Braille Neue: A New Version of Braille That Can Be Simultaneously Read by the Sighted and the Blind
Photo via Kosuke Takahashi
To those of us who’ve never had reason to learn it, the Braille alphabet can have an appealingly retro-futuristic look, not least because Braille signage in America seems most often installed in pre-2000s public buildings. But it must smack of the past to many of the visually impaired as well, who these days have a host of ever higher-tech reading devices available to them (thanks to which, of course, they can read sites like this one). And though public support for producing materials in Braille exists, the educational programs needed to spread Braille literacy in the first place have fewer champions. Braille itself, perhaps, needs an upgrade for the 21st century.
Kosuke Takahashi may be just the graphic designer to provide that upgrade. He’s come up with Braille Neue, “a universal typeface that combines braille with existing characters. This typeface communicates to both the sighted and blind people in the same space.” He has, in other words, designed a readable alphabet that allows for the overlaying of English with the corresponding raised Braille dots, keeping both legible at a glance — or at a touch, as the case may be. Other designers have tried their hand at the same project, but unlike Takahashi, none of their alphabets support phonetic Japanese characters as well. “Our aim is to use this universal typeset for [the] Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics 2020 to create a truly universal space where anyone can access information,” says Takahashi’s Braille Neue page.
Photo via Kosuke Takahashi
Based on the existing Helvetica Neue font, Braille Neue — whose designer, according to My Modern Met, “is still experimenting with cost-effective printing and is refining the font prior to final release” — has the potential to spread not just awareness but literacy of Braille, given that it essentially shows sighted non-Braille readers a key every time they read it. As any non-Japanese person who has lived in Takahashi’s native land knows, even if you start with no idea of how to read a character in an unknown writing system, you’ll start to get a sense of it almost automatically if you see it often enough in context with your own. They’ll also know that if any country can implement retrofuturistic design in a way that fascinates the world, it’s Japan.
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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...Radiooooo: Discover the Musical Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Different Times & Places
Radio has always been a fairly transportive medium.
During the Great Depression, entire families clustered round the electronic hearth to enjoy a variety of entertainments, including live remote broadcasts from the glamorous nightclubs and hotels where celebrity bandleaders like Count Basie and Duke Ellington held sway.
1950s teens’ transistors took them to a head space less square than the white bread suburbs their parents inhabited.
During the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese stations played homegrown renditions of the rock and soul sounds dominating American airwaves.
The Radiooooo.com site (there’s also a version available for the iPhone and Android) allows modern listeners to experience a bit of that magical time traveling sensation, via an interactive map that allows you to tune in to specific countries and decades.
The content here is user-generated. Register for a free account, and you too can begin sharing eccentric faves.
Find a user whose tastes mirror your own? Click their profile for a stat card of tracks they’ve favorited and uploaded, as well as any other sundry details they may feel like sharing, such as country of origin and age.
There are fun awards to be earned here, with the most sought after pelts going to the first to upload a song to an empty country, or upload a track from 1910–1920. (Cameroon, 1940 … go!)
As with an actual radio, you are not selecting the actual playlist, though you can nudge the needle a bit by toggling to your desired mood—slow, fast and/or weird.
And you need not limit yourself to a single destination. Embark on a strange musical trip by using Radiooooo’s taxi function to carry you to multiple countries and decades. (I closed my eyes and wound up shuttling between Ukraine and Mauritania in the 60s and 80s.)
Dotted around the map are island icons, where the ever-growing collection is sorted according to themes like Hawaii, Neverland (“for children big and small”), and 8‑Bit video game music. Le Club, floating midway between Europe and North America, contains brand new releases from contemporary labels.
The Now Playing window includes an option to buy, when possible, as well as the artist’s name and album artwork. Share, like, get your groove on…
And stay tuned for Radiooooo’s latest baby, Le Globe, an interactive 3‑D map of the world and a decade selector dial mounted on a “beautiful connected object.”
The boundaries are extremely permeable here.
Have a browse through Radiooooo’s Instagram feed for a feast of cover art or head to France for one of their in-person listening parties. (There’s one next week in the secret listening room of Paris’ Grand Hotel Amour.)
Readers, if your explorations unearth an exceptional track, please share it in the comments, below.
