How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

in Music | January 25th, 2022

More than two decades ago, New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross pub­lished a piece on Bob Dylan in what many would then have con­sid­ered his “late” peri­od. “In the ver­bal jun­gle of rock crit­i­cism, Dylan is sel­dom talked about in musi­cal terms,” Ross writes. “His work is ana­lyzed instead as poet­ry, pun­dit­ry, or mys­ti­fi­ca­tion.” Despite hav­ing long pos­sessed exalt­ed cul­tur­al sta­tus, and been sub­ject to the atten­dant inten­si­ty of scruti­ny and exe­ge­sis that comes along with it, “Dylan him­self declines the high­brow treat­ment — though you get the sense that he wouldn’t mind pick­ing up a Nobel Prize.” As it hap­pened, he picked one up sev­en­teen years lat­er, in a clear insti­tu­tion­al affir­ma­tion of his work’s being, indeed, lit­er­a­ture. But what (as many have asked about the work itself) does that mean?

In the video essay at the top of the post, Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, exam­ines Dylan’s lit­er­ary pow­ers through the micro­cosm of one song. “All Along the Watch­tow­er” first appeared on the aus­tere 1967 album John Wes­ley Hard­ing, a seem­ing repu­di­a­tion of both the increas­ing­ly psy­che­del­ic pop-cul­tur­al zeit­geist and his own per­sona as a prophet­ic folk singer-turned-rock­er. “Dylan spent much of his ear­ly career fight­ing off the label of prophet,” says Puschak, “but here he seems to accept the role, lay­ing down an appre­hen­sive, apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nario, as if to say, ‘You want a prophe­cy? Okay, I’ll give you a prophe­cy, but it comes at a price: the price is mys­tery and entrap­ment, a prophe­cy the mean­ing of which is for­ev­er out of reach.”

A short folk bal­lad, “All Along the Watch­tow­er” is told “as a con­ver­sa­tion that aims to con­vey a mes­sage. But the fin­ger­prints of the blues are every­where on this song: name­ly, of one of Dylan’s heroes, Robert John­son, who, the leg­end has it, sold his sold to the Dev­il for musi­cal genius.” In addi­tion to deal­ing with longer musi­cal tra­di­tions, the song also finds Dylan employ­ing time­less arche­types like the jok­er and the thief, draw­ing as well from the Bible (to which John Wes­ley Hard­ing con­tains some 70 ref­er­ences) as he tells their sto­ry. These sound like the qual­i­ties of a lit­er­ary enter­prise, but as PBS Idea Chan­nel host Mike Rugnetta argues in the video above, “When we label some­thing lit­er­a­ture, we’re not mak­ing a sim­ple fac­tu­al state­ment about the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a work of art. We’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing about what we con­sid­er worth­while.”

In con­sid­er­ing whether Dylan’s work is “real­ly lit­er­a­ture,” Rugnetta cites lit­er­ary the­o­rist Ter­ry Eagle­ton’s essay “What Is Lit­er­a­ture?” In it Eagle­ton writes that “lit­er­a­ture trans­forms and inten­si­fies ordi­nary lan­guage, devi­ates sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly from every­day speech” — but also that “one can think of lit­er­a­ture less as some inher­ent qual­i­ty or set of qual­i­ties dis­played by cer­tain kinds of writ­ing, all the way from Beowulf to Vir­ginia Woolf, than as a num­ber of ways in which peo­ple relate them­selves to writ­ing.” Par­tic­i­pat­ed in by crit­ics, aca­d­e­mics, and ama­teurs, the ever-grow­ing indus­try of “Dylanol­o­gy” attests to a par­tic­u­lar­ly inti­mate and long-last­ing rela­tion­ship between Dylan’s music and its lis­ten­ers. The adjec­tive lit­er­ary, here, seems to imply the exis­tence of ambi­tion, com­plex­i­ty, ambi­gu­i­ty, and extend­ed cul­tur­al cen­tral­i­ty. 

Noth­ing evi­dences cul­tur­al cen­tral­i­ty like par­o­dy, and as the Poly­phon­ic video above shows, Dylan has inspired more than a few astute send-ups over the decades. “With so much con­ver­sa­tion around him and such a dis­tinct style,” says its nar­ra­tor, “it’s per­haps unsur­pris­ing that he’s been a fre­quent tar­get of satire.” That includes songs by oth­er famous and well-regard­ed musi­cians. In “A Sim­ple Desul­to­ry Philip­pic (or How I Was Robert McNa­ma­ra’d into Sub­mis­sion),” Paul Simon “mocks Dylan’s lyri­cal habits and pro­cliv­i­ty for ref­er­enc­ing his­tor­i­cal and fic­tion­al fig­ures in his music.” In addi­tion to its “nasal folk-rock style,” Steal­ers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Mid­dle with You” uses “the arche­typ­al fig­ures of the clown and the jok­er,” much like “All Along the Watch­tow­er.” (To say noth­ing of Weird Al’s palin­dromic “Bob.”)

