John Cage Performs Water Walk on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)

in Art, Music, Television | December 18th, 2014

Back in 2011, we fea­tured John Cage’s 1960 tele­vi­sion per­for­mance of his piece Water Walk. Its video qual­i­ty may have left some­thing to be desired, but now, thanks to the YouTube chan­nel of Bard Col­lege’s Richard B. Fish­er Cen­ter for the Per­form­ing Arts, you can watch the entire ten-minute seg­ment in much crisper qual­i­ty than most sur­viv­ing pro­grams from that era. This unlike­ly hap­pen­ing occurred on I’ve Got a Secret, the long-run­ning occu­pa­tion-guess­ing game show whose guest ros­ter also includ­ed chess prodi­gy Bob­by Fis­ch­er, “fifth Bea­t­le” Pete Best, and fried-chick­en icon Colonel Har­land Sanders. For this par­tic­u­lar episode, we wrote in our ear­li­er post, “the TV show offered Cage some­thing of a teach­able moment, a chance to intro­duce the broad­er pub­lic to his brand of avant-garde music.”

For Water Walk, Cage round­ed up a vari­ety of “instru­ments” all to do with that liq­uid — a bath­tub, a pitch­er, ice cubes in a mix­er — and the uncon­ven­tion­al sym­pho­ny they pro­duce cul­mi­nates in the Rube Gold­ber­gian mix­ing of a drink, the sip­ping of which the com­po­si­tion dic­tates about two and a half min­utes in. Nat­u­ral­ly, Cage being Cage, the piece incor­po­rates audi­ence reac­tion nois­es; when host Gary Moore warns him that cer­tain mem­bers of the stu­dio audi­ence will laugh, Cage responds, “I con­sid­er laugh­ter bet­ter than tears.”

You can learn more about this inter­sec­tion of far for­ward-think­ing artistry and the mid­cen­tu­ry tele­vi­su­al main­stream in Lau­ra Paolin­i’s piece “John Cage’s Secret,” avail­able at johncage.org. “At that moment in 1960, a rup­ture was being deep­ened,” Paoli­ni writes. “High art and low were becom­ing more and more com­fort­able with one anoth­er over the air­waves. At this moment, as the screens glow their blue auras into the homes of North Amer­i­ca, every­one sees some­thing they haven’t seen before. And every­one has an opin­ion about it.” And those opin­ions, I like to think Cage would have said, only extend the art fur­ther.

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:

John Cage Per­forms Water Walk on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1960)

10 Rules for Stu­dents and Teach­ers Pop­u­lar­ized by John Cage

Lis­ten to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Mat­ters Worse)

Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Watch a Sur­pris­ing­ly Mov­ing Per­for­mance of John Cage’s 1948 “Suite for Toy Piano”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Animated Introductions to Quantum Mechanics: From Schrödinger’s Cat to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

in Animation, Physics | December 9th, 2014

If you nev­er quite got a hang of quan­tum mechan­ics, you can take anoth­er run at it by watch­ing four ani­mat­ed Ted-Ed primers, cre­at­ed by Chad Orzel, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Physics and Astron­o­my at Union Col­lege. He’s also the author of How to Teach Quan­tum Physics to Your Dog. In Par­ti­cles and waves: The cen­tral mys­tery of quan­tum mechan­ics (above), Orzel briefly traces the con­cep­tu­al devel­op­ment of quan­tum mechan­ics, high­light­ing the con­tri­bu­tions of physi­cists like Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Louis de Broglie.

Next up, Orzel tack­les the famous thought exper­i­ment known as Schrödinger’s cat, devised, of course, by the Nobel-prize win­ning Aus­tri­an physi­cist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. For anoth­er primer on this top­ic, you should also check out this les­son pre­sent­ed by Six­ty Sym­bols, a web site spe­cial­iz­ing in physics and astron­o­my videos host­ed by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham. The two remain­ing videos in Orzel’s series appear below.

Ein­stein’s bril­liant mis­take: Entan­gled states

What is the Heisen­berg Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple?

via Ted-ED

Relat­ed Con­tent:

64 Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

“Do Sci­en­tists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Ein­stein in 1936. Ein­stein Then Responds.

