Great Depression Cooking: Get Budget-Minded Meals from the Online Cooking Show Created by 93-Year-Old Clara Cannucciari

in Food & Drink, History, Life | November 23rd, 2015

“The Depres­sion was not fun,” the late YouTube star, Clara Can­nuc­cia­ri, states in the very first episode of her Great Depres­sion Cook­ing web series, above. Her first recipe—Pasta with Peas—would like­ly give your aver­age urbane food­ie hives, as would her knife skills, but Clara, who start­ed mak­ing these videos when she was 93, takes obvi­ous sat­is­fac­tion in the out­come.

Her film­mak­er grand­son Christo­pher Can­nuc­cia­ri wise­ly kept Clara in her own kitchen, rather than relo­cat­ing her to a more san­i­tized kitchen set. Her plas­tic paper tow­el hold­er, linoleum lined cab­i­nets, and teapot-shaped spoon rest kept things real for sev­er­al years worth of step-by-step, low bud­get, most­ly veg­e­tar­i­an recipes.

Her fruit-and-ging­ham ceram­ic salt and pep­per shak­ers remained con­sis­tent through­out.

How many tele­vi­sion chefs can you name who would allow the cam­era crew to film the stained tin­foil lin­ing the bot­tom of their ovens?

Nona­ge­nar­i­an Clara appar­ent­ly had noth­ing to hide. Each episode includes a cou­ple of anec­dotes about life dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, the peri­od in which she learned to cook from her thrifty Ital­ian moth­er.

She ini­tial­ly dis­liked being filmed, agree­ing to the first episode only because that was grand­son Christopher’s price for shoot­ing a pre-need funer­al por­trait she desired. She turned out to be a nat­ur­al. Her celebri­ty even­tu­al­ly led to a cook­book (Clara’s Kitchen: Wis­dom, Mem­o­ries, and Recipes from the Great Depres­sion), as well as a video where­in she answered view­er ques­tions with char­ac­ter­is­tic frank­ness.

To what did she attribute her youth­ful appear­ance?

Clean liv­ing and large quan­ti­ties of olive oil (poured from a ves­sel the size and shape of a cof­fee pot).

How to avoid anoth­er Great Depres­sion?

“At my age, I don’t real­ly care,” Clara admit­ted, “But for the younger gen­er­a­tion it’s bad.” In the worst case sce­nario, she coun­sels stick­ing togeth­er, and not wish­ing for too much. The Depres­sion, as we’ve men­tioned, was not fun, but she got through it, and so, she implies, would you.

The series can be enjoyed on the strength of Clara’s per­son­al­i­ty alone, but Great Depres­sion Cook­ing has a lot to offer col­lege stu­dents, undis­cov­ered artists, and oth­er fledg­ling chefs.

Her recipes may not be pro­fes­sion­al­ly styled, but they’re sim­ple, nutri­tious, and unde­ni­ably cheap (espe­cial­ly Dan­de­lion Sal­ad).

Home­made Piz­za—Clara’s favorite—is the antithe­sis of a 99¢ slice.

The tight belts of the Great Depres­sion did not pre­clude the occa­sion­al treat like hol­i­day bis­cot­ti or Ital­ian Ice.

Those on a lean Thanks­giv­ing bud­get might con­sid­er mak­ing Clara’s Poor Man’s Feast: lentils and rice, thin­ly sliced fried steak, plain sal­ad and bread.

Right up until her final, touch­ing appear­ance below at the age of 96, her hands were nim­ble enough to shell almonds, pur­chased that way to save mon­ey, though crack­ing also put her in a hol­i­day mood. Food­ies who shud­der at Pas­ta with Peas should find no fault with her whole­some recipe for her mother’s home­made toma­to sauce (and by exten­sion, paste).

You can watch all of Clara’s video’s on the Great Depres­sion Cook­ing chan­nel. Or find Sea­sons 1 and 2 below.