Like many a lit­er­ary mas­ter, Dylan has dished it out as well as tak­en it. But his best-known acts of mock­ery seem to have been direct­ed not toward his peers but the press, whose rav­en­ous­ness in the 20th cen­tu­ry of ever-more-mass media did so much to both build him up and cramp his style. “In his ear­ly days, Dylan used the media as a tool for self-myth­mak­ing,” says Poly­phon­ic’s nar­ra­tor in the video above. But “soon enough, be became the icon for a grow­ing coun­ter­cul­ture,” and the title of “voice of a gen­er­a­tion” began to weigh heav­i­ly. Throw­ing it off required get­ting adver­sar­i­al, not least through songs like “Bal­lad of a Thin Man,” a j’ac­cuse against an unspec­i­fied “Mr. Jones,” rep­re­sen­ta­tive — so it’s been pro­posed — of the legions of bad­ger­ing squares sent by news­pa­pers, tele­vi­sion, and so on.

Dylan could also have intend­ed Mr. Jones to stand more broad­ly for “peo­ple out of touch with him and his move­ment, peo­ple who pestered him for his beliefs with­out tru­ly under­stand­ing where they came from,” mem­bers of “old soci­ety, try­ing to pass blan­ket moral­is­tic judg­ments on his cul­ture and lifestyle.” Like a char­ac­ter out of F. Scott Fitzger­ald, “inau­then­tic on all lev­els,” Mr. Jones is “fak­ing his way through intel­lec­tu­al cir­cles while fetishiz­ing the coun­ter­cul­ture.” 57 years after “Bal­lad of a Thin Man,” the now-octo­ge­nar­i­an Dylan con­tin­ues to record and per­form, and to engage with the media when and how he sees fit. He’s some­how avoid­ed join­ing the estab­lish­ment, let alone becom­ing a Mr. Jones; he remains the jok­er who, asked in a 1960s press con­fer­ence whether he con­sid­ered him­self a song­writer or a poet, replied, “Oh, I con­sid­er myself more of a song and dance man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Tan­gled Up in Blue”: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Bob Dylan’s Famous Tele­vised Press Con­fer­ence After He Went Elec­tric (1965)

A 94-Year-Old Eng­lish Teacher and Her For­mer Stu­dents Reunite in Their Old Class­room & Debate the Mer­its of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

Kurt Von­negut on Bob Dylan: He “Is the Worst Poet Alive”

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.

New Study Finds That Humans Are 33,000 Years Older Than We Thought

in History, Science | January 24th, 2022

pho­to by Céline Vidal

“Where’re you from?” one char­ac­ter asks anoth­er on the Fire­sign The­atre’s clas­sic 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Any­where at All. “Nairo­bi, ma’am,” the oth­er replies. “Isn’t every­body?” Like most of the count­less mul­ti-lay­ered gags on their albums, this one makes a cul­tur­al ref­er­ence, pre­sum­ably to the dis­cov­er­ies made by famed pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gists Louis and Mary Leakey over the pre­vi­ous 20 years. Their dis­cov­ery of fos­sils in Kenya and else­where did much to advance the the­sis that humankind evolved in Africa, and that the process was hap­pen­ing more than 1.75 mil­lion years before.

Like all sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs, the Leakeys’ work only prompt­ed more ques­tions — or rather, cre­at­ed more oppor­tu­ni­ties for refin­ing and adding detail to the rel­e­vant body of knowl­edge. Sub­se­quent digs all over Africa have pro­duced fur­ther evi­dence of how far our species and its pre­de­ces­sors go back, and where exact­ly the evo­lu­tion­ary progress hap­pened.

Just this month, Nature pub­lished a new paper on the “age of the old­est known Homo sapi­ens from east­ern Africa.” These new find­ings about known fos­sils, orig­i­nal­ly dis­cov­ered in south­west­ern Ethiopia in 1967, sug­gest that the time has come for anoth­er revi­sion of the long pre-his­to­ry of human­i­ty.

pho­to by Céline Vidal

The paper’s authors, writes Reuters’ Will Dun­ham, “used the geo­chem­i­cal fin­ger­prints of a thick lay­er of ash found above the sed­i­ments con­tain­ing the fos­sils to ascer­tain that it result­ed from an erup­tion that spewed vol­canic fall­out over a wide swathe of Ethiopia rough­ly 233,000 years ago.” These fos­sils “include a rather com­plete cra­nial vault and low­er jaw, some ver­te­brae and parts of the arms and legs.” After their ini­tial dis­cov­ery by the late Richard Leakey, son of Louis and Mary (and a man gen­uine­ly from Nairo­bi, born and raised), the fos­sils buried by this pre­his­toric Vesu­vius were pre­vi­ous­ly believed to be “no more than about 200,000 years old.”

Dun­ham quotes the paper’s lead author, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge vol­ca­nol­o­gist Celine Vidal, as say­ing this dis­cov­ery aligns with “the most recent sci­en­tif­ic mod­els of human evo­lu­tion plac­ing the emer­gence of Homo sapi­ens some­time between 350,000 to 200,000 years ago.” Though Vidal and her team’s analy­sis of the ash’s geo­chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion has deter­mined the min­i­mum age of Omo I, as these fos­sils are known, the max­i­mum age remains an open ques­tion. Or at least, it awaits the efforts of researchers to date the “ash lay­er below the sed­i­ment con­tain­ing the fos­sils” and ren­der a more pre­cise esti­mate. And when that’s estab­lished, it will then, ide­al­ly, become mate­r­i­al for the next big absur­dist com­e­dy troupe.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

How Humans Migrat­ed Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Ani­mat­ed Look

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er the World’s First “Art Stu­dio” Cre­at­ed in an Ethiopi­an Cave 43,000 Years Ago

The Life & Dis­cov­er­ies of Mary Leakey Cel­e­brat­ed in an Endear­ing Cutout Ani­ma­tion

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.