New Archive Puts 1000s of Einstein’s Papers Online, Includ­ing This Great Let­ter to Marie Curie

Future Shock: Orson Welles Narrates a 1972 Film About the Perils of Technological Change

in Film | December 5th, 2014

The begin­ning of the 1972 doc­u­men­tary Future Shock, direct­ed by Alex Grasshof, shows Orson Welles, beard­ed and chomp­ing on a cig­ar, stand­ing on an air­port peo­ple mover. He turns to the cam­era and deliv­ers a mono­logue in his trade­mark silken bari­tone. “In the course of my work, which has tak­en me to just about every cor­ner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phe­nom­e­non which I’m just begin­ning to under­stand. Our mod­ern tech­nolo­gies have changed the degree of sophis­ti­ca­tion beyond our wildest dreams. But this tech­nol­o­gy has exact­ed a pret­ty heavy price. We live in an age of anx­i­ety and time of stress. And with all our sophis­ti­ca­tion, we are in fact the vic­tims of our own tech­no­log­i­cal strengths –- we are the vic­tims of shock… a future shock.”

The doc­u­men­tary itself is won­der­ful­ly dat­ed. From its bizarre open­ing mon­tage; to its sound­track, which lurch­es from ear­ly elec­tron­ic music to jazz funk; to some endear­ing video spe­cial effects, which, for what­ev­er rea­son, most­ly cen­ters around Orson Welles’s head, the film feels thor­ough­ly root­ed in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Yet many of the ideas dis­cussed in the movie are, if any­thing, more rel­e­vant now than in the 1970s.

The term “future shock” was invent­ed in Alvin Tof­fler’s huge­ly best­selling book of the same name to describe the con­stant, bewil­der­ing bar­rage of new tech­nolo­gies and all the result­ing soci­etal changes those tech­nolo­gies bring about. Any­one who has strug­gled to com­pre­hend a new, baf­fling and sup­pos­ed­ly essen­tial social media plat­form, any­one who has been dri­ven to paral­y­sis over the num­ber of choic­es on Net­flix, any­one who found their liveli­hood dec­i­mat­ed because of a hot new app knows what “future shock” is.

Tof­fler (along with his wife and uncred­it­ed co-writer Hei­di Tof­fler) argued that we are in the midst of a mas­sive struc­tur­al change from an indus­tri­al soci­ety to a post-indus­tri­al one – a soci­ety that bog­gles the mind with an over­load of infor­ma­tion and an over­load of con­sumer choic­es. “Change,” as they wrote, “is the only con­stant.”

Along the way, the Tof­flers man­aged to pre­dict the col­lapse of Amer­i­ca’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, along with things like Prozac, temp jobs, the inter­net and the mete­oric rise and fall of ins­ta-celebs (Alex from Tar­get, we hard­ly knew you.) Oth­er pre­dic­tions – under­wa­ter cities, paper clothes and being able to choose your own skin col­or – haven’t yet come to pass. Still, they had a sur­pris­ing­ly good track record con­sid­er­ing these pre­dic­tions were writ­ten over four decades ago.

The video ends with a plea from not Welles, but Tof­fler him­self, who is seen address­ing col­lege stu­dents.

If we can rec­og­nize that indus­tri­al­ism is not the only pos­si­ble form of tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, if we can begin to think more imag­i­na­tive­ly about the future, then we can pre­vent future shock and we can use tech­nol­o­gy itself to build a decent, demo­c­ra­t­ic and humane soci­ety. […] We can no longer allow tech­nol­o­gy just to come roar­ing down at us. We must begin to say “No” to cer­tain kinds of tech­nol­o­gy and begin to con­trol tech­no­log­i­cal change, because we have now reached the point at which tech­nol­o­gy is so pow­er­ful and so rapid that it may destroy us, unless we con­trol it. But what is the most impor­tant is we sim­ply do not accept every­thing; that we begin to make crit­i­cal deci­sions about what kind of world we want and what kind of tech­nol­o­gy we want.

Find oth­er short films nar­rat­ed by Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 “Types of Mistakes” Young Writers Make

in Literature, Sci Fi, Writing | December 5th, 2014

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

H.P. Love­craft is remem­bered as a bril­liant fan­ta­sist, a cre­ator of a com­plete­ly unique uni­verse of hor­ror. He’s also remem­bered, unfor­tu­nate­ly, as a big­ot. But the author whose head—to the cha­grin of some—provided the mod­el for the World Fan­ta­sy Award is not often remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly good writer. Or rather, I should say, a par­tic­u­lar­ly good styl­ist. His writ­ing can sound sti­fling­ly archa­ic, over­stuffed with Vic­to­ri­anisms. “His prose, “writes Scott Malt­house, “can be turgid and adjec­tives suf­fo­cat­ing,” and “his char­ac­ters tend to be as thin as the paper they’re print­ed on.”