Sea­son 1:

Sea­son 2:

Sea­son 3:

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Harvard’s Free Course on Mak­ing Cakes, Pael­la & Oth­er Deli­cious Food

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once (Free Online Course)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She recent­ly co-authored a com­ic about epilep­sy with her 18-year-old daugh­ter. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Punk & Heavy Metal Music Makes Listeners Happy and Calm, Not Aggressive, According to New Australian Study

in Music, Psychology | November 13th, 2015

Cre­ative Com­mons pho­to by Met­al Chris

In My Day, so much of the music we lis­tened to seemed angri­er, more rau­cous and unruly—more aggres­sive and plain­ly evil—than music today. Not that I have any hard evi­dence for these asser­tions; cus­tom­ar­i­ly none is required for an In My Day rant. But I sub­mit to you this: all that musi­cal rage, in my opin­ion, was a good thing.

And it seems at least in this case, I can sub­stan­ti­ate my opin­ion with sci­ence. This past sum­mer, we report­ed on a study done by researchers at Hum­boldt State, Ohio State, UC River­side, and UT Austin show­ing that kids who lis­tened to heavy met­al in the 80s were “sig­nif­i­cant­ly hap­pi­er in their youth and bet­ter adjust­ed cur­rent­ly than either mid­dle-aged or cur­rent col­lege-age youth com­par­i­son groups.” Despite heat­ed debates in the 80s and 90s over objec­tion­able lyri­cal con­tent in both pop­u­lar and alter­na­tive music (remem­ber the “Cop Killer” con­tro­ver­sy?), researchers con­clud­ed that angry rock did­n’t turn peo­ple into alien­at­ed mani­acs. Instead, they found, “par­tic­i­pa­tion in fringe style cul­tures may enhance iden­ti­ty devel­op­ment in trou­bled youth.”

Now, even more recent research into the effects of angry hard­core punk and met­al on the psy­ches of young peo­ple seems to con­firm these results and fur­ther sug­gest that aggres­sive music has a para­dox­i­cal­ly calm­ing effect. In a study titled “Extreme met­al music and anger pro­cess­ing,” Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land psy­chol­o­gists Leah Shar­man and Genevieve Din­gle describe how they sub­ject­ed “39 extreme music lis­ten­ers aged 18–34 years of age” to “anger induc­tion,” dur­ing which time, writes Con­se­quence of Sound, “they talked about such irri­tat­ing things as rela­tion­ships, mon­ey, and work.” Once the test sub­jects were good and stressed, Shar­man and Din­gle had them lis­ten either to a “ran­dom assign­ment” of “extreme music from their own playlist” for ten min­utes or to ten min­utes of silence.

As uni­ver­si­ty pub­li­ca­tion UQ News sum­ma­rizes, “In con­trast to pre­vi­ous stud­ies link­ing loud and chaot­ic music to aggres­sion and delin­quen­cy,” this study “showed lis­ten­ers most­ly became inspired and calmed” by their met­al. “The music helped them explore the full gamut of emo­tion they felt,” says Shar­man, “but also left them feel­ing more active and inspired.” The researchers also pro­vide a brief his­to­ry of what they call “extreme music” and define it in terms of sev­er­al gen­res and sub­gen­res:

Fol­low­ing the rise of punk and heavy met­al, a range of new gen­res and sub­gen­res sur­faced. Hard­core, death met­al, emo­tion­al/e­mo­tion­al-hard­core (emo), and screamo appeared through­out the 1980s, grad­u­al­ly becom­ing more a part of main­stream cul­ture. Each of these gen­res and their sub­gen­res are socio-polit­i­cal­ly charged and, as men­tioned ear­li­er, are char­ac­ter­ized by heavy and pow­er­ful sounds with expres­sive vocals.