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

in Archives, Art, Biology | January 20th, 2022

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, per­son­al­ly, still require con­vinc­ing on that point, just have a look at Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, the draw­ings of Ernst Hein­rich Haeck­el, Eliz­a­beth Black­well’s A Curi­ous Herbal, and Nan­cy Anne Kings­bury Woll­stonecraft’s Spec­i­mens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to men­tion the paint­ings of Geor­gia O’ Keeffe — all pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But those works con­cern them­selves only with plant life as it exists above ground.

What goes on down below, under­neath the soil? That you can see for your­self — and with­out hav­ing to pull up one of our fine flow­er­ing (or non-flow­er­ing) friends to do so — at Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty’s online archive of root sys­tem draw­ings. “The out­come of 40 years of  root sys­tem exca­va­tions in Europe,” says that site, the col­lec­tion con­tains 1,180 dia­grams of species from Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christ­mas tree) to Zygo­phyl­lum xan­thoxy­lon (a faint­ly scrub­by-look­ing native of the arid and semi-arid regions of con­ti­nents like Africa and Aus­tralia).

The site explains that “the draw­ings, their analy­sis and descrip­tion were done by Univ. Prof. Dr. Erwin Licht­eneg­ger (1928–2004) and Univ. Prof. Dr. Lore Kutschera (1917–2008), leader of Pflanzen­sozi­ol­o­gis­ches Insti­tut, Kla­gen­furt, (now in Bad Gois­ern, Aus­tria).”

Over the course of 40 years, writes The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Erin Blake­more, Licht­eneg­ger and Kustchera “col­lab­o­rat­ed on an enor­mous ‘root atlas’ that maps the under­ground tra­jec­to­ries of com­mon Euro­pean plants.” Cre­at­ed through “a labo­ri­ous sys­tem of dig­ging up and doc­u­ment­ing the intri­cate sys­tems,” these draw­ings are “also art in their own right, hon­or­ing the beau­ty of a part of plants most nev­er give that much thought.”

Even the least botan­i­cal­ly aware among us knows that plants have roots, but how many of us are aware of the scale and com­plex­i­ty those roots can attain? “Root sys­tems allow plants to gath­er the water and min­er­als they use to grow,” writes Blake­more. “As the root sys­tem grows, it cre­ates more and more path­ways that allow water to get into the deep sub­soil, and fos­ter­ing the growth of microbes that ben­e­fit oth­er life. Strong root sys­tems can pre­vent ero­sion, pro­tect­ing the land on which they grow. And the struc­tures allow the soil to cap­ture car­bon.” Thus root sys­tems, nev­er a par­tic­u­lar locus of cool­ness, have the dis­tinc­tion of doing their part to fight cli­mate change. And thanks to Licht­eneg­ger and Kustcher­a’s draw­ings, they under­score the capac­i­ty of art to reveal worlds hid­den to most of us. View all of the images here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Inter­ac­tive Online Edi­tion of Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants (1868)

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

The Social Lives of Trees: Sci­ence Reveals How Trees Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Talk to Each Oth­er, Work Togeth­er & Form Nur­tur­ing Fam­i­lies

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.

The Philosophy of Games: C. Thi Nguyen on the Philosophy vs. Improv Podcast

in Games, Philosophy, Podcasts | January 18th, 2022

Thi Nguyen (pro­nounced “TEE NWEEN”) teach­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah, and his first book, 2020’s Games: Agency as Art, makes a case for games being treat­ed as a seri­ous object of study for phi­los­o­phy. Thi sees game analy­sis as not just a sub-divi­sion in the phi­los­o­phy of art (aes­thet­ics), but in the phi­los­o­phy of action. How do games relate to oth­er human activ­i­ties with con­straints, like cus­toms, lan­guage, and more specif­i­cal­ly per­for­ma­tive acts with­in lan­guage (like say­ing “I do” dur­ing a mar­riage cer­e­mo­ny, where you’re not just describ­ing that you do some­thing, but actu­al­ly tak­ing action)?

On this record­ing (episode 24 of the pod­cast), Thi joins phi­los­o­phy pod­cast­er Mark Lin­sen­may­er of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life and impro­vi­sa­tion­al com­e­dy coach Bill Arnett of the Chica­go Improv Stu­dio to talk about games and improv, and to engage in a cou­ple of improv scenes that explore the con­nec­tion between the two.

This is the third phi­los­o­phy guest for the Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv pod­cast, which alter­nates between guests from the improv world, guests from the phi­los­o­phy world, and no guest at all. The over­all for­mat involves a les­son from each host, which they teach to each oth­er (and the guest) simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. This often results in unex­pect­ed syn­chronic­i­ty giv­en the con­nec­tions between two dis­ci­plines that stress the analy­sis of lan­guage, liv­ing delib­er­ate­ly, and quick think­ing.

For anoth­er philo­soph­i­cal­ly rich episode, see episode #20 in which St. Lawrence Uni­ver­si­ty’s Jen­nifer L. Hansen appeared to dis­cuss the many aspects of the con­cept of “The Oth­er” in phi­los­o­phy.