Writ­ers love him, Malt­house argues, because he was such an orig­i­nal “world builder,” not because he was a fine artist. Eliz­a­beth Bear at Tor echoes the sen­ti­ment, writ­ing that Love­craft’s work is “crit­i­cized for its style, for its pur­ple­ness and den­si­ty and fail­ures of struc­ture,” yet still evokes such a potent response that “the Love­craft­ian uni­verse must be con­sid­ered a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort at this point,” since so many writ­ers have fur­thered his “appeal­ing­ly bleak” vision. You can down­load a good part of his col­lect­ed works in ebook and audio­book for­mats here.

So per­haps he isn’t such a bad writer after all? In any case, he’s cer­tain­ly a very dis­tinc­tive one whose style, like Joseph Conrad’s, say, or even William Faulkner’s, endears read­ers pre­cise­ly for its fever­ish excess­es. Love­craft him­self was very self-con­scious about his craft and took writ­ing very seriously—enough to have pub­lished a lengthy, high­ly detailed essay called “Lit­er­ary Com­po­si­tion” which tack­les in sev­er­al para­graphs a host of issues the writer must con­tend with: gram­mar, “read­ing,” vocab­u­lary, “ele­men­tal phras­es,” descrip­tion, nar­ra­tion, “fic­tion­al nar­ra­tion,” “uni­ty, mass, coher­ence,” and “forms of com­po­si­tion.” We won’t recite the whole of his advice here—you can read the whole thing for your­self. But to give you some of the fla­vor of Lovecraft’s ped­a­gogy, we bring you his list of twen­ty “types of mis­takes” young writ­ers make.

See his com­plete list below.

1. Erro­neous plu­rals of nouns, as val­lies or echos.
2. Bar­barous com­pound nouns, as view­point or upkeep.
3. Want of cor­re­spon­dence in num­ber between noun and verb where the two are wide­ly sep­a­rat­ed or the con­struc­tion involved
4. Ambigu­ous use of pro­nouns.
5. Erro­neous case of pro­nouns, as whom for who, and vice ver­sa, or phras­es like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loy­al, act prompt­ly.”
6. Erro­neous use of shall and will, and of oth­er aux­il­iary verbs.
7. Use of intran­si­tive for tran­si­tive verbs, as “he was grad­u­at­ed from col­lege,” or vice ver­sa, as “he ingra­ti­at­ed with the tyrant.”
8. Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest,”
9. Errors in moods and tens­es of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do oth­er­wise”, or “He said the earth was”
10. The split infini­tive, as “to calm­ly ”
11. The erro­neous per­fect infini­tive, as “Last week I expect­ed to have met”
12. False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
13. Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
14. Mis­use of prepo­si­tions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unwor­thy object,” or “The gold was divid­ed between the five men.”
15. The super­flu­ous con­junc­tion, as “I wish for you to do this.”
16. Use of words in wrong sens­es, as “The book great­ly intrigued me”, “Leave me take this”, “He was obsessed with the idea”, or “He is a metic­u­lous”
17. Erro­neous use of non-Angli­cised for­eign forms, as “a strange phe­nom­e­na”, or “two stratas of clouds”.
18. Use of false or unau­tho­rised words, as bur­glarise or supremest.
19. Errors of taste, includ­ing vul­garisms, pompous­ness, rep­e­ti­tion, vague­ness, ambigu­ous­ness, col­lo­qui­al­ism, bathos, bom­bast, pleonasm, tau­tol­ogy, harsh­ness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetor­i­cal awk­ward­ness.
20. Errors of spelling and punc­tu­a­tion, and con­fu­sion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apos­tro­phe in the pos­ses­sive pro­noun its.

Most of this is sol­id, com­mon sense writ­ing advice. Some of it isn’t. As with all things Love­craft, you would be wise to use your dis­cre­tion. A full read of Lovecraft’s trea­tise on com­po­si­tion will give you some sense of how to begin writ­ing your own Love­craft pas­tiche. For even more of his advice on the writ­ing of fiction—particularly, as he called it, “weird fic­tion,” see his list of five tips for hor­ror writ­ing, which we fea­tured in Octo­ber.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

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

Discover the 1950s & 1960s Computer & Cut-Up Animation of Pioneering Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek

in Animation | December 3rd, 2014

Hey, lovers of ani­ma­tion and exper­i­men­tal film: do you know the name Stan Van­Der­Beek? If not, you’ll enjoy learn­ing it, for more rea­sons than that it allows you to type four cap­i­tal let­ters. End­less­ly adven­tur­ous in his quest to find new ways to craft (not to men­tion dis­play) mov­ing images, Van­Der­Beek, who in col­lege encoun­tered the likes of John Cage, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, and Robert Rauschen­berg, mobi­lized for his ani­ma­tion a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies that, in his day, peo­ple did­n’t have much of a sense of what to do with, artis­ti­cal­ly or oth­er­wise. “Every­thing that artists made art from, or with, in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, he pret­ty much touched,” this NPR piece quotes MIT LIST Visu­al Arts Cen­ter cura­tor Joao Ribas as say­ing about him. “The medi­um, what­ev­er he was work­ing with, was not ade­quate enough. Paint­ing was too sta­t­ic, and then one film was too lin­ear, and then four films were too cum­ber­some.”

