nothing to say about events in the external world—Communist Party meetings, appointments at the doctor’s or even trysts with Diego Rivera, the artist whom Kahlo loved so much that she married him twice. Instead it is full of paintings and drawings that appear to be dredged from her fertile unconscious.”
This descriptions suggests that the diary substitutes the image for the word, but this is not so—it is filled with Kahlo’s experiments with language: playful prose-poems, witty and cryptic captions, free-associative happy accidents. Like the visual autobiography of kindred spirit Jean-Michel Basquiat, her private feelings must be inferred from documents in which image and word are inseparable. There are “neither startling disclosures,” writes Solomon, “nor the sort of mundane, kitchen-sink detail that captivates by virtue of its ordinariness.” Rather than exposition, the diary is filled, as Abrams describes it, with “thoughts, poems, and dreams… along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations.”
Kahlo’s diary allows for no “dreamy identification with its subject” notes Solomon, through Instagram-worthy summaries of her dinners or wardrobe woes. Unlike her many, gushing letters to Rivera and other lovers, the “irony is that these personal sketches are surprisingly impersonal.” Or rather, they express the personal in her preferred private language, one we must learn to read if we want to understand her work. More than any other artist of the time, she turned biography into mythology.
Knowing the bare facts of her life gives us much-needed context for her images, but ultimately we must deal with them on their own terms as well. Rather than explaining her painting to us, Kahlo’s diary opens up an entirely new world of imagery—one very different from the controlled self-portraiture of her publicbody of work—to puzzle over.
“Eastern medicine” and “Western medicine”—the distinction is a crude one, often used to misinform, mislead, or grind cultural axes rather than make substantive claims about different theories of the human organism. Thankfully, the medical establishment has largely given up demonizing or ignoring yogic and meditative mind-body practices, incorporating many of them into contemporary pain relief, mental health care, and preventative and rehabilitative treatments.
Hindu and Buddhist critics may find much not to like in the secular appropriation of practices like mindfulness and yoga, and they may find it odd that such a fundamental insight as the relationship between mind and body should ever have been in doubt. But we know from even a slight familiarity with European philosophy (“I think, therefore I am”) that it was from the Enlightenment into the 20th century.
Now, says Riitta Hari, co-author of a 2014 Finish study on the bodily locations of emotion, “We have obtained solid evidence that shows the body is involved in all types of cognitive and emotional functions. In other words, the human mind is strongly embodied.” We are not brains in vats. All those colorful old expressions—“cold feet,” “butterflies in the stomach,” “chill up my spine”—named qualitative data, just a handful of the embodied emotions mapped by neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa and co-authors Riitta Hari, Enrico Glerean, and Jari K. Hietanen.
In their study, the researchers “recruited more than 1,000 participants” for three experiments, reports Ashley Hamer at Curiosity. These included having people “rate how much they experience each feeling in their body vs. in their mind, how good each one feels, and how much they can control it.” Participants were also asked to sort their feelings, producing “five clusters: positive feelings, negative feelings, cognitive processes, somatic (or bodily) states and illnesses, and homeostatic states (bodily functions).”
After making careful distinctions between not only emotional states, but also between thinking and sensation, the study participants colored blank outlines of the human body on a computer when asked where they felt specific feelings. As the video above from the American Museum of Natural History explains, the researchers “used stories, video, and pictures to provoke emotional responses,” which registered onscreen as warmer or cooler colors.
Similar kinds of emotions clustered in similar places, with anger, fear, and disgust concentrating in the upper body, around the organs and muscles that most react to such feelings. But “others were far more surprising, even if they made sense intuitively,” writes Hamer “The positive emotions of gratefulness and togetherness and the negative emotions of guilt and despair all looked remarkably similar, with feelings mapped primarily in the heart, followed by the head and stomach. Mania and exhaustion, another two opposing emotions, were both felt all over the body.”
The researchers controlled for differences in figurative expressions (i.e. “heartache”) across two languages, Swedish and Finnish. They also make reference to other mind-body theories, such as using “somatosensory feedback… to trigger conscious emotional experiences” and the idea that “we understand others’ emotions by simulating them in our own bodies.” Read the full, and fully illustrated, study results in “Bodily Maps of Emotions,” published by the National Academy of Sciences.
Journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short) has a new podcast, Against the Rules, that “takes a searing look at what’s happened to fairness—in financial markets, newsrooms, basketball games, courts of law, and much more. And he asks what’s happening to a world where everyone loves to hate the referee.” That is, what happens when we, as a society, lose confidence in the arbiters of truth and fairness?