“At the fore­front of [the] con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing extreme music,” they write, “is the promi­nence of aggres­sive lyrics and titles.” In addi­tion­al exper­i­ments, Shar­man and Din­gle found that “vio­lent lyrics” did increase “par­tic­i­pants’ state hos­til­i­ty,” but the effect was fleet­ing. Against pre­vail­ing assump­tions that angry-sound­ing, aggres­sive music caus­es or cor­re­lates with depres­sion, vio­lence, self-harm, sub­stance abuse, or sui­cide, the Queens­land researchers found exact­ly the opposite—that “extreme music” alle­vi­at­ed lis­ten­ers’ “angst and aggres­sion,” made them hap­pi­er, calmer, and bet­ter able to cope with the anger-induc­ing stres­sors that sur­round us all.

via Con­se­quence of Sound

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are All Right: New Study Sug­gests They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

New Research Shows How Music Lessons Dur­ing Child­hood Ben­e­fit the Brain for a Life­time

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

This is Your Brain on Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: The Neu­ro­science of Cre­ativ­i­ty

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

Hear the Writing of French Theorists Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Kenneth Goldsmith

in Comedy, Philosophy | November 10th, 2015

Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard, Roland Barthes… to my fresh­man ears, the names of these French the­o­rists sound­ed like pass­words to an occult world of strange and for­bid­ding ideas. I start­ed col­lege in the mid-90s, when Eng­lish depart­ments glee­ful­ly claimed post­struc­tural­ism as their birthright. Aca­d­e­m­ic cam­paigns against the fuzzy log­ic of these thinkers had not yet gath­ered much steam, though con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture war­riors were already on the warpath against post­mod­ernism. Very short­ly after my intro­duc­tion to French post­struc­tural­ist thought, ana­lyt­i­cal pos­i­tivists launched for­mi­da­ble cam­paigns to ban­ish crit­i­cal the­o­ry to the mar­gins.

The back­lash against obscu­ran­tist the­o­ry made a good case, with pub­lic sham­ings like the “Sokal Hoax” and Phi­los­o­phy and Lit­er­a­ture’s Bad Writ­ing Con­test. Such dis­plays made the work of many Euro­pean philoso­phers and their adher­ents seem indeed—as Noam Chom­sky said of Der­ri­da, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Lacan—like so much vac­u­ous “pos­tur­ing.” But as potent as these cri­tiques may be, I’ve nev­er cared much for them; they seem to miss the point of more cre­ative kinds of the­o­ry, which is not, I think (as phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Eric Schwitzgebel alleges) “intel­lec­tu­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism and cow­ardice,” but instead an explorato­ry attempt to expand the rigid bound­aries of lan­guage and cog­ni­tion, and to enact the mean­der­ings of dis­cur­sive thought in prose that cap­tures its “errantry” (to take a term from Mar­tini­quan poet, nov­el­ist, and aca­d­e­m­ic Edouard Glis­sant.)

In any case, the debate was not new at all, but only a lat­er iter­a­tion of the old Continental/Analytic divide that has long pit­ted expo­nents of Anglo­phone clar­i­ty against the some­times awk­ward prose of thinkers like Kant and Hegel. And I hap­pen to think that Kant, Hegel, and, yes, even lat­er Con­ti­nen­tals like Derrida—despite the delib­er­ate obscu­ri­ty of their writing—are inter­est­ing thinkers who deserve to be read. They even deserve to be sung, bad­ly, by poets—namely by con­cep­tu­al poet Ken­neth Gold­smith, who is also found­ing edi­tor of Ubuweb, senior edi­tor of PennSound, and one­time host of a radio show on glo­ri­ous­ly weird, free-form radio sta­tion WFMU.

With his nat­ty sense of style and seri­ous appre­ci­a­tion for absur­di­ty, Gold­smith has sung to lis­ten­ers the work of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, and Sig­mund Freud; he has giv­en us an avant-garde musi­cal ren­di­tion of Har­ry Pot­ter; and he has turned selec­tions of Theodor Adorno’s grim Min­i­ma Moralia into 80s hard­core punk. Now, we bring you more of Goldsmith’s musi­cal inter­ven­tions: his goof­ball singing of Der­ri­da over an icy min­i­mal­ist com­po­si­tion by Anton Webern (top); of Bau­drillard over a lounge-pop instru­men­tal by Fran­cis Lai (mid­dle); and of Roland Barthes over the All­man Broth­ers (above).

