The Experimenters, a three-episode series that animates the words of scientific innovators, concludes with the reflections of Richard Feynman, the charismatic, Nobel-Prize winning physicist who did so much to make science engaging to a broader public. Feynman knew how to popularize science — to make the process of scientific discovery and exploration so contagious — because he learned from a good teacher: his father. You can learn more about that by watching the animated video above. And don’t miss the previous two episodes in The Experimenters series. They touched on the life and thought of Buckminster Fuller and Jane Goodall.
This visual curiosity beats the black/gold dress craze of last month. The video above asks you to look at a photo and decide whether you see Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe — two 20th century icons who look pretty much nothing alike. If you say Albert, your eyes are in good shape. If you say Marilyn, it’s apparently time to pay a visit to the optometrist.
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Wonderful, presumably. You’re wealthy, well respected, and highly sought. Your random real world cameos bring joy to scores of unsuspecting mortals.
He doesn’t care about what just happened. He doesn’t think about what’s going to happen. He doesn’t even book round-trip tickets. Bill buys one-ways and then decides when he wants to go home.
A stunningly good use of wealth and power. If he were anyone but the inimitable Bill Murray, I bet we’d be seething with envious class rage.
He devises the rules by which he plays, from the way he rubs shoulders with the common man to the toll free number that serves as his agent to indulging in creative acts of rebellion that could get a younger, less nuanced star labelled bratty, if not mentally ill, and desperately in need of rehab.
I’ve retired a couple of times. It’s great, because you can just say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m retired.” And people will actually believe that you’ve retired. There are nutters out there that will go, “Oh, okay!” and then leave you alone.
…someone told me some secrets early on about living, and that you just have to remind yourself … you can do the very best you can when you’re very very relaxed. No matter what it is, whatever your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are. That’s sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had the better I did it and I thought, that’s a job I can be proud of. If I had to go to work and no matter what my condition, no matter what my mood is, no matter how I feel … if I can relax myself and enjoy what I’m doing and have fun with it, I can do my job really well. It has changed my life, learning that.
When the question was put to him at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, Murray led a guided meditation, below, to help the audience get a feel for what it feels like to be as relaxed and in the moment as Bill Murray. Putting all joking to the side, he shares his formula as sincerely as Mr. Rogers addressing his young television audience. Don’t forget that this is a man who read the poetry of Emily Dickinson to a roomful of rapt construction workers with a straight and confident face. Complete text is below.
Let’s all ask ourselves that question right now: What does it feel like to be you? What does it feel like to be you? Yeah. It feels good to be you, doesn’t it? It feels good, because there’s one thing that you are — you’re the only one that’s you, right?
So you’re the only one that’s you, and we get confused sometimes — or I do, I think everyone does — you try to compete. You think, damn it, someone else is trying to be me. Someone else is trying to be me. But I don’t have to armor myself against those people; I don’t have to armor myself against that idea if I can really just relax and feel content in this way and this regard.
If I can just feel… Just think now: How much do you weigh? This is a thing I like to do with myself when I get lost and I get feeling funny. How much do you weigh? Think about how much each person here weighs and try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bottom right now. Parts in your feet and parts in your bum. Just try to feel your own weight, in your own seat, in your own feet. Okay? So if you can feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most personal identification, a very personal identification, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now. Then you don’t feel like you have to leave, and be over there, or look over there. You don’t feel like you have to rush off and be somewhere. There’s just a wonderful sense of well-being that begins to circulate up and down, from your top to your bottom. Up and down from your top to your spine. And you feel something that makes you almost want to smile, that makes you want to feel good, that makes you want to feel like you could embrace yourself.
So, what’s it like to be me? You can ask yourself, “What’s it like to be me?” You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is.