Phi­los­o­phy vs. Improv is a pod­cast host­ed by Mark Lin­sen­may­er, who also hosts The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music. 

How to Decode NASA’s Message to Aliens

in Astronomy, Science | January 12th, 2022

When NASA spent close to a bil­lion dol­lars on the Voy­ager pro­gram, launch­ing a pair of probes from Cape Canaver­al in 1977, its pri­ma­ry pur­pose was not to find intel­li­gent extra-ter­res­tri­al life. The pro­gram grew out of ambi­tions for a “Grand Tour”: four robot­ic probes that would vis­it all the plan­ets in the out­er solar sys­tem, tak­ing advan­tage of a 175-year align­ment of Jupiter and Sat­urn. A down­sized ver­sion pro­duced Voy­ager 1 and 2, each craft “a minia­ture mar­vel,” writes the Attic. “Weigh­ing less than a Volk­swa­gen, each had 65,000 parts. Six thrusters pow­ered by plu­to­ni­um. Three gyro­scopes. Assort­ed instru­ments to mea­sure grav­i­ty, radi­a­tion, mag­net­ic fields, and more. Design and assem­bly took years.”

Since reach­ing Jupiter in 1979, the two probes have sent back aston­ish­ing images from the great gas giants and the very edges of the solar sys­tem. “By 2030, Voy­ager 1 and 2 will cease com­mu­ni­ca­tions for good,” says Cory Zap­at­ka in the Verge Sci­ence video above, “and while they won’t be able to beam infor­ma­tion back to Earth, they’re going to con­tin­ue sail­ing through space at almost 60,000 kilo­me­ters per hour,” reach­ing inter­stel­lar unknowns their mak­ers will nev­er see. Voy­ager 1 was only sup­posed to last 10 years. In 2012, it left the solar sys­tem, to drift, along with its twin, “end­less­ly among the stars of our galaxy,” Tim­o­thy Fer­ris writes in The New York­er, “unless some­one or some­thing encoun­ters them some­day.”

As deep space detri­tus, the probes will make excel­lent car­ri­ers for an inter­stel­lar mes­sage in a bot­tle, the Voy­ager team rea­soned. The idea prompt­ed the cre­ation of the Gold­en Record, an LP fit­ted to each probe con­tain­ing a mes­sage from human­i­ty to the cos­mos. “Etched in cop­per, plat­ed with gold, and sealed in alu­minum cas­es, the records are expect­ed to remain intel­li­gi­ble for more than a bil­lion years, mak­ing them the longest-last­ing objects ever craft­ed by human hands.” Pro­duced by Fer­ris and over­seen by Carl Sagan and a team includ­ing his future wife, Ann Druyan, the Gold­en Record includes the work of Mozart, Chuck Berry, folk music from around the world, the sounds of waves and whales, and one of the most uni­ver­sal of human sounds, laugh­ter (like­ly that of Sagan him­self).

The Gold­en Record also includes 115 images, etched into its very sur­face. No, they are not dig­i­tal files. “There are no jpegs or tifs includ­ed on it,” says Zap­at­ka. After all, “The Voyager’s com­put­er sys­tems were only 69 kilo­bytes large, bare­ly enough for one image, let alone 115.” These are ana­log still pho­tographs and dia­grams that must be recon­struct­ed with math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­lae extract­ed from elec­tron­ic tones. The process starts with the dia­grams on the record’s cov­er — sim­ple icons that con­tain an incred­i­ble den­si­ty of infor­ma­tion. We begin with two cir­cles joined by a line. They are hydro­gen atoms, the most plen­ti­ful gas in the uni­verse, under­go­ing a change that occurs spon­ta­neous­ly once every 10 mil­lion years.

Dur­ing this rare occur­rence, the hydro­gen atoms emit ener­gy at wave­lengths of 21 cen­time­ters. This mea­sure­ment is used as “a con­stant for all the oth­er sym­bols on the record.” That’s an awful lot of back­ground knowl­edge required to deci­pher what look to the sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly untrained eye like a pair of tiny eyes behind a pair of odd eye­glass­es. But for space­far­ing aliens, “how hard could that be?” says Bill Nye above in an abridged descrip­tion of how to decode the Gold­en Record. We may nev­er, in a bil­lion years, know if any extra-ter­res­tri­al species ever finds the record and makes the attempt. But the Gold­en Record has become as much an object of fas­ci­na­tion for humans as it is a greet­ing from Earth to the galaxy. Learn more from NASA here about the images encod­ed on the Gold­en Record and order your own repro­duc­tion (on LP or CD) here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

NASA Lets You Down­load Free Posters Cel­e­brat­ing the 40th Anniver­sary of the Voy­ager Mis­sions

Carl Sagan Warns Con­gress about Cli­mate Change (1985)

