Search Results for "anal"

A Look Inside Hannah Arendt’s Personal Library: Download Marginalia from 90 Books (Heidegger, Kant, Marx & More)

in Archives, Philosophy, Politics | August 14th, 2015

Hannah_Arendt

It does seem pos­si­ble, I think, to over­val­ue the sig­nif­i­cance of a writer’s library to his or her own lit­er­ary pro­duc­tions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have great­ly influ­enced us. What we keep or don’t keep can be as much a mat­ter of hap­pen­stance or sen­ti­ment as delib­er­ate per­son­al archiv­ing. But while we may not always be con­scious cura­tors of our lives’ effects, those effects still speak for us when we are gone in ways we may nev­er have intend­ed. In the case of famous—and famous­ly controversial—thinkers like Han­nah Arendt, what is left behind will always con­sti­tute a body of evi­dence. And in some cases—such as that of Arendt’s teacher and one­time lover Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger’s glar­ing­ly anti-Semit­ic Black Note­books—the evi­dence can be irrev­o­ca­bly damn­ing.

Heidegger Early Greek

In Arendt’s case, we have no such smok­ing gun to sub­stan­ti­ate argu­ments that, despite her own back­ground, Arendt was anti-Jew­ish and blamed the vic­tims of the Holo­caust. Dur­ing the so-called “Eich­mann wars” in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, a tor­rent of crit­i­cism bom­bard­ed Arendt’s Eich­mann in Jerusalem, the com­pi­la­tion of dis­patch­es she penned as an observ­er of the Nazi arch-bureaucrat’s tri­al. These days, writes Corey Robin in The Nation, “while the con­tro­ver­sy over Eich­mann remains, the con­tro­ver­sial­ists have moved on.” The debate now seems more cen­tered on Arendt’s book itself than on her moti­va­tions. What do Arendt’s obser­va­tions reveal to us today about the log­ic of total­i­tar­i­an­ism and geno­ci­dal state actions? One way to approach the ques­tions of mean­ing in Eich­mann, and in her mon­u­men­tal The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, is to exam­ine the sources of her thought—and her use of those sources.

Arendt Nicomachean

Arendt’s library—much of it on view online thanks to Bard col­lege—offers us a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to do just that, not only by giv­ing us access to the spe­cif­ic edi­tions and trans­la­tions that she her­self read and saved (for what­ev­er rea­son), but also by offer­ing insight into what Arendt con­sid­ered impor­tant enough in those texts to under­line and anno­tate. In Bard’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of “Arendt Mar­gin­a­lia”—selec­tions of her anno­tat­ed books in down­load­able PDFs—we see a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy informed by Aris­to­tle (see a page from her copy of Nico­machean Ethics above), Pla­to, and Kant, but also by con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man polit­i­cal the­o­rist Carl Schmitt, a mem­ber and active sup­port­er of Nazism, and of course, by Hei­deg­ger, whose work occu­pies a cen­tral place in her library: in Ger­man and Eng­lish (like his Ear­ly Greek Think­ing above, inscribed by the trans­la­tor), and in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sources.

While it may go too far to claim, as promi­nent schol­ar Bernard Wasser­stein did in 2009, that an exam­i­na­tion of Arendt’s sources shows her inter­nal­iz­ing the val­ues of Nazis and anti-Semi­tes, the pre­pon­der­ance of con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man thinkers in her per­son­al library does give us a sense of her intel­lec­tu­al lean­ings. But we can­not draw broad con­clu­sions from a cur­so­ry sur­vey of a life­time of read­ing and re-read­ing, though we do see a par­tic­u­lar­ly Aris­totelian strain in her think­ing: that the indi­vid­ual is only as healthy as his or her polit­i­cal cul­ture. What schol­ars of Arendt will find in Bard’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion are ample clues to the devel­op­ment and evo­lu­tion of her phi­los­o­phy over time. What lay read­ers will find is the out­line of a course on the sources of Arendt-ian thought, includ­ing not only Greeks and Ger­mans, but the Amer­i­can poet Robert Low­ell, who wrote a glow­ing pro­file of Arendt and con­tributed at least four signed books of his to her library.

