Google Digitizes and Puts Online a Vast Archive of Latino Artworks and Artifacts

in Art, History | February 22nd, 2018

You can’t under­stand human cul­ture in the 21st cen­tu­ry with­out under­stand­ing Amer­i­can cul­ture, and as any­one who’s spent time in most any major U.S. city knows, you cer­tain­ly can’t under­stand Amer­i­can cul­ture with­out under­stand­ing Lati­no cul­ture. I write this while trav­el­ing in Los Ange­les, a city that makes that point with par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive force, but just a few moments with an overview of Lati­no art will under­score the vital­i­ty it has pro­vid­ed Amer­i­ca, and thus the world. You could do lit­tle bet­ter for such an overview than the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute’s brand new Lati­no Cul­tures in the U.S. project, a siz­able free dig­i­tal archive of Lati­no art and arti­facts of Lati­no his­to­ry.

Forbes’ Veron­i­ca Vil­lafañe quotes Google and Youtube Head of His­pan­ic Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Jesús Gar­cía as describ­ing the archive as “a labor of love for many Googlers and part­ner insti­tu­tions. It was a project that was more than a year in the mak­ing and took a small army to help dig­i­tize the 2,500 new art­works and curate 69 new exhibits.”

As a whole it offers “over 4,300 archives and art­works — includ­ing Diego Rivera murals — relat­ed to the Lati­no expe­ri­ence in the U.S., mul­ti­me­dia exhibits in Eng­lish and Span­ish and vir­tu­al tours of his­toric sites, as well as pro­files of key Lati­no fig­ures, such as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huer­ta and Supreme Court Jus­tice Sonia Sotomay­or.”

Google Head of Lati­no Com­mu­ni­ty Engage­ment Lau­ra Mar­quez notes that it also allows you to “vis­it some of the most vibrant neigh­bor­hoods in the U.S. — the homes to and cen­ters of Lati­no cul­ture— by way of his­toric pho­tographs or unmiss­able loca­tions on Google Street View, all from your phone.” You’ll also find “ultra-high res­o­lu­tion images of icon­ic Lati­no murals, such as Diego Rivera’s Detroit Indus­try from the Detroit Insti­tute of Arts.” Using the for­mi­da­ble explorato­ry plat­form of Google Earth, the project has also cre­at­ed a whole Lati­no Murals in the U.S. sec­tion, from River­a’s work in Detroit to José Clemente Oroz­co’s Prometheus in Cal­i­for­nia to the Mia­mi Arti­sans’ Free­dom Tow­er mur­al at Mia­mi Dade Col­lege.

You can also browse the Lati­no Cul­tures in the U.S. Project’s offer­ings by form, includ­ing dance, film, music, and style. And though the designs of Oscar de la Renta, the songs of Glo­ria Este­fan, the paint­ings of Frank Romero (and, of course, lowrid­ers) have drawn the inter­est of many a non-Lati­no toward Lati­no cul­ture, what has done quite so much out­reach as the food? Google’s project even cov­ers that ter­ri­to­ry with con­tent like an edi­to­r­i­al fea­ture on “Fast Food, Tor­tillas, and the Art of Accept­ing Your­self” by Javier Cabral, a food crit­ic based, and well known, in — where else? — Los Ange­les.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bat­tle for LA’s Murals

Charles & Ray Eames’ Short Film on the Mex­i­can Day of the Dead (1957)

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

Google Lets You Take a 360-Degree Panoram­ic Tour of Street Art in Cities Across the World

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.

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What the Map of the United States Would Look Like If All 50 States Had Equal Populations

in History, Politics | February 22nd, 2018

In the U.S., recent elec­toral events with which we’re all quite famil­iar have prompt­ed one par­tic­u­lar rad­i­cal re-eval­u­a­tion of the polit­i­cal sys­tem, among many oth­ers: we find every­one from high-pro­file Con­sti­tu­tion­al schol­ars to anony­mous com­menters engaged in debates about the neces­si­ty, or demo­c­ra­t­ic legit­i­ma­cy, of the Elec­toral Col­lege. While the debate may not be new, it has reached an urgent inten­si­ty, and hap­pens to occur at a time when every­thing seems up for grabs. When Neil Free­man pro­posed redraw­ing state bor­ders on his pre­scient­ly-named design site Fake is the New Real back in 2012, he cre­at­ed the map above (view it in a larg­er for­mat here) to even­ly dis­trib­ute the country’s pop­u­la­tion. He did so with the dis­claimer, “this is an art project, not a seri­ous pro­pos­al.”

The idea might get a more seri­ous recep­tion these days. Nonethe­less, the iner­tia of tra­di­tion has­n’t less­ened any. Not only is it total­ly unlike­ly that states would ever be redrawn and renamed, but the Elec­toral Col­lege is also a found­ing insti­tu­tion, emerg­ing at the first Con­sti­tu­tion­al Con­ven­tion when James Madi­son first pro­posed it in 1787. Since then, PBS’s Kamala Kelkar wrote on Novem­ber 6th, 2016, “the Elec­toral Col­lege sys­tem has cost four can­di­dates the race after they received the pop­u­lar vote.” Two days lat­er that num­ber went up to five.

