Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

in Philosophy, Psychology | May 3rd, 2017

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

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

New Film Project Features Citizens of Alabama Reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a Poetic Embodiment of Democratic Ideals

in Poetry, Travel | April 25th, 2017

In times of nation­al anx­i­ety, many of us take com­fort in the fact that the U.S. has endured polit­i­cal crises even more severe than those at hand. His­to­ry can be a teacher and a guide, and so too can poet­ry, as Walt Whit­man reminds us again and again. Whit­man wit­nessed some of the great­est upheavals and rev­o­lu­tion­ary changes the coun­try has ever expe­ri­enced: the Civ­il War and its after­math, the assas­si­na­tion of Abra­ham Lin­coln, the fail­ure of Recon­struc­tion, the mas­sive indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the coun­try at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry.…

Per­haps this is why we return to Whit­man when we make what crit­ics call a “poet­ic turn.” His expan­sive, mul­ti­va­lent verse speaks for us when beau­ty, shock, or sad­ness exceed the lim­its of every­day lan­guage. Whit­man con­tained the nation’s war­ring voic­es, and some­how rec­on­ciled them with­out dilut­ing their unique­ness. This was, indeed, his lit­er­ary mis­sion, to “cre­ate a uni­fied whole out of dis­parate parts,” argues Karen Swal­low Pri­or at The Atlantic. “For Whit­man, poet­ry wasn’t just a vehi­cle for express­ing polit­i­cal lament; it was also a polit­i­cal force in itself.” Poetry’s impor­tance as a bind­ing agent in the frac­tious, frag­ile coali­tion of states, meant that for Whit­man, the country’s “Pres­i­dents shall not be their com­mon ref­er­ee so much as their poets shall.”

Whit­man wrote as a gay man who, by the time he pub­lished the first edi­tion of Leaves of Grass in 1855, had gone from being an “ardent Free-Soil­er” to ful­ly sup­port­ing abo­li­tion. His poet­ry pro­claimed a “rad­i­cal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an vision,” writes Mar­tin Klam­mer, “of an ide­al, mul­tira­cial repub­lic.” A coun­try that was, itself, a poem. “The Unit­ed States them­selves are essen­tial­ly the great­est poem,” wrote Whit­man in his pref­ace. The nation’s con­tra­dic­tions inhab­it us just as we inhab­it them. The only way to resolve our dif­fer­ences, he insist­ed, is to embody them ful­ly, with open­ness toward oth­er peo­ple and the nat­ur­al world. Under­stand­ing Whitman’s mis­sion makes film­mak­er Jen­nifer Crandall’s project Whit­man, Alaba­ma all the more poignant.

For two years, Cran­dall “criss­crossed this deep South­ern state, invit­ing peo­ple to look into a cam­era and share part of them­selves through the words of Walt Whit­man.” To the ques­tion “Who is Amer­i­can?,” Crandall—just as Whit­man before her—answers with a mul­ti­tude of voic­es, weav­ing in and out of a col­lab­o­ra­tive read­ing of the epic “Song of Myself,” begin­ning with 97-year-old Vir­ginia Mae Schmitt of Birm­ing­ham, at the top, who reads Whitman’s lines, “I, now thir­ty-sev­en years old in per­fect health begin / Hop­ing to cease not till death.” No one watch­ing the video, Cran­dall remarks, should ask, “Why isn’t’ a thir­ty-sev­en year old man read­ing this?” To do so is to ignore Whitman’s design for the uni­ver­sal in the par­tic­u­lar.

When Whit­man penned the first lines of “Song of Myself,” the coun­try had not yet “Unlimber’d” the can­nons “to begin the red busi­ness,” as he would lat­er write, but the 1850 Fugi­tive Slave Act had clear­ly lain the foun­da­tion for civ­il war. The poet­’s many revi­sions, addi­tions, and sub­se­quent edi­tions of Leaves of Grass after his first small run in 1855 con­tin­ued until his death in 1892. He was obsessed with the huge­ness and dynamism of the coun­try and its peo­ple, in their dark­est, blood­i­est moments and at their most flour­ish­ing. His vision lets every­one in, with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion, con­stant­ly rewrit­ing itself to meet new faces in the ever-chang­ing nation.