I say “at least” because the Bard dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is yet incom­plete, rep­re­sent­ing only a por­tion of the phys­i­cal media in the college’s phys­i­cal archive of “approx­i­mate­ly 4,000 vol­umes, ephemera and pam­phlets that made up the library in Han­nah Arendt’s last apart­ment in New York City.” What we don’t have online are books inscribed to her by Jew­ish schol­ar and mys­tic Ger­shom Scholem, by W.H. Auden and Ran­dall Jar­rell, and many oth­ers. Nonethe­less the “Arendt Mar­gin­a­lia” gives us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to peer into a writer and scholar’s process, and see her wres­tle with the thought of her pre­de­ces­sors and con­tem­po­raries. The full Arendt col­lec­tion gives us even more to sift through, includ­ing pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence and record­ings of pub­lic speech­es. The dig­i­ti­za­tion of these sources offers many oppor­tu­ni­ties for those who can­not trav­el to New York and access the phys­i­cal archives to delve into Arendt’s intel­lec­tu­al world in ways pre­vi­ous­ly only avail­able to pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

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

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Pipes with Cannabis Traces Found in Shakespeare’s Garden, Suggesting the Bard Enjoyed a “Noted Weed”

in Literature | August 11th, 2015

William-Shakespeare-68 Hours

Not more than 10 days ago, Jonathan Crow high­light­ed for you Adam Bertocci’s Two Gen­tle­men of Lebows­ki, a book that asks you to sus­pend dis­be­lief and imag­ine, What if…William Shake­speare had writ­ten The Big Lebows­ki?

Now comes news that makes the col­li­sion of the Bard’s and Lebowski’s worlds some­what more plau­si­ble. Accord­ing to The Tele­graph, “South African sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that 400-year-old tobac­co pipes exca­vat­ed from the gar­den of William Shake­speare con­tained cannabis, sug­gest­ing the play­wright might have writ­ten some of his famous works while high.” Lebows­ki could relate.

If you want to get into the specifics, you can read the pré­cis pub­lished in The South African Jour­nal of Sci­ence called “Shake­speare, plants, and chem­i­cal analy­sis of ear­ly
17th cen­tu­ry clay ‘tobac­co’ pipes from Europe.” It details how a team, led by anthro­pol­o­gist Fran­cis Thack­er­ay at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Wit­wa­ter­srand in Johan­nes­burg, used a “sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nique called gas chro­matog­ra­phy mass spec­trom­e­try (GCMS)” to ana­lyze “pipes [that] had been exca­vat­ed from the gar­den of William Shake­speare.” The results of their study? They “indi­cat­ed Cannabis in eight sam­ples, nico­tine (from tobac­co leaves of the kind asso­ci­at­ed with Raleigh) in at least one sam­ple, and (in two sam­ples) def­i­nite evi­dence for Peru­vian cocaine from coca leaves of the kind which Thack­er­ay et al. asso­ci­at­ed with Drake who had him­self been to Peru before 1597.”

Thack­er­ay also finds lit­er­ary sup­port for the idea that Shake­speare had a taste for Cannabis, not­ing that in “Son­net 76 Shake­speare writes about ‘inven­tion in a not­ed weed’. This can be inter­pret­ed to mean that Shake­speare was will­ing to use ‘weed’ … for cre­ative writ­ing (‘inven­tion’).” The pré­cis goes on to add: “In the same son­net it appears that [Shake­speare] would pre­fer not to be asso­ci­at­ed with ‘com­pounds strange’, which can be inter­pret­ed, at least poten­tial­ly, to mean ’strange drugs’ (pos­si­bly cocaine).” You can read Son­net 76 in full here:

Why is my verse so bar­ren of new pride,
So far from vari­a­tion or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found meth­ods and to com­pounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep inven­tion in a not­ed weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Show­ing their birth and where they did pro­ceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argu­ment;
So all my best is dress­ing old words new,
Spend­ing again what is already spent:
For as the sun is dai­ly new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre

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Read Arthur C. Clarke’s Super Short, 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, “siseneG”

in Sci Fi | August 10th, 2015

clarke 31 word story

As brevi­ty in fic­tion goes, who can top “For sale: baby shoes, nev­er worn”? That much-ref­er­enced six-word sto­ry, often attrib­uted to Ernest Hem­ing­way, cer­tain­ly packs an impres­sive amount of human dra­ma into its short length. But what about oth­er gen­res? What would a six-word sci­ence- fic­tion sto­ry look like? i09 crowd­sourced count­less such works in 2014: respons­es, which tend­ed toward the escha­to­log­i­cal, includ­ed “The Uni­verse died. He did not,” “New world. Cryo­genic fail­ure. Seeds dead,” and “Final­ly sen­tient, it switched itself off.”

Not bad, but what would we get if we went to the pro­fes­sion­als? Alas, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, pro­lif­ic author of such respect­ed sci-fi nov­els as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ren­dezvous with Rama, passed away just five years before i09 issued its chal­lenge. Still, we have an idea of the direc­tion his entry might have gone in from of “siseneG,” a sto­ry sto­ry — a very short sto­ry indeed — Clarke sent in to Ana­log mag­a­zine in 1984:

And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Uni­verse ceased to exist.

Then he pon­dered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It nev­er had exist­ed.

“This is the only short sto­ry I’ve writ­ten in ten years or so,” Clarke wrote in the accom­pa­ny­ing note. “I think you’ll agree that they don’t come much short­er.” We now know that they can come some­what short­er, at least 25 words short­er than “siseneG,” but sure­ly we can all agree that Clarke set a high stan­dard for sci­en­tif­ic (or per­haps tech­no­log­i­cal-exis­ten­tial) flash fic­tion decades before the coinage of the term. But then, we always knew the man had a knack for look­ing ahead.

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Inter­net, 3D Print­ers and Trained Mon­key Ser­vants

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts in 2001 What the World Will Look By Decem­ber 31, 2100

Arthur C. Clarke Nar­rates Film on Mandelbrot’s Frac­tals; David Gilmour Pro­vides the Sound­track

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy: Hear a Radio Dramatization (1973)

in Audio Books, Sci Fi | August 6th, 2015

TheFoundationTrilogy
Last year Jonathan Nolan–screenwriter of Memen­to and Inter­stel­lar and not coin­ci­den­tal­ly direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan’s brother–announced that he would be devel­op­ing Isaac Asimov’s leg­endary Foun­da­tion tril­o­gy for HBO as a series. And we assume he’s still doing that, because there’s been nary a peep from the chan­nel since. So far the Inter­net con­sen­sus has been a col­lec­tive “well, that could be good!” instead of groans, which is a heart­en­ing thing these days.

For those who haven’t read the clas­sic books, but would like to get the jump on ol’ Nolan, we sub­mit this BBC Radio pro­duc­tion from 1973, which is now avail­able on Spo­ti­fy below. (Down­load Spo­ti­fy soft­ware here.) The record­ing also lives on Archive.org as well.

Right from the begin­ning we know we are in good hands, with the ana­log drones of the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop ush­er­ing us into a stereo land­scape filled with plum­my British accents and atmos­pher­ic sound effects. It’s like the best ever episode of Doc­tor Who with­out a Tardis, cor­ri­dors, or the enfee­bled cries of a lost com­pan­ion.

The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy is heav­i­ly indebt­ed to Edward Gibbon’s The His­to­ry of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as a belief in the cir­cu­lar nature of his­to­ry.