Download the Radioooo app for Mac or Android here, or listen on the website. (You may need to fool around with various browsers to find the one that works best for you.)
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her radio dial is set to Romania 1910 in anticipation of the third installment of her literary-themed variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain , Monday, April 23 at the New York Society Library. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Stream 47 Hours of Classic Sci-Fi Novels & Stories: Asimov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Lovecraft & More
The pronouncements of French theorist Jean Baudrillard could sound a bit silly in the early 1990s, when the internet was still in its infancy, a slow, clunky technology whose promises far exceeded what it could deliver. We hoped for the cyberpunk spaces of William Gibson, and got the beep-boop tedium of dial-up. Even so, in his 1991 essay “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Baudrillard contended that the real and the imaginary were no longer distinguishable, and that the collapse of the distance between them meant that “there is no more fiction.” Or, conversely, he suggested, that there is no more reality.
What seemed a far-fetched claim about the totality of “cybernetics and hyperreality” in the age of AOL and Netscape now sounds far more plausible. After all, it will soon be possible, if it is not so already, to convincingly simulate events that never occurred, and to make millions of people believe they had, not only through fake tweets, “fake news,” and age-old propaganda, but through sophisticated manipulation of video and audio, through augmented reality and the onset of “reality apathy,” a psychological fatigue that overwhelms our abilities to distinguish true and false when everything appears as a cartoonish parody of itself.
Technologist Aviv Ovadya has tried since 2016 to warn anyone who would listen that such a collapse of reality was fast upon us—an “Infocalypse,” he calls it. If this is so, according to Baudrillard, “both traditional SF and theory are destined to the same fate: flux and imprecision are putting an end to them as specific genres.” In an apocalyptic prediction, he declaimed, “fiction will never again be a mirror held to the future, but rather a desperate rehallucinating of the past.” The “collective marketplace” of globalization and the Borgesian condition in which “the map covers all the territory” have left “no room any more for the imaginary.” Companies set up shop expressly to simulate and falsify reality. Pained irony, pastiche, and cheap nostalgia are all that remain.
It’s a bleak scenario, but perhaps he was right after all, though it may not yet be time to despair—to give up on reality or the role of imagination. After all, sci-fi writers like Gibson, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard grasped long before most of us the condition Baudrillard described. The subject proved for them and many other late-20th century sci-fi authors a rich vein for fiction. And perhaps, rather than a great disruption—to use the language of a start-up culture intent on breaking things—there remains some continuity with the naïve confidence of past paradigms, just as Newtonian physics still holds true, only in a far more limited way than once believed.
Isaac Asimov’s short essay “The Relativity of Wrong” is instructive on this last point. Maybe the theory of “hyperreality” is right, in some fashion, but also incomplete: a future remains for the most visionary creative minds to discover, as it did for Asimov’s “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon in The Foundation Trilogy. You can hear a BBC dramatization of that groundbreaking fifties masterwork in the 47-hour science fiction playlist above, along with readings of classic stories—like Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (and an audiobook of the same read by English actor Maxwell Caulfield). From Jules Verne to H.P. Lovecraft to George Orwell; from the mid-fifties time travel fiction of Andre Norton to the 21st-century time-travel fiction of Ruth Boswell….
We’ve even got a late entry from theatrical prog rock mastermind Rick Wakeman, who followed up his musical adaptation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth with a sequel he penned himself, recorded in 1974, and released in 1999, called Return to the Centre of the Earth, with narration by Patrick Stewart and guest appearances by Ozzy Osbourne, Bonnie Tyler, and the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward. Does revisiting sci-fi, “weird fiction,” and operatic concept albums of the past constitute a “desperate rehallucinating” of a bygone “lost object,” as Baudrillard believed? Or does it provide the raw material for today’s psychohistorians? I suppose it remains to be seen; the future—and the future of science fiction—may be wide open.
The 47-hour science fiction playlist above will be added to our collection of 900 Free Audio Books.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World
Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breathless with the anticipation of catching Pokémon on your phone screen?
If so, you might enjoy bagging some of the Pokeverse’s real world counterparts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new photo-identification app. It does for the natural world what Shazam does for music.
Aim your phone’s camera at a nondescript leaf or the grasshopper-ish-looking creature who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the relevant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get better acquainted.