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

How to Ride a Pterosaur, According to Science

in Science | January 11th, 2022

From the BBC: “Dur­ing the Late Cre­ta­ceous, winged pre­his­toric crea­tures called pterosaurs dom­i­nat­ed the air. They were the first ver­te­brates to mas­ter flight. They were not dinosaurs but close­ly relat­ed. Some were tiny, but some were the biggest crea­tures ever to have flown. We ask a ques­tion you’ve all been won­der­ing, could we ride one, and if so, how?” In the ani­ma­tion above, sci­ence pro­duc­er Pierange­lo Pirak explores some ideas Dr. Liz Mar­tin-Sil­ver­stone, a palaeon­tol­o­gist with a keen inter­est in bio­me­chan­ics. She runs the Palaeo­bi­ol­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ries, includ­ing the XTM Imag­ing Facil­i­ty for microCT scan­ning and imag­ing analy­sis, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via TheKidsShould­SeeThis

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er 200,000-Year-Old Hand & Foot­prints That Could Be the World’s Ear­li­est Cave Art

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters (1914)

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Animals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

in Biology | January 5th, 2022

Every pet own­er knows that ani­mals love to play, but laugh­ter seems reserved for humans, a few apes, and maybe a few birds good at mim­ic­k­ing humans and apes. As it turns out, accord­ing to a new arti­cle pub­lished in the jour­nal Bioa­coustics, laugh­ter has been “doc­u­ment­ed in at least 65 species,” Jes­si­ca Wolf writes at UCLA News­room. “That list includes a vari­ety of pri­mates, domes­tic cows and dogs, fox­es, seals, and mon­goos­es, as well as three bird species, includ­ing para­keets and Aus­tralian mag­pies.” This is a far cry from just a few years ago when apes and rats were the “only known ani­mals to get the gig­gles,” as Liz Lan­g­ley wrote at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2015.

Yes, rats laugh. How do sci­en­tists know this? They tick­le them, of course, as you can see in the video just above. (Rat tick­ling, it turns out, is good for the ani­mals’ well being.) The pur­pose of this exper­i­ment was to bet­ter under­stand human touch — and tick­ling, says study author Michael Brecht, “is one of the most poor­ly under­stood forms of touch.”

Laugh­ter, on the oth­er hand, seems some­what bet­ter under­stood, even among species sep­a­rat­ed from us by tens of mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion. In their recent arti­cle, UCLA pri­ma­tol­o­gist Sasha Win­kler and UCLA pro­fes­sor of com­mu­ni­ca­tion Greg Bryant describe how “play vocal­iza­tions” sig­nal non-aggres­sion dur­ing rough­hous­ing. As Win­kler puts it:

When we laugh, we are often pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion to oth­ers that we are hav­ing fun and also invit­ing oth­ers to join. Some schol­ars have sug­gest­ed that this kind of vocal behav­ior is shared across many ani­mals who play, and as such, laugh­ter is our human ver­sion of an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly old vocal play sig­nal.

Gen­er­al­ly, humans are unlike­ly to rec­og­nize ani­mal laugh­ter as such or even per­ceive it at all. “Our review indi­cates that vocal play sig­nals are usu­al­ly incon­spic­u­ous,” the authors write. Rats, for exam­ple, make “ultra­son­ic vocal­iza­tions” beyond the range of human hear­ing. The play vocal­iza­tions of chim­panzees, on the oth­er hand, are much more sim­i­lar to human laugh­ter, “although there are some dif­fer­ences,” Win­kler notes in an inter­view. “Like, they vocal­ize in both the in-breath and out breath.”

Why study ani­mal laugh­ter? Beyond the inher­ent inter­est of the top­ic — an espe­cial­ly joy­ful one for sci­en­tif­ic researchers — there’s the seri­ous busi­ness of under­stand­ing how “human social com­plex­i­ty allowed laugh­ter to evolve from a play-spe­cif­ic vocal­iza­tion into a sophis­ti­cat­ed prag­mat­ic sig­nal,” as Win­kler and Bryant write. We use laugh­ter to sig­nal all kinds of inten­tions, not all of them play­ful. But no mat­ter how many uses humans find for the vocal sig­nal, we can see in this new review arti­cle how deeply non-aggres­sive play is embed­ded through­out the ani­mal world and in our evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry. Read “Play vocal­i­sa­tions and human laugh­ter: a com­par­a­tive review” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eye of the Pan­golin: The Search for an Ani­mal on the Edge 

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Down­load Ani­mals and Ethics 101: Think­ing Crit­i­cal­ly About Ani­mal Rights (Free)

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

The Famous Downfall Scene Explained: What Really Happened in Hitler’s Bunker at the End?

in Film, History, YouTube | December 29th, 2021

Before his role as Hitler in the 2004 Ger­man film Down­fall turned Swiss actor Bruno Ganz into a viral inter­net star, he was best known for play­ing an angel who com­forts the dying in Wim Wen­ders’ 1987 Wings of Desire. “Peo­ple real­ly seemed to think of me as a guardian angel,” he told The Irish Times in 2005. “Peo­ple would bring their chil­dren before me for a bless­ing or some­thing.” Sev­en­teen years lat­er, the self-described intro­vert trans­formed his gen­tle, com­fort­ing face into the Nazi screen mon­ster: “Noth­ing pre­pared me for what must be the most con­vinc­ing screen Hitler yet,” wrote The Guardian’s Rob Mack­ie. “An old, bent, sick dic­ta­tor with the shak­ing hands of some­one with Parkinson’s, alter­nat­ing between rage and despair in his last days in the bunker.”