Asimov’s hero in the first book, Hari Sel­don, using a sci­ence called psy­chohis­to­ry, can see the inevitable col­lapse of the Galac­tic Empire in which he lives and sets about try­ing to change it by set­ting up an oppo­si­tion called the Foun­da­tion. The nov­els then jump decades ahead, check­ing in with this essen­tial con­flict, much like Gibbon’s work goes from emper­or to emper­or, mark­ing the decline of empire and its inevitabil­i­ty. Free of aliens and shoot-em-ups, Foun­da­tion is very human despite its galac­tic scope.

Adapt­ed by Patrick Tull and Mike Stott, the eight part radio series does a good job of pre­sent­ing the nov­els as a char­ac­ter-dri­ven dra­ma, and while it is talky (it’s radio after all), it was Orson Scott Card who said of Foun­da­tion, it is “all talk, no action — but Asi­mov’s talk is action.”

It also influ­enced many future sci-fi writ­ers. No doubt some­where along the way Dou­glas Adams was lis­ten­ing to the radio play’s talk­ing ency­clo­pe­dia and think­ing, hmm, what if this had jokes?
And once you get through the trilogy–maybe after an eight-hour flight?–there’s more Asi­mov radio plays for your lis­ten­ing plea­sure on Spo­ti­fy: Host­ess, Peb­ble in the Sky, and Night­fall.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Sto­ry “The Last Ques­tion” Read by Isaac Asi­mov— and by Leonard Nimoy

Lis­ten to 188 Dra­ma­tized Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries by Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Isaac Asi­mov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Bal­lard & More

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

in | August 4th, 2015

Down­load 800 free eBooks to your Kin­dle, iPad/iPhone, com­put­er, smart phone or eread­er. Col­lec­tion includes great works of fic­tion, non-fic­tion and poet­ry, includ­ing works by Asi­mov, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Neil Gaiman, Tol­stoy, Dos­to­evsky, Shake­speare, Ernest Hem­ing­way, Vir­ginia Woolf & James Joyce. Also please see our col­lec­tion 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free, where you can down­load more great books to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er.

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What Beatboxing and Opera Singing Look Like Inside an MRI Machine

in Music, Science | July 31st, 2015

Beat­box­ing, the prac­tice of pro­duc­ing drum machine-like beats (espe­cial­ly TR-808-like beats) with one’s voice, has long since made the tran­si­tion from par­lor trick to acknowl­edged musi­cal art form. But we still have much to under­stand about it, as the recent­ly-emerged first gen­er­a­tion of beat­box­ing schol­ars knows full well. “A team of lin­guis­tics and engi­neer­ing stu­dents at USC want­ed to learn more about the mechan­ics behind the rhythms,” writes Los Ange­les Times music crit­ic Ran­dall Roberts. “By using MRI tech­nol­o­gy, they record­ed an unnamed local beat­box­er work­ing his mag­ic, broke down the most com­mon­ly employed sounds by exam­in­ing the move­ments of his mouth and then ana­lyzed the data.”

This result­ed in a paper called “Par­alin­guis­tic Mech­a­nisms of Pro­duc­tion in Human ‘Beat­box­ing’: A Real-Time Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance Imag­ing Study.” Roberts describes it as “pre­dictably heavy with lin­guis­tic jar­gon, but even to a civil­ian, the results are illu­mi­nat­ing,” espe­cial­ly the video the research team record­ed, “which reveals how the human mouth can so con­vinc­ing­ly cre­ate the pop of a snare drum.” At the top of the post, you can see this sort of thing for your­self: in this video “The Diva and the Emcee,” fea­tured at the Inter­na­tion­al Soci­ety for Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance in Med­i­cine (ISMRM) Sci­en­tif­ic Ses­sions in Seat­tle, we see how a beat­box­er’s tech­nique com­pares to that of an opera singer.