As Mari­am Jal­loh, a 14-year old Mus­lim girl from Guinea, recites in her short por­tion of the read­ing fur­ther up, “every atom belong­ing to me as good belongs to you.” Jol­lah quite lit­er­al­ly makes Whitman’s lan­guage her own, trans­lat­ing into her native Fulani the line, “If they are not just as close as they are dis­tant, they are noth­ing.” Jal­loh “may seem like a sur­pris­ing con­duit for the writ­ing of Whit­man, a long-dead queer social­ist poet from Brook­lyn,” writes Chris­t­ian Kerr at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “but such incon­gruity is the active agent in Whit­man, Alaba­ma’s ther­a­peu­tic salve.” It is also, Whit­man sug­gest­ed, the matrix of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy.

See more read­ings from the project above from Lau­ra and Bran­don Reed­er of Cull­man, the Sul­li­van fam­i­ly of Mobile, and by Demetrius Leslie and Fred­er­ick George, and Patri­cia Mar­shall and Tam­my Coop­er, inmates at mens’ and wom­ens’ pris­ons in Mont­gomery. Whitman’s voice winds through these bod­ies and voic­es, set­tling in, find­ing a home, then, rest­less, mov­ing on, invit­ing us all to join in the cho­rus, yet also—in its con­trar­i­an way—telling us to find our own paths. “You shall no longer take things at sec­ond or third hand.…,” wrote Whit­man, “nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spec­tres in books, / You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall lis­ten to all sides and fil­ter them from your­self.”

Find many more read­ings at the Whit­man, Alaba­ma web­site. And stay tuned for new read­ings as they come online.

Also find works by Walt Whit­man on our lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Iggy Pop Reads Walt Whit­man in Col­lab­o­ra­tions With Elec­tron­ic Artists Alva Noto and Tar­wa­ter

Walt Whit­man Gives Advice to Aspir­ing Young Writ­ers: “Don’t Write Poet­ry” & Oth­er Prac­ti­cal Tips (1888)

Walt Whitman’s Unearthed Health Man­u­al, “Man­ly Health & Train­ing,” Urges Read­ers to Stand (Don’t Sit!) and Eat Plen­ty of Meat (1858)

The Civ­il War & Recon­struc­tion: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

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

Alec Baldwin Has a Podcast: Hear His Intimate Interviews with Patti Smith, Thom Yorke, Jerry Seinfeld, Ira Glass, Amy Schumer & More

in Podcasts | April 21st, 2017

It some­how escaped me. Alec Bald­win has a pod­cast. With 133 episodes in its archive, Here’s The Thing with Alec Bald­win  (Web — iTunes — Feeds) fea­tures “inti­mate and hon­est con­ver­sa­tions” with “artists, pol­i­cy mak­ers and per­form­ers – to hear their sto­ries, what inspires their cre­ations, what deci­sions changed their careers, and what rela­tion­ships influ­enced their work.” Below, we’ve embed­ded his recent con­ver­sa­tion with Pat­ti Smith. It’s quite good. But there are so many oth­ers worth a men­tion. Let me rat­tle off a quick list: REM’s Michael Stipe, Vig­go Mortensen, Michael Pol­lan, Amy Schumer and Judd Apa­tow, William Fried­kin, Paul Simon, Ira Glass, Jer­ry Sein­feld, David Simon, Radio­head­’s Thom Yorke, Lena Dun­ham, Peter Framp­ton, David Let­ter­man, Car­ol Bur­nett, Kris­ten Wiig, SNL’s Lorne Michaels, and Chris Rock.

Click the links to stream each inter­view, and don’t miss Bald­win’s new mem­oir, Nev­er­the­less. He hap­pens to nar­rate the audio­book ver­sion, which you can down­load for free if you sign up for Audible.com’s 30-day free tri­al. We have info on that here.

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!

Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Creates a 19-Song Playlist to Help You Get Over Writer’s Block

in Music, Writing | April 13th, 2017

Pho­to by Steve Jurvet­son, via Flickr Com­mons

Last year we alert­ed you to a short doc about authors and their rela­tion­ship with writer’s block. Many were philo­soph­i­cal. Oth­ers like Philipp Mey­er dis­missed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actu­al­ly exists,” he said. “It’s basi­cal­ly inse­cu­ri­ty.”

How seri­ous­ly you take it or how ter­ri­bly it affects you, we have a Spo­ti­fy playlist cre­at­ed by Lin-Manuel Miran­da of Hamil­ton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”

He revealed the playlist on his Twit­ter feed on March 20 with an apol­o­gy that the mix took longer to make than expect­ed. It is a mix, he said, “about writ­ing, songs that fea­ture great writ­ing, and every­thing in between.” Like his oth­er mix­es, he’s think­ing about us, that kind­ly Mr. Miran­da.

The eclec­tic mix begins with “Hap­py Birth­day Dar­ling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then fea­tures Eng­lish-lan­guage hip hop from the Hamil­ton Mix­tape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Span­ish-lan­guage hip hop from Calle 13 (“Aden­tro”), folk clas­sics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morn­ing”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaun­ty pop from Vam­pire Week­end (“Oxford Com­ma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza­’s bal­lad “Why” from the musi­cal Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which clos­es the mix with a paean to the healthy addic­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)

And don’t wor­ry if you don’t have Spo­ti­fy (which you can down­load here). He’s list­ed the tracks on his Twit­ter post too.

It’s nice to know that Miran­da fussed over this selec­tion like one used to do back in the days of cas­sette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?

via Nerdist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

8 Writ­ers on How to Face Writer’s Block and the Blank Page: Mar­garet Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

A Clever Super­cut of Writ­ers Strug­gling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Bar­ton Fink to The Roy­al Tenen­baums

How Famous Writ­ers Deal With Writer’s Block: Their Tips & Tricks

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

S‑Town: The Podcast That Will Help You Binge-Listen Your Way Through This Week

in Podcasts | April 3rd, 2017

Last week, the folks behind Ser­i­al and This Amer­i­can Life, teamed up to release S‑Town (short for Shit­town), a sev­en-episode/­sev­en-hour pod­cast which I devoured in three days flat. I don’t want to give any spoil­ers. So let me give you just the text that pro­motes the pod­cast on iTunes, and then sug­gest you start lis­ten­ing:

John despis­es his Alaba­ma town and decides to do some­thing about it. He asks a reporter to inves­ti­gate the son of a wealthy fam­i­ly who’s alleged­ly been brag­ging that he got away with mur­der. But then some­one else ends up dead, spark­ing a nasty feud, a hunt for hid­den trea­sure, and an unearthing of the mys­ter­ies of one man’s life.

Find episodes on iTunes, Stitch­er, RSS feed, Radio Pub­lic, or the web.

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!

I’m Just a Pill: A Schoolhouse Rock Classic Gets Reimagined to Defend Reproductive Rights in 2017

in Biology, Current Affairs, Health, Politics, Television | March 27th, 2017

Like many Amer­i­can chil­dren of the 70s and 80s, my under­stand­ing of how our gov­ern­ment is sup­posed to func­tion was shaped by School­house Rock.

Immi­gra­tion, sep­a­ra­tion of leg­isla­tive, exec­u­tive and judi­cial pow­ers and of course, the promise of the Con­sti­tu­tion (“a list of prin­ci­ples for keepin’ peo­ple free”) were just a few of the top­ics the ani­mat­ed musi­cal series cov­ered with clar­i­ty and wit.

The new world order in which we’ve recent­ly found our­selves sug­gests that 2017 would be a grand year to start rolling out more such videos.

The Lady Parts Jus­tice League, a self-declared “cabal of comics and writ­ers expos­ing creeps hell­bent on destroy­ing access to birth con­trol and abor­tion” leads the charge with the above homage to School­house Rock­’s 1976 hit, “I’m Just a Bill,” recast­ing the original’s glum aspi­rant law as a feisty Plan B con­tra­cep­tive pill. The red haired boy who kept the bill com­pa­ny on the steps of the Cap­i­tal is now a teenage girl, con­fused as to how any legal, over-the-counter method for reduc­ing the risk of unwant­ed preg­nan­cy could have so many ene­mies.