This por­tray­al has nev­er been sur­passed, and per­haps it nev­er will be. How many fic­tion­al­ized film treat­ments of these events do we need? Espe­cial­ly since this one lives for­ev­er in meme form: Ganz end­less­ly spit­ting and ges­tic­u­lat­ing, while cap­tions sub­ti­tle him rant­i­ng about “his piz­za arriv­ing late” – Gael Fash­ing­baeur Coop­er writes at cnet – or “the Red Wed­ding scene on Game of Thrones, or find­ing out he was­n’t accept­ed into Har­ry Pot­ter’s Hog­warts.” As Vir­ginia Hef­fer­nan wrote at The New York Times in 2008 – maybe the height of the meme’s viral­i­ty – “It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost any­one in the midst of a cri­sis…. Some­thing in the spec­ta­cle of an auto­crat falling to pieces evi­dent­ly has wide­spread appeal.”

Giv­en the wide­spread pref­er­ence for memes over facts, the ubiq­ui­ty of the Down­fall clip as viral spec­ta­cle, and the renewed rel­e­vance of mur­der­ous autoc­ra­cy in the West, we might find our­selves won­der­ing about the his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy of Down­fall’s por­tray­al. Did the dic­ta­tor real­ly lose it in the end? And why do we find this idea so sat­is­fy­ing? To begin to answer the first ques­tion, we might turn to the video above, “That Down­fall Scene Explained,” from the mak­ers of The Great War, billed as the “biggest ever crowd­fund­ed his­to­ry doc­u­men­tary.” Despite tak­ing as their sub­ject the First World War, the film­mak­ers also cov­er some of the events of WWII for fans.

First, we must remem­ber that Down­fall is an “artis­tic inter­pre­ta­tion.” It con­dens­es weeks into days, days into hours, and takes oth­er such dra­mat­ic lib­er­ties with accounts gath­ered from eye­wit­ness­es. So, “what is Hitler freak­ing out about” in the famous scene?, the sub­ti­tle asks. It is April 1945. The Red Army is 40 kilo­me­ters from Nazi head­quar­ters in Berlin. The dictator’s Chief of the Army Gen­er­al Staff Hans Krebs explains the sit­u­a­tion. Hitler remains in con­trol, draw­ing pos­si­ble lines of attack on the map, believ­ing that SS com­man­der Felix Steiner’s Panz­er divi­sions will repel the Sovi­ets.

Lit­tle does he know that Steiner’s divi­sions exist only on paper. In real­i­ty, the SS leader has refused to take to the field, con­vinced the bat­tle can­not be won. Anoth­er Gen­er­al, Alfred Jodel, steps in and deliv­ers the news. Hitler then clears the room of all but Jodl, Krebs, and two oth­er high-rank­ing gen­er­als. Joseph Goebbels and Mar­tin Bor­mann stay behind as well. Then (as played by Ganz, that is) Hitler has that famous screen melt­down. The out­burst “shows just how he had cen­tral­ized the chain of com­mand,” and how it failed him.

This may have been so. Down­fall presents us with a con­vinc­ing, if high­ly con­densed, por­trait of the major per­son­al­i­ties involved. But “the scene that spawned a thou­sand YouTube par­o­dies,” writes Alex Ross at The New York­er, “is based, in part, on prob­lem­at­ic sources.” One of these, the so-called Hitler Book, was com­piled from “tes­ti­mo­ny of two Hitler adju­tants, Otto Gün­sche and Heinz Linge, who had been cap­tured by the Red Army and inter­ro­gat­ed at length…. The most curi­ous thing about The Hitler Book is that it was intend­ed for a sin­gle read­er: Joseph Stal­in.” The Sovi­et dic­ta­tor want­ed, and got, “a lav­ish­ly detailed chron­i­cle of Hitler’s psy­cho­log­i­cal implo­sion.” Oth­er sources “con­vey a more com­plex pic­ture.”

Accord­ing to oth­er accounts, Hitler was “gen­er­al­ly com­posed” when learn­ing about the Red Army attack on Berlin, even as he decid­ed to give up and die in the bunker. Accord­ing to Nazi stenog­ra­ph­er, Ger­hard Her­rge­sell, it was the gen­er­als who “vio­lent­ly opposed” sur­ren­der and spoke harsh­ly to Hitler to per­suade him to defend the city – a speech that had some effect dur­ing an April 22nd meet­ing. It did not, of course, pre­vent Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun’s even­tu­al April 30 sui­cide. For Ross, how­ev­er, this more com­plex his­tor­i­cal pic­ture shows “how cults of per­son­al­i­ty feed as much upon the aspi­ra­tions of their mem­bers as upon the ambi­tions of their lead­ers.” The mem­bers of Hitler’s inner cir­cle were as com­mit­ted to the ide­ol­o­gy as the leader him­self.

