Malcolm Gladwell Has Launched a New Podcast, Revisionist History: Hear the First Episode
Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast. Some of you will require no further information, and in fact have already clicked over to iTunes (or another podcast downloading application of your choice), desperate to download the first episode. Allow me to inform those cooler heads who remain that Revisionist History won’t begin its ten-week run, with one episode out per week, until June 16th. (Update: The first episode is now live and you can stream it below.) But you can subscribe right now (iTunes — Stitcher — RSS), and while you wait over the next few days, you can listen to the preview that Gladwell has already posted.
You can also get a little a taste of Gladwell’s new project by watching the trailer at the top of the post. “Every week, I’m going to take you back into the past,” Gladwell promises in the video’s narration, “to examine something that I think has been overlooked and misunderstood.”
He gets into more detail on the Brian Lehrer Show segment below, in which he describes the first episode of Revisionist History as about the question of what it means to be “the first outsider to enter a closed world,” starting from the career of British painter Elizabeth Thompson, whose 1874 canvas The Roll Call became, for a time, the most famous image in the country. It broke its female artist into the male-dominated world of painting, and seemed, for an even shorter time, to herald a new era rich with high-profile female painters. “Everyone waits and waits for the revolution to happen,” Gladwell says, already into his characteristic storytelling mode, “and it never happens.”
Lehrer reacts to Gladwell’s choice of the story of “the first woman to break through in a male-dominated field” with the obvious question: “Is that a coincidence?” It is absolutely not a coincidence, Gladwell replies, going on to connect the phenomenon in question to not just modern figures like Hillary Clinton but Barack Obama, Julia Gillard, and Margaret Thatcher as well, and in the podcast itself surely many others besides. He also hints at an episode later in the season that begins with an obscure Elvis Costello song — and a “terrible” one at that, he adds — and uses it “as a way of finding out how creativity works, and how an awful lot of what we consider works of genius had an incredibly circuitous path to greatness,” ending up at a gallery looking at Cézannes.
You can sign up for episode updates at the official Revisionist History site. The show comes as a product of Panoply, the podcast network of The Slate Group, and its first season promises slick production in addition to the kind of compelling stories and memorable social-science insights with which Gladwell has made himself famous. And we shouldn’t ignore his talent for marketing, either, fully in evidence from nothing more than the tagline he speaks in the trailer: “Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.” All this together sounds like more than a good reason to give his podcast a first one.
Revisionist History is listed in our new collection, The 150 Best Podcasts to Enrich Your Mind.
Related Content:
The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University
Malcolm Gladwell: What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce
Malcolm Gladwell: Taxes Were High and Life Was Just Fine
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Moby Lets You Download 4 Hours of Ambient Music to Help You Sleep, Meditate, Do Yoga & Not Panic
Back in May, I wrote about the damaging effects stress has on the body, and the scientifically-validated power of yoga and meditation to undo them. Following close behind stress as a chronic contributor to illness is sleeplessness, which the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School links to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy. Add to all these risks the problems of poor productivity and disorganized thinking, and you’ll begin to see insomnia for the dangerous condition it is.
What to do with that anxious, overworked, overtired self? Well, again, I’d heartily recommend a yoga or meditation practice. Power naps throughout the day can boost your endurance and brainpower as well. But I’d also recommend music—music that calms the body and helps wash away the mental gunk that accumulates throughout the day. Composer Max Richter recently released an eight-hour piece of music intended to lull listeners to sleep and keep them there. His efforts are now joined by electronica superstar Moby, who has spoken frankly about the insomnia that has plagued him since the age of four.
For his own benefit, Moby began making what he describes on his website as “really really really quiet music to listen to when I do yoga or sleep or meditate or panic.” He “ended up with 4 hours of music,” he says, and “decided to give it away.” The collection consists of 11 “Long Ambient” pieces between around 20 and 30 minutes each. You can hear them all—or not, if they put you to sleep—at the Spotify playlist above, or download them at Moby’s site. (He also gives you the option to play the recordings on Apple Music, Soundcloud, Deezer and other platforms.) “It’s really quiet,” he reiterates, “no drums, no vocals, just very slow calm pretty chords and sounds and things.”
Consisting of rumbling drone notes with reverb-drenched synths floating atop, Moby’s “Long Ambient” compositions remind me of the soundscapes of Brian Eno or William Basinski, and like the work of those composers, his sleep music feels both oceanic and cinematic. Perhaps in his move a few years back from his native New York to L.A., Moby found himself musically inspired by the Pacific and the movies. (You might remember his gorgeous, dramatic soundtrack to the L.A.-set Michael Mann film Heat.) Wherever this music comes from, it’s a peaceful way to combat insomnia, stress, or panic.
Related Content:
Daily Meditation Boosts & Revitalizes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Harvard Study Finds
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Recordings: World & Classical Music, Interviews, Nature Sounds & More
Online archives, galleries, and libraries offer Vegas-sized buffets for the senses (well two of them, anyway). All the art and photography your eyes can take in, all the music and spoken word recordings your ears can handle. But perhaps you’re still missing something? “Geordies banging spoons” maybe? Or “Tawang lamas blowing conch shell trumpets… Tongan tribesmen playing nose flutes…,” the sound of “the Assamese woodworm feasting on a window frame in the dead of night”?
