Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate: 7 Courses Helps Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months
During the pandemic, Google launched a series of Career Certificates that will “prepare learners for an entry-level role in under six months.” One such certificate focuses on User Experience Design, or what’s called UX Design, the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful experiences to users.
Offered on the Coursera platform, the User Experience (UX) Design Professional Certificate features seven courses, including the Foundations of User Experience, Start the UX Design Process, Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes, and Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts. In total, this program “includes over 200 hours of instruction and hundreds of practice-based activities and assessments that simulate real-world UX design scenarios and are critical for success in the workplace. The content is highly interactive and developed by Google employees with decades of experience in UX design.” Upon completion, students can directly apply for jobs with Google and over 130 U.S. employers, including Walmart, Best Buy, and Astreya. You can start a 7‑day free trial and explore the courses. If you continue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That translates to about $235 after 6 months.
Explore the User Experience (UX) Design Professional Certificate by watching the video above. Learn more about the overall Google career certificate initiative here. And find other Google professional certificates here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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Read More...In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More
A century ago, the popular English novelist W.L. George sat down and put his mind to envisioning the world we live in today. That world has not, alas, turned out to be one in which his books are much read, but in his day a great many readers were moved by his social cause-driven fiction and reportage. One might compare him to Upton Sinclair, his contemporary on the other side of the Atlantic. In the Paris-born-and-raised George’s ancestral homeland, George Orwell described him as an author of what G.K. Chesterton called “good bad books,” singling out for praise his 1920 novel Caliban amid the “shoddy rubbish” of his wider oeuvre.
Still even authors of rubbish — and perhaps especially authors of rubbish — can sense the shape of things to come. For its edition of May 7, 1922, the New York Herald commissioned George to share that sense with their readers. In response he described a world in which “commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace,” reducing the separation of America and Europe to eight hours, and whose passenger steamers and railroads will have consequently fallen into obsolescence. “Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system,” resulting in generations who’ll never have seen “a wire outlined against the sky.”
That goes for the transmission of electricity as well, since George credits (a bit hastily, it seems) the possibility of wireless power systems of the kind researched by Nikola Tesla. In 2022, coal will take a distant backseat to the tides, the sun, and radium, and “it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed.” As for the cinema, “the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only need to know how to smile but also how to talk.”
Other women, however, have proven just as capable as George had imagined: “All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts, and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.” Georges foresees the birth-control pill, but also the “pill lunch.” Unlike some reformers, he hesitates to declare the abolition of the family, but he does imagine the “majority of mankind” occupying modular homes in high-rise communal dwellings (“I have a vision of walls, furniture, and hangings made of more or less compressed papier-mâché”), all gathered in climate-controlled cities set under glass.
On the whole, in 2022, “the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago.” Indeed, he suspects that a glimpse of our reality wouldn’t much surprise “the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station.” It could even be dull, what with complete settlement and development leaving “no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day.” In 1922, George could write that “in fiction, America leads the world by sincerity, faith and fearlessness,” and believe that “in 2022 American literature will be a literature of culture. The battle will be over and the muzzle off. There will be no more things one can’t say, and things one can’t think.” Whatever the inspirations of his prophecy, they must not have told him about social media.
You can find a copy of George’s original article over at the Library of Congress.
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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.
Read More...The Anti-Vaxxer Who Waged War Against Jonas Salk & His Polio Vaccine: When History Keeps Repeating
Almost immediately after Scottish doctor Edward Jenner learned how to inoculate humans against smallpox in 1796, mass movements sprang up in England and the U.S. to oppose the measure. The rejection of inoculation and vaccination generally made its stand on “political grounds,” says Yale historian Frank Snowden. For over two hundred years, people have “widely considered [vaccines to be] another form of tyranny.” In the 19th century, fears of government control mutated into pseudoscientific conspiracy theories claiming the smallpox vaccine might cause, for example, the growth of hooves and horns or the birth of human/cow hybrid babies.