Still, whether one deems it nec­es­sary, super­flu­ous, or deeply per­ni­cious, it’s hard­ly con­tro­ver­sial to note that this elect­ing body comes from an era so unlike our own as to be unrec­og­niz­able. A time when, as some founders argued, writes Akhil Reed Amar at Time, “ordi­nary Amer­i­cans across a vast con­ti­nent [lacked] suf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion to choose direct­ly and intel­li­gent­ly among lead­ing pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates.” This might still be the case for var­i­ous rea­sons. But putting aside man­u­fac­tured fil­ter bub­bles and vast dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns, most Amer­i­cans now have instant access, if they want it, to more infor­ma­tion than they know what to do with.

When we look at the pri­ma­ry sources, we find the actu­al rea­son for the Elec­toral Col­lege: slav­ery. Madi­son, notes Kelkar, “now known as the ‘Father of the Con­sti­tu­tion,’” was a slave­hold­ing Vir­gin­ian who wor­ried vocal­ly that North­ern states would have a decid­ed advan­tage, since upwards of 40% of the pop­u­la­tion in South­ern states con­sist­ed of enslaved peo­ple, who, of course, would not be cast­ing votes. Madison’s propo­si­tion includ­ed the infa­mous and dehu­man­iz­ing “three-fifths com­pro­mise,” which his­to­ri­an Paul Finkel­man argues enabled Thomas Jef­fer­son to win over John Adams in 1800.

Despite this his­to­ry, most peo­ple are taught that the sys­tem arose sole­ly to “bal­ance the inter­ests,” Amar writes, “of high-pop­u­la­tion and low-pop­u­la­tion states.” This sounds like a polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral inten­tion. But Free­man doesn’t ques­tion the legit­i­ma­cy of the Elec­toral Col­lege, call­ing it “a time-hon­ored, log­i­cal sys­tem” that he thinks should be pre­served. And yet, he writes, “it’s obvi­ous that reforms are need­ed.”

“The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem of the elec­toral col­lege,” Free­man writes, “is that the states of the Unit­ed States are too dis­parate in size and influ­ence. The largest state is 66 times as pop­u­lous as the small­est and has 18 times as many elec­toral votes. This increas­es the chance for Elec­toral Col­lege results that don’t match the pop­u­lar vote.” This is hard­ly the only issue. But is Freeman’s pro­pos­al a more sta­ble solu­tion to major flaws in U.S. nation­al elec­tions than sim­ply scrap­ping the Elec­toral Col­lege alto­geth­er? He makes the fol­low­ing argu­ment, in a series of bul­let-point­ed advan­tages. His map:

  • Pre­serves the his­toric struc­ture and func­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege.
  • Ends the over-rep­re­sen­ta­tion of small states and under-rep­re­sen­ta­tion of large states in pres­i­den­tial vot­ing and in the US Sen­ate by elim­i­nat­ing small and large states.
  • Polit­i­cal bound­aries more close­ly fol­low eco­nom­ic pat­terns, since many states are more cen­tered on one or two metro areas.
  • Ends vary­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the House. Cur­rent­ly, the pop­u­la­tion of House dis­tricts ranges from 528,000 to 924,000. After this reform, every House seat would rep­re­sent dis­tricts of the same size. (Since the cur­rent size of the House isn’t divis­i­ble by 50, the num­bers of seats should be increased to 450 or 500.)
  • States could be redis­trict­ed after each cen­sus — just like House seats are dis­trib­uted now.

Free­man based the map–featuring new states like “Mesabi,” “Ogal­lala,” “Big Thick­et,” “Chi­nati,” and “King”–on data from the 2010 Cen­sus, which, inci­den­tal­ly, actu­al­ly did change the dis­tri­b­u­tion of elec­tors in 2012. The Cen­sus “records a pop­u­la­tion of 308,745,538 for the Unit­ed States,” he notes, “which this map divides into 50 states, each with a pop­u­la­tion of about 6,175,000.”

He does seem to down­play the dis­ad­van­tages, list­ing only two con­cerns about dupli­cat­ed coun­ty names and a “shift in state laws and pro­ce­dures.” Free­man doesn’t men­tion the high like­li­hood of civ­il war or wide­spread social unrest if such a mas­sive redis­tri­b­u­tion of the country’s state pop­u­la­tions were ever attempt­ed. Giv­en the exam­ples of pitched legal bat­tle fought dai­ly over con­gres­sion­al redis­trict­ing of ger­ry­man­dered states, it’s also prob­a­ble noth­ing like this plan would ever make it through the courts. Con­sid­ered as an “art project” or thought exper­i­ment in civics, how­ev­er, who knows? It just might work….

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal Khan & the Mup­pets’ Grover Explain the Elec­toral Col­lege

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

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

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Massive Archive of 78RPM Records Now Digitized & Put Online: Stream 78,000 Early 20th Century Records from Around the World

in Archives, Music | February 21st, 2018

Last sum­mer we checked in with the Inter­net Archive’s Great 78 Project, a vol­un­teer effort to dig­i­tize thou­sands of 78rpm records—the old­est mass-pro­duced record­ing medi­um. Draw­ing on the exper­tise and vast hold­ings of preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood, L.P., the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music, and over 20 more insti­tu­tions from around the world, the project aims to save the record­ed sounds of the past, and not only those that have come down to us through the efforts of high­ly selec­tive cura­tors. What we think of as the sound of the ear­ly 20th century—the blues, jazz, coun­try, clas­si­cal, rag­time, gospel, blue­grass, etc.—only rep­re­sents a pop­u­lar sam­ple.