You can see here some of the fruits of this dri­ve that kept Van­Der­Beek “con­stant­ly try­ing some­thing else that could get clos­er and clos­er to what he saw.” At the top, we have a 1966 exam­ple of the ani­mat­ed poet­ry he cre­at­ed with Bell Labs com­put­er graph­ics pio­neer Ken Knowl­ton, using a pro­gram­ming lan­guage of Knowl­ton’s own design and a score by jazz drum­mer Paul Mot­ian. But Van­Der­Beek built more of his rep­u­ta­tion with his mas­tery of cut-and-paste ani­ma­tion, the kind you see in action in 1959’s Sci­ence Fric­tion just above. Five years lat­er, he would put out Breathdeath below, which Tate calls “a sur­re­al fan­ta­sy based on 15th cen­tu­ry wood­cuts of The Dance of the Dead” made of “cut-up pho­tos and news­reels, reassem­bled into a black com­e­dy ded­i­cat­ed to Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton.” Does this all remind you a bit of Ter­ry Gilliam? It should. The Mon­ty Python ani­ma­tor, a notable Van­Der­Beek fan, named Breathdeath one of the best ani­mat­ed films of all time.

Find more exper­i­men­tal films in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Best Ani­mat­ed Films of All Time, Accord­ing to Ter­ry Gilliam

Watch 13 Exper­i­men­tal Short Films by Tezu­ka Osamu, the Walt Dis­ney of Japan

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rockers” (1994)

in Music | December 3rd, 2014

Chrissie Hyn­de knows a few things about being a female rock­er. When at the ten­der age of 14 she saw Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels play at a fair­ground in her home­town of Akron, Ohio, the band got into a fist­fight with each oth­er dur­ing the per­for­mance. She was hooked. “I thought,” she said to The Guardian ‘That’s got to be the life!’ ”

Not long after col­lege at Kent State, where she was in a band with Devo’s Mark Moth­ers­baugh, she end­ed up in Lon­don. There she worked at Mal­colm McLaren’s noto­ri­ous store SEX along­side the future mem­bers of The Sex Pis­tols. She even asked Sid Vicious and John­ny Rot­ten to mar­ry her for the work visa. She tried to start a band with Mick Jones of The Clash, but that didn’t take. She was kicked out of the band Mas­ters of the Back­side before they changed their name to The Damned and became famous. Then in 1978, she formed the band The Pre­tenders and quick­ly became a rock icon with hit tunes like “Don’t Get Me Wrong” and “Mes­sage of Love.”

In short, Hyn­de has been rock­ing for over 40 years now and she has some advice for aspir­ing lady rock­ers, which was orig­i­nal­ly print­ed as a pro­mo for her 1994 release “Night in my Veins.”

1. Don’t moan about being a chick, refer to fem­i­nism or com­plain about sex­ist dis­crim­i­na­tion. We’ve all been thrown down the stairs, and f—ed about, but no one wants to hear a whin­ing female. Write a loose­ly dis­guised song about it instead and clean up. ($)

2. Nev­er pre­tend to know more than you do. If you don’t know chord names, refer to the dots. Don’t go near the desk unless you plan on becom­ing an engi­neer.

3. Make the oth­er band mem­bers look and sound good. Bring out the best in them; that’s your job. Oh, and you bet­ter sound good too.

4. Do not insist in [sic] work­ing with “females.” That’s just more b.s. Get the best man for the job. If it hap­pens to a woman, great – you’ll have some­one to go to depart­ment stores with on tour instead of mak­ing one of the road crew go with you.

5. Try not to have a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with the band. It always ends in tears.

6. Don’t think that stick­ing your boobs out and try­ing to look f—able will help. Remem­ber you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not “f—me,” it’s “f—you”!

7. Don’t try to com­pete with the guys; it won’t impress any­body. Remem­ber, one of the rea­sons they like you is because you don’t offer yet more com­pe­ti­tion to the already exist­ing male egos.