As an added bonus, if you can call it that, hear Gold­smith war­ble Marx­ist the­o­rist Fred­er­ic Jame­son over Coltrane, just above. Do these ridicu­lous musi­cal exer­cis­es make these thinkers any eas­i­er to digest? I doubt it. But they do seem to say to the many haters of crit­i­cal the­o­ry and post­mod­ern French phi­los­o­phy, “hey, light­en up, will ya?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

The The­o­ry of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein & Sig­mund Freud Sung by Ken­neth Gold­smith

30 Min­utes of Har­ry Pot­ter Sung in an Avant-Garde Fash­ion by UbuWeb’s Ken­neth Gold­smith

Theodor Adorno’s Crit­i­cal The­o­ry Text Min­i­ma Moralia Sung as Hard­core Punk Songs

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

An Animated Kurt Vonnegut Visits NYU, Riffs, Rambles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970)

in Animation, Literature | November 10th, 2015

Kurt Von­negut nev­er grad­u­at­ed from col­lege, but that did­n’t stop him from vis­it­ing col­lege class­rooms, or from giv­ing com­mence­ment speech­es (nine of which were pub­lished last year in a vol­ume called If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young). If you’ve expe­ri­enced a Von­negut speech, you know he had a ten­den­cy to riff and ram­ble. But he also enter­tained and edu­cat­ed. Above, the lat­est video from Blank on Blank cap­tures the essence of a Von­negut class­room vis­it, ani­mat­ing a talk the author gave to a class at NYU on Novem­ber 8, 1970. Top­ics include: the para­noia that goes into writ­ing and the exhaus­tion it brings about, his child­hood in Indi­ana, the death of his par­ents, and his odd con­cept for a new short sto­ry called “The Big Space Fuc%,” which fea­tures a war­head filled with sperm. It leaves the kids a lit­tle stunned.

The full talk orig­i­nal­ly aired on WBAI 99.5 FM New York and now resides in the Paci­fi­ca Radio Archives. You can lis­ten to the full, unedit­ed tape below.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? For exam­ple, John Malkovich read­ing Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons? Or James Fran­co read­ing Slaugh­ter­house-Five? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaughterhouse-Five,Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Kurt Von­negut Cre­ates a Report Card for His Nov­els, Rank­ing Them From A+ to D

New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haruki Murakami Stories Is Coming Your Way: Help Kickstart It

in Literature, Video Games | November 4th, 2015

Back in grade school, I got into the genre of com­put­er games known as “graph­ic adven­tures,” nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ences — and often quite elab­o­rate ones — through which the play­er guides the pro­tag­o­nist with points and clicks: games like Mani­ac Man­sion, Space Quest, Mean Streets, Zak McCrack­en and the Alien Mind­ben­ders. In col­lege I got into the writ­ing of Haru­ki Muraka­mi, the inter­na­tion­al super­star of Japan­ese lit­er­a­ture spe­cial­iz­ing in the kind of sto­ries that, in his words, have under­gone “a kind of mag­i­cal bap­tism to link the world on this side with the world on the oth­er side.” More recent­ly, I’ve cul­ti­vat­ed an inter­est in projects crowd­fund­ed on plat­forms like Kick­starter. At long last, some­one has come up with a cre­ation that unites all three: Mem­o­randa, a Muraka­mi-inspired graph­ic adven­ture now rais­ing its bud­get on Kick­starter.