Inter­net Archive founder Brew­ster Kahle wants to widen our son­ic appre­ci­a­tion of the peri­od, and include every­thing, “Mid­west, dif­fer­ent coun­tries, dif­fer­ent social class­es, dif­fer­ent immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties and their loves and fears.”

This mas­sive archive will even­tu­al­ly num­ber in the mil­lions, up to 3 mil­lion record­ings, to be exact, and con­tin­ues apace at the rate of about 5,000 new uploads per month.

Last August, the record­ings in the archive num­bered over 25,000. Now, the Great 78 Project con­tains more than 78,000 and count­ing dig­i­tal trans­fers of frag­ile 78rpm records—everything from Prokofiev to the Carter Fam­i­ly (fur­ther up) to Mis­sis­sip­pi John Hurt from 1928 (above) to inter­na­tion­al folk dances to field record­ings of ani­mal sounds.

The col­lect­ed works of Al Jol­son, span­ning the years 1911 to 1926, appear (above), as does a fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion from Argenti­na, brought to the U.S. by Tina Argume­do, who began col­lect­ing 78s in the 30s and con­tin­ued to do so for anoth­er 20 years before mov­ing to the States. Her dig­i­tized col­lec­tion of almost 700 records “com­pris­es pri­mar­i­ly tan­go music, with boleros, sam­bas, mam­bo, and oth­er dance music,” like the Argen­tine swing of Dajos Bela y su Orques­tra from 1932 below.

As we not­ed in our pre­vi­ous post, the utmost care has gone into pre­serv­ing the orig­i­nal sound of these records, with a vari­ety of dig­i­tal trans­fers made with dif­fer­ent vin­tage sty­lus­es to rep­re­sent the dif­fer­ences in play­back sys­tems. The process also pre­serves all the orig­i­nal records’ crack­le and hiss—sometimes the music seems to swim below the sur­face noise, which only enhances the effect of hear­ing, trans­port­ed through time, music from 80, 90, and 100 years ago and more.

Enter the 78 archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

Stream 8,000 Vin­tage Afropop Record­ings Dig­i­tized & Made Avail­able by The British Library

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

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What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Isolated Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pinball Wizard”

in Music | February 21st, 2018

Drum­mer Kei­th Moon was sure­ly the most kinet­ic mem­ber of The Who—which is real­ly say­ing a lot—but he was not the band’s best musi­cian, even if he is rou­tine­ly named one of the best drum­mers of all time. Moon knew the appeal of his play­ing often lay in the fact that it was like no one else’s: he described him­self as the “great­est Kei­th Moon-type drum­mer in the world.” Noth­ing in rock approached his untamed excess, mod­eled after the far more dis­ci­plined flights of his hero, Gene Kru­pa.

But if the band “can be said to have an instru­men­tal vir­tu­oso,” writes Chris Jisi at Drum! mag­a­zine, “it is John Alec Entwistle,” their true sol­id cen­ter (they called him “The Ox”) and the per­fect rhyth­mic foil to Moon, who “could sound like a drum kit falling down­stairs,” Entwistle says. The bass play­er not only kept time, he tells Jisi, since Moon didn’t, and fol­lowed Moon’s “mess of cym­bals” and “all over the place” snare drum, but he also filled in for a rhythm gui­tarist as Pete Town­shend slashed away.

He kept his bass riffs rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple, he had to, and he “added top end or tre­ble… to cut through the rest of the noise.” It works, for sure. He is right­ful­ly sin­gled out as one of the great­est rock bass play­ers ever for his phe­nom­e­nal skill and poise.

A less­er play­er try­ing to com­pete with Moon’s wall of drums and Townshend’s mas­sive pow­er chords might dis­ap­pear entire­ly. Entwistle always stands out. His com­ments about Moon’s play­ing might sound dis­parag­ing, but they come off in con­text as hon­est and accu­rate, as do his descrip­tions of his own play­ing.

Entwistle sug­gests he wouldn’t be the play­er he became with­out Moon and the rest of the band. “We con­struct­ed our music to fit ‘round each oth­er,” he says. “It was some­thing very pecu­liar that none of us played the same way as oth­er peo­ple.” In their best moments, some parts “slid togeth­er by mag­ic and were gone for­ev­er.” This is the essence, real­ly, of rock and roll, the serendip­i­tous tran­scen­dence that aris­es from wild­ly col­lid­ing waves of sound.

But such con­trolled chaos can require, espe­cial­ly in a band like The Who, one cool, well-trained vir­tu­oso who can­not be ruf­fled, no mat­ter what, whose per­fec­tion looks effort­less and who nev­er breaks a sweat. The eter­nal arche­type of that play­er is John Entwistle. At the top, hear Entwistle’s iso­lat­ed bass in a live take of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” (He comes in at 1:45, after a much-extend­ed intro). Below it, you’ll eas­i­ly pick out his every note in the stu­dio ver­sion. And fur­ther up, after anoth­er extend­ed syn­the­siz­er intro, hear him solo at 1:25 on “Baba O’Ri­ley,” also live at Shep­per­ton Stu­dios in 1978. (The stu­dio record­ing is above).

And just above, in one of his most ener­getic per­for­mances, hear him play a live ver­sion of “Pin­ball Wiz­ard” (start­ing at 0:36). And then catch one more jaw-drop­ping solo, just for good mea­sure, record­ed live at Roy­al Albert Hall.