In Episode 5, Lewis focuses on “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Jesus Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which famously sold at auction for $450 million in 2017. Pretty remarkable, considering that some question whether “Salvator Mundi,” is really a Leonardo painting at all. Or, if it is, whether the highly-restored painting still retains any brushstrokes from Leonardo himself. This leads Lewis to ask some intriguing questions about the authenticity of art, and to explore the pressure placed on the referees of art–namely, art historians–to confirm the authenticity of potentially valuable paintings. Below, you can stream the episode, “The Hand of Leonardo.”
As a bonus, we’ve also added an episode that examines how sketchy “customer service” companies mislead people trying to repay their student loans, and how the Trump administration has undermined government agencies designed to protect debt-strapped Americans.
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Theory. The word alone can intimidate, and it can especially intimidate those of us outside the academic humanities. The rigor and complexity of scientific theory is forbidding enough, but cultural theory, with its thickets of multivalent meaning and thinkers with their cultishly devoted and territorial followings, has surely made many a hopeful learner turn back before they’ve even stepped in. But help has arrived in this age of explainers, most recently in the form of a University of Exeter PhD student and Youtuber named Tom Nicholas who has taken it upon himself to explain such tricky subjects as postmodernism, semiotics, phenomenology, and many others besides in his series “What the Theory?”
In more recent “What the Theory?” videos, Nicholas takes on individual ideas as popularized (at least within the academy) by certain writers, theorists, and philosophers. He explains, for example, what Roland Barthes meant when he proclaimed “the death of the author” in 1967, as well as what Barthes’ countryman Guy Debord meant when he described humanity as living in a “society of the spectacle” that same year. Watch through the entire “What the Theory?” playlist so far, and there’s a chance you might come away with an interest in launching an academic career of your own in order to dig deeper into these and other ideas. But there’s a much greater chance that you’ll come away believing that these critical texts actually do have insights to offer our world, the societies that make up our world, and the culture that drives those societies — barely intelligible though many of them may still look.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Why do David Bowie’s songs sounds like no one else’s, right down to the words that turn up in their lyrics? Novelist Rick Moody, who has been privy more than once to details of Bowie’s songwriting process, wrote about it in his column on Bowie’s 2013 album The Next Day: “David Bowie misdirects autobiographical interpretation, often, by laying claim to reportage and fiction as songwriting methodologies, and he cloaks himself, further, in the cut-up.” Anyone acquainted with the work of William S. Burroughs will recognize that term, which refers to the process of literally cutting up existing texts in order to generate new meanings with their rearranged pieces.
You can see how Bowie performed his cut-up composition in the 1970s in the clip above, in which he demonstrates and explains his version of the method. “What I’ve used it for, more than anything else, is igniting anything that might be in my imagination,” he says. “It can often come up with very interesting attitudes to look into. I tried doing it with diaries and things, and I was finding out amazing things about me and what I’d done and where I was going.”
Given what he sees as its ability to shed light on both the future and the past, he describes the cut-up method as “a very Western tarot” — and one that can provide just the right unexpected combination of sentences, phrases, or words to inspire a song.
As dramatically as Bowie’s self-presentation and musical style would change over the subsequent decades, the cut-up method would only become more fruitful for him. When Moody interviewed Bowie in 1995, Bowie “observed that he worked somewhere near to half the time as a lyricist in the cut-up tradition, and he even had, in those days, a computer program that would eat the words and spit them back in some less referential form.” Bowie describes how he uses that computer program in the 1997 BBC clip above: “I’ll take articles out of newspapers, poems that I’ve written, pieces of other people’s books, and put them all into this little warehouse, this container of information, and then hit the random button and it will randomize everything.”