As with the orig­i­nal series, the prime objec­tive is to edu­cate, and com­ic Lea DeLar­ia’s Pill hap­pi­ly oblig­es, explain­ing that while peo­ple may dis­agree as to when “life” begins, it’s a sci­en­tif­ic fact that preg­nan­cy begins when a fer­til­ized egg lodges itself in the uterus. (DeLar­ia plays Big Boo on Orange is the New Black, by the way.) That process takes a while—72 hours to be exact. Plen­ty of time for the par­tic­i­pants to scut­tle off to the drug­store for emer­gency con­tra­cep­tion, aka Plan B, the so called “morn­ing-after” pill.

As per the drug’s web­site, if tak­en with­in 72 hours after unpro­tect­ed sex, Plan B  can reduce the risk of preg­nan­cy by up to 89%. Tak­en with­in 24 hours, it is about 95% effec­tive.

And yes, teenagers can legal­ly pur­chase it, though Teen Vogue has report­ed on numer­ous stores who’ve made it dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, for shop­pers to gain access to the pill.

(The Repro­duc­tive Jus­tice Project encour­ages con­sumers to help them col­lect data on whether Plan B is cor­rect­ly dis­played on the shelves as avail­able for sale to any woman of child­bear­ing age.)

There’s a help­ful foot­ball anal­o­gy for those who may be a bit slow in under­stand­ing that Plan B is indeed a bonafide con­tra­cep­tive, and not the abor­ti­fa­cient some mis­tak­en­ly make it out to be. It’s NSFW, but only just, as a team of car­toon penis-out­lines push down the field toward the uter­ine wall in the end zone.

The oth­er bills who once stood in line await­ing the president’s sig­na­ture have been reimag­ined as sperm, while song­writer Hol­ly Miran­da pays trib­ute to Dave Frish­berg’s lyrics with a piz­zazz wor­thy of the orig­i­nal:

I’m just a pill

A help­ful birth con­trol pill

No mat­ter what they say on Cap­i­tal Hill

So now you know my truth

I’m all about pre­ven­tion

If your con­dom breaks

I’m here for inter­ven­tion

Join me take a stand today

I real­ly hope and pray that you will

Drop some facts

Tell the world

I’m a pill.

Let’s hope the resis­tance yields more catchy, edu­ca­tion­al ani­ma­tions!

And here, for com­par­ison’s sake, is the mag­nif­i­cent orig­i­nal:

Via BUST Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

School­house Rock: Revis­it a Col­lec­tion of Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Edu­ca­tion­al Videos

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

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

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film, Music | March 22nd, 2017

What hap­pens when you cue up The Wiz­ard of Oz (1939) and Pink Floy­d’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and play them togeth­er? You get some­thing mag­i­cal. Or, to be more pre­cise, you get “Dark Side of the Rain­bow,” a mashup that first began cir­cu­lat­ing in 1995, back when the inter­net first went com­mer­cial. Watch “Dark Side of the Rain­bow” (here) and you could believe that Floyd wrote Dark Side as a stealth Wiz­ard of Oz soundtrack–though that’s some­thing the band firm­ly denies. And, we believe them.

But bury one rumor, and anoth­er takes its place. The Vimeo cap­tion accom­pa­ny­ing the oth­er mashup above reads as fol­lows:

It has long been rumoured that Pink Floyd set ‘Echoes’ to the final sequence of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Two years before pro­duc­ing their album ‘Med­dle’, fea­tur­ing the 23 minute piece ‘Echoes’, Pink Floyd worked on the ‘More’ French film sound­track, where they worked with film syn­chro­ni­sa­tion equip­ment. From there the rumours blos­somed, with Roger Waters being mis­quot­ed as say­ing the band were orig­i­nal­ly offered to do the sound­track (they in fact turned down an offer to fea­ture the ‘Atom Heart Moth­er’ suite in ‘A Clock­work Orange’). Whether or not the rumours have any basis in fact, there is an unde­ni­able beau­ty when watch­ing the com­bi­na­tion of Kubrick­’s intri­cate stop-motion uni­verse, cou­pled with the psy­che­del­ic won­ders of Pink Floyd.