As if we needed the competition—am I right, parents?—of some very excellent children’s books read by some beloved stars of stage and screen, and even a former vice president. With Storyline Online, the SAG Foundation, charitable arm of the Screen Actor’s Guild, has brought together top talent for enthusiastic readings of books like William Steig’s Brave Irene, read by Al Gore, Satoshi Kitamura’s Me and My Cat, read by Elijah Wood, and Patricia Polacco’s Thank You, Mr. Falker, read by the fantastic Jane Kaczmarek. There are so many readings (28 total), I could go on… so I will. How about Betty White’s irresistible reading of Harry the Dirty Dog, just above? Or Rita Moreno reading of I Need My Monster, below, a lighthearted story about our need for darkness? Or James Earl Jones, who touchingly discusses his own childhood struggles with reading aloud, and tells the story of To Be a Drum, further down?
I won’t be able to resist showing these to my three-year-old, and if she prefers the readings of highly acclaimed actors over mine, well, I can’t say I blame her. Each video features not only the faces and voices of the actors, but also some fine animation of each storybook’s art. The purpose of the project, writes the SAG Foundation, is to “strengthen comprehension and verbal and written skills for English-language learners worldwide.” To that end, “Storyline Online is available online 24 hours a day for children, parents, and educators” with “supplemental curriculum developed by a literacy specialist.” The phrase “English-language learners” should not make you think this program is only geared toward non-native speakers. Young children in English speaking countries are still only learning the language, and there’s no better way for them than to read and be read to.
As a matter of fact, we’re all still learning—as James Earl Jones says, we need to practice, no matter how old we are: practice tuning our ears to the sounds of well-turned phrases and appreciating the delight of a story—about a dirty dog, a monster, cat, cow, or lion—unfolding. So go on, don’t worry if you don’t have children, or if they happen to be elsewhere at the moment. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of hearing Robert Guillaume read Chih-Yuan Chen’s Guji Guji, or Annette Bening read Avi Slodovnick’s The Tooth, or… alright, just go see the full list of books and readers here… or see Storytime Online’s Youtube page for access to the full archive of videos.
Bear in mind, fantasy baseball fans, that with the season about to start up again, you shouldn’t feel like you have to take any grief for enjoying the game. It counts among its enthusiasts no less a luminary than Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road and The Dharma Bums, and he didn’t just enjoy it, he arguably invented it. The New York Public library devoted an exhibition to Kerouac’s near-lifelong hobby called “Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats,” revealing how the writer invented an elaborate means of experiencing the joys of America’s National Pastime all on his own.
He also created an entire world of imagined teams, imagined players, and imagined athletic and financial dramas as well. The New York Times’ Charles McGrath writes that Kerouac “obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).”
Rather than a distraction from his writing, all this proved to be “ideal training for a would-be author,” since his version of fantasy baseball also required him come up with voluminous coverage of the action which “imitates the overheated, epithet-studded sportswriting of the day.” Fantasy baseball has since turned into a national (and, to an extent, even international) phenomenon, but the game that thousands of baseball nuts play today, which uses the real statistics of non-made-up baseball players on actual teams, doesn’t demand nearly as much creativity as did the one Kerouac played by himself.
Kerouac’s fantasy baseball even achieved a kind of prescience, not just in terms of prefiguring fantasy baseball as we now know it, but events in baseball proper: “As befitting the author of On the Road, the narrator of which journeys three times to California with a pilgrim’s zeal,” says the NYPL’s site, Kerouac “brought his fantasy baseball league to California. In this instance, fantasy trumped reality, since Kerouac’s California teams are established at least one year before the Dodgers and Giants abandoned New York for California.” One wonders what the victories and tribulations of the Plymouths and the Chevvies, the Grays and the Blacks, their fates decided with marbles, sticks, complex diagrams, and cards full of now-indecipherable symbols, might foretell about the fate of Major League Baseball’s teams this coming season.
