If you ever find yourself in an argument about the best Tom Waits songs, say, or best Tom Waits albums, or best Tom Waits period, you now have the luxury of calling Mr. Waits himself to the stand. Or, at least, you can point to the 76-song playlist below, curated by Waits to mark the re-release of his first seven albums, all “originally released through Elektra Asylum Records in the 1970s,” notes Folk Radio UK, “many of which have been long out of print.” (If you don’t have Spotify, you can also stream the playlist on iTunes if you have Apple Music.)
All seven records have been re-mastered and made available digitally, on CD, and vinyl pre-order at the official Tom Waits online store. Closing Time, Heart of Saturday Night, Nighthawks at the Diner, Small Change, Foreign Affairs, Blue Valentine, Heart Attack and Vine…. If you don’t know this first phase of Waits’ career, the titles alone should clue you in to the fact that he spent most of the 70s as a Sinatra-loving lounge singer, composing the sad drunken sound of 2 A.M. heartbreak at a seedy Hollywood dive.
This side of Waits survives, of course, in better-known albums like Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Real Gone, but it’s often buried deep within the crashing, smashing, banging, clanging sound of his later work (or—in the case of his cover of Daniel Johnston’s “King Kong”—beatboxing, Tom Waits-style). In the 1987 live version of Rain Dogs’ “Clap Hands” (top), the first song on Waits’ playlist, he mixes his registers, trading his earlier raspy croon for his later commanding bark, over cool, lounge‑y Latin-tinged jazz.
“Spanning decades of material,” writes Reid McCarter at The Onion’s A.V. Club, the playlist has Waits, “like a growling Virgil taking your soft little hand safely into his gnarled grip,” leading you through his catalog as only he could. Have a quarrel with his choices? “Upset that the first half hour is dominated by piano ballads?” Well, take it up with the man himself. “Surely,” McCarter taunts, “you must know Tom Waits’ music better than Tom Waits himself.”
Of course, we’re always free to disagree with the artist’s assessment of his work. But if you’re a Waits newbie, I couldn’t recommend a better guide. Alternately, you can work your way through his entire catalog from start to finish—stream it all, from Closing Time to his last studio album Bad as Me,here.
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Philosophy doesn’t have to be daunting. Thanks to the Continuing Education program at Oxford University, you can now ease into philosophical thinking by listening to five lectures collectively called Philosophy for Beginners. (The video above is admittedly grainy, so you could always explore the audio options available on iTunes or this Oxford website.) Taught by Marianne Talbot, Lecture 1 starts with a “Romp Through the History of Philosophy” and moves in a brief hour from Ancient Greece to the present. Subsequent lectures (usually running about 90 minutes) cover the following topics: logic, ethics, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, and language.
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… and conclude that people who live in glass houses should stop reaching for stones.
Published in 1897 by the Comparative Synoptical Chart Company, this now unfathomable document–History of the Civil War in the United States: 1860–1865–achieved its goal of squeezing the maximum amount of content onto a single sheet.
Another holds that text should be used sparingly, lest it clutter up strong visuals. Consumers have a limited attention span, and for content to be considered shareable, they should be able to take it in at a glance.
Modern eyes may be forgiven for mistaking this chart for the world’s most convoluted subway map. But those aren’t stops, friend. They’re minor engagements. Bloodier and better-known battles are delineated with larger circles—yellow centers for a Union victory, pale green for Confederate.
The fastest way to begin making heads or tails of the chart is to note that each column is assigned to a different state.
The vertical axis is divided into months. Notice all the negative space around Fort Sumter.
And the constant entries in Virginia’s column.
The publisher noted that the location of events was “entirely governed” by this time scale.
You’ll have to look hard for Lincoln’s assassination.
It would still make a superb addition to any history teacher’s classroom, both as decoration and the tinder that could ignite discussion as to how we receive information, and how much information is in fact received.
Who among us has never fantasized about traveling through time? But then, who among us hasn’t traveled through time? Every single one of us is a time traveler, technically speaking, moving as we do through one second per second, one hour per hour, one day per day. Though I never personally heard the late Stephen Hawking point out that fact, I feel almost certain that he did, especially in light of one particular piece of scientific performance art he pulled off in 2009: throwing a cocktail party for time travelers — the proper kind, who come from the future.