Registered users can pin their finds to their personal collections, provided the app’s recognition technology produces a match.
(Several early adopters suggest it’s still a few houseplants shy of true functionality…)
Seek’s protective stance with regard to privacy settings is well suited to junior specimen collectors, as are the virtual badges with which it rewards energetic uploaders.
While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is building a photo library, composed in part of user submissions.
(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)
(Ditto your Portobello Mushroom burger…)
Download Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Watch Ta-Nehisi Coates Speak French Before & After Attending Middlebury’s Immersion Program
The many fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, longtime Atlantic correspondent and author of books like The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me (not to mention his more recent role as a writer of Black Panther comics), know a thing or two about the trials and tribulations he went through to become one of America’s best-known public intellectuals, but fewer of them know how intense a battle he’s waged, over the past few years, on the side: that of mastering the French language in his 30s and 40s.
“I’m taking an hour a week to try to teach myself French,” Coates wrote on his blog at The Atlantic in the summer of 2011, explaining that his wife “went to Paris five years ago and loved it. She wants me to go back with her, and I want to go. But I refuse to do so until I have a rudimentary understanding of the language. This isn’t about impressing the French — I expect my accent to mocked — it’s about how I interpret the world. Language is a big part of it.” After starting to dig into the Foreign Service Institute’s French materials (available free in our language-learning collection), he crossed out the word week in “an hour a week” to replace it with day, already sensing, no doubt, the unexpected demands this particular language would make on him.
“ ‘Et alors’ is similar to our ‘So what?’ But ‘Et Alors’ doesn’t simply sound different, it feels different, it carries another connotation, another music,” he wrote in an early 2012 follow-up. “I don’t know if that means anything to people who don’t write professionally, but for me it means a ton.” It seems only right, he concluded, “that a writer should explore languages and try to spend time with as many as he or she can. That I should arrive at such an obvious conclusion at this late date is humbling.” And so he pressed steadfastly on, memorizing French vocabulary words and grammatical structures, taking classes, meeting with a tutor, and after receiving his first passport at the age of 37, studying and practicing in real Francophone places like Paris and Switzerland.
Coates stepped up to a higher level of French skill — and a much higher level of French challenge — when he signed up for Middlebury College’s seven-week French immersion program, throwing himself into an environment of much younger and “fiercer” classmates without the possibility of leaning on his native language. When he sat down for the four-minute video interview at the top of the post before shipping out to Middlebury, he later revealed, “there were several moments when I didn’t even understand the question.” No such problems when he sat for another short conversation after the seven weeks, captured in the video just above: “What changed most at Middlebury, for me, was not in how I talked, but how I heard.”
Though Middlebury clearly helped push him forward, Coates doesn’t seem to consider participation in such a program a requirement for even the ambitious French learner. Maintaining the right attitude, however, is non-negotiable: “I expect to suck for awhile. Then I expect to slowly get better. The point is neither mastery, nor fluency. The point is hard study — the repeated application of a principle until the eyes and ears bleed a little.” Grappling with French has taught him, among other life lessons he’s written about, “that it is much better to focus on process, than outcomes. The question isn’t ‘When will I master the subjunctive?’ It’s ‘Did I put in my hour of study today?’ ”
How you feel about your process of study, Coates emphasizes, “it is as important as any objective reality. Hopelessness feeds the fatigue that leads the student to quit. It is not the study of language that is hard, so much as the ‘feeling’ that your present level is who you are and who you will always be. I remember returning from France at the end of the summer of 2013, and being convinced that I had some kind of brain injury which prevented me from hearing French vowel sounds. But the real enemy was not any injury so much as the ‘feeling’ of despair. That is why I ignore all the research about children and their language advantage. I don’t want to hear it. I just don’t care.”
After less than a year of studying French, Coates found, his brain had begun to “hunger for that feeling of stupidity” that comes from less-than-satisfactory comprehension. “There is absolutely nothing in this world like the feeling of sucking at something and then improving at it,” he wrote in a more recent reflection on his ongoing (and now surely lifelong) engagement with French. “Everyone should do it every ten years or so.”
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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...How Much Money Do You Need to Be Happy? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Figures
“If I gave you a million dollars, would you…?” (insert possibly life-altering risk, humiliation, or soul-selling crime here). What about ten million? 100 million? One BILLION dollars? Put another way, in the terms social scientists use these days, how much money is enough to make you happy?