This last thought is sec­ond­ed by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Joe Steiff, who, writ­ing in the edit­ed col­lec­tion, Pink Floyd and Phi­los­o­phy, adds this:

A less­er-known mashup is the sync­ing of “Echoes” (from Med­dle) with the final twen­ty min­utes of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (begin­ning with “Jupiter and Beyond the Infi­nite”)… [T]he mashup is coher­ent and cohe­sive. The emo­tion­al tone of the music and the images work in near-har­mo­ny, result­ing in a mashup that stands up to repeat­ed view­ings.… Both the movie and the music feed into and expand the sense of mys­tery and unknowa­bil­i­ty that each explores inde­pen­dent­ly.

Watch “Echoes Odyssey” above and see for your­self.

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:

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

How Did Beethoven Compose His 9th Symphony After He Went Completely Deaf?

in Biology, Math, Music, Science | March 14th, 2017

You don’t need to know any­thing at all about clas­si­cal music, nor have any lik­ing for it even, to be deeply moved by that most famous of sym­phonies, Lud­wig van Beethoven’s 9th—“per­haps the most icon­ic work of the West­ern musi­cal tra­di­tion,” writes The Juil­liard Jour­nal in an arti­cle about its hand­writ­ten score. Com­mis­sioned in 1817, the sub­lime work was only com­plet­ed in 1824. By that time, its com­pos­er was com­plete­ly and total­ly deaf. At the first per­for­mance, Beethoven did not notice that the mas­sive final choral move­ment had end­ed, and one of the musi­cians had to turn him around to acknowl­edge the audi­ence.

This may seem, says researcher Natalya St. Clair in the TED-Ed video above, like some “cru­el joke,” but it’s the truth. Beethoven was so deaf that some of the most inter­est­ing arti­facts he left behind are the so-called “con­ver­sa­tion books,” kept from 1818 onward to com­mu­ni­cate with vis­i­tors who had to write down their ques­tions and replies. How then might it have been pos­si­ble for the com­pos­er to cre­ate such endur­ing­ly thrilling, rap­tur­ous works of aur­al art?

Using the del­i­cate, melan­choly “Moon­light Sonata” (which the com­pos­er wrote in 1801, when he could still hear), St. Clair attempts to show us how Beethoven used math­e­mat­i­cal “pat­terns hid­den beneath the beau­ti­ful sounds.” (In the short video below from doc­u­men­tary The Genius of Beethoven, see the onset of Beethoven’s hear­ing loss in a dra­mat­ic read­ing of his let­ters.) Accord­ing to St. Clair’s the­o­ry, Beethoven com­posed by observ­ing “the math­e­mat­i­cal rela­tion­ship between the pitch fre­quen­cy of dif­fer­ent notes,” though he did not write his sym­phonies in cal­cu­lus. It’s left rather unclear how the com­poser’s sup­posed intu­ition of math­e­mat­ics and pitch cor­re­sponds with his abil­i­ty to express such a range of emo­tions through music.

We can learn more about Beethoven’s deaf­ness and its bio­log­i­cal rela­tion­ship to his com­po­si­tion­al style in the short video below with research fel­low Edoar­do Sac­cen­ti and his col­league Age Smilde from the Biosys­tems Data Analy­sis Group at Amsterdam’s Swammer­dam Insti­tute for Life Sci­ences. By count­ing the high and low fre­quen­cies in Beethoven’s com­plete string quar­tets, a task that took Sac­cen­ti many weeks, he and his team were able to show how three dis­tinct com­po­si­tion­al styles “cor­re­spond to stages in the pro­gres­sion of his deaf­ness,” as they write in their paper (which you can down­load in PDF here).