You can find out more at the site of the Speech Pro­duc­tion and Artic­u­la­tion Knowl­edge group (SPAN), the USC team that per­formed this pio­neer­ing research into an impor­tant com­po­nent of one of the pil­lars of hip hop. Keep their find­ings in mind next time you watch a beat­box­ing clip that goes viral (such as the Gold­berg Vari­a­tions one we fea­tured back in 2012) for a rich­er lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. After all, it does no harm to the romance of the beat­box, to para­phrase Carl Sagan, to know a lit­tle bit about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beat­box­ing Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

Langston Hugh­es Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Won­der­ful Illus­trat­ed Book for Kids (1954)

Do Rap­pers Have a Big­ger Vocab­u­lary Than Shake­speare?: A Data Sci­en­tist Maps Out the Answer

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Animated Intro to G.W.F. Hegel, and Everything Else You Wanted to Know About the Daunting German Philosopher

in Philosophy | July 29th, 2015

There’s no way around it, Ger­man philoso­pher George Wil­helm Friedrich Hegel is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to under­stand. And yet, his work, like few oth­ers since Pla­to, has been reduced over and over again to one idea—the “Hegelian dialec­tic” of “the­sis, antithe­sis, syn­the­sis.” As a 1996 beginner’s guide to Hegel phras­es it, this “tri­adic struc­ture” is the “organ­ic, frac­tal form” of the effu­sive thinker’s log­ic. The for­mu­la is what most lay peo­ple learn of Hegel, and often no more. So it may come as a sur­prise to learn that Hegel him­self nev­er used these terms in this way. As Gus­tav E. Mueller has writ­ten of this “most vex­ing and dev­as­tat­ing leg­end,” Hegel “does not use this ‘tri­ad’ once” in all twen­ty vol­umes of his com­plete works, nor “does it occur in the eight vol­umes of Hegel texts, pub­lished for the first time in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” So where does the idea come from?

From Hegel’s inter­preters, who—baffled by his “obscu­ri­ty” and “pecu­liar ter­mi­nol­o­gy and style”—have imposed all sorts of clar­i­fy­ing (or dis­tort­ing) con­cepts on his work. In his ani­mat­ed School of Life video intro­duc­tion above, Alain de Bot­ton begins with the prob­lem of Hegel’s famous dif­fi­cul­ty. Hegel’s writ­ing has gen­er­al­ly been thought of as “horrible”—obscure, over­stuffed, tan­gled, “con­fus­ing and com­pli­cat­ed when it should be clear and direct.” I can’t speak to his Ger­man, but this cer­tain­ly seems to be the case in Eng­lish. Yet, whether any­one can say what a philosopher’s work “should be” seems like a mat­ter of inter­pre­tive bias. How can we, after all, sep­a­rate a thinker’s ideas from his or her prose, as though these things can exist inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er? De Bot­ton con­tin­ues with anoth­er should:

He tapped into a weak­ness of human nature: to be trust­ful of grave-sound­ing, incom­pre­hen­si­ble prose. This has made phi­los­o­phy much weak­er in the world than it should be, and it’s made it much hard­er to hear the valu­able things that Hegel has to say to us.

The video goes on to make a short list of “a small num­ber of lessons” we can take from Hegel. I’ll leave it to you to find out what de Bot­ton thinks those are. Some may find in his tidy sum­ma­tions a use­ful guide to Hegel’s thought, oth­ers a fur­ther over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of a phi­los­o­phy that delib­er­ate­ly resists easy read­ing. No doubt, what­ev­er we make of Hegel, we need to dis­abuse our­selves of the notion that his think­ing eas­i­ly boils down to a “Hegelian dialec­tic.”