The pushback against the smallpox vaccine, writes Slate’s Nick Keppler, occurred during a time “when arguments about bodily integrity and religious objection carried as much weight as scientific evidence.” But vaccine science progressed nonetheless, and scientific institutions – very much in league with government by the mid-20th century – shared their largesse in the form of medical breakthroughs and consumer conveniences. “The postwar era was a very trust-in-science-era,” says researcher scientist Jonathan M. Berman, author of Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. “The public not just accepted, but cheered, the headline-making work of guys in white lab coats,” Keppler remarks.
Not everyone was cheering for Jonas Salk, the March of Dimes, and the polio vaccine, however. While celebrities like Elvis Presley legitimized the vaccine in the eyes of a previously skeptical public, a few fervent anti-vaxxers rose to prominence, some using the same combination of fear mongering, pseudoscientific speculation, and conspiratorial thinking common to the smallpox era – and common, once again, in the time of COVID-19.
One of these figures, Florida businessman Duon Miller, founded a cosmetics company, then invested his own money and that of others into an organization called Polio Prevention Inc., a one-man operation that purported to fight polio with information about nutrition. Miller’s organization actually served to undermine the vaccine with a host of outrageous, logically fallacious claims about the causes of polio and the dangers of vaccination. As Keppler notes:
Like today’s COVID skeptics, Miller cherry-picked physicians who were skeptical of polio as a virus and misrepresented facts. One mailer was a rapid fire of out-of-context information: Salk “isn’t entirely satisfied with the vaccine.” Some children still got polio after being vaccinated. And just as the “real” number of COVID-19 deaths pales in comparison to vaccine deaths in some dark corners of the internet, so it was with polio in Miller’s world: “Polio ‘CRIPPLES’ and Polio ‘DEATHS’ are merely ‘Statistics’ to the ‘Charity-Brokers,’ whose record to date of ‘Cripples’ and ‘Deaths’ is TRULY DISGRACEFUL.”
Like many conspiracy theorists today, Miller’s claims contained several kernels of truth, misplaced in the service of a bizarre crusade. Research now ties excess consumption of soft drinks, white flour, and refined sugar to an increase in cancers and heart disease. In this, Miller was prescient, given that these are the some of the biggest killers in the country. But this had nothing to do with the polio virus. Miller’s uncritical thinking, mistaking large-scale correlations for causation, typifies conspiracy theories. His appeal to the welfare of children also strikes a familiar chord, but it’s unsurprising in this case, given that “polio was a disease of children,” says René F. Najera, editor of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s History of Vaccines project, “so people were already afraid for their children.” Comparatively, COVID-19 “has largely left children alone … so we don’t mobilize as much.”
Keppler draws many other parallels between Miller’s personal anti-polio vaccine project and the efforts today to resist the COVID-19 vaccine, all representative of American anti-intellectualism and the well-funded will to disbelieve what the science clearly demonstrates. Miller distributed mailers in schools around Florida, accepted hundreds in donations, and printed thousands of pamphlets for distribution. He even offered to get injected with the polio virus to show that it was harmless. However, “federal charges ended Miller’s crusade,” when he was charged with “sending ‘libellous, scurrilous and defamatory’ statements through the mail” in 1954, the year Salk readied nationwide trials of the vaccine. Five years later, “U.S. polio cases were about 14 percent of what they were in 1952, thanks to vaccination,” not, as Miller would have the public believe, a change in diet. “Give us proper diets,” he continued to write to newspapers, “and we’ll solve the physical imperfections of Americans young and old.” He might have been on to a good argument about nutrition just by chance, but the public had no reason to listen to his opinions about polio simply because he could afford to circulate them.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An Opera Singer & Cabaret Artist Record an Astonishing Version of David Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure”
On the surface of things, Anthony Roth Costanzo, the internationally-recognized countertenor and Justin Vivian Bond, the subversive performance artist best known for their creation Kiki DuRane, “an alcoholic battle-axe with a throat full of razor-blades,” would have little reason to share a mic, let alone inhabit the same stage.
Leave surfaces behind!
Their genre-defying, just released album, Only An Octave Apart, explores the depths that lurk beneath them, finding common cause between their chosen art forms and then some. The album’s title, a nod to the opening number of a Metropolitan Opera television special starring comedian Carol Burnett and operatic soprano Beverly Sills, is just the tip of the iceberg.