The pro­gres­sion is unusu­al. As his con­di­tion wors­ened, Beethoven includ­ed few­er and few­er high fre­quen­cy sounds in his com­po­si­tions (giv­ing cel­lists much more to do). By the time we get to 1824–26, “the years of the late string quar­tets and of com­plete deafness”—and of the com­ple­tion of the 9th—the high notes have returned, due in part, Smilde says, to “the bal­ance between an audi­to­ry feed­back and the inner ear.” Beethoven’s reliance on his “inner ear” made his music “much and much rich­er.” How? As one vio­lin­ist in the clip puts it, he was “giv­en more free­dom because he was not attached any­more to the phys­i­cal sound, [he could] just use his imag­i­na­tion.”

For all of the com­pelling evi­dence pre­sent­ed here, whether Beethoven’s genius in his painful lat­er years is attrib­ut­able to his intu­ition of com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal pat­terns or to the total free rein of his imag­i­na­tive inner ear may in fact be undis­cov­er­able. In any case, no amount of ratio­nal expla­na­tion can explain away our aston­ish­ment that the man who wrote the unfail­ing­ly pow­er­ful, awe­some­ly dynam­ic “Ode to Joy” finale (con­duct­ed above by Leonard Bern­stein), couldn’t actu­al­ly hear any of the music.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryosh­ka Dolls in Japan

Leonard Bern­stein Con­ducts Beethoven’s 9th in a Clas­sic 1979 Per­for­mance

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

An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy

in Media, Politics | March 13th, 2017

For near­ly as many years as he’s occu­pied the pub­lic eye, famed lin­guist and anar­chist philoso­pher Noam Chom­sky has made claims that might have dis­cred­it­ed oth­er aca­d­e­mics. Per­haps his many books, arti­cles, lec­tures, inter­views, etc. car­ry such weight because of his “famed lin­guist” sta­tus and his long­time tenure at MIT. But there’s more to his longevi­ty as a respect­ed crit­ic of U.S. state pow­er. His voice also car­ries sig­nif­i­cant author­i­ty because he sub­stan­ti­ates his argu­ments with eru­dite, gran­u­lar analy­ses of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry, his­to­ry, and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy.

We’ve seen him do exact­ly this in his fierce oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam War at the begin­ning of his activist career, and in his cri­tiques of proxy wars, impe­ri­al­is­tic repres­sion, and cor­po­rate resource grabs in Latin Amer­i­ca and South­east Asia in decades since.

When it comes to the U.S. domes­tic scene, one of Chomsky’s most point­ed and con­tin­u­al­ly rel­e­vant cri­tiques address­es the way in which we’re led to believe the country’s actions over­seas jus­ti­fy them­selves, as well as its actions upon its own cit­i­zens. We might debate whether the U.S. is a democ­ra­cy or a repub­lic, but accord­ing to Chom­sky, both notions may well be illu­so­ry.

Instead, Chom­sky argues in Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent—his 1988 cri­tique of “the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of the mass media” with Edward S. Herman—that the mass media sells us the idea that we have polit­i­cal agency. Their “pri­ma­ry func­tion… in the Unit­ed States is to mobi­lize sup­port for the spe­cial inter­ests that dom­i­nate the gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor.” Those inter­ests may have changed or evolved quite a bit since 1988, but the mech­a­nisms of what Chom­sky and Her­man iden­ti­fy as “effec­tive and pow­er­ful ide­o­log­i­cal insti­tu­tions that car­ry out a sys­tem-sup­port­ive pro­pa­gan­da func­tion” might work in the age of Twit­ter just as they did in one dom­i­nat­ed by net­work and cable news.

Those mech­a­nisms large­ly divide into what the authors called the “Five Fil­ters.” The video at the top of the post, pro­duced by Marcela Pizarro and nar­rat­ed by Democ­ra­cy Now’s Amy Good­man, pro­vides a quick intro­duc­tion to them, in a jar­ring ani­mat­ed sequence that’s part Mon­ty Python, part Res­i­dents video. See the five fil­ters list­ed below in brief, with excerpts from Goodman’s com­men­tary:

1. Media Own­er­ship—The endgame of all mass media orgs is prof­it. “It is in their inter­est to push for what­ev­er guar­an­tees that prof­it.”

2. Adver­tis­ing—Media costs more than con­sumers will pay: Adver­tis­ers fill the gap. What do adver­tis­ers pay for? Access to audi­ences. “It isn’t just that the media is sell­ing you a prod­uct. They’re also sell­ing adver­tis­ers a prod­uct: you.”