“Three years ago I sat down with a friend to brain­storm for mak­ing a game,” writes one of Mem­o­ran­da’s devel­op­ers. Murakami’s work “had inspired us pro­found­ly and we thought that the vague, sur­re­al­is­tic real­i­ty of his fic­tion­al world would have a great poten­tial for being turned into some­thing visu­al and could lead to the cre­ation of odd char­ac­ters, an essen­tial ele­ment in game design.” This led to a “script inspired by more than 20 sto­ries by Muraka­mi” involv­ing a lit­tle town (which has “Euro­pean-like archi­tec­ture but that does­n’t mean it belongs to some­where in Europe”) “where there are both lap­tops and bam­boo water clocks,” a cast of char­ac­ters from “a WWII sur­viv­ing sol­dier to an ele­phant tak­ing shel­ter in a man’s house hop­ing to become human,” and a pro­tag­o­nist “who lit­tle by lit­tle real­izes she is for­get­ting her own name.”

Kick­starter has proven a viable financ­ing medi­um for a new wave of graph­ic adven­ture games, some of them by the cre­ators of the old wave: Tim Schafer, known for Mani­ac Man­sion’s beloved sequel Day of the Ten­ta­cle, raised $3.3 mil­lion for what would become Bro­ken Age, and Space Quest mas­ter­minds Scott Mur­phy and Mark Crowe more recent­ly reunit­ed to raise over $500,000 for SpaceVen­ture. Mem­o­ran­da, by com­par­i­son, requires no more than a shoe­string, and, with ten days to go in its fund­ing dri­ve, it has already raised more than the $13,695 request­ed by Bit Byterz, its Van­cou­ver-based Iran­ian devel­op­ers (how’s that for a demon­stra­tion of Murakami’s glob­al appeal?). But you can still con­tribute at its Kick­starter page, and as a reward could get a copy of the game, its sound­track, a dig­i­tal art book, or even — enthu­si­asts of Muraka­mi tropes, take note — the inclu­sion of your own cat in the sto­ry. No game com­pa­ny ever offered me that in grade school.

You can watch a trail­er for Mem­o­ran­da above.

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

Haru­ki Murakami’s Advice Col­umn (“Mr. Murakami’s Place”) Is Now Online: Read Eng­lish Trans­la­tions

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Dis­cov­er Haru­ki Murakami’s Adver­to­r­i­al Short Sto­ries: Rare Short-Short Fic­tion from the 1980s

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

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

Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Compelling Poems

in Audio Books, Poetry | October 27th, 2015

No mat­ter how casu­al a rela­tion­ship you’ve had with 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can poet­ry, you’ve heard the name Sylvia Plath. Maybe you’ve already dared to expe­ri­ence her dark but com­pelling lit­er­ary world, or maybe you just know a few of the basic ele­ments of her life and career: her auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el The Bell Jar, her famous­ly har­row­ing poet­ry col­lec­tion Ariel, her stormy mar­riage to British poet lau­re­ate Ted Hugh­es, her death by her own hand at the age of thir­ty. But what bet­ter day than today, the 83rd anniver­sary of Plath’s birth, to get bet­ter acquaint­ed with her work?

And what bet­ter way than to hear that work read in Plath’s own voice? Sure, you could just pick up one of the many yel­lowed mass-mar­ket paper­back copies of Ariel you see on book­shelves all across Amer­i­ca and plunge in, but you might first con­sid­er turn­ing to our archives, which con­tain a 2013 post in which we fea­tured Plath read­ing fif­teen poems that would appear in the Ariel col­lec­tion that, pub­lished two years after her death (“left sit­ting on the kitchen table to be found along with her body,” not­ed Josh Jones), would raise her poet­ic rep­u­ta­tion to new heights. You can hear the first part of these read­ings, record­ed in 1962, at the top of this post, and the rest at this orig­i­nal post.

We might feel lucky that, in her short life, she left even those per­for­mances for pos­ter­i­ty, but there’s more: last year, we fea­tured Sylvia Plath read­ing her poet­ry, the 1977 record released by pio­neer­ing pre-audio­book label Caed­mon which con­tains 23 poems Plath com­mit­ted to tape as ear­ly as 1959. Find all of the read­ings here.