“Hawking’s party was actually an experiment on the possibility of time travel,” writes Atlas Obscura’s Anne Ewbank. “Along with many physicists, Hawking had mused about whether going forward and back in time was possible. And what time traveler could resist sipping champagne with Stephen Hawking himself?” ”
By publishing the party invitation in his mini-series Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking, Hawking hoped to lure futuristic time travelers. You are cordially invited to a reception for Time Travellers, the invitation read, along with the the date, time, and coordinates for the event. The theory, Hawking explained, was that only someone from the future would be able to attend.”
Alas, no time travelers turned up. Since someone possessed of that technology at any point in the future would theoretically be able to attend, does Hawking’s lonely party, which you can see in the clip above, prove that time travel will never become possible? Maybe — or maybe the potential time-travelers of the future know something about the space-time-continuum-threatening risks of the practice that we don’t. As for Dr. Hawking, I have to imagine that he came away satisfied from the shindig, even though his hoped-for Ms. Universe from the future never walked through the door. “I like simple experiments… and champagne,” he said, and this champagne-laden simple experiment will continue to remind the rest of us to enjoy our time on Earth, wherever in that time we may find ourselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
When Spike Lee makes a movie, people talk about it. People talked in 1986 when he made the black-and-white indie comedy She’s Gotta Have It; they talked even more when he came out with Do the Right Thing a few years later; they talked, with sharply divided opinion, about his most recent picture, the crime-themed musical Chi-Raq; and they’re already talking about his upcoming Black Klansman, and not just because of the title. Lee has managed to remain culturally and artistically relevant throughout a career of more than thirty years and counting, and his new online course at Masterclass just might let us in on how he’s done it.
“When you’re an independent filmmaker, and making films outside Hollywood, that’s hard,” says the long Brooklyn-based Lee in the trailer for the course above. “You have to pray on bended knee at the church of cinema.” But even as an aspiring auteur with a pocket-change budget — Lee remembers well when he “was a caterer, the producer, the director, the screenwriter, acted in it, and I was the first AD” on his first feature— you already possess “tools that can help you tell a story”: heightening dynamic camerawork to heighten the emotions, for instance, or writing characters with strong beliefs to intensify the conflicts of the story. He used such techniques when he started out, and he still uses them today.
Though Lee seems more than willing to talk about his methods, you can’t fully understand any filmmaker unless you understand that filmmaker’s influences. And so we offer you Lee’s list of 95 essential movies every aspiring director should see, expanded from his original list of 87, drawn up to hand out to the graduate-school classes he’s taught. Featuring multiple works from directors like Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, John Huston, and Stanley Kubrick, the first version of the list runs as follows:
Taken to task for that list’s lack of female filmmakers, Lee came up with these additions:
The Piano — Jane Campion (1993)
Daughters of the Dust — Julie Dash (1991)
The Hurt Locker — Kathryn Bigelow (2008)
Sugar Cane Alley - Euzhan Palcy (1983)
The Seduction of Mimi — Lina Wertmuller (1972)
Love and Anarchy - Lina Wertmuller (1973)
Swept Away - Lina Wertmuller (1974)
Seven Beauties — Lina Wertmuller (1975)
Lee’s Masterclass on filmmaking joins the site’s other offerings on the same subject from auteurs no less distinctive than Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. Though all three became major filmmakers at different times and under different circumstances — and ended up with very different cinematic sensibilities — they all, as Lee might put it, pray at the same church.
And just as it takes the perspective of many theologists to get a sense of the ineffable essence of the divine, so it takes the perspective of many filmmakers to get an ineffable essence of cinema. You could take all three courses with Masterclass’ $180 all-access pass, or you could pay $90 for just Lee’s. Either way, you’ll learn how he made She’s Gotta Have It for a then-dirt-cheap $175,000, but these days you could surely go out and shoot your own film afterward for not much more than the cost of the Masterclass itself. It’s still hard out there for an indie filmmaker, mind you; just not quite as hard as it was.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
If you’re an aspiring guitar player, you’re in luck. In the age of YouTube, there’s no shortage of talented YouTubers who will teach you how to play the guitar parts of your favorite songs. How to play George Harrison’s guitar solo on “Let It Be”? This video has every little detail covered. Meanwhile, other videos neatly map out the finer points of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Pick your favorite song, and chances are someone has created a primer.
Then occasionally you run into videos like this–a tutorial straight from the artist him or herself. Above, Wayne Kramer, co-founder of Detroit’s ur-punk band, the MC5, sets the record straight and shows you the authentic way to play the 1969 anthem, “Kick Out the Jams.” “There are guys out there trying to show you how to play ‘Kick Out the Jams,’ and they’re all getting it wrong,” says Kramer. “They’re all messing it up. None of them are doing it right, and I’ve had enough.” So here is the “the proper, correct and official way” to play it. Let the lesson begin.