As they state in the program notes for a recent appearance with the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center:
We each sound different from what you would expect when you look at us. The juxtaposition of our voices, personalities, and repertoire subverts notions of high and low, be it in terms of pitch, cultural echelon, or degrees of camp — not to mention the difference in height.
If you thought David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sent things into the stratosphere when they joined forces on “Under Pressure,” listen to Costanzo and Bond’s take, above.
Their Dido’s Lament / White Flag Medley smashes the musical binary with a delicacy that is given room to grow.
Costanzo begins with two and a half soaring minutes from Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas.
Introducing the number at Jazz at Lincoln Center, he recalled how Dido & Aeneas was one of his first professional opera gigs at 19. No, he wasn’t cast as the fatally distraught Queen of Carthage, a diva role he’s eyed for years, but rather the Second Woman and First Witch.
(“Second Woman / First Witch…sounds like the story of my life,” Bond marveled. “I own it! Can you imagine if you were First Woman and Second Witch?”)
Costanzo got his chance at Dido in the summer of 2020 when, with performance venues still closed due to the pandemic, he hatched an idea to cart Philharmonic musicians and guest singers around the city’s five Boroughs in a rented pickup dubbed the NY Phil Bandwagon. 80-some free performances later, he felt ready to record.
When Bond joins in, it’s with English singer-songwriter Dido’s 2003 chart topper, White Flag, which also speaks to the pains of love. The sincerity of the performers causes a gorgeous alchemical reaction to soften the positions of more than a few staunch opera-phobes and pop-deniers.
(“The wonderful thing about the opera,” Bond cracks, “is when you wake up, you’re at the opera!”)
Their Egyptian Sun mash up is born of an even cannier pairing — The Bangles’ mid-80s hit, Walk Like An Egyptian and Philip Glass’ ancient Egypt-themed minimalist modern opera, Akhnaten, in which Costanza recently starred, making his first entrance nude and flecked with gold.
Other treasures from this fruitful collaboration include skillful intertwinings of Tom Jobim’s Bossa nova favorite Águas de Março (Waters of March) with Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella-themed confection La Cenerentola, and Gluck’s 18th-century masterpiece, Orfeo ed Euridice with Don’t Give Up, a “message of hope in the bleakest of moments” and a hit for Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush when Bond was a year out of college…and Costanzo was four.
Listen to Only an Octave Apart in its entirety on YouTube or Spotify.
Anthony Ross Costanzo will reprise his role as the revolutionary pharaoh, Akhnaten, at the Metropolitan Opera later this spring.
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Tennessee School Board Bans Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize Winning Graphic Novel on the Holocaust; the Book Becomes #1 Bestseller on Amazon
Last week, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban Maus, the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, citing instances of profanity and nudity. Specifically, the McMinn County school board objected to utterances of the words “God damn” and a small, barely-perceptible breast. (Look closely, and you may eventually find it.) Rather uncomfortably, the banning came on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it figures into a larger right-leaning effort to ban books countrywide.
Happily, bad decisions can have good unintended consequences. In recent days, Art Spiegelman’s Maus has soared to #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. (Another edition of the book sits at #3 on the list.) Elsewhere, a college professor has created a free online course on Maus designed solely for students from McMinn County. And within Tennessee itself, bookstores are giving away free copies of Spiegelman’s classic, while a church has decided to convene conversations on the groundbreaking book.
Above, you can watch Spiegelman respond to the ban and wonder whether it’s “a harbinger of things to come,” a step in a larger effort to efface the memory of the Holocaust.
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Read More...How Pulp Fiction Uses the Socratic Method, the Philosophical Method from Ancient Greece
No sooner did Pulp Fiction open in theaters than its director, a young former video-store clerk named Quentin Tarantino, became the new auteur to beat. Drawing from a variety of cinematic traditions both high and low, Tarantino’s breakout film showed mainstream audiences things they’d never seen before, or at least in combinations they’d never seen before. Its dialogue in particular was often cited as an example of Tarantino’s sheer filmmaking vitality. And so it remains: recall how many times, over the past few decades, you’ve heard lines quoted just from the conversation early in Pulp Fiction between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s black-suited hit men Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield.