If these two audio col­lec­tions give you a taste for the poet biog­ra­ph­er Carl Rollyson called “the Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe of mod­ern lit­er­a­ture,” have a lis­ten to Cre­do Records’ album Sylvia Plath, which offers some mate­r­i­al you’ll have heard along­side some you won’t have. Hav­ing lis­tened to all this, you’ll hard­ly asso­ciate the adjec­tive “cel­e­bra­to­ry” with Plath’s work — but that does­n’t mean that, on what would have been her 83rd birth­day, poet­ry-lovers can’t cel­e­brate it.

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:

Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fif­teen Poems From Her Final Col­lec­tion, Ariel, in 1962 Record­ing

The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revis­it Her Sketch­es, Self-Por­traits, Draw­ings & Illus­trat­ed Let­ters

Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poet­ry: 23 Poems from the Last 6 Years of Her Life

Sylvia Plath, Girl Detec­tive Offers a Hilar­i­ous­ly Cheery Take on the Poet’s Col­lege Years

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

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Freddie Mercury’s Final Video Performance

in Music | October 26th, 2015

How­ev­er you feel about Bri­an May and Roger Tay­lor of Queen reform­ing recent­ly under the band’s name with Amer­i­can Idol run­ner-up Adam Lam­bert on vocals, the band has stat­ed on sev­er­al occa­sions that they nev­er intend­ed to replace Fred­die Mer­cury. “[Lam­bert] inter­prets the songs the way he inter­prets them which is won­der­ful,” May has remarked, “We want­ed him to be him­self.” Fair enough. But even if Queen had want­ed to replace Mer­cury after his death from AIDS com­pli­ca­tions in 1991, the task would have proved impos­si­ble. No one sounds like Fred­die Mer­cury, no one com­mands a stage like he did, and no one writes like him either, with his unique mix of raunchy, fun­ny, quirky, can­did, and deeply heart­felt lyri­cism.

“Moth­er Love,” the last song Mer­cury record­ed—at the band’s Mon­treux stu­dio—con­tains some of the most painful of Mercury’s lyrics, an expres­sion of his desire “for peace before I die.” In what we can’t help but hear in hind­sight as a direct ref­er­ence to his ill­ness, Mer­cury sings, “My body’s aching, but I can’t sleep… I’m com­ing home to my sweet / Moth­er love.” The inher­ent pathos of “Moth­er Love,” per­vades the posthu­mous­ly-released 1995 album Made in Heav­en, but the song that most seemed to define Fred­die Mer­cury imme­di­ate­ly after his death is also a rumi­na­tion on mor­tal­i­ty. Shot through with nos­tal­gia, remorse, and expres­sions of the brevi­ty of life, “These Are the Days of Our Lives”—from Innu­en­do, the last album the band released dur­ing Mercury’s lifetime—laments, “you can’t turn back the clock, you can turn back the tide.” Long­ing for child­hood lost, Mer­cury sings, “the rest of my life’s been just a show.” Maybe so, but what a show it was, even in the band’s final video, above, shot in black-and-white to hide Mercury’s frail con­di­tion.

At the top of the post, you can see behind-the-scenes footage of Mer­cury from the “These Are the Days of Our Lives” video shoot, dis­cov­ered, writes The Inde­pen­dent, “dur­ing a five-year trawl through the Queen archives by Rhys Thomas, the com­e­dy actor,” who co-pro­duced the BBC Two doc­u­men­tary, Queen: Days of Our Lives. “The footage of Fred­die in his final video,” says Thomas, “is shock­ing. He is so frail, he needs two hands to hold a cham­pagne glass. But he knows he is being filmed and wants to show peo­ple what he was going through.” Bri­an May remem­bers Mer­cury spend­ing “hours and hours in make-up sort­ing him­self out so it’d be OK. He actu­al­ly says a kind of good­bye in the video.”