There is more to the film’s title in Ger­man, Unter­gang, than its trans­la­tion sug­gests, Ross writes: “It car­ries con­no­ta­tions of decline, dis­so­lu­tion, or destruc­tion.” When we fix the end of Nazism to the sui­ci­dal death of one delu­sion­al, drug-addled mad­man, we lose sight of this wider mean­ing. In the viral spread of the Hitler meme, we see a kind of com­i­cal­ly banal tri­umph. It is “the out­come,” Hef­fer­nan argues, that “Hitler, the his­tor­i­cal fig­ure sought….” A sit­u­a­tion in which he becomes “not the author of the Holo­caust” but “the brute voice of the every­man uncon­scious,” a pro­lif­er­at­ing griev­ance machine. From anoth­er per­spec­tive, imag­in­ing Hitler’s end may offer “com­fort­ing moral clo­sure to a sto­ry of lim­it­less hor­ror,” writes Ross. But it has helped feed the myth that it could only hap­pen there and then: “Now Ger­man his­to­ri­ans are end­ing their books on Nazism with thin­ly veiled ref­er­ences to an Amer­i­can Unter­gang.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Carl Jung Psy­cho­an­a­lyzes Hitler: “He’s the Uncon­scious of 78 Mil­lion Ger­mans.” “With­out the Ger­man Peo­ple He’d Be Noth­ing” (1938)

Hitler Was ‘Blitzed’ On Cocaine & Opi­ates Dur­ing World War II: Hear a Wide-Rang­ing Inter­view with Best-Sell­ing Author Nor­man Ohler

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

When Maurice Sendak Created a Dark Nutcracker Ballet

in Books, Dance, Design, K-12 | December 24th, 2021

Chil­dren are the per­fect audi­ence for The Nut­crack­er. 

(Well, chil­dren and the grand­moth­ers who can’t wait for the tod­dler to start sit­ting still long enough to make the hol­i­day-themed bal­let an annu­al tra­di­tion…)

Mau­rice Sendak, the cel­e­brat­ed children’s book author and illus­tra­tor, agreed, but found the stan­dard George Bal­an­chine-chore­o­graphed ver­sion so trea­cly as to be unwor­thy of chil­dren, dub­bing it the “most bland and banal of bal­lets.”

The 1983 pro­duc­tion he col­lab­o­rat­ed on with Pacif­ic North­west Bal­let artis­tic direc­tors Kent Stow­ell and Fran­cia Rus­sell did away with the notion that chil­dren should be “cod­dled and sweet­ened and sug­arplummed and kept away from the dark aspects of life when there is no way of doing that.”

Tchaikovsky’s famous score remained in place, but Sendak and Stow­ell ducked the source mate­r­i­al for, well, more source mate­r­i­al. As per the New York City Ballet’s web­site, the Russ­ian Impe­r­i­al Ballet’s chief bal­let mas­ter, Mar­ius Peti­pa, com­mis­sioned Tchaikovsky to write music for an adap­ta­tion of Alexan­der Dumas’ child-friend­ly sto­ry The Nut­crack­er of Nurem­berg. But The Nut­crack­er of Nurem­berg was inspired by the much dark­er E.T.A. Hoff­man tale, 1816’s “The Nut­crack­er and the Mouse King.”

The “weird, dark qual­i­ties” of the orig­i­nal were much more in keep­ing with Sendak’s self pro­claimed “obses­sive theme”: “Chil­dren sur­viv­ing child­hood.”

Sendak want­ed the bal­let to focus more intent­ly on Clara, the young girl who receives the Nut­crack­er as a Christ­mas present in Act I:

It’s about her vic­to­ry over her fear and her grow­ing feel­ings for the prince… She is over­whelmed with grow­ing up and has no knowl­edge of what this means. I think the bal­let is all about a strong emo­tion­al sense of some­thing hap­pen­ing to her, which is bewil­der­ing.

Bal­an­chine must have felt dif­fer­ent­ly. He benched Clara in Act II, let­ting the adult Sug­arplum Fairy take cen­ter­stage, to guide the chil­dren through a pas­sive tour of the Land of Sweets.

As Sendak scoffed to the Dal­las Morn­ing News:

It’s all very, very pret­ty and very, very beau­ti­ful… I always hat­ed the Sug­arplum Fairy. I always want­ed to whack her.

“Like what kids real­ly want is a can­dy king­dom. That short­changes children’s feel­ings about life,” echoes Stow­ell, who revived the Sendak com­mis­sion, fea­tur­ing the illus­tra­tor’s sets and cos­tumes every win­ter for 3 decades.

In lieu of the Sug­ar Plum Fairy, Sendak and Stow­ell intro­duced a daz­zling caged pea­cock — a fan favorite played by the same dancer who plays Clara’s moth­er in Act I.

The threats, in the form of eccen­tric uncle Drosselmeier, a fero­cious tiger, and a mas­sive rat pup­pet with an impres­sive, puls­ing tail, have a Freudi­an edge.

The paint­ed back­drops, grow­ing Christ­mas tree, and Nut­crack­er toy look as if they emerged from one of Sendak’s books. (He fol­lowed up the bal­let by illus­trat­ing a new trans­la­tion of the Hoff­man orig­i­nal.)

The Sendak-designed cos­tumes are more under­stat­ed, thought Pacif­ic North­west Bal­let cos­tumer Mark Zap­pone, who described work­ing with Sendak as “an incred­i­ble joy and plea­sure” and recalled the fun­ny ongo­ing bat­tle with the Act II Moors cos­tumes to Seat­tle Met:

Maurice’s design had the women in quite bil­lowy pants. So we ripped them out of the box, threw them on the girls upstairs in the stu­dios, and Kent start­ed rehears­ing the Moors. And one by one, the girls got their legs stuck in those pants and—boom—hit the floor, all six of them. It was like, “Oh my God, what are we going to do about that one?” They end­ed up, for years, twist­ing the legs in their cos­tumes and mak­ing a lit­tle tuck here and there. It was a rite of pas­sage; if you were going to do the Moors, don’t for­get to twist your pants around so you won’t get stuck in them.