If you’re Montgomery Burns, it’s at least a billion dollars, lest you be forced to suffer the torments of the Millionaire’s Camp. (“Just kill me now!”) As it tends to do, The Simpsons’ dark humor nails the insatiable greed that seems the scourge of our time, when the richest 1 percent take 82 percent of the world’s wealth, and the poorest 50 percent get nothing at all.
Hypothetical windfalls aside, the question of how much is enough is an urgent one for many people: as in, how much to feed a family, supply life’s necessities, purchase just enough leisure for some small degree of personal fulfilment?
As the misery of Monty Burns demonstrates, we have a sense of the 1% as eternally unfulfilled. He’s the wicked heir to more serious tragic figures like Charles Foster Kane and Jay Gatsby. But satire is one thing, and desire, that linchpin of the economy, is another.
“What we see on TV and what advertisers tell us we need would indicate there is no ceiling when it comes to how much money is needed for happiness,” says Purdue University psychologist Andrew T. Jebb, “but we now see there are some thresholds.” In short: money is a good thing, but there is such a thing as too much of it.
Jebb and his colleagues from Purdue and the University of Virginia addressed questions in their study “Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world” like, “Does happiness rise indefinitely with income, or is there a point at which higher incomes no longer lead to greater wellbeing?” What they found in data from an international Gallup World Poll survey of over 1.7 million people in 164 countries varies widely across the world.
People in wealthier areas seem to require more income for happiness (or “Subjective Well Being” in the social science terminology). In many parts of the world, higher incomes, “beyond satiation”—a metric that measures how much is enough—“are associated with lower life evaluations.” The authors also note that “a recent study at the country level found a slight but significant decline in life evaluation” among very high earners “in the richest countries.”
You can see the wide variance in happiness worldwide in the “Happiness” study. As Dan Kopf notes at Quartz, these research findings are consistent with those of other researchers of happiness and income, though they go into much more detail. Problems with the methodology of these studies—primarily their reliance on self-reported data—make them vulnerable to several critiques.
But, assuming they demonstrate real quantities, what, on average, do they tell us? “We found that the ideal income point,” averaged out in U.S. dollars, “is $95,000 for [overall life satisfaction],” says Jebb, “and $60,000 to $75,000 for emotional well-being,” a measure of day-to-day happiness. These are, mind you, individual incomes and “would likely be higher for families,” he says.
Peter Dockrill at Science Alert summarizes some other interesting findings: “Globally, it’s cheaper for men to be satisfied with their lives ($90,000) than women ($100,000), and for people of low ($70,000) or moderate education ($85,000) than people with higher education ($115,000).”
Yes, the study, like those before it, shows that after the “satiation point,” happiness decreases, though perhaps not to Monty Burns levels of dissatisfaction. But where does this leave most of us in the new Gilded Age? Given that “satiation” in the U.S. is around $105K, with day-to-day happiness around $85K, the majority of Americans fall well below the happiness line. The median salary for U.S. workers at the end of 2017 was $44, 564, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Managers and professionals averaged $64,220 and service workers around $28,000. (As you might imagine, income inequality diverged sharply along racial lines.)
And while the middle class saw a slight bump in income in the last couple years, median household income was still only $59,039 in 2016. However, we measure it the “middle class… has been declining for four decades,” admits Business Insider—“identifying with the middle class is, in part, a state of mind” rather than a state of debt-to-income ratios. (One study shows that Millennials make 20% less than Baby Boomers did at the same age.) Meanwhile, as wealth increases at the top, “the country’s bottom 20% of earners became worse off.”
This may all sound like bad news for the happiness quotient of the majority, if happiness (or Subjective Well Being) requires a certain amount of material security. Maybe one positive takeaway is that it doesn’t require nearly the amount of vast private wealth that has accumulated in the hands of a very few people. According to this research, significantly redistributing that wealth might actually make the wealthy a little happier, and less Mr. Burns-like, even as it raised happiness standards a great deal for millions of others.