Entwistle is some­times com­pared to Jimi Hen­drix, but in some ways, The Ox came first with his fuzzed-out sound. The mild-man­nered play­er “pio­neered the use of feed­back in music and smash­ing his instru­ment,” writes Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, “with Jimi Hen­drix fol­low­ing suit after see­ing Entwistle do it.” For all his reserved Eng­lish cool­ness, Entwistle first pushed the bound­aries of loud­ness, “using 200 watts of pow­er when most bands used 50,” just one of the rea­sons, as you’ll hear in these tracks, for his oth­er nick­name: “Thun­derfin­gers.”

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

The Genius of Paul McCartney’s Bass Play­ing in 7 Iso­lat­ed Tracks

The Jimi Hen­drix of the Bass: Watch a Busker Shred the Bass on the Streets of New­cas­tle

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

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Watch 3000 Years of Art, a 1968 Experimental Film That Takes You on a Visual Journey Through 3,000 Years of Fine Art

in Art, Film, Music | February 21st, 2018

Even if we can’t name them, we’ve all seen hun­dreds of the most impor­tant paint­ings in art his­to­ry, and even if we can’t name it, we’ve all heard “Clas­si­cal Gas.” 3000 Years of Art, the 1968 exper­i­men­tal film above, offi­ci­ates an aes­thet­ic union of about 2500 of those much-seen, high­ly influ­en­tial images and Mason Williams’ instru­men­tal hit song, all in just over three min­utes.

Ini­tial­ly released on The Mason Williams Phono­graph Record in 1967, the track went on, with the help of 3000 Years of Art, to become “one of the ear­li­est records that used a visu­al to help pro­mote it on tele­vi­sion, which prob­a­bly qual­i­fies it as one of the ear­li­est music videos.” Those words come from Williams him­self, who post­ed the video to his own Youtube chan­nel.

When “Clas­si­cal Gas” first became a hit, he writes, “I was also the head writer for The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour on CBS. I had seen a film titled God Is Dog Spelled Back­wards at The Encore, an off beat movie house in L.A. The film was a col­lec­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 2500 clas­si­cal works of art, most­ly paint­ings, that flashed by in three min­utes. Each image last­ed only two film frames, or twelve images a sec­ond! At the end of the film the view­er was pro­nounced ‘cul­tur­al’ since they had just cov­ered ‘3000 years of art in 3 min­utes!’ ”

Con­tact­ing the short­’s cre­ator, a UCLA stu­dent by the name of Dan McLaugh­lin, Williams asked if he could re-cut its imagery to “Clas­si­cal Gas” for a Smoth­ers Broth­ers seg­ment. First air­ing on the show in the sum­mer of 1968 — the same year that saw anoth­er of the show’s writ­ers, a young man by the name of Steve Mar­tin, bring his tal­ents direct­ly to the air — the result­ing pro­to-music-video rock­et­ed Williams’ song to anoth­er sphere of pop­u­lar­i­ty entire­ly. Not only that, it “opened the door to real­iza­tions that the view­er’s mind could absorb this intense lev­el of visu­al input” with its use of kines­ta­sis, the phe­nom­e­non where­by a mon­tage of still images cre­ates its own kind of motion.

Fol­low­ing the idea to its then-log­i­cal con­clu­sion, Williams soon after wrote a skit for the Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour “pro­ject­ing the idea that some­day VJs would be play­ing hit tapes on TV.” And so the tra­jec­to­ries of easy-lis­ten­ing instru­men­tal music, gen­tly sub­ver­sive tele­vi­sion com­e­dy, and art his­to­ry inter­sect­ed to give the world an ear­ly glimpse of MTV, Youtube, and whichev­er host of even short­er-form, intenser view­ing expe­ri­ences comes next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to 100 Impor­tant Paint­ings with Videos Cre­at­ed by Smarthis­to­ry

One Minute Art His­to­ry: Cen­turies of Artis­tic Styles Get Packed Into a Short Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion

100,000 Free Art His­to­ry Texts Now Avail­able Online Thanks to the Get­ty Research Por­tal

An Online Guide to 350 Inter­na­tion­al Art Styles & Move­ments: An Invalu­able Resource for Stu­dents & Enthu­si­asts of Art His­to­ry

The Art His­to­ry Web Book

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.

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Learn to Code with Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science Course: A Free Course (2017)

in Computer Science, Online Courses | February 21st, 2018

In recent months, Har­vard has been rolling out videos from the 2017 edi­tion of Com­put­er Sci­ence 50 (CS50), the uni­ver­si­ty’s intro­duc­to­ry cod­ing course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a peren­ni­al­ly pop­u­lar pro­fes­sor (you’ll see why), the one-semes­ter course (taught most­ly in C) com­bines cours­es typ­i­cal­ly known else­where as “CS1” and “CS2.”

Even if you’re not a Har­vard stu­dent, you’re wel­come to fol­low CS50 online by head­ing over to this site here. There you will find video lec­tures (stream them all above or access them indi­vid­u­al­ly here), prob­lem sets, quizzes, and oth­er use­ful course mate­ri­als. Once you’ve mas­tered the mate­r­i­al cov­ered in CS50, you can start branch­ing out into new areas of cod­ing by perus­ing our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,300 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Note: Har­vard’s CS50 is also avail­able as a MOOC (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) on edX. Also taught by David Malan, the course can be tak­en in a self-paced for­mat for free. Find it here.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. 