8. If you sing, don’t “belt” or “screech.” No one wants to hear that sh–; it sounds “hys­ter­i­cal.”

9. Shave your legs, for chris­sakes!

10. Don’t take advice from peo­ple like me. Do your own thing always.

A lot of this is just sound advice for get­ting along at the work­place – don’t act like you know more than you do, don’t com­plain, make your work­mates look good but don’t doink them. But prob­a­bly the key points for Hyn­de is num­ber one and num­ber sev­en.

In that inter­view with the Guardian, she indeed proved to be reluc­tant to “moan” about sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion in the rock­dom. “There’s always been women doing this, just not that many,” she said. “I don’t know what the fem­i­nists have to say about it. Over the years, you’d hear, ‘We weren’t encour­aged.’ Well, I don’t think Jeff Beck­’s moth­er was say­ing, ‘Jef­frey! What are you doing up in your room? Are you rehears­ing up there?’ No one was ever encour­aged to play gui­tar in a band. But I nev­er found it hard­er because I’m a woman. If any­thing I’ve been treat­ed bet­ter. Guys will car­ry my gui­tars and stuff – who’s going to say no? Guys always tune my gui­tars, too.”

Check out the video for “Night in my Veins” below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk Lets You Watch Vin­tage Footage from the Hey­day of NYC’s Great Music Scene

The Art of Punk Presents a New Doc­u­men­tary on The Dead Kennedys and Their Grit­ty Aes­thet­ics

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The Red Menace: A Striking Gallery of Anti-Communist Posters, Ads, Comic Books, Magazines & Films

in Art, History, Politics | November 18th, 2014

By its very nature, pro­pa­gan­da dis­torts the truth or tells out­right lies. It tar­gets our basest impulses—fear and anger, flight or fight. While works of pure pro­pa­gan­da may pre­tend to make log­i­cal argu­ments, they elim­i­nate nuance and over­sim­pli­fy com­pli­cat­ed issues to the point of car­i­ca­ture. These gen­er­al ten­den­cies hold true in every case, but nowhere, per­haps, is this gross exag­ger­a­tion and fear mon­ger­ing more evi­dent than in times of war.

And while we’ve all seen our share of wartime pro­pa­gan­da, we may be less famil­iar with the decades-long pro­pa­gan­da war the U.S. and West­ern Europe waged against social­ism and Com­mu­nism, even decades before the Cold War era. It may sur­prise you to learn that this offen­sive began even before the start of World War One, as you can see above in a British Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty poster from 1909.

Rep­re­sent­ing social­ism as an ape-like demon stran­gling some sort of god­dess of “pros­per­i­ty,” this strik­ing piece of poster art sets the tone for almost all of the anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da to come in the wake of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. At least since this ear­ly graph­ic sal­vo, Com­mu­nists and social­ists have gen­er­al­ly been depict­ed as ter­ri­fy­ing mon­sters. See, for exam­ple, an ear­ly, post-WWI exam­ple of Russ­ian anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da above, por­tray­ing the Com­mu­nist threat as an apoc­a­lyp­tic horse­man of death.

As the per­ceived threat increased, so too did the scale of the mon­strous car­i­ca­tures. In the post-WWI era Ger­man and Nor­we­gian posters above, Godzil­la-sized Com­mu­nists lay waste to entire cities. Below, in “Bol­she­vism Unmasked,” an exam­ple from the Sec­ond World War, the skele­tal Com­mu­nist destroy­er strad­dles the entire globe.

Occa­sion­al­ly the racial dimen­sions of these depic­tions were explic­it. More often, they were strong­ly implied. But a 1953 Cold War exam­ple below is par­tic­u­lar­ly unsub­tle. Show­ing a scene lit­er­al­ly right out of a schlocky Para­mount hor­ror film, fea­tur­ing actress Janet Logan, the text tells us, “In case the Com­mu­nists should con­quer, our women would be help­less beneath the boots of the Asi­at­ic Rus­sians.” At the top of this rather lurid piece of agit-prop, we’re also told that “many Amer­i­can men would be ster­il­ized” should Rus­sia win the “next world war.”

In the 50s and 60s, pop cul­ture media like film and com­ic books lent them­selves par­tic­u­lar­ly well to anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da, and they were exploit­ed relent­less­ly by gov­ern­ment agen­cies, pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, and cor­po­ra­tions. Films like I Mar­ried a Com­mu­nist (below) and The Red Men­ace (top), both from 1949, offered sen­sa­tion­al­ized pulpy takes on the red scare.