It’s thanks to this passage of Tarantino’s script that even Americans know the name of the French equivalent of McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. But a bit later, and with a bit more subtlety, it also demonstrated to viewers what’s known as the Socratic method. Such is the premise, anyway, of the Practicable video at the top of the post.
Named for its first practitioner, the peripatetic Greek of the fifth-century B.C. who has since lived in on dialogues composed by his student Plato, the Socratic method has come to be regarded as an effective means of getting to the truth through conversation, either with others or with oneself — or rather, as an effective means of getting away with falsehoods: false opinions, false convictions, false beliefs.
Socrates, says Practicable’s narrator, “would start off asking people for a definition of a term like wisdom, courage, or justice, and through repeatedly pointing out contradictions in their definition, and then the contradictions in their adjustments to their original definition, they would eventually reach a state of admitted ignorance.” Such a process occurs in Pulp Fiction when Vincent and Jules discuss their gangster boss Marsellus Wallace’s recent killing of a man who dared to give his wife a foot massage. “Jules believes Marsellus overreacted, and Vincent believes that Antoine Roccamora got what was coming to him. At this point, we see Vincent try to get to the root of why Jules thinks it was an overreaction.”
Consciously or unconsciously, Vincent does so using the Socratic method, which requires first establishing an argument, then raising an exception or contradiction, then re-formulating the argument, and repeating those steps as truth is approached or falsehood escaped. At issue is the inherently sexual nature of foot massages. By bringing out contradictions in Jules’ own beliefs about them — he gives them to his mother, he argues, though he also takes pride in his advanced technique, which he’s never applied to the feet of a man — Vincent “can finally establish that Marsellus’ use of violence was, in fact, justified.” The dialogue could continue, but Tarantino leaves it there, with Jules in the state of internal contradiction Socrates called aporia. After all, like most of Tarantino’s talkative characters, they’ve got a a job to do.
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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.
Read More...The 850 Books a Texas Lawmaker Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Students Feel Uncomfortable
“Who’s afraid of critical race theory?” asked lawyer, legal scholar and Harvard professor Derrick Bell in a 1995 essay. Bell helped pioneer the discipline in the 70s, and until recently, it remained mostly confined to academic journals, grad school seminars and the pages of progressive magazines. Now the phrase is everywhere. What happened? Did radical scholars force third graders to read footnotes? Or did conservatives show up fifty years late to a conversation, skip the reading, and decide the best way to respond was to lash out indiscriminately at every identity and civil rights issue that makes them uncomfortable, starting with kindergarten and working their way up? Maybe Bell’s question has answered itself.
In the recent moral panic over CRT, the term has become a denunciation, a shibboleth that can apply to any history, civics, or literature lesson broadly construed, whether taught through current events, fiction, poetry, memoir, nonfiction, or any material — to use the language of the “anti-CRT” Texas House Bill 3979 — that might make a student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Connections to Bell’s critical race theory are tenuous, at best. As Allyson Waller notes at the Texas Tribune, that academic discipline “is not being taught in K‑12 schools.”
This fact means little to right wing legislators, school board members and parents’ groups, who have found a convenient boogeyman on which to project their anxieties. What the Texas bill means in practice has been impossible to parse. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Emerson Sykes filed a federal suit over a similar law in Oklahoma, arguing that it’s “so vague,” as Michael Powell reports at The New York Times, “that it fails to provide reasonable legal guidance to teachers and could put jobs in danger.” A Black principal near Dallas has already been forced to resign in the anti-CRT panic, for writing a public letter after George Floyd’s death that declared, “Education is the key to stomping out ignorance, hate, and systemic racism.”
In another part of the state, a district-level executive director of curriculum has recommended teaching “other perspectives” on the Holocaust to meet the bill’s mandates. Teachers and administrators are not the only ones targeted by the bill and its supporters. “One minute they’re talking critical race theory,” says middle school librarian Carrie Damon. “Suddenly I’m hearing librarians are indoctrinating students. One library in Llano County, about 80 miles northwest of Austin, shut down for three days for a “thorough review” of every children’s book. At the statewide level, Texas Republican State Representative Matt Krause launched an anti-CRT witch-hunt, in advance of a run for State Attorney General, by emailing a list 850 books to state superintendents, asking if any of them appeared in their libraries.