If you’d like to sup­port Open Cul­ture and our mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us pro­vide the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Sandel’s Free Course on Jus­tice, the Most Pop­u­lar Course at Har­vard, Is Now Online

Learn Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy with Har­vard University’s Free Online Course

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Online Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

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Hear a 19-Hour Playlist of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Favorite Music: Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and… Yvette Guilbert

in Music, Philosophy | February 20th, 2018

Among his many var­ied interests—which, in addi­tion to phi­los­o­phy, includ­ed aero­nau­ti­cal engi­neer­ing and archi­tec­ture—Lud­wig Wittgen­stein was also a great lover of music. Giv­en his well-deserved rep­u­ta­tion for intel­lec­tu­al aus­ter­i­ty, we might assume his musi­cal tastes would tend toward min­i­mal­ist com­posers of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry like fel­low Aus­tri­an Arnold Schoen­berg. The “order­ly seri­al­ism,” of Schoenberg’s aton­al music “does seem an obvi­ous com­ple­ment to Wittgenstein’s phi­los­o­phy,” writes Grant Chu Cov­ell. “Observers have won­dered why the famous­ly arro­gant thinker who attempt­ed to infuse phi­los­o­phy with log­ic didn’t find Schoenberg’s 12-tone sys­tem attrac­tive.”

But indeed, he did not—in fact, Wittgen­stein despised almost all mod­ern music and seemed to believe that “noth­ing of val­ue had been com­posed after the 19th century’s demise.” While his philo­soph­i­cal work made as rad­i­cal a break with the past as Schoenberg’s the­o­ry, when it came to music, the philoso­pher was a strict tra­di­tion­al­ist who “liked to say that there were only six tru­ly great com­posers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schu­bert, Brahms and Labor.”

This last name will hard­ly be famil­iar to most read­ers. Labor, a blind organ­ist and com­pos­er, was a close friend of the Wittgen­stein fam­i­ly and a teacher of Ludwig’s broth­er Paul (and of Schoen­berg as well). Although he lived into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, Labor main­ly drew his influ­ence from ear­ly music.

The extrav­a­gant­ly wealthy Wittgen­steins were a musi­cal family—both Ludwig’s old­er broth­ers became musi­cians. Wittgenstein’s par­ents and grand­par­ents knew Brahms, adopt­ed vio­lin­ist Joseph Joachim, a dis­tant cousin, into the fam­i­ly, and fre­quent­ly host­ed such lumi­nar­ies as Gus­tav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Lud­wig him­self learned to play the clar­inet and “was a fas­tid­i­ous lis­ten­er,” Cov­ell notes. “Acquain­tances mar­veled at his vir­tu­oso whistling. His reper­toire includ­ed Brahms’ Haydn Vari­a­tions and oth­er sym­phon­ic works. He would unhesi­tat­ing­ly cor­rect oth­ers’ inac­cu­rate hum­ming or singing.” He sup­pos­ed­ly had an “untir­ing obses­sion with per­fect recre­ations of the clas­sics.”

The philosopher’s per­fec­tion­ism lead to some harsh crit­i­cal judg­ments. “Brahms is Mendelssohn with­out the flaws,” he wrote. He declared Mahler “worth­less… quite obvi­ous­ly it took a set of very rare tal­ents to pro­duce this bad music.” What did Wittgen­stein val­ue in music besides an ide­al of per­fec­tion? Gram­mar, silence, and pro­fun­di­ty. “The music of the Baroque era… made use of the spe­cial effect of silence,” writes Yael Kaduri at Con­tem­po­rary Aes­thet­ics. “The gen­er­al pause of the Baroque was used to illus­trate con­cepts such as eter­ni­ty, death, infin­i­ty and silence in vocal music.” These con­cepts “did not dis­ap­pear in the tran­si­tion to the clas­sic era.” Haydn’s music in par­tic­u­lar “con­tains so many gen­er­al paus­es that it seems they form an intrin­sic com­po­nent of his musi­cal lan­guage.”

Wittgen­stein had oth­er cri­te­ria as well, much of it, sure­ly, as enig­mat­ic as the prin­ci­ples that gov­erned his thought. What does become clear, Cov­ell argues, is that “Wittgen­stein could only have been attract­ed to com­mon-prac­tice tonal­i­ty, with its cod­i­fied rules and delin­eation between orna­ment and form.” He need­ed “a sys­tem the details of which enhance an under­ly­ing struc­ture.” In the playlist above, you can hear a selec­tion of the philoso­pher’s favorites. Com­piled by Wittgen­stein biog­ra­ph­er Ray Monk, the playlist omits Haydn, for some rea­son, but includes Wag­n­er and Roman­tic com­pos­er Georges Bizet.

You’ll also find one rare excep­tion to Wittgenstein’s obses­sion with clas­si­cal musi­cal order: cabaret actress and singer Yvette Guil­bert, favorite sub­ject of artist Hen­ri Toulouse-Lautrec and one­time star of the Moulin Rouge. The famous­ly soli­tary, severe, and ill-tem­pered philoso­pher may have, it seems, nur­tured a soft­er side after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus Sung as a One-Woman Opera

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Lud­wig Wittgen­stein & His Philo­soph­i­cal Insights on the Prob­lems of Human Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Bru­tal Stint as an Ele­men­tary School Teacher

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

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Ditching the Lecture Hall for the Recording Studio: One Historian Is Using the Power of Podcasting to Inspire a Whole New Audience

in History, Podcasts | February 20th, 2018

His­to­ry is dying at U.S. col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.  Enroll­ment in under­grad­u­ate his­to­ry cours­es is way down since 2010, and the num­ber of his­to­ry degrees award­ed annu­al­ly has like­wise been falling faster and faster.  The most recent data show a 9% nation­wide drop in his­to­ry degrees award­ed in 2014 com­pared to 2013, with an even sharp­er 13% decline at the nation’s top uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Yale, Har­vard, and Stan­ford. (1,2,3,4)  So, is his­to­ry just get­ting old?