3. Media Elite—“Jour­nal­ism can­not be a check on pow­er, because the very sys­tem encour­ages com­plic­i­ty. Gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, and big insti­tu­tions know how to influ­ence the media. They feed it scoops and inter­views with sup­posed experts. They make them­selves cru­cial to the process of jour­nal­ism. If you want to chal­lenge pow­er, you’ll be pushed to the mar­gins…. You won’t be get­ting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

4. Flack—“When the sto­ry is incon­ve­nient for the pow­ers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: dis­cred­it­ing sources, trash­ing sto­ries, and divert­ing the con­ver­sa­tion.”

5. The Com­mon Ene­my—“To man­u­fac­ture con­sent, you need an ene­my, a tar­get: Com­mu­nism, ter­ror­ists, immi­grants… a boogey­man to fear helps cor­ral pub­lic opin­ion.”

Chom­sky and Herman’s book offers a sur­gi­cal analy­sis of the ways cor­po­rate mass media “man­u­fac­tures con­sent” for a sta­tus quo the major­i­ty of peo­ple do not actu­al­ly want. Yet for all of the recent ago­niz­ing over mass media fail­ure and com­plic­i­ty, we don’t often hear ref­er­ences to Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent these days. This may have some­thing to do with the book’s dat­ed exam­ples, or it may tes­ti­fy to Chomsky’s mar­gin­al­iza­tion in main­stream polit­i­cal dis­course, though he would be the first to note that his voice has not been sup­pressed.

It may also be the case that media the­o­ry and crit­i­cism like Chom­sky’s, or the work of Mar­shall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, or Jean Bau­drillard (all very dif­fer­ent kinds of thinkers), has fall­en out of favor in a 140-char­ac­ter world. In the late-80s and 90s, how­ev­er, such the­o­ry received a good deal of atten­tion, and Chom­sky appeared in the many venues you’ll see in the short video above, excerpt­ed from an almost 3‑hour 1992 doc­u­men­tary called Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent, a film made by “die-hard fans,” wrote Col­in Mar­shall in an ear­li­er post, that “curates instances of Chom­sky going from inter­view to inter­view, debate to debate, forum to forum, mak­ing sharp-sound­ing points about the rela­tion­ship between busi­ness elites and the media.”

Our desire for instant reward and set­tled opin­ion may have over­tak­en our abil­i­ty to sub­ject the entire phe­nom­e­non of mass media to crit­i­cal analy­sis, as we leap from cliffhang­er to cliffhang­er and cri­sis to cri­sis. But should we take the time to watch this film and, prefer­ably also, read Chomsky’s book, we may find our­selves some­what bet­ter equipped to eval­u­ate the onslaught of pro­pa­gan­da to which we’re sub­ject­ed on what seems like an hourly basis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

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

Watch a 5‑Part Animated Primer on Afrofuturism, the Black Sci-Fi Phenomenon Inspired by Sun Ra

in Music, Sci Fi | March 9th, 2017

We rec­og­nize its hall­marks in music espe­cial­ly. It is the province of Sun Ra, George Clin­ton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Afri­ka Bam­baataa, and, in recent years, Janelle Mon­ae, Andre 3000, Bey­on­cé, and many oth­er black artists who have updat­ed for the 21st cen­tu­ry the styles and sounds of Afro­fu­tur­ism. Reach­ing back into an Afro­cen­tric past—with heavy empha­sis on Egyptology—and for­ward to an inter­stel­lar future, the genre of Afro­fu­tur­ism reclaims the ter­rain of sci­ence fic­tion for peo­ple of African descent, serv­ing as an “umbrel­la term,” as one con­tem­po­rary Afro­fu­tur­ist com­mu­ni­ty puts it, “for the Black pres­ence in sci-fi, tech­nol­o­gy, mag­ic, and fan­ta­sy.”