For those seek­ing to under­stand why his work has been so influ­en­tial despite, or because of, its leg­endary dif­fi­cul­ty, there are numer­ous resources online. One might start with “Hegel by Hyper­text,” a huge com­pendi­um of intro­duc­to­ry and bio­graph­i­cal mate­r­i­al, analy­sis, dis­cus­sion, links, and Hegel’s own writ­ing. Hegel.net col­lects excerpts and full texts of the philosopher’s work in both Ger­man and Eng­lish, as well as “works of Hegel’s 19th cen­tu­ry fol­low­ers” on both the right and left. Hegel’s most famous inter­preter was of course Karl Marx, and you will find in every archive a num­ber of com­men­taries and cri­tiques from Marx him­self and sev­er­al Marx­ist thinkers.

The Hegel Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca also gives us arti­cles on Hegel from a range of thinkers across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. Final­ly, we should attempt, as best we can, to grap­ple with Hegel’s own words, and we can do so with all of his major works in trans­la­tion at Project Gutenberg’s eBooks library. For two very dif­fer­ent ways of read­ing Hegel, see pro­fes­sor Rick Roderick’s lec­ture on “Hegel and Mod­ern Life” and Slavoj Žižek’s lec­ture on “The Lim­its of Hegel,” above. And should you feel that any or all of these inter­preters mis­rep­re­sent the for­mi­da­ble Ger­man philoso­pher, have a lis­ten to the lec­ture below by Dr. Justin Burke enti­tled, appro­pri­ate­ly, “Every­thing You Know About Hegel is Wrong.”

Find cours­es on Hegel in our col­lec­tion of 140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, and texts by the philoso­pher on our list of 135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein & Sartre Explained with Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tions by The School of Life

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

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

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Miles Davis Covers Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (1983)

in Jazz, Music | July 27th, 2015

What hap­pens when the Prince of Dark­ness cov­ers the King of Pop?

Miles Davis’ deci­sion to record a stu­dio ver­sion of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit, “Human Nature,” caused Al Fos­ter, his friend and drum­mer, to walk out mid-ses­sion, thus putting an end to their long­time col­lab­o­ra­tion. Davis chalked it up to Foster’s unwill­ing­ness to “play that funky back­beat,” and brought in his nephew, Vince Wilburn, Jr., to fin­ish the job.

Fos­ter must’ve real­ly hat­ed that song.

Say what you will, “Human Nature” is–like most Jack­son hits–an ear worm.

Depend­ing on who you talk to, Davis’ stu­dio track, above, is a either a straight­for­ward homage in which his horn recre­ates “Jack­son’s breathy inti­ma­cy” or “flat, schmaltzy ele­va­tor music.”

Peo­ple’s feel­ings for it tend to echo their response to Jack­son’s orig­i­nal, to which Davis cleaved pret­ty close­ly.

“Human Nature” was writ­ten by Toto’s key­boardist Steve Por­caro, the son of a jazz musi­cian who idol­ized Davis. He was under­stand­ably hon­ored that his dad’s hero chose to cov­er his work along with Cyn­di Lauper’s “Time after Time,” on 1985’s You’re Under Arrest, one of the pro­lif­ic artist’s final albums.

Davis’ asso­ci­a­tion no doubt con­tributes to the tune’s ongo­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty. Those who want to com­pare and con­trast, can take their pick of reg­gae, hip-hop, elec­tron­i­ca and funked up New Orleans brass ver­sions.

But back to “Human Nature” as ren­dered by Miles Davis. Most crit­ics pre­fer the live ver­sion, below, cap­tured July 7, 1988, at Mon­treux. Slate’s Fred Kaplan described it as “an upbeat rouser” through which Davis “prances.”

As Davis him­self explained in a 1985 inter­view with Richard Cook:

On a song like “Human Nature,” you have to play the right thing. And the right thing is around the melody. I learned that stuff from Cole­man Hawkins. Cole­man could play a melody, get ad-libs, run the chords – and you still heard the melody. I play “Human Nature,” varies every night. After I play the melody, that tag on the end is mine to have fun with. It’s in anoth­er key … uh, D nat­ur­al. Move up a step or so to F nat­ur­al. Then you can play it any way you want to.