A con­sum­mate per­former to the end, Mer­cury was deter­mined to work until he couldn’t, record­ing new mate­r­i­al until days before his death. In the full-col­or film from the “These Are the Days of Our Lives” shoot, we see him study­ing and cri­tiquing footage of him­self, ful­ly engaged in the cre­ation of what he like­ly knew would be his final per­for­mance. He had cer­tain­ly come a long way from the shy school­boy he was before Queen brought him inter­na­tion­al celebri­ty and acclaim. In the poignant video above, we see what is like­ly the first footage of the young man then known as Fred­die Bul­sara. The film shows Mer­cury in 1964—the year his fam­i­ly migrat­ed to Eng­land from Zanzibar—with school mates at Isle­worth Poly­tech­nic (new West Thames Col­lege). It would be anoth­er six years before Mer­cury would meet May and Tay­lor and form the band that defined the rest of the days of his life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fred­die Mer­cury, Live Aid (1985)

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

The Mak­ing of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit “Under Pres­sure”: Demos, Stu­dio Ses­sions & More

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

Free Course: An Introduction to the Art of the Italian Renaissance

in Art, Online Courses | October 12th, 2015

In 43 lec­tures, Dr. Vida Hull offers an intro­duc­tion to the art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance. Packed with slides of great paint­ings, the lec­tures (all stream­able above or avail­able indi­vid­u­al­ly here), cov­er painters like Masac­cio and Bot­ti­cel­li, Tit­ian, da Vin­ci, Raphael, Michelan­ge­lo and more. Hull, who taught the course at East Ten­nessee State, earned her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr Col­lege. Her course has been added to the Art His­to­ry sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Dis­cov­er 100 Great Works of Art with Videos Cre­at­ed by Khan Acad­e­my & Google Art Project

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Initiative

in Education | October 8th, 2015

If you want to pre­pare for a career prac­tic­ing law, you could do much worse than join­ing Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s debate team. But if, far on the oth­er end of the spec­trum of the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than col­lege, you need not relin­quish your dreams of excelling at this tra­di­tion­al intel­lec­tu­al sport. We now have the prece­dent to prove it: “Months after win­ning a nation­al title,” reports the Guardian’s Lau­ren Gam­bi­no, “Harvard’s debate team has fall­en to a group of New York prison inmates.”

“The show­down,” which revolved around the ques­tion of whether pub­lic schools should be allowed to turn away undoc­u­ment­ed stu­dents, “took place at the East­ern cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty in New York, a max­i­mum-secu­ri­ty prison where con­victs can take cours­es taught by fac­ul­ty from near­by Bard Col­lege, and where inmates have formed a pop­u­lar debate club.” They call this pro­gram the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard Col­lege degree (through a non-voca­tion­al “lib­er­al arts cur­ricu­lum, includ­ing lit­er­a­ture, for­eign lan­guage, phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry and the social sci­ences, math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, and the arts”) at satel­lite cam­pus­es estab­lished in six New York state pris­ons. You can see this selec­tive, rig­or­ous and high­ly unusu­al edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion in action in the Wash­ing­ton Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour pro­file below.

The Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive’s debate vic­to­ry over Har­vard made for a notable event in the pro­gram’s his­to­ry indeed. “But it’s also worth point­ing out,” writes Peter Hol­ley, author of the Post arti­cle, “the fal­la­cy of our under­ly­ing assump­tions about such a matchup — the first (and most per­ni­cious) being that crim­i­nals aren’t smart. If a defin­i­tive link between crim­i­nal­i­ty and below-aver­age intel­li­gence exists, nobody has found it.” The Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive has oper­at­ed on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s pre­vi­ous high-pro­file win saw it beat­ing that of West Point — all, you may hard­ly believe, through old-fash­ioned research, with­out any kind of access to the inter­net. If you’d like to leave your con­do­lences for the Har­vard Col­lege Debat­ing Union, you may do so at their Face­book page. You can also make a worth­while finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion to the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Bald­win Debates Mal­colm X (1963) and William F. Buck­ley (1965): Vin­tage Video & Audio