One might be sur­prised to learn that the term itself did not orig­i­nate with the vision­ary founder of its aes­thet­ic. Sun Ra (for­mer­ly Her­man Poole Blount)—bandleader of the Arkestra and space alien from Saturn—called his space-themed big band music “cos­mic jazz” or, some­times, “phre music—music of the sun.” Instead, “Afro­fu­tur­ism” was coined by cul­tur­al crit­ic Mark Dery in his sem­i­nal 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” which includ­ed inter­views with sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany, crit­ic and musi­cian Greg Tate, and schol­ar Tri­cia Rose. Afro­fu­tur­ism has tak­en on a vari­ety of mean­ings, not only in music, but also in art, dance, film, and sci­ence fic­tion writ­ing like that of Delany and Octavia But­ler.

But as you’ll learn in the video above, the first in a 5‑part ani­mat­ed series on the genre from Dust, “its roots go back to the late 1930s in Huntsville, Alaba­ma,” the actu­al birth­place of Sun Ra, where he main­tained he was abduct­ed, tak­en to Sat­urn (not Jupiter, as the nar­ra­tor mis­tak­en­ly says), and told by aliens to “trans­port black peo­ple away from the vio­lence and racism of plan­et Earth.” The series traces the growth of Sun Ra’s orig­i­nal mis­sion through the cul­tur­al touch­stones of Lieu­tenant Uhu­ra, George Clin­ton, Jimi Hen­drix, and Mis­sy Elliott.

Sun Ra died in 1993, the year before Dery invent­ed the name for his gen­er­ous lega­cy. “What does it say,” the nar­ra­tor asks, “about how far we have or have not come if this mes­sage still res­onates with each new gen­er­a­tion?” Dery recent­ly took on the ques­tion in a 2016 essay, in which he quotes Tate—now at work on a book on Afro­fu­tur­ism: “Hav­ing ced­ed the racial ground war to Enlight­en­ment-era impe­ri­al­ism some­where back in the 17th cen­tu­ry, black futur­ism deter­mined that the fiery realms of the sym­bol­ic and the myth­ic and the rhetor­i­cal and the spir­i­tu­al and the wicked­ly styl­ish, son­ic, and polyrhyth­mic would become our culture’s baili­wick, rai­son d’être, and cul­tur­al tri­umphal­ist bat­tle­ground.”

Afro­fu­tur­ism trans­forms trau­ma, the era­sure of the black past, and bleak prospects for the future into pow­er­ful dis­plays of cre­ative agency. The strug­gle to claim that agency in the face of impe­r­i­al vio­lence and plun­der con­tin­ues, Dery argues, but now takes place in the midst of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments even a space alien like Sun Ra could not have fore­seen. While many of the ques­tions once asked about the human­i­ty of enslaved peo­ple have shift­ed to debates over androids, cyborgs, and oth­er posthu­man cre­ations, the con­di­tions for many col­o­nized and mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple all over the world have not con­sid­er­ably improved.

As “Afro­fu­tur­ism is all too aware,” Dery writes, “objects can have inner lives…. Con­se­quent­ly, it is less con­cerned with knock­ing the human off its onto­log­i­cal perch than it is in forg­ing alliances with Oth­ers of any species, human or posthu­man.”

Afro­fu­tur­ism speaks to our moment because it alone – not the ahis­tor­i­cal, apo­lit­i­cal cor­po­rate pre­cogs at TED talks; not the fatu­ous Hol­ly­wood fran­chis­es that have noth­ing to say about our times – offers a mythol­o­gy of the future present, an explana­to­ry nar­ra­tive that recov­ers the lost data of his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry, con­fronts the dystopi­an real­i­ty of black life in Amer­i­ca, demands a place for peo­ple of col­or among the mono­rails and the Hugh Fer­ris mono­liths of our tomor­rows, insists that our Visions of Things to Come live up to our pieties about racial equal­i­ty and social jus­tice. 

You can see three short episodes of Dust’s Afro­fu­tur­ism series above, with parts four and five to come. (You will be able to find them all here.) Until then, watch the short Vox video explain­er on Afro­fu­tur­ism below.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sun Ra’s Full Lec­ture & Read­ing List From His 1971 UC Berke­ley Course, “The Black Man in the Cos­mos”

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

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