Not only are higher incomes “usually accompanied by higher demands,” as Jebb and his colleagues conclude—on one’s time, and perhaps on one’s conscience—but “additional factors” may also play a role in decreasing happiness as incomes rise, including “an increase in materialistic values, additional material aspirations that may go unfulfilled, increased social comparisons,” etc. The longstanding truism about money not buying love—or fulfillment, meaning, peace of mind, what-have-you—may well just be true.
You can dig further into Andrew T. Jebb’s study here: “Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Tattoos Can Now Start Monitoring Your Medical Conditions: Harvard and MIT Researchers Innovate at the Intersection of Art & Medicine
Once reserved for rebels and outliers, tattoos have gone mainstream in the United States. According to recent surveys, 21% of all Americans now have at least one tattoo. And, among the 18–29 demographic, the number rises to 40%. If that number sounds high, just wait until tattoos go from being aesthetic statements to biomedical devices.
At Harvard and MIT, researchers have developed “smart tattoo ink” that can monitor changes in biological and health conditions, measuring, for example, when the blood sugar of a diabetic rises too high, or the hydration of an athlete falls too low. Pairing biosensitive inks with traditional tattoo designs, these smart tattoos could conceivably provide real-time feedback on a range of medical conditions. And also raise a number of ethical questions: what happens when your health information gets essentially worn on your sleeve, available for all to see?
To learn more about smart tattoos, watch the Harvard video above, and read the corresponding article in the Harvard Gazette.
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Read More...175+ College Admissions Offices Promise Not to Penalize High School Students Who Get Suspended for Protesting Peacefully Against Gun Violence
Image by Lorie Shaull, via Flickr Commons
“Will my admission get rescinded if I get suspended for engaging in a school walk-out meant to bring attention to the school shooting issue?” That’s a question many high school students have posed to college admissions offices around the country, especially after some high school officials threatened to suspend students taking part in anti-gun demonstrations.
Many leading universities have since issued policy statements and given these students their blessing and support. In a post called “In Support of Student Protests,” Hannah Mendlowitz, from Yale’s Admissions Office, writes:
[W]e continue to get the question: will Yale look unfavorably upon discipline resulting from peaceful demonstrations?
The answer is simple: Of course not.
To the students who have reached out to us with these concerns, we have made clear that they should feel free to participate in walk-out events to bring attention to this issue without fear of repercussion. Yale will NOT be rescinding anyone’s admission decision for participating in peaceful walkouts for this or other causes, regardless of any high school’s disciplinary policy. I, for one, will be cheering these students on from New Haven.
And on the official Twitter feed for the Brown University, a tweet reads:
Applicants to Brown: Expect a socially conscious, intellectually independent campus where freedom of expression is fundamentally important. You can be assured that peaceful, responsible protests against gun violence will not negatively impact decisions on admission to Brown.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Below, find a list of 175+ universities that have granted similar assurances, along with links to their statements. The list comes from Alex Garcia, who is maintaining a regularly-updated Google Doc. Access it online here.
- Agnes Scott
- Alfred University
- American
- Amherst
- Baldwin Wallace
- Bard
- Bates
- Bellarmine
- Bennington
- Berkeley
- Berkshire CC
- Binghamton
- Boston College
- Bowdoin
- Brandeis
- Bridgewater State
- Brown
- Bryn Mawr
- BU
- Bucknell
- Cal State U System
- CalTech
- Case Western
- Catholic
- Chapman
- Clark
- CMU
- Colby
- Colgate
- Coll. of the Atlantic
- College of NJ
- College of Wooster
- Colorado College
- Colorado State
- Columbia U.