The list, writes Danika Ellis at Book Riot, is “a bizarre assortment of titles, formatted in a way that suggests it’s copy-and-pasted from library listings.” It includes books about human rights, sex education, any and every LGBTQ topic, race, American history, and policing. Ironically, it also includes books about burning books and bullying (a problem causing student walkouts around the country). The books range from those for young children to middle and high school students and college-aged young adults. Most of them “were written by women, people of color and LGBTQ writers.” It also includes “a particularly puzzling choice,” writes Powell (probably a mistake?): Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, two authors who have made careers out of exposing what they allege are illegitimate “grievances” in academia.
You can see Krause’s full list here. The state rep’s “motive was unclear,” Powell writes, but it seems clear enough he wished to flag these books for possible removal. Given that critical race theory is not, in fact, a phrase that means “anything that makes conservatives feel guilty and/or uncomfortable” but is foremost a legal theory, we might ask legal questions like cui bono? – “who benefits” from banning the books on Krause’s list? Who feels uncomfortable and guilty when they read about racist policing, healthy gay relationships, or the civil rights movement– and why? Should that discomfort provide just cause for censorship and the violation of other students’ rights to quality educational material? How can the subjective standard of “comfort” be used to evaluate the educational value of a book?
Debates over free inquiry in education seem never to end. (Consider that the first book banned in Colonial North America mocked the Puritans, who themselves loved nothing more than banning things.) As we approach the question this time around, it seems we might have learned not to ban books under vague laws that empower bigots to hunt down an amorphous enemy so insidious it can lurk anywhere and everywhere. Such laws have their own history, too, in the U.S. and elsewhere. Nowhere have they led to a state of affairs most of us want, one free from violence, bigotry, discrimination and state repression — that is, unless we need such things to make us comfortable.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Makes Salvador Dalí’s Iconic Surrealist Painting “The Persistence of Memory” a Great Work of Art
Salvador Dalí painted melting clocks. This is not as drastic an oversimplification as it sounds: after first painting such a counterintuitive image, “Dalí, who knew the importance of branding, would use the melting clocks for his entire career.” So says no less an expert than James Payne, the gallerist and video essayist behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained. In its latest episode Payne takes on the unrelentingly prolific Dalí’s most famous canvas of all, The Persistence of Memory. Completed in 1931, this work of art has by now spent about half a century adorning the walls of college dorm rooms, among other spaces inhabited by viewers interested in the alteration of their own perceptive faculties.
The Persistence of Memory doesn’t mark Dalí’s first use of melting clocks, though it’s without doubt his most important. Yet “despite its huge cultural impact,” says Payne, the painting is “quite small, about the size of a sheet of paper.” Against the background of “a huge desert landscape with vast depths of field, reduced to a shrunken world” — one harboring references to Goya, De Chirico, and Bosch — it vividly realizes a moment in the process of metamorphosis.
“A key concept in the Surrealist movement,” metamorphosis is here “exemplified by the paradox of Dalí’s rendering of the hardest and most mechanical objects, watches, into a soft and flaccid form.” Like all of the artist’s best work, it thus “exploits the ambiguity of our perceptual process and plays with our own fears.” But what do the melting clocks mean?
That, to Dalí’s own mind, is the wrong question: “I am against any kind of message,” he declared in one of his many television appearances. Indeed, his frequent appearances on television (What’s My Line?, The Mike Wallace Interview, The Dick Cavett Show) and in other media assured that, at a certain point, “Dalí the artist had become a prisoner of Dalí the celebrity.” But his appearances in the spotlight also gave him the chance to disseminate the chaff of conflicting explanations of his own work. Perhaps the melting clocks refer to Einstein’s then-novel theory of relativity; perhaps they symbolize impotence. Or it may all come down to Dalí’s obsession with death, which even in 1931 had long since taken both his mother and the younger brother of whom he believed himself a reincarnation. In the event, Dalí couldn’t escape mortality. None of us can, of course, and that, as much as anything else, may illuminate why The Persistence of Memory never quite passes into the realm of kitsch.
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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.