Anoth­er remark from the same inter­view proved pre­scient:

You don’t have to do like Wyn­ton Marsalis and play “Star­dust “and that shit… Why can’t “Human Nature” be a stan­dard? It fits. A stan­dard fits like a thor­ough­bred. The melody and every­thing is just right, and every time you hear it you want to hear it some more. And you leave enough of it to know what you want to hear again. When you hear it again, the same feel­ing comes over you. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

Watch Miles Davis Impro­vise Music for Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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How ABC Television Introduced Rap Music to America in 1981: It’s Painfully Awkward

in Music, Television | July 24th, 2015

Of all the var­i­ous types of pro­fes­sion­al explain­ers out there, none may come across as more clue­less than the tele­vi­sion news reporter faced with a minor­i­ty youth cul­ture and try­ing to account for its existence—one he or she had pre­vi­ous­ly been unaware of. Every descrip­tion gets reduced to the broad­est of judge­ments, easy stereo­types fill in for appre­ci­a­tion. The larg­er the media out­let, the more these ten­den­cies seem to man­i­fest; in fact a string of such sen­su­al­ized reportage put togeth­er seems to con­sti­tute both the rise and the fall of a cor­po­rate news career.

All of the above should pre­pare you for what you are about to see in ABC’s 20/20 spe­cial “Rap­pin’ to the Beat” from 1981. Inves­tiga­tive reporter Steve Fox jour­neys into the world of rap music, a form—his con­de­scend­ing co-anchor tells us in a back-hand­ed remark—“so com­pelling, you’ll nev­er miss the fact there’s no melody.” “It’s a music that is all beat,” he says, “strong beat, and talk.” With the tone estab­lished, enter Fox to tell us that Blondie’s “Rap­ture” is the main rea­son rap caught on. It only gets worse. I sup­pose you could blame Deb­bie Har­ry, but she didn’t ask to be the first voice of rap we hear in a 20/20 spe­cial. That deci­sion was the spe­cial purview of “Rap­pin’ to the Beat”’s pro­duc­ers.

But like all archival film and video of emerg­ing cre­ative move­ments, these clips redeem them­selves with footage of the scene’s pio­neers, includ­ing a per­for­mance from a 22-year-old Kur­tis Blow and some ear­ly breakdancing—or, as one NYC Tran­sit cop calls it, a riot. The sec­ond part, above, gives us some insight­ful com­men­tary from NYC radio DJ Pablo Guz­man, folk­lorist John Szwed (who wrote the defin­i­tive biog­ra­phy of Sun Ra), and syn­di­cat­ed rock colum­nist Lisa Robin­son, who reminds us of how “very black and very urban” rap is, then goes on to say, “peo­ple hat­ed rock and roll 15 years ago.”

It’s cer­tain­ly true that 15 years or so after this clum­sy attempt at cap­tur­ing the moment, rap and hip-hop became ubiquitous—at a time when punk rock also hit the sub­urbs. Punk also had its 20/20 moment in the late 70s (above); it sym­bol­ized, the announc­er tells us, “the dread­ful pos­si­bil­i­ty of riot which has always seemed to cling to rock and roll.” Met­al got the Ger­al­do treat­ment in “Heavy Met­al Moms”—the exam­ples abound. Which of them is more banal, con­de­scend­ing, or just painful­ly awk­ward is impos­si­ble to say, but they make fas­ci­nat­ing win­dows onto the medi­a’s con­sis­tent­ly weird­ed-out response to out­siders they can’t ignore. As a coun­ter­point, check out the way Fred Rogers wel­comed to his show a 12-year-old break­dancer or a cou­ple of exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic musi­cians, mak­ing no effort to be cool, knowl­edge­able, or detached, only kind and curi­ous. It’s just my opin­ion, but I always thought TV news need­ed more Mr. Rogers and less.… what­ev­er the jour­nal­is­tic approach in “Rap­pin’ to the Beat” is sup­posed to be.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