- Conn. College
- Cornell University
- CU Boulder
- CU Denver
- Dartmouth
- Davidson
- Denison
- DePaul
- Dickinson
- Dominican U of Cal
- Drew
- Duke
- Eastern CT State
- Elmira
- Emerson
- Emory
- Florida
- Fordham
- Georgetown
- Gettysburg
- GMU
- Gonzaga
- Goucher
- Grinnell
- Guilford
- GW
- Hamilton College
- Hamline
- Hampshire
- Hanover
- Harvard
- Harvey Mudd
- Haverford
- Hofstra
- Holy Cross
- Illinois State
- Indiana University
- Johns Hopkins
- Juniata
- Kalamazoo
- Kenyon College
- Knox
- Lafayette
- LawrenceU
- Lebanon Valley College
- Lehigh
- Lewis & Clark
- Lindenwood
- Loyola Marymount
- Macalester
- Manchester
- Miami of Ohio
- Middlebury
- MIT
- Mt Holyoke
- Muhlenberg College
- NCSU
- New School
- Northeastern
- Northwestern
- NYU
- Oberlin
- Occidental
- Ohio Wesleyan
- Pace
- Pacific Lutheran
- Penn
- Penn State
- Pitzer College
- Plymouth State
- Pomona
- Providence College
- Randolph
- Reed
- Rhodes College
- Rice
- RIT
- Saint Mary’s
- Salve Regina
- Sarah Lawrence
- Seattle University
- Simon’s Rock
- Skidmore
- Smith
- St. Johns
- St. Lawrence
- Stanford
- Stetson
- Stevens
- Suffolk
- Swarthmore
- Sweet Briar
- Syracuse
- Temple
- Transylvania
- Trinity College
- Trinity Washington
- Tufts
- Tulane
- U. Dayton
- U. Maryland
- U. New England
- U. Puget Sound
- U. Richmond
- U. South Carolina
- U. Southern California
- UCDavis
- UCLA
- UConn
- UIUC
- UMass-Amherst
- UMass Lowell
- UMBC
- UNH
- UPitt
- UVA
- UVM
- UWashington
- Vassar
- Villanova
- Virginia Tech
- W&M
- Wake Forest
- Wellesley
- Wesleyan
- Western Mich. U.
- Western Washington
- Wheaton
- Whitman college
- Widener
- Willamette
- Williams
- Winthrop University
- Wisconsin
- Wittenberg
- Worcester State
- WPI
- WUSTL
- WVU
- Yale
Again, you can refer to this Google Doc for more updates.
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!
Read More...What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Isolated Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pinball Wizard”
Drummer Keith Moon was surely the most kinetic member of The Who—which is really saying a lot—but he was not the band’s best musician, even if he is routinely named one of the best drummers of all time. Moon knew the appeal of his playing often lay in the fact that it was like no one else’s: he described himself as the “greatest Keith Moon-type drummer in the world.” Nothing in rock approached his untamed excess, modeled after the far more disciplined flights of his hero, Gene Krupa.
But if the band “can be said to have an instrumental virtuoso,” writes Chris Jisi at Drum! magazine, “it is John Alec Entwistle,” their true solid center (they called him “The Ox”) and the perfect rhythmic foil to Moon, who “could sound like a drum kit falling downstairs,” Entwistle says. The bass player not only kept time, he tells Jisi, since Moon didn’t, and followed Moon’s “mess of cymbals” and “all over the place” snare drum, but he also filled in for a rhythm guitarist as Pete Townshend slashed away.
He kept his bass riffs relatively simple, he had to, and he “added top end or treble… to cut through the rest of the noise.” It works, for sure. He is rightfully singled out as one of the greatest rock bass players ever for his phenomenal skill and poise.
A lesser player trying to compete with Moon’s wall of drums and Townshend’s massive power chords might disappear entirely. Entwistle always stands out. His comments about Moon’s playing might sound disparaging, but they come off in context as honest and accurate, as do his descriptions of his own playing.
Entwistle suggests he wouldn’t be the player he became without Moon and the rest of the band. “We constructed our music to fit ‘round each other,” he says. “It was something very peculiar that none of us played the same way as other people.” In their best moments, some parts “slid together by magic and were gone forever.” This is the essence, really, of rock and roll, the serendipitous transcendence that arises from wildly colliding waves of sound.
But such controlled chaos can require, especially in a band like The Who, one cool, well-trained virtuoso who cannot be ruffled, no matter what, whose perfection looks effortless and who never breaks a sweat. The eternal archetype of that player is John Entwistle. At the top, hear Entwistle’s isolated bass in a live take of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” (He comes in at 1:45, after a much-extended intro). Below it, you’ll easily pick out his every note in the studio version. And further up, after another extended synthesizer intro, hear him solo at 1:25 on “Baba O’Riley,” also live at Shepperton Studios in 1978. (The studio recording is above).
And just above, in one of his most energetic performances, hear him play a live version of “Pinball Wizard” (starting at 0:36). And then catch one more jaw-dropping solo, just for good measure, recorded live at Royal Albert Hall.