Rent a filmed ver­sion of Mau­rice Sendak’s The Nut­crack­er on Ama­zon Prime. (Look for a Wild Thing cameo in the boat­ing scene with Clara and her Prince.)

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

Mau­rice Sendak Sent Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Let­ters to Fans — So Beau­ti­ful a Kid Ate One

Mau­rice Sendak Illus­trates Tol­stoy in 1963 (with a Lit­tle Help from His Edi­tor)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Does It Take to Be a Great Artist?: An Aging Painter Reflects on His Creative Process & Why He Will Never Be a Picasso

in Art, Life | December 23rd, 2021

What does it take to be an artist? In the short film above by Jakub Blank, artist Bill Blaine med­i­tates on the ques­tion as he strolls around his home and stu­dio and talks about his work. Blaine has aged into the real­iza­tion that mak­ing art is what ful­fills him, even though it prob­a­bly won’t bring him immor­tal fame. “I’ve thought about this,” he says. “I would prob­a­bly be a hap­pi­er per­son if I were paint­ing all the time.” Bloat­ed egos belong to the young, and Blaine is glad to put the “absurd” ambi­tions of youth behind him. “In the old days,” he mus­es, “your ego was so big, that you want­ed to be bet­ter than every­body else, you want­ed to be on the cut­ting edge of things… at least with old age, you don’t have a lot of that.”

And yet, though he seems to have every­thing an artist could want in the mate­r­i­al sense – a pala­tial estate with its own well-appoint­ed stu­dio – a melan­choly feel­ing of defeat hangs over the artist. Sad­ness remains in his ready smile as he gen­tly inter­ro­gates him­self, “So then, why the hell aren’t you paint­ing all the time?” Blaine chuck­les as he con­tem­plates see­ing a ther­a­pist, an idea he doesn’t seem to take par­tic­u­lar­ly seri­ous­ly. Aside from a few out­liers, maybe the psy­chi­atric pro­fes­sion hasn’t tak­en the cre­ative impulse par­tic­u­lar­ly seri­ous­ly either. One psy­cho­an­a­lyst who did, Otto Rank, wrote in Art and Artist of the impor­tance of cre­ativ­i­ty to all human devel­op­ment and activ­i­ty.

“The human urge to cre­ate,” Rank argued, “does not find expres­sion in works of art alone. It also pro­duces reli­gion and mythol­o­gy and the social insti­tu­tions cor­re­spond­ing to these. In a word, it pro­duces the whole cul­ture.” Every­thing we do, from bak­ing bread to writ­ing sym­phonies, is a cre­ative act, in that we take raw mate­ri­als and make things that didn’t exist before. In West­ern cul­ture, how­ev­er, the role of the artist has been dis­tort­ed. Artists are ele­vat­ed to the sta­tus of genius, or rel­e­gat­ed to medi­oc­ri­ties, at best, dis­pos­able dead­beats, at worst. Blaine sure­ly deserves his lot of hap­pi­ness from his work. Has he been under­mined by self-doubt?

His vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and the sharp can­dor of his obser­va­tions leave us with a por­trait of a man almost in agony over the knowl­edge, he says – again using the accusato­ry sec­ond per­son – that “you’re not going to be the next Picas­so or the next Frank Stel­la or what­ev­er else.” There’s more to the neg­a­tive com­par­isons than wound­ed van­i­ty. He should feel free to do what he likes, but he lacks what made these artists great, he says:

You have to be obses­sive, you real­ly do. Com­pul­sive. And I’m not enough, unfor­tu­nate­ly. Had a cer­tain amount of tal­ent, just didn’t have the obses­sion appar­ent­ly. I think that’s what great artists have. They can’t let it go. And even­tu­al­ly, what­ev­er they do, that’s their art, that’s who they are.

Blaine con­trasts great­ness with the work of unse­ri­ous “dilet­tantes” who may approx­i­mate abstract expres­sion­ist or oth­er styles, but whose work fails to man­i­fest the per­son­al­i­ty of the artist. “You can see through it,” says Blaine, winc­ing. Shot in his “home and stu­dio in Mount Dora, Flori­da,” notes Aeon, the film is “full of his orig­i­nal paint­ings and pho­tographs. Blaine offers his unguard­ed thoughts on a range of top­ics relat­ed to the gen­er­a­tive process.”

Artists are rarely their own best crit­ics, and Blaine’s assess­ments of his work can seem with­er­ing when voiced over Blank’s slideshow pre­sen­ta­tions. But as he opens up about his cre­ative process, and his per­cep­tion of him­self as “too bour­geois” to real­ly make it, he may reveal much more about the strug­gles that all artists — or all cre­ative peo­ple — face than he real­izes.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Long Game of Cre­ativ­i­ty: If You Haven’t Cre­at­ed a Mas­ter­piece at 30, You’re Not a Fail­ure

The 10 Para­dox­i­cal Traits of Cre­ative Peo­ple, Accord­ing to Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi (RIP)

60-Sec­ond Intro­duc­tions to 12 Ground­break­ing Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hop­per, Pol­lock, Rothko & More

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