Last year we featured All of Bach, a site that, in the fullness of time, will allow you to watch the Netherlands Bach Society perform each and every one of Bach’s compositions, completely for free. Back when we first posted about it, the site offered only five performances to watch, but now you’ll find a full 53 waiting there, ready for you to enjoy. Just above, we have BWV 565, “Toccata And Fugue In D Minor,” one of Bach’s most famous organ works, thanks in no small part to the frequency with which it appears on television, video game and movie soundtracks.
Every Friday brings a new performance of another Bach piece — until, that is, the Netherlands Bach Society gets through all 1080 of them. But between now and then, they’ve also got special musical events planned, such as a special performance of the whole of the St. Matthew Passion scheduled for this Friday, April 3. (You can now find it online here.) It will mark the probable 288th anniversary of the piece’s debut, an event which musical historians think happened in Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, where Bach served as cantor and chorus director.
“Lutherian severity lies at the core of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion,” writes New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. “The immensity of Bach’s design — his use of a double chorus and a double orchestra; his interweaving of New Testament storytelling and latter-day meditations; the dramatic, almost operatic quality of the choral writing; the invasive beauty of the lamenting arias, which give the sense that Christ’s death is the acutest of personal losses — has the effect of pulling all of modern life into the Passion scene. By forcing the singers to enact both the arrogance of the tormentors and the helplessness of the victims, Bach underlines Luther’s point about the inescapability of guilt. A great rendition of the St. Matthew Passion should have the feeling of an eclipse, of a massive body throwing the world into shadow.”
In order to prepare yourself for this momentous musical event, have a look at the teaser for it in the middle of the post, and the behind-the-scenes documentary Closer to Bach in Naarden just above, which reveals the relationship the musicians of the Netherlands Bach Society have to the St. Matthew Passion. As you can see, they’ve taken pains to make sure that this Good Friday will, for music-lovers, prove to be a very good Friday indeed.
Find the Matthew Passion on All of Bachthis Friday — the same place where you can find new recordings each week.
Christopher Hitchens was there, railing against religion and war criminals one minute, and the next, it seems, he was gone, a victim to esophageal cancer in 2011. In the 2010 video above, Hitchens takes on one of the hoariest precepts of the Bible (and the Torah) and reimagines an updated, secular version. I mean, it’s not like the Ten Commandments are set in stone, right? (Rimshot!)
The first two-thirds of the video features Hitchens making his way through the original commandments one by one, pulling them apart for inconsistencies and hypocrisy. For example Moses, having told his followers Thou Shalt Not Kill, encouraged them to then kill all the Midianites and save the virgin girls as chattel/prizes, which they then did.
Now, Hitchens does like the 8th Commandment (“Thou Shalt Not Steal”) because, hey, what society isn’t against stealing, and he saves his true admiration for the example of “rare nuance and sophistication” in the 9th Commandment (“Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness”) because it looks ahead to a truth-based judgement system (and the Magna Carta.)
I: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
II: Do not ever use people as private property.
III: Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
IV: Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
V: Do not condemn people for their inborn nature.
VI: Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.
VII: Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
VIII: Turn off that fucking cell phone.
IX: Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
X: Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
Passover starts this Friday. And you might ask: why is this Passover different from all other Passovers? Because this Passover is getting ushered in by a Rube Goldberg Machine that tells highlights of the Passover story. Designed by students from Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, the device features falling matzah dominoes, baby Moses getting blown across the water by a fan, and a text message telling the Pharaoh to “let my people go.” How it all came together? You can find out by watching this “behind-the-scenes” video.
Let’s take a love song—let’s take Huey Lewis and the News’ “Power of Love,” why not? Catchy, right? And that video? Back to the Future! That takes you back, doesn’t it? Yeah…. Now let’s ask some hard questions. Is this song an accurate representation of the human emotion we call “love”? All upbeat synths and blaring horns? Really? But then, there’s Lewis, who, right out of the gate, acknowledges that love, “a curious thing,” can “make one man weep” and “another man sing.” I imagine that love can make a woman feel the same. A curious thing. Huey Lewis’ 80s anthem may not sound like love, necessarily, but he’s a smart enough songwriter to know that love often uses its power for ill—“it’s strong and sudden and it’s cruel sometimes.”