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

1902 French Trading Cards Imagine “Women of the Future”

in History, Photography | October 7th, 2015

The lag time between our imag­in­ing of social equal­i­ty and its arrival can be sig­nif­i­cant­ly long indeed, or it least it can seem so, giv­en the lim­i­ta­tions of human mor­tal­i­ty. 113 years may not be an espe­cial­ly long time for a tree, say, or even a very healthy Gala­pa­gos tor­toise, but if you or I had been alive in 1902, chances are we’d nev­er know that in 2015 the pres­i­dent of Europe’s most pow­er­ful nation is a woman, as are two major pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates in the Unit­ed States. Giv­en the amount of inequal­i­ty we still see world­wide, this may not always feel like a tri­umph. In 1902, it might have seemed like “noth­ing but fan­ta­sy.”

And yet even then, it was cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble to fore­see women occu­py­ing all the roles that men did, through the lens­es, writes Lau­ra Hud­son at Boing Boing, of “fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion,” which “can often help us open our minds behind the lim­i­ta­tions of the world we live in and imag­ine a bet­ter one instead.” In 1902, artist Albert Berg­eret was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the trad­ing cards you see here—just a small selec­tion of twen­ty total pho­tographs called “Les Femmes de l’Avenir”—Women of the Future. Only one theme among many in a series of dif­fer­ent sets of cards, this “retro­fu­tur­is­tic attempt to expand the role of women in soci­ety” showed us a “small and fash­ion­able world” where “women were giv­en a more equal role in soci­ety, not to men­tion spec­tac­u­lar hats.”

That may be so, but just as we can nev­er accu­rate­ly see the future, we can also nev­er reach con­sen­sus on the mean­ing of the past. The Dai­ly Mail’s Maysa Rawi agrees with Hud­son about the “pin-up qual­i­ty to many of the images,” which show “an awful lot of arm.”  And yet Rawi dis­par­ages the entire set as “meant to cap­ture men’s fan­tasies rather than be part of any fem­i­nist move­ment.” I’ll admit, I don’t see the cards this way at all, nor do I think the cat­e­gories are mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. Pin-up girls have also rep­re­sent­ed social pow­er, albeit main­ly sex­u­al pow­er. Scant­i­ly-clad female super­heroes like Won­der Woman, though craft­ed to appeal to the fan­tasies of teenage boys, are also pow­er­ful because… well, they have super­pow­ers.

Per­haps that’s one way to look at Bergeret’s cards. He is not mock­ing his sub­jects, nor hyper-sex­u­al­iz­ing them, but pre­sent­ing, as each card indi­cates, advanced futur­is­tic beings who didn’t yet exist in his time. The Dai­ly Mail cap­tions sev­er­al of the pho­tos with fac­toids about women’s advances in French his­to­ry. In some cas­es, Berg­eret did not have to extrap­o­late far. Women could prac­tice law in 1900; women served in the army dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, but did not fight. Col­leges had been open to women since 1879. A few women worked as doc­tors and jour­nal­ists in Bergeret’s time. Marie Curie, you’ll recall, had dis­cov­ered polo­ni­um, coined the term “radioac­tiv­i­ty,”  and would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Queen Vic­to­ria had ruled over half the world.

But French women would have to wait sev­er­al more decades to enter most of the pro­fes­sions rep­re­sent­ed. No mat­ter how sexy—and in some cas­es ridiculous—some of the cos­tumes in these pho­tos, Berg­eret shot the mod­els with poise, style, and dig­ni­ty. Per­haps he and many in his audi­ence could eas­i­ly imag­ine female gen­er­als, may­ors, fire­women, sol­diers, etc. Yet one par­tic­u­lar card stands out. It por­trays a self-sat­is­fied, Bohemi­an mod­el labeled “rapin”—which a read­er below informs us is “an argot word for (bad) painter.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

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