On the con­trary.  At least out­side of acad­e­mia, his­to­ry has nev­er been more pop­u­lar.  Cul­tur­al icons includ­ing Barack Oba­ma and Bill Gates have cit­ed his­to­ry books such as Yuval Noah Harar­i’s Sapi­ens: A Brief His­to­ry of Mankind and Steven Pinker’s Enlight­en­ment Now: The Case for Rea­son, Sci­ence, Human­ism and Progress as among their favorite books of all time.  The His­to­ry Chan­nel has enjoyed a resur­gence in view­er­ship since 2013, and judg­ing by the recep­tion of more epic pro­duc­tions, from Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-win­ning movie Lin­coln in 2012 to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit musi­cal Hamil­ton in 2015, it’s clear that pub­lic hunger for his­to­ry is only grow­ing.  What, then, accounts for lack­lus­ter lec­ture hall atten­dance?

“Part of the prob­lem is that much of aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ry has become too eso­teric,” says pod­cast­er Brad Har­ris, who holds a PhD from Stan­ford in the his­to­ry of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy.  “Course con­tent has been shift­ing away from big ideas like the rise of mod­ern sci­ence and democ­ra­cy to nar­row­er stud­ies of things like the pol­i­tics of emo­tion and cul­tur­al con­struc­tions, which many stu­dents find less rel­e­vant to their inter­ests.”  More­over, Har­ris con­tends that col­lege his­to­ry cours­es have nev­er been more cyn­i­cal.  “Too many pro­fes­sors dwell on what human­i­ty has done wrong–who we’ve oppressed, what we’ve destroyed–and not enough on what human­i­ty has done right–who we’ve lib­er­at­ed, what we’ve invent­ed.  Where’s the inspi­ra­tion?  It’s no won­der peo­ple are ditch­ing his­to­ry lec­tures.”  And now, so has Brad Har­ris.

Since leav­ing acad­e­mia in 2015, Har­ris has been work­ing full-time to offer an attrac­tive alter­na­tive for peo­ple who want to learn his­to­ry, pro­vid­ing con­tent that is as infor­ma­tive as a col­lege lec­ture but as enter­tain­ing as a cin­e­mat­ic pro­duc­tion: a pod­cast called How It Began: A His­to­ry of the Mod­ern World.  Avail­able every­where pod­casts are found, and also from his web­site, howitbegan.com, How It Began inter­prets a broad array of the most impor­tant sci­en­tif­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal, and cul­tur­al advance­ments in his­to­ry, from dog domes­ti­ca­tion to the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion.  Here is an excerpt from the show’s intro­duc­to­ry episode:

In each episode, we will fly through the cen­turies to fol­low the seeds of an inno­va­tion or dis­cov­ery as it blos­soms into one of the many fruits of moder­ni­ty.  Far from a cat­a­log of dead men and dates, How It Began offers a cin­e­mat­ic-like immer­sion into the sto­ries behind some of our species’ great­est achieve­ments.  The over­all theme?  Cel­e­bra­tion!  We are for­tu­nate to be descend­ed from men and women who dared to dream big and even die for the cause of progress.  Their work is unfin­ished, and some parts of moder­ni­ty are even worse than before.  But most are bet­ter, much bet­ter.  And we have more tools than ever to fix what’s still bro­ken.  

Brad Har­ris hopes his show’s focus on mod­ern progress will cap­ti­vate peo­ple who crave more inspir­ing explo­rations of his­to­ry, and judg­ing by How It Began’s recep­tion so far, he seems well on his way to achiev­ing exact­ly that.  

Episodes are between 30 and 60 min­utes long and released every month or so.  The pod­cast explores a wide range of top­ics, from the rise of mod­ern surgery and com­put­ers to the devel­op­ment of the Eng­lish lan­guage and the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion.  “Wolves to Dogs: The Ori­gin of our Alliance” was one of the most pop­u­lar episodes of Sea­son One.   In a more recent episode, Har­ris reveals the sur­pris­ing cor­re­la­tions between the spread of cof­fee con­sump­tion and the estab­lish­ment of mod­ern insti­tu­tions:

Sources:
1. “New Data Show Large Drop in His­to­ry Bach­e­lor’s Degrees,” Per­spec­tives on His­to­ry, Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, March 2016: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2016/new-data-show-large-drop-in-history-bachelors-degrees
2. “Sur­vey Finds Few­er Stu­dents Enrolling in Col­lege His­to­ry Cours­es,” Per­spec­tives on His­to­ry, Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, Sep­tem­ber 2016: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2016/survey-finds-fewer-students-enrolling-in-college-history-courses
3. “The Rise and Decline of His­to­ry Spe­cial­iza­tions over the Past 40 Years,” Per­spec­tives on His­to­ry, Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, Decem­ber 2015: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2015/the-rise-and-decline-of-history-specializations-over-the-past-40-years
4. “The Decline and Fall of His­to­ry,” Niall Fer­gu­son, pub­lished by The Amer­i­can Coun­cil of Trustees and Alum­ni, Octo­ber 2016: https://www.goacta.org/images/download/Ali-Ferguson-Merrill-Speech.pdf

 

This is a guest post by Mor­gan Stew­art, an edu­ca­tion­al con­sul­tant and founder of With­in Reach Edu­ca­tion­al Con­sul­tants.