In these peak Cold War decades, anti-Com­mu­nist sen­ti­ment flour­ished as the U.S.’s for­mer ally the Sovi­et Union became its pri­ma­ry ene­my. Com­ic books pro­vid­ed the per­fect plat­form for the broad strokes of anti-Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da. As psy­chi­a­trist Fredric Wertham waged war against the cor­rupt­ing influ­ence of com­ic books, adver­tis­ers and the gov­ern­ment found them increas­ing­ly effec­tive at spread­ing mes­sages. “If there was any enti­ty that believed in the pow­er of com­ic books to indoc­tri­nate and instruct as Wertham did,” writes Greg Beato at Rea­son, “it was the U.S. gov­ern­ment.”

But pri­vate enti­ties did their share in the com­ic book war against Com­mu­nism as well. Wit­ness a par­tic­u­lar­ly wild exam­ple, Is This Tomor­row?, above. Pub­lished by the “Cat­e­chet­i­cal Guild Edu­ca­tion­al Soci­ety” in St. Paul, MN, this 1947 com­ic impli­cates gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of busi­ness, social wel­fare pro­grams, anti-reli­gious sen­ti­ment, and “peo­ple giv­ing up their sil­ly ideas about ‘sacred­ness’ of life” in a fiendish­ly orches­trat­ed plot to take over Amer­i­ca. Work­ers who embrace Com­mu­nist doc­trine are lit­tle more than dupes and pawns. You can read the whole fever­ish sce­nario here.

These car­toon scare tac­tics may seem out­landish, but of course we know that red scare pro­pa­gan­da had real effects on the lives and liveli­hoods of real Amer­i­cans, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the arts and acad­e­mia. Free­think­ing, left-lean­ing cre­ative types and intel­lec­tu­als have long been tar­gets of anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia. The Amer­i­can Legion Mag­a­zine cov­er above illus­trates the fear—one still very preva­lent now—that col­lege pro­fes­sors were bent on cor­rupt­ing young, mal­leable minds. “Par­ents,” the mag­a­zine states, “can rid cam­pus­es of com­mu­nists who cloak them­selves in ‘aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom.’” At the height of the red scare, many col­lege pro­fes­sors, like Stan­ley Moore at Reed Col­lege, were dragged before the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee and sum­mar­i­ly fired.

More con­fi­dent, it seems, than the pro­pa­gan­da of pre­vi­ous decades, the Cold War vari­ety shrunk the Com­mu­nist threat back to human dimen­sions. But Com­mu­nists were no less mon­strous than before—only more insid­i­ous. They looked like your neigh­bors, your co-work­ers, and your chil­dren’s teacher. Instead of pur­vey­ors of brute force, they were depict­ed as devi­ous manip­u­la­tors who used ide­o­log­i­cal machi­na­tions to per­vert democ­ra­cy and crip­ple cap­i­tal­ism. As in the Amer­i­can Legion col­lege pro­fes­sor cov­er sto­ry, edu­ca­tion was often posed as the cul­tur­al bat­tle­field on which—as the heat­ed Canadair ad above states—“Communism could take the citadel from with­in” by spread­ing “doubts about the old ways” and insin­u­at­ing “ideas of athe­ism, reg­i­men­ta­tion and false ide­al­ism.”

Post-WWII, of course, the great­est threat was not a full-scale invasion—it was total nuclear anni­hi­la­tion. It was a grim possibility—as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove satir­i­cal­ly point­ed out—in which no one would win. Web Urban­ist points us toward one par­tic­u­lar­ly chill­ing and dis­hon­est piece of pro­pa­gan­da dis­trib­uted by the gov­ern­ment. In the poster above, we are assured that “After total war can come total liv­ing.” Unless the hap­py cou­ple is gaz­ing out over a man­i­cured sub­urb in the after­life, this scene of “total liv­ing” post-nuclear war is absurd giv­en the strat­e­gy of Mutu­al­ly Assured Destruc­tion. Nev­er­the­less, what the poster depicts is an ana­logue of the Sovi­ets’ total­i­tar­i­an ethos—it’s a future of total ide­o­log­i­cal puri­ty, in which the Earth has been cleansed of the hulk­ing mon­strous hordes of Com­mu­nism, as well as, pre­sum­ably, the cryp­to-Com­mu­nist teach­ers, artists, intel­lec­tu­als, and bureau­crats who threat­en from with­in.

via Web Urban­ist/io9/Kuriosi­tas

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of How Boot­legged Hol­ly­wood Movies Helped Defeat Com­mu­nism in Roma­nia