For good measure, he includes the lyrics and chords in the YouTube blurb:
Ten years ago, airlines were straightforward about complying with the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other governing bodies’ requirements. These instructions were serious business. Children and other first time travelers paid strict attention to information about tray tables, exits, and inflatable life vests that jaded frequent flyers ignored, confident that most take offs and landings tend to go according to plan, and the overwhelming number of planes tend stay in the air for the duration of one’s flight.
What about the ones that don’t though? There are times when a too-cool-for-school business traveler seated next to an emergency exit could spell disaster for everyone onboard.
For the .0001% of you who have never operated a seatbelt before, it works like this…
The cocky tone was dialed down for more critical information, like how to assist the child in the seat next to you when the yellow oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartment. (Imagine the mayhem if indie animator Bill Plympton had been in the pilot’s seat for this one…)
The irreverent approach was a hit. The FAA took note, encouraging creativity in a 2010 Advisory Circular:
Every airline passenger should be motivated to focus on the safety information in the passenger briefing; however, motivating people, even when their own personal safety is involved, is not easy. One way to increase passenger motivation is to make the safety information briefings and cards as interesting and attractive as possible.
For a while EVA Air, an innovator whose fleet includes several Hello Kitty Jets, played it safe by sticking to crowd pleasing schtick. Its 2012 CGI safety demo video, below, must’ve played particularly well with the Hello Kitty demographic.
…looks a bit 2012, no?
A few months ago, EVA took things in a direction few industry professionals could’ve predicted: modern dance, performed with utmost sincerity.
Choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava, a member of Taiwan’s indigenous Paiwan community, and a small crew of dancers spent three months translating the familiar directives into a vocabulary of symbolic gestures. See the results at the top of the post.
You’ll find none of the stock characters who populate other airlines’ videos here—no sneaky smokers, no concerned moms, no sleepy businesspeople. There’s barely a suggestion of a cabin.
Unfettered by seats or overhead bins, the brightly clad, barefoot dancers leap and roll as they interact with 3D projections, behavior that would certainly summon a flight attendant if performed on an actual plane.
Does it work?
The answer may depend on whether or not the plane on which you’re traveling takes a sudden nose dive.
In “No Joking,” an essay about airport security, University of Ottawa professor Mark B. Salter writes that it is “difficult to motivate passengers to contemplate their own mortality.” The fashion for jokiness in safety videos “naturalizes areas of anxiety,” a mental trick of which Freud was well aware.
What then are we to make of the EVA Air dancer at the 4:35 minute mark, who appears to be falling backward through the night sky?
Would you show a jet’s worth of travelers the modern dance equivalent of Airplane 1975, Fearless, or Snakes on a Plane before they taxi down the runway?
Mercifully, the narrator steps in to remind passengers that smoking is prohibited, before the digitally projected dark waters can swallow the writhing soloist up.
There’s also some question as to whether the video adequately addresses the question of tray table operation.
Readers, what do you think? Does this new video make you feel secure about taking flight?
The ways that Othello, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and Shylock from The Merchant of Venice—Shakespeare’s “explicitly racialized characters,” as George Washington University’s Ayanna Thompson puts it—have been interpreted over the centuries may have less to do with the author’s intentions and more with contemporary ideas about race, the actors cast in the roles, and the directorial choices made in a production. To a great degree, these characters have been played as though their identities were like the costumes put on by actors who darkened their faces or wore stereotypical markers of ethnic or religious Judaism (including “an obnoxiously large nose”).
Such portrayals risk turning complex characters into caricatures, validating much of what we might see as overt and implicit racism in the text. But there are those, Thompson says, who think such roles are actually “about racial impersonation.” Othello, for example, is “a role written by a white man, intended for a white actor in black makeup.”
For centuries, that is what most audiences fully expected to see. The tradition continued in Britain until the 19th century, when the Shakespearean color line, so to speak, was first crossed by Ira Aldridge, an American actor born in New York City in 1807.
“Educated at the African Free School,” notes the Folger Shakespeare Library, Aldridge “was able to see Shakespeare plays at the Park Theatre and the African Grove Theatre.” He took on roles like Romeo with the African Company, but “New York was generally not a welcoming place for black actors… some white theatergoers even attempted to prevent black companies from performing Shakespeare at all.” As Tony Howard, an English professor at the University of Warwick, tells PRI, “he was beaten up in the streets.” And so Aldridge left for England in 1824, where he played Othello at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden, at only 17 years old, the first black actor to play a Shakespearean role in Britain.