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An Animated Introduction to the Existentialist Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre… and How It Can Open Our Eyes to Life’s Possibilities

in Philosophy | February 20th, 2018

Among the vogue names of mid­cen­tu­ry West­ern phi­los­o­phy, few ever rose to such cul­tur­al heights as that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Fans once dropped it when­ev­er they could, and made sure to be seen read­ing Being and Noth­ing­ness wher­ev­er they could. But why did his par­tic­u­lar ideas so cap­ti­vate his read­ers, and what — now that French phi­los­o­phy fever has, for the most part died down — do we still stand to gain from famil­iar­iz­ing our­selves with them? This six-and-a-half-minute ani­mat­ed Sartre primer from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life can get us start­ed under­stand­ing them.

Sartre’s entry in the accom­pa­ny­ing site The Book of Life breaks his exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy down into four key insights: “Things are weird­er than we think,” “We are free,” “We shouldn’t live in ‘Bad faith’,” and “We’re free to dis­man­tle Cap­i­tal­ism.”

Or in oth­er words, every­day log­ic can give way to sheer absur­di­ty; that absur­di­ty pro­vides us glimpses of the vast and usu­al­ly unac­knowl­edged pos­si­bil­i­ties of life (which exist not least because noth­ing has any fixed pur­pose); we have an oblig­a­tion to acknowl­edge those pos­si­bil­i­ties and our free­dom to choose between them; and we need not live under a sys­tem that oper­ates to lim­it those pos­si­bil­i­ties. But how do we actu­al­ly act on any of this?

On the most basic lev­el, Sartre helps us real­ize that “things do not have to be the way they are.” He “urges us to accept the flu­id­i­ty of exis­tence and to cre­ate new insti­tu­tions, habits, out­looks and ideas. The admis­sion that life doesn’t have some pre­or­dained log­ic and is not inher­ent­ly mean­ing­ful can be a source of immense relief when we feel oppressed by the weight of tra­di­tion and the sta­tus quo.” That notion must have exud­ed a spe­cial appeal in the post­war West, when the enor­mous growth of large-scale indus­tri­al and cor­po­rate orga­ni­za­tions start­ed to make life seem fright­en­ing­ly reg­i­ment­ed.

Things may look quite dif­fer­ent here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, near­ly 40 years after Sartre’s death, but even after all our sup­posed enlight­en­ment and empow­er­ment since then, we’d do well to heed his insis­tence that noth­ing in our lives, or thoughts, or our econ­o­my real­ly has to be the way it is. And since none of it, in his view, came down to us divine­ly ordained, we can change any of it when­ev­er and how­ev­er we wish. We have that great pow­er, but with great pow­er, as the Spi­der-Man comics say, comes great respon­si­bil­i­ty. No won­der we so often pre­fer to pre­tend we have no choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Con­cepts of Free­dom & “Exis­ten­tial Choice” Explained in an Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry

Jean-Paul Sartre on How Amer­i­can Jazz Lets You Expe­ri­ence Exis­ten­tial­ist Free­dom & Tran­scen­dence

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre Dis­cov­ered

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.

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Enroll in Harvard’s Free Online Architecture Course: An Introduction to the History & Theory of Architecture

in Architecture, Online Courses | February 20th, 2018

So, you want to be an archi­tect. Where to begin? It seems like a very big aspi­ra­tion. One the­o­rist argues that mod­ernist archi­tec­ture has been “char­ac­ter­ized by a thau­matur­gic… ambi­tion which would heal the ‘dis­eases’ of indi­vid­u­als and soci­ety.” As any­one who’s spent much time in a hous­ing project, face­less office park, or strip mall might attest, more recent approach­es can also have “the pow­er of hurt­ing.”

If you’re intent on wield­ing the pow­er of archi­tec­ture for good, you’ll need many years of study and appren­tice­ship. But whether you’re just get­ting your feet wet or have already wad­ed into the field, you’ll like­ly gain quite a lot of under­stand­ing from “The Archi­tec­tur­al Imag­i­na­tion,” a free online course from Har­vard’s Grad­u­ate School of Design, in which you will “learn how to ‘read’ archi­tec­ture as a cul­tur­al expres­sion as well as a tech­ni­cal achieve­ment.” The course, which begins on Feb­ru­ary 28th, is free, but for $99 stu­dents can also receive a cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion.

“Archi­tec­ture is one of the most com­plex­ly nego­ti­at­ed and glob­al­ly rec­og­nized cul­tur­al prac­tices,” notes the course intro­duc­tion. Build­ing design “involves all of the tech­ni­cal, aes­thet­ic, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic issues at play with­in a giv­en soci­ety.” In addi­tion to cre­at­ing sin­gle-fam­i­ly dwellings, archi­tects are tasked with design­ing har­mo­nious spaces through which thou­sands of peo­ple might move on a dai­ly basis.

Suc­cess­ful design requires more than an under­stand­ing of the nec­es­sary rela­tion­ships between form and func­tion. “In some ways,” the course trail­er video above tells us, “it’s just what exceeds neces­si­ty that is archi­tec­ture. And it’s the open­ing onto that excess that makes archi­tec­ture a fun­da­men­tal­ly human endeav­or.”