Let’s take another songwriter, one with a darker vision, a more literary bent, Nick Cave. The Australian post-punk crooner and former leader of chaotic punk band The Birthday Party wrote a song called “People Ain’t No Good,” the most universal of laments, after a breakup. See him, in the live version in Poland at the top, declare in a mournful, soulful baritone accompanied only by a piano, the truth of no-goodness. Unlike Huey Lewis, this song allows for no quality, power of love or otherwise, to “change a hawk into a little white dove.” It’s Nietzschean in its tragic disappointment. And yet, such is the power of Nick Cave, to write a song of no goodness that sounds like a hymn of praise. The duality Cave embraces gets a part autobiographical, part gospel treatment in the lecture above (“The Secret Life of the Love Song”), which Cave delivered at the Vienna Poetry Festival in 1999.
Cave, the son of a literature professor and himself an accomplished novelist and poet, knows his craft well. The ballads that dominate pop music have deeper roots in a harsher world, one that produced the “murder ballad,” not coincidentally the title of a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record — one Allmusic writes Cave “was waiting to make his entire career.” Cave recognizes, as he says in his talk above “an uncaring world—a world that fucks everybody over.” And yet… and yet, he says again and again, there is love, or rather, love songs. Quoting W.H. Auden and Federico Garcia Lorca, he goes on to describe the form as “a howl in the void, for Love and for comfort.” The love song “lives on the lips of the child crying for its mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God.”
The love song, then, must contain a quality Garcia Lorca called Duende, an “eerie and inexplicable sadness.” Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and Neil Young have it. “It haunts,” he says, his ex P.J. Harvey. “All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.” Cave draws on Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” the “brutal prose” of the Old Testament, and the most innocuous-sounding pop songs, which can disguise “messages to God that cry out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance.”
He also references, and reads, his own song, “Far From Me,” from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, the post-breakup record that contains “People Ain’t No Good.” (Cave begins the lecture with a rendition of “West Country Girl” from that same record.) It’s an album that brought Cave’s “morbidity to near-parodic levels,” stripping the Bad Seeds stumbling lounge punk down to mostly piano and voice. This reference is not a matter of vanity but of the most well chosen illustration. Cave admits he is “happy to be sad,” to live in “divine discontent.” His religious existentialism is ultimately relieved by the power of love songs, by his “crooked brood of sad eyed children” which “rally round and in their way, protect me, comfort me and keep me alive.” Maybe Huey Lewis had something similar to say, but there’s no way he could ever say it the way that Nick Cave does. Read a partial transcript of Cave’s talk here.
In 1958, Hunter S. Thompson applied for a job with the Vancouver Sun. He was fresh out of the Air Force and struggling to make a living in New York City, though from the tone of the letter you wouldn’t know it.
People who are experts in such things say that good cover letters should match the employer’s needs with the applicant’s abilities, should be tailored specifically to the job in question and should show some personality. By those yardsticks, Thompson’s letter to the Vancouver Sun is a model to be followed. He lays out his eagerness to work: “I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary.” Any HR manager would be tickled with lines like that. He succinctly describes his work experience: “most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.” And for any other fault you might find with the letter, it definitely doesn’t lack in personality.
Yet the letter somehow failed to charm his would-be employer; Thompson never moved to Vancouver. Perhaps they were given pause by Thompson’s steady stream of insults directed towards his former editor — “It was as if the Marquis De Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham” — and towards journalism in general: “It’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” Or perhaps it was his intentionally off-putting arrogance, “I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.” In any case, it’s a hoot to read. More people should write job application letters like this.
Read the full letter below.
Vancouver Sun
TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN
October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City
Sir,
I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.
Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.
By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
Nothing beats having good references.
Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers. If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.
I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.
I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.
It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
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