Read More...Hear Haruki Murakami Play Beatles Covers on His Radio Show, Murakami Radio
Now ramping up to a wide release is a film that will draw in no few fans of Haruki Murakami around the world: Drive My Car, adapted by filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi from Murakami’s short story of the same name. That name itself comes, of course, from the Beatles song, their knockout opener to Rubber Soul. It wasn’t the first time Murakami had borrowed a title from the Fab Four. The novel that made him a household name, in his homeland of Japan and subsequently the rest of the world, was called Norwegian Wood.
The Beatles’ albums have also provided him with inspiration, as evidenced by his story “With the Beatles,” published in translation last year by The New Yorker. It takes place in 1965, when the Beatles had become hugely popular in not just the West but Japan as well. “Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs,” says the narrator. “I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits,” but “truth be told, I was never a fervent Beatles fan. I never actively sought out their songs. For me, it was passive listening, pop music flowing out of the tiny speakers of my Panasonic transistor radio.” Despite being a high-school, then college student in the 1960s, “I didn’t buy a single Beatles record. I was much more into jazz and classical music.”
This story is fictional; its narrator is not its author. Yet Murakami, who happened to come of age in the same era, made similar remarks about his experience with the Beatles a couple of years ago. His originally one-off session as a disc jockey on Tokyo FM has become a more or less full-fledged show, Murakami Radio. Each of its broadcasts he dedicates to a different musical theme, and it was thus only a matter of time before he got around to the Beatles.
Despite his early indifference, as Murakami explains between songs, he later, in his thirties, came to sense the genius of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, during a stay in Greece with their self-titled 1968 “White Album” on tape in his Walkman — which, despite lacking its title song, inspired him to start writing Norwegian Wood. Apart from that memory, the late-period Beatles figure only secondarily into Murakami’s “Beatles Night.” He focuses instead on their early, pre-Rubber Soul work, or rather, on a variety of lesser-known covers thereof.
If you listen to the actual broadcast on Japanese video-streaming site Niconico, you’ll also hear such additional Beatles covers as “Do You Want to Know a Secret” by Motown singer Mary Wells and “She Loves You” by Rita Lee of Brazilian rock titans Os Mutantes. Obviously, the appeal of the Beatles transcends cultural boundaries, as does that of the extensively translated Murakami. What explains it? Perhaps, in both cases, that they created their own genres — or rather, their own wondrous realities.
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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.
Read More...Watch John Cage’s 4′33″ Played by Musicians Around the World
Make sure to watch the video above with the sound on. In it musicians from around the world all play a well-known composition: 4′33″ by John Cage. “I spent weeks asking strangers on the internet to send me their radically different interpretations, and boy did they deliver,” writes the video’s creator Sam Vladimirsky. “My inbox filled with adaptations by an Austrian death metal band, a marimba player, a bunny rabbit, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Phoenix, a middle school music teacher, a version played on Guitar Hero and over Zoom.” Though originally composed for piano, 4′33″ is easily transposed to all these instruments and others, calling as it does for their players to do the very same thing: nothing.
“Inspired by Zen Buddhism, the Dada movement and Cage’s strong distaste for the ubiquitous muzak of the time,” says Aeon, “its score instructs performers not to play their instruments for the piece’s four-minute, thirty-three-second duration.” The result is not silence but “the unique ambient soundscape of the environment in which it’s performed, reflecting Cage’s belief that music is ever-present.”
Here the submitted performances take place in such environments as a classroom, a bedroom, a courtyard, a driveway, a bus, and a subway station. Vladimirsky pairs the videos, allowing us to enjoy not just parallel viewing experiences but a layered listening experience of these ambient soundscapes.
“Stuck inside,” writes Vladimirsky, “professional musicians, dedicated amateurs, awkward teens and college students found 4′33″ to be the music of our moment.” If the Rolling Stones could play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” in lockdown, each from his separate home, then who’s to say this isn’t the next logical step? Each performance of 4′33″ reflects not just its immediate setting but its cultural period: compare the clip just above, in which Cage himself plays it in Harvard Square in 1973. Most of us haven’t seen the inside of a concert hall in quite some time, let alone heard the ambient sounds produced within it in the absence of proper music. But each of us can, at least, perform 4′33″ for ourselves whenever and wherever we like — one way of doing it being simply to play the video at the top of the post with the sound off.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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