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

Download 135 Free Philosophy eBooks: From Aristotle to Nietzsche & Wittgenstein

in e-books, Philosophy | November 14th, 2014

Just want­ed to give you a quick heads up that we’ve recent­ly spun out a col­lec­tion of Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks (from our larg­er, more diverse col­lec­tion of 600 Free eBooks). Right now, you will find 110 clas­sic works on the new list — foun­da­tion­al texts writ­ten by Aris­to­tle, Descartes, Hegel and Kant, not to men­tion Kierkegaard, Wittgen­stein and Niet­zsche, too. The list will keep grow­ing at a steady clip. But if you see any cru­cial texts miss­ing, please let us know, and we will try to get them added ASAP. Of course, we’re look­ing for works in the pub­lic domain.

You can gen­er­al­ly down­load the Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks to your Kin­dle, iPad, iPhone and oth­er devices. (Kin­dle users can use these instruc­tions to get .mobi files onto their devices.) Or, in most cas­es, we give you the option to read the books in your web brows­er. Take your pick.

As a quick last note, you might want to com­ple­ment the Phi­los­o­phy eBooks with our big list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es. The two col­lec­tions go hand in hand.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

28 Impor­tant Philoso­phers List the Books That Influ­enced Them Most Dur­ing Their Col­lege Days

The Epis­te­mol­o­gy of Dr. Seuss & More Phi­los­o­phy Lessons from Great Children’s Sto­ries

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Down­load 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

The Har­vard Clas­sics: A Free, Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

David Foster Wallace’s Syllabus for His 2008 Creative Nonfiction Course: Includes Reading List & Footnotes

in Literature, Writing | November 13th, 2014

Pho­to cour­tesy of Clau­dia Sher­man.

The term “cre­ative non­fic­tion” has picked up a great deal of trac­tion over the past decade — per­haps too much, depend­ing upon how valid or invalid you find it. Mean­ing­ful or not, the label has come into its cur­rent pop­u­lar­i­ty in part thanks to the essays of nov­el­ist David Fos­ter Wal­lace: whether writ­ing non­fic­tion­al­ly about the Illi­nois State Fair, David Lynch, pro­fes­sion­al ten­nis, or a sev­en-night Caribbean cruise, he did it in a way unlike any oth­er man or woman of let­ters. While nobody can learn to write quite like him — this we’ve seen when Wal­lace-imi­ta­tors write pas­tich­es of their own — he did spend time teach­ing the art of cre­ative non­fic­tion as he saw it,

a broad cat­e­go­ry of prose works such as per­son­al essays and mem­oirs, pro­files, nature and trav­el writ­ing, nar­ra­tive essays, obser­va­tion­al or descrip­tive essays, gen­er­al-inter­est tech­ni­cal writ­ing, argu­men­ta­tive or idea-based essays, gen­er­al-inter­est crit­i­cism, lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism, and so on. The term’s con­stituent words sug­gest a con­cep­tu­al axis on which these sorts of prose works lie. As non­fic­tion, the works are con­nect­ed to actu­al states of affairs in the world, are “true” to some reli­able extent. If, for exam­ple, a cer­tain event is alleged to have occurred, it must real­ly have occurred; if a propo­si­tion is assert­ed, the read­er expects some proof of (or argu­ment for) its accu­ra­cy. At the same time, the adjec­tive cre­ative sig­ni­fies that some goal(s) oth­er than sheer truth­ful­ness moti­vates the writer and informs her work. This cre­ative goal, broad­ly stat­ed, may be to inter­est read­ers, or to instruct them, or to enter­tain them, to move or per­suade, to edi­fy, to redeem, to amuse, to get read­ers to look more close­ly at or think more deeply about some­thing that’s worth their atten­tion… or some combination(s) of these.

This comes straight from the syl­labus of Eng­lish 183D, a work­shop Wal­lace taught at Pomona Col­lege in the spring of 2008, which you can read in its entire­ty at Salon (reprint­ed from The David Fos­ter Wal­lace Read­er). As you may remem­ber from the pre­vi­ous Wal­lace syl­labus we fea­tured, from a 1994 semes­ter of Eng­lish 102 — Lit­er­ary Analy­sis I: Prose Fic­tion at Illi­nois State Uni­ver­si­ty, the man could real­ly assem­ble a read­ing list. For his cre­ative non­fic­tion course, he had stu­dents read Jo Ann Beard’s “Wern­er,” Stephen Elliott’s “Where I Slept,” George Orwell’s clas­sic “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage,” Don­na Steiner’s “Cold,” David Gessner’s “Learn­ing to Surf,” Kathryn Harrison’s “The For­est of Mem­o­ry,” Hes­ter Kaplan’s “The Pri­vate Life of Skin,” and George Saunders’s “The Brain­dead Mega­phone.”