Amid that randomness, Bowie says, “if you put three or four dissociated ideas together and create awkward relationships with them, the unconscious intelligence that comes from those pairings is really quite startling sometimes, quite provocative.” Sixteen years later, Moody received a startling and provocative set of seemingly dissociated words in response to a long-shot e‑mail he sent to Bowie in search of a deeper understanding of The Next Day. It ran as follows, with no further comment from the artist:
Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination
Indifference
Miasma
Pressgang
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Funereal
Glide
Trace
Balkan
Burial
Reverse
Manipulate
Origin
Text
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
Tragic
Nerve
Mystification
“Chthonic is a great word,” Moody writes, “and all art that is chthonic is excellent art.” He adds that “when Bowie says chthonic, it’s obvious he’s not just aspiring to chthonic, the album has death in nearly every song” — a theme that would wax on Bowie’s next and final album, though The Next Day came after an emergency heart surgery ended his live-performance career. “Chthonic has personal heft behind it, as does isolation, which is a word a lot like Isolar, the name of David Bowie’s management enterprise.” Moody scrutinizes each and every one of the words on the list in his column, finding meanings in them that, whatever their involvement in the creation of the album, very much enrich its listening experience. By using techniques like the cut-up method, Bowie ensured that his songs can never truly be interpreted — not that it will keep generation after generation of intrigued listeners from trying.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
The maxim “children need rules” does not necessarily describe either a right-wing position or a leftist one; either a political or a religious idea. Ideally, it points to observable facts about the biology of developing brains and psychology of developing personalities. It means creating structures that respect kids’ intellectual capacities and support their physical and emotional growth. Substituting “structure” for rules suggests even more strongly that the “rules” are mainly requirements for adults, those who build and maintain the world in which kids live.
Grown-ups must, to the best of their abilities, try and understand what children need at their stage of development, and try to meet those needs. When Susan Sontag’s son David was 7 years old, for example, the writer and filmmaker made a list of ten rules for herself to follow, touching on concerns about his self-concept, relationship with his father, individual preferences, and need for routine. Her first rule serves as a general heading for the prescriptions in the other nine: “Be consistent.”
Sontag’s rules only emerged from her journals after her death. She did not turn them into public parenting tips. But nearly ten years after she wrote them, a man appeared on television who seemed to embody their exactitude and simplicity. From the very beginning in 1968, Fred Rogers insisted that his show be built on strict rules. “There were no accidents on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” says former producer Arthur Greenwald. Or as Maxwell King, author of a recent biography on Rogers, writes at The Atlantic:
He insisted that every word, whether spoken by a person or a puppet, be scrutinized closely, because he knew that children—the preschool-age boys and girls who made up the core of his audience—tend to hear things literally…. He took great pains not to mislead or confuse children, and his team of writers joked that his on-air manner of speaking amounted to a distinct language they called “Freddish.”
In addition to his consistency, almost to the point of self-parody, Rogers made sure to always be absolutely crystal clear in his speech. He understood that young kids do not understand metaphors, mostly because they haven’t learned the commonly agreed-upon meanings. Preschool-age children also have trouble understanding the same uses of words in different contexts. In one segment on the show, for example, a nurse says to a child wearing a blood-pressure cuff, “I’m going to blow this up.”
Rogers had the crew redub the line with “’I’m going to puff this up with some air.’ ’Blow up’ might sound like there’s an explosion,” Greenwald remembers, “and he didn’t want kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.” In another example, Rogers wrote a song called “You Can Never Go Down the Drain,” to assuage a common fear that very young children have. There is a certain logic to the thinking. Drains take things away, why not them?
Rogers “was extraordinarily good at imagining where children’s minds might go,” writes King, explaining to them, for example, that an ophthalmologist could not look into his mind and see his thoughts. His care with language so amused and awed the show’s creative team that in 1977, Greenwald and writer Barry Head created an illustrated satirical manual called “Let’s Talk About Freddish.” Anyone who’s seen the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? knows Rogers could take a good-natured joke at his expense, likely including the imaginative reconstruction of his methods below.
“State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.
“Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.
“Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.”
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example, that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.
“Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.
“Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.
His crew respected him so much that even their parodies serve as slightly exaggerated tributes to his concerns. Rogers adapted his philosophical guidelines from the top psychologists and child-development experts of the time. The 9 Rules (or maybe 9 Stages) of “Freddish” above, as imagined by Greenwald and Head, reflect their work. Maybe implied in the joke is that his meticulous procedure, considering the possible effects of every word, would be impossible to emulate outside of his scripted encounters with children, prepped for by hours of conversation with child-development specialist Margaret McFarland.
Such is the kind of experience parents, teachers, and other caretakers never have. But Rogers understood and acknowledged the unique power and privilege of his role, more so than most every other children’s TV programmer. He made sure to get it right, as best he could, each time, not only so that kids could better take in the information, but so the grown-ups in their lives could make themselves better understood. Rogers wanted us to know, says Greenwald, “that the inner life of children was deadly serious to them,” and thus deserving of care and recognition.
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