Heal­ing soci­ety? Grasp­ing the big issues in arts, pol­i­tics, and engi­neer­ing? Design­ing for the “fun­da­men­tal­ly human”? These are deep briefs indeed. A more light­heart­ed approach to the field—the tongue-in-cheek “I Am an Archi­tect” rap above—suggests a cou­ple sim­pler pre­req­ui­sites for the aspir­ing archi­tect: a life­long pas­sion for mak­ing things (with blocks, Legos, Jen­ga, etc.), and, of course, a pair of black plas­tic glass­es. If you can relate, sign up for Harvard’s “The Archi­tec­tur­al Imag­i­na­tion” and find many more edX Archi­tec­ture cours­es here.

via Arch Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Course from Yale 

Archi­tec­ture Stu­dio: Build­ing in Land­scapes (A Free Course from MIT) 

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times 

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

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Is Charles Bukowski a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Brutally Honest, Yet Oddly Inspiring, Poems and Decide for Yourself

in Literature, Writing | February 19th, 2018

I don’t know if he’s been replaced as a major influ­ence on young, rest­less (and almost exclu­sive­ly male) aspir­ing writ­ers, but once upon a time—if you weren’t into the roman­tic wan­der­lust of Ker­ouac but still con­sid­ered your­self a fringe character—it might be to the hard-boiled shit-talk­ing of wise old man Charles Bukows­ki that you turned. Upon first learn­ing this, and being a busy col­lege stu­dent, I decid­ed to take a crash course and checked out a doc­u­men­tary.

I did not find myself charmed all at once. But one can fall in love with an author’s per­sona yet loathe them on the page. Bukowski’s crude­ness and bad humor on film could not hide the deep wells of sad­ness in which he seemed to swim, as if—like some ancient cyn­ic philosopher—he knew some­thing pro­found and ter­ri­ble and spared us the telling of it by pos­ing as a drunk­en, half-mad street-cor­ner racon­teur. I had to go and read him.

In his idiom—that of an elo­quent street­wise barfly—Bukowski can be every bit as pas­sion­ate and pro­found as his hero Dos­to­evsky. His unfor­get­table mix­ing of com­ic seed­i­ness and casu­al abuse with a deeply trag­ic mourn­ing over the human con­di­tion, while not to everyone’s taste, make his decades-long strug­gle out of penury and obscu­ri­ty a feat wor­thy of the telling in his semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal prose and poet­ry.

But does it make him a role mod­el? For any­one but cer­tain young, most­ly male, aspir­ing writ­ers maybe spend­ing more time drink­ing than writ­ing, that is?

A fair num­ber of peo­ple seem to think so, and I leave it to you to decide, first by lis­ten­ing to the Bukows­ki poems read here, post­ed on YouTube with heavy, inspi­ra­tional back­ground music. Some are giv­en new titles to sound more like self-help seminars—such as “Rein­vent Your Life” at the top (orig­i­nal­ly “No Lead­ers, Please”). The video read­ing called “Go all the way,” sec­ond from top, changes the title of “Roll the Dice,” a clas­sic pic­ture of Bukowski’s uncom­pro­mis­ing com­mit­ment to “going all the way,” even if it means “freez­ing on a park bench” and “los­ing girl­friends, wives, rel­a­tives, jobs and maybe your mind.”

Solid­ly mid­dle-class par­ents might approve of the first poem’s sen­ti­ments, which could be wedged into a suit­ably vague, yet bold-sound­ing com­mence­ment speech or a job recruiter’s pep talk. But “Roll the Dice” sim­ply goes too far. “It could mean jail, it could mean deri­sion, mock­ery, iso­la­tion”? This won’t do at all. Hear anoth­er read­ing of “Roll the Dice” by inspi­ra­tional rock star Bono fur­ther up, just after the more Bukows­ki-like Tom Waits reads “The Laugh­ing Heart,” fre­quent­ly ref­er­enced for its inten­si­ty of feel­ing. Like Thomas Hardy or Leonard Cohen, the bard of the barstools could look life straight in the eye, see all of its bleak­ness and vio­lence, and still man­age at times to catch a divine glim­mer.

And for the many aspi­rants to whom Bukows­ki has appealed, we have, fur­ther up, “So, You Want to Be a Writer?” Before you hear, or read, this poem, be advised: these are not warm words of encour­age­ment or help­ful life-coach­ing in verse. It is the kind of raw talk no respectable writ­ing teacher will give you, and maybe they’re right not to, who’s to say? Except a man who went all the way, froze on park bench­es, went to jail, lost girl­friends, wives, rel­a­tives, jobs and maybe his mind? Read an excerpt of Bukowski’s writ­ing advice below, and just above, hear the author him­self read “Friend­ly Advice to a Lot of Young Men,” which urges them to do vir­tu­al­ly any­thing they like, “But don’t write poet­ry.”

don’t be like so many writ­ers,
don’t be like so many thou­sands of
peo­ple who call them­selves writ­ers,
don’t be dull and bor­ing and
pre­ten­tious, don’t be con­sumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned them­selves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rock­et,
unless being still would
dri­ve you to mad­ness or
sui­cide or mur­der,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burn­ing your gut,
don’t do it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­ry Dean Stan­ton (RIP) Reads Poems by Charles Bukows­ki

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance” 

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

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

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