Entwistle is sometimes compared to Jimi Hendrix, but in some ways, The Ox came first with his fuzzed-out sound. The mild-mannered player “pioneered the use of feedback in music and smashing his instrument,” writes Ultimate Classic Rock, “with Jimi Hendrix following suit after seeing Entwistle do it.” For all his reserved English coolness, Entwistle first pushed the boundaries of loudness, “using 200 watts of power when most bands used 50,” just one of the reasons, as you’ll hear in these tracks, for his other nickname: “Thunderfingers.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Noam Chomsky Explains What’s Wrong with Postmodern Philosophy & French Intellectuals, and How They End Up Supporting Oppressive Power Structures
Noam Chomsky has always had irascible tendencies—when he doesn’t like something, he lets us know it, without ever raising his voice and usually with plenty of footnotes. It’s a quality that has made the emeritus MIT professor and famed linguist such a potent critic of U.S. empire for half a century, vigorously denouncing the Vietnam War, the Iraq War(s), and the possibility of a catastrophic war with North Korea. Chomsky isn’t a professional historian or political philosopher; these are avocations he has taken on to bolster his arguments. But those arguments are strengthened by his willingness to engage with primary sources and take them seriously.
When it comes, however, to his much-publicized feud with “Postmodernism,” a term he uses liberally at times to describe almost all post-war French intellectual culture, Chomsky rarely confronts his opponents in their own terms. That’s largely because, as he’s said on many occasions, he can’t make any sense of them. It’s not exactly an original critique. Mandarins of French thought like Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard have been accused for decades, and not without merit, of knowingly peddling bullshit to a French readership that expects, as Michel Foucault once admitted, a mandatory “ten percent incomprehensible.” (Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu asserts that the number is much higher.)
But Chomsky’s critique goes further, in a direction that doesn’t get nearly as much press as his charges of obscurantism and overuse of insular jargon. Chomsky claims that far from offering radical new ways of conceiving the world, Postmodern thought serves as an instrument of oppressive power structures. It’s an interesting assertion given some recent arguments that “post-truth” postmodernism is responsible for the rise of the self-described “alt-right” and the rapid spread of fake information as a tool for the current U.S. ruling party seizing power.
Not only is there “a lot of material reward,” Chomsky says, that comes from the academic superstardom many high-profile French philosophers achieved, but their position—or lack of a clear position—“allows people to take a very radical stance… but to be completely dissociated from everything that’s happening.” Chomsky gives an example above of an anonymous postmodernist critic branding a talk he gave as “naïve” for its discussion of such outmoded “Enlightenment stuff” as making moral decisions and referring to such a thing as “truth.” In his brief discussion of “the strange bubble of French intellectuals” at the top of the post, Chomsky gets more specific.
Most post-war French philosophers, he alleges, have been Stalinists or Maoists (he uses the example of Julia Kristeva), and have uncritically embraced authoritarian state communism despite its documented crimes and abuses, while rejecting other modes of philosophical thought like logical positivism that accept the validity of the scientific method. This may or may not be a fair critique: political orientations shift and change (and at times we accept a thinker’s work while fully rejecting their personal politics). And the postmodern critique of scientific discourse as form of oppressive power is a serious one that needn’t entail a wholesale rejection of science.
Are there any post-structuralist thinkers Chomsky admires? Though he takes a little dig at Michel Foucault in the clip above, he and the French theorist have had some fruitful debates, “on real issues,” Chomsky says, “and using language that was perfectly comprehensible—he speaking French, me English.” That’s not a surprise. The two thinkers, despite the immense difference in their styles and frames of reference, both engage heavily with primary historical sources and both consistently write histories of ideology.
It is partly through the interplay between Foucault and Chomsky’s ideas that we might find a synthesis of French Marxist post-structuralist thought and American anarchist political philosophy. Rather than seeing them as professional wrestlers in the ring, with the postmodernist as the heel and headlines like “Chomsky DESTROYS Postmodernism,” we could look for complementarity and points of agreement, and genuinely read, as difficult as that can be, as many of the arguments of postmodern French philosophers as we can (and perhaps this defense of obscurantism) before deciding with a sweeping gesture that none of them make any sense.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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