He later began performing under the name Keene, “a homonym,” notes the site Black History 365, “for the then popular British actor, Edmund Kean.” Aldridge’s big break came after he met Kean and his son Charles, also an actor, in 1831, and both became supporters of his career. When the elder Kean collapsed onstage in 1833, then died, Aldridge took over his role as Othello at London’s Royalty Theatre in two performances. “Critics objected,” the Folger writes, “to his race, his youth, and his inexperience.” As Howard tells it, this characterization is a gross understatement:
There were those who said this is a very interesting and extraordinary young actor. And the fact that he’s a black actor makes it more interesting and fascinating. But for many people, it was an insult because this is still a society where there is a great deal of slavery in the British Empire. And in order to combat the idea of increasing abolition, performers like Ira had to be stopped. And so there was a great deal of violent aggression. Not physical violence this time, but violence in the press.
Some of that verbal violence included comparing Aldridge to “performing horses” and “performing dogs.” Many London critics saw his entry on the Shakespearean stage as an affront to English literary tradition. Performing the bard’s works was “a kind of violation,” Howard summarizes, “he has no right to do that, not even to play Othello.”
Photo via the Folger Library
From his beginnings in Coventry to his experience in London, Aldridge made the once-blackface role his own, perhaps increasingly drawing “on his own experience and his own feeling.” He also portrayed Aaron in Titus, and as he persevered through negative press and prejudice, he took on other starring roles, including Richard III, Shylock, Iago, King Lear, and Macbeth. He “toured the English provinces extensively,” the BBC writes, “and stayed in Coventry for a few months, during which time he gave a number of speeches on the evils of slavery. When he left, people inspired by his speeches went to the county hall and petitioned for its abolition.”
By the end of the 1840s, however, Aldridge felt he had gone as far as he could go in England and left to tour the Continent in what had become his signature role, Othello. While first touring with an English company, he “later began to work with local theater troupes,” the Folger writes, “performing in English while the rest of the cast would perform in German, Swedish, etc. Despite the language barrier, Aldridge’s performances in Europe were highly acclaimed, a testament to his acting skills.” (See a playbill further up from a Bonn performance.) After winning great fame in Europe and Russia, the actor returned in triumph to London in 1855, and this time was very well-received.
Aldridge died in 1867. And though he was the subject of many portraits of the period—like that by James Northcote at the top of the post, portraying the 19-year-old Aldridge as Othello, and this 1830 painting by Henry Perronet Briggs—he was “largely forgotten by theater historians.” (See him above in an 1858 drawing by Ukranian artist Taras Shevchenko.) But his legacy has been revived in recent years. Aldridge was the subject of two recent plays, Black Othello, by Cecilia Sidenbladh, and Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti. And last year, he was honored in Coventry by a plaque on the site of the theater where he first achieved fame.
While he succeeded in becoming an all-around great Shakespearean actor, Aldridge’s legacy rests especially in the way he helped transform roles performed as “racial impersonation” for a few hundred years into the provenance of talented black actors who bring new depth, complexity, and authenticity to characters often played as stock ethnic villains. While white actors like Orson Welles and Lawrence Olivier continued to play Othello well into the 20th century, these days such casting can be seen as “ridiculous,” as Hugh Muir writes at The Guardian, especially if that actor “blacks up” for the role.
Above, you can watch him teach an Oxford course on Deep Learning, a hot subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence which creates neural networks–essentially complex algorithms modeled loosely after the human brain–that can recognize patterns and learn to perform tasks.
The bombast, arrogance and bloviation–maybe you need a break from it all. You may need exactly the opposite–a little Fred Rogers. If so, we’ve got two things for you. First, head over to Twitch.TV where they’re currently livestreaming all 856 episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (for a limited time). It’s a grand way of celebrating what would have been Fred’s 90th birthday this week. And then, above, watch the brand new trailer for Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the upcoming documentary by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom). Due out in June, the film “takes us beyond the zip-up cardigans and the land of make-believe, and into the heart of a creative genius who inspired generations of children with compassion and limitless imagination.” As you watch the trailer, you’ll be reminded that Rogers worked his magic during other periods of chaos and discontent, and how sorely his calming presence is missing today.
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