Fight For Your Right Revis­it­ed: Adam Yauch’s 2011 Film Com­mem­o­rates the Beast­ie Boys’ Leg­endary Music Video

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

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

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Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Masterwork (1945): “Citizen Kane Is Not Cinema”

in Film, Photography | July 23rd, 2015

orson_welles_citizen_french_movie_poster_14a

You may recall our post­ing last year of Jorge Luis Borges’ review of Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane — sure­ly one of the most Open Cul­ture-wor­thy inter­sec­tions of 20th cen­tu­ry lumi­nar­ies ever to occur. Borges described Welles’ mas­ter­work as pos­sessed of one side that, “point­less­ly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits,” and anoth­er, a “kind of meta­phys­i­cal detec­tive sto­ry” whose “sub­ject (both psy­cho­log­i­cal and alle­gor­i­cal) is the inves­ti­ga­tion of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spo­ken, the many lives he has ruined.” On the whole, the author of Labyrinths called the pic­ture “not intel­li­gent, though it is the work of genius.”

Not long after our post, the Paris Review’s Dan Piepen­bring wrote one that also quot­ed anoth­er, lat­er review of Cit­i­zen Kane by none oth­er than Jean-Paul Sartre:

Kane might have been inter­est­ing for the Amer­i­cans, [but] it is com­plete­ly passé for us, because the whole film is based on a mis­con­cep­tion of what cin­e­ma is all about. The film is in the past tense, where­as we all know that cin­e­ma has got to be in the present tense. ‘I am the man who is kiss­ing, I am the girl who is being kissed, I am the Indi­an who is being pur­sued, I am the man pur­su­ing the Indi­an.’ And film in the past tense is the antithe­sis of cin­e­ma. There­fore Cit­i­zen Kane is not cin­e­ma.

The 1945 review orig­i­nal­ly ran in high-mind­ed film jour­nal L’Écran français under the head­line “Quand Hol­ly­wood veut faire penser … Cit­i­zen Kane d’Orson Welles,” or, “When Hol­ly­wood Wants to Make Us Think … Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane.” Accord­ing to The Writ­ings of Jean-Paul Sartre: A Bib­li­o­graph­i­cal Life, “in re-read­ing this [review], which he did not remem­ber at all, Sartre hard­ly rec­og­nized his style and expressed some doubt about the authen­tic­i­ty of his sig­na­ture. On the oth­er hand, he did find in it the ideas Cit­i­zen Kane sug­gest­ed to him when he first saw it in the Unit­ed States. After he saw the film again in France, Sartre had a slight­ly more favor­able opin­ion of it, but he still thinks it is undoubt­ed­ly no mas­ter­piece.”

But at the time, writes Simon Leys, “the impact of this con­dem­na­tion was dev­as­tat­ing. The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons was shown soon after­wards in Paris but failed mis­er­ably. The cul­ti­vat­ed pub­lic always fol­lows the direc­tives of a few pro­pa­gan­da com­mis­sars: there is much more con­for­mi­ty among intel­lec­tu­als than among plumbers or car mechan­ics.” Or at least the cul­ti­vat­ed pub­lic did so in 1940s Paris; the mechan­ics of cul­ture have changed some­what since then, but as far as Cit­i­zen Kane goes, high-pro­file opin­ions about it have grown only more pos­i­tive over time. Sure, Ver­ti­go recent­ly knocked it down a peg in the Sight and Sound poll, but that just makes me won­der what Sartre thought of Hitch­cock­’s mas­ter­work — a film that might have had a res­o­nance or two in the mind of an exis­ten­tial­ist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges, Film Crit­ic, Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1964: “It Was Mon­strous!”

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Doc­u­men­tary Pro­files Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger & Sartre

Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein & Sartre Explained with Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tions by The School of Life

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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