In some ways, Wal­lace syl­labi them­selves count as pieces of cre­ative non­fic­tion. What oth­er pro­fes­sor ever had the prose chops to make you actu­al­ly want to read any­thing under the “Class Rules & Pro­ce­dures” head­ing? In the ninth of its thir­teen points, he lays out the work­shop’s oper­a­tive belief:

that you’ll improve as a writer not just by writ­ing a lot and receiv­ing detailed crit­i­cism but also by becom­ing a more sophis­ti­cat­ed and artic­u­late crit­ic of oth­er writ­ers’ work. You are thus required to read each of your col­leagues’ essays at least twice, mak­ing help­ful and spe­cif­ic com­ments on the man­u­script copy wher­ev­er appro­pri­ate. You will then com­pose a one-to-three-page let­ter to the essay’s author, com­mu­ni­cat­ing your sense of the draft’s strengths and weak­ness­es and mak­ing clear, spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions for revi­sion.

But what­ev­er the rig­ors of Eng­lish 183D, Wal­lace would have suc­ceed­ed, to my mind, if he’d instilled noth­ing more than this in the minds of his depart­ing stu­dents:

In the grown-up world, cre­ative non­fic­tion is not expres­sive writ­ing but rather com­mu­nica­tive writ­ing. And an axiom of com­mu­nica­tive writ­ing is that the read­er does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly care about you (the writer), nor does she find you fas­ci­nat­ing as a per­son, nor does she feel a deep nat­ur­al inter­est in the same things that inter­est you.

True to form, DFW’s syl­labus comes com­plete with foot­notes.

1 (A good dic­tio­nary and usage dic­tio­nary are strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed. You’re insane if you don’t own these already.)

You can read the Cre­ative Non­fic­tion syl­labus in full here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Read David Fos­ter Wallace’s Notes From a Tax Account­ing Class, Tak­en to Help Him Write The Pale King

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Learn The History of Philosophy in 247 Podcasts (With More to Come)

in Philosophy, Podcasts | November 12th, 2014

Yes­ter­day we took a look at, or rather a lis­ten to, the “pod­cast­ing renais­sance,” high­light­ing a few of the new wave of shows and rec­om­mend­ing some of the pre-exist­ing ones you may have missed. Many Open Cul­ture read­ers will remem­ber our addic­tion to phi­los­o­phy pod­casts — The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Phi­los­o­phy Bites, and Phi­los­o­phize This!, to name but three of our favorites — and some may won­der if The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps (iTunes – RSS Feed – Web Site), which we fea­tured back in 2011 and again in 2012, sur­vived the dark ages into which pod­cast­ing had appar­ent­ly fall­en. Could its host Peter Adam­son, pro­fes­sor at Lud­wig Max­i­m­il­ian Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, have suc­cumbed to the dread­ed pod­fade some­where between Plot­nius on the soul and Chris­t­ian asceti­cism?

Wor­ry not, stu­dents of thought, for Adam­son has con­tin­ued these past few years, still reg­u­lar­ly and gap­less­ly, to pro­vide “the ideas and lives of the major philoso­phers as well as the less­er-known fig­ures of the tra­di­tion.” Just this past week­end, he put up a twen­ty-minute episode on the Car­olin­gian Renais­sance. If you haven’t kept up with the show since we last post­ed about it, you’ve got a great deal of intel­lec­tu­al­ly rich catch­ing up to do. You will find more than 100 new pod­casts, fea­tur­ing short talks on Latin Pla­ton­ism, Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy’s “Bagh­dad school,” phi­los­o­phy’s reign in Spain, Illu­mi­na­tion­ism, and women schol­ars and Islam. If you’ve want­ed to learn the entire his­to­ry phi­los­o­phy in the most con­ve­nient pos­si­ble man­ner, now’s the time to jump aboard. If you planned on wait­ing until Adam­son gets to, say, Der­ri­da, I fear you’ll have a bit of a daunt­ing back­log on your hands — not to men­tion your ears and brain.

Note: This arti­cle was first pub­lished in Novem­ber, 2014. As of Feb­ru­ary, 2016, there are 247 episodes in this series. The title of the post has been updat­ed to reflect that.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: A Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Pod­cast Still Going Strong

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Phi­los­o­phize This!: The Pop­u­lar, Enter­tain­ing Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast from an Uncon­ven­tion­al Teacher

Down­load 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.