No worries, the British Library’s got you covered and then some. In 2009, it “made its vast archive of world and traditional music available to everyone, free of charge, on the internet,” amounting to roughly 28,000 recordings and, The Guardian estimates “about 2,000 hours of singing, speaking, yelling, chanting, blowing, banging, tinkling and many other verbs associated with what is a uniquely rich sound archive.”
But that’s not all, oh no! The complete archive, titled simply and authoritatively “Sounds,” also houses recordings of accents and dialects, environment and nature, pop music, “sound maps,” oral history, classical music, sound recording history, and arts, literature, and performance (such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s short discourse on “Wireless,” animated in the video below).
The 80,000 recordings available to stream online represent just a selection of the British Library’s “extensive collections of unique sound recordings,” but what a selection it is. In the short video at the top of the post, The Wire Magazine takes us on a mini-tour of the physical archive’s meticulous digitization methods. As with all such wide-ranging collections, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
One might browse the range of unusual folk sounds on aural display in the World & Traditional music section, covering every continent and a daunting metacategory called “Worldwide.” For a more specific entry point, Electronic Beats recommends a collection of “around 8,000 Afropop tracks” from Guinea, recorded on “the state-supported Syliphone label” and “released between 1958 and 1984.”
Other highlights include “Between Two Worlds: Poetry & Translation,” an ongoing project begun in 2008 that features readings and interviews with “poets who are bilingual or have English as a second language, or who otherwise reflect the project’s theme of dual cultures.” Or you may enjoy the extensive collection of classical music recordings, including “Hugh Davies experimental music,” or the “Oral History of Jazz in Britain.”
The category called “Sound Maps” organizes a diversity of recordings—including regional accents, interviews with Holocaust survivors, wildlife sounds, and Ugandan folk music—by reference to their locations on Google maps.
Not all of the material in “Sounds” is sound-based. Recording and audio geeks and historians will appreciate the large collection of “Playback & Recording Equipment” photographs (such as the 1912 Edison Disc Phonograph, above ), spanning the years 1877 to 1992. Also, many of the recordings—such as the wonderful first version of “Dirty Old Town” by Alan Lomax and the Ramblers, with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger (below)—feature album covers, front and back, as well as disc labels.
The recordings in the Archive are unfortunately not downloadable (unless you are a licensed member of a UK HE/FE institution), but you can stream them all online and share any of them on your favorite social media platform. Perhaps the British Library will extend download privileges to all users in the future. For now, browsing through the sheer volume and variety of sounds in the archive should be enough to keep you busy.
Related Content:
The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Features 17,000 Blues & Folk Recordings
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Ursula K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read
Image by Gorthian, via Wikimedia Commons
I’m sure I speak for many when I say that Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels and stories changed what I thought science fiction could be and do. Raised on H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other mostly-white-male-centered classic sci-fi, I found Le Guin’s literary thought experiments startling and refreshing. Now it seems like almost a matter of course that science fiction and fantasy narratives come from a diversity of peoples and perspectives. But Le Guin remains the first to wake me from a dogmatic slumber about the potential of speculative fiction to imagine not only future technologies, but also expansive future identities.
Novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven reflect Le Guin’s very broad range of interests in politics and the humanities and social sciences. She began her career as an academic studying Renaissance French and Italian literature, and her fiction synthesizes years of careful reading in anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and Eastern and Western philosophy. Likewise, though she has been much influenced by traditional hard science fiction, Le Guin’s literary loves are wide and deep. All that’s to say she’s as admirable and interesting a reader as she is a writer. When she praises a book, I pay attention. Thanks to her genial, loquacious online presence for many years, her fans have had ample opportunity to find out what she’s reading and why.
Le Guin recently made a few lists of books she likes, and made sure to preface each one with a disclaimer: “This list is not ‘my favorite books.’ It’s just a list of books I’ve read or re-read, recently, that I liked and wanted to tell people about.” She leaps from genre to genre, writing mini-reviews of each book and linking each one to Powell’s, the independent bookstore in her beloved city of Portland, Oregon. Below, we’ve excerpted some of Le Guin’s “Books I’ve Liked” from each list, along with her commentary. Click on each date heading to see her complete lists of recommendations.
Seeing, by José Saramago. A sequel to his amazing novel Blindness. Saramago is not easy to read. He punctuates mostly with commas, doesn’t pararaph often, doesn’t set off conversation in quotes —; mannerisms I wouldn’t endure in a lesser writer; but Saramago is worth it. More than worth it. Transcendently worth it. Blindness scared me to death when I started it, but it rises wonderfully out of darkness into the light. Seeing goes the other way and is a very frightening book.
Changing Ones, by Will Roscoe. An examination of how gender has been constructed in Native American societies. Responsibly researched, very well written, generous in spirit, never oversimplifying a complex subject, this is a wonderfully enlightening book.
Age of Bronze: The Story of the Trojan War. I: A Thousand Ships, and II: Sacrifice by Eric Shanower. A graphic novel —; the first two volumes of a projected series. The drawing is excellent, the language lively, and the research awesome. Shanower goes back to the very origins of the war to follow the early careers of the various heroes —; Agamemnon and Menelaus, Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, Paris, Aeneas, and their families, parents, wives, lovers, children… Thus, by the end of Book Two, the actual siege of Troy, which the Iliad tells one part of, is yet to begin. I see a looming problem: the battles (of which there have been a good many already) are visually all alike, and there’s endlessly more to come —; battle scenes in Homer are brutally monotonous and interminable (as war is). But these two volumes are visually and narratively varied, and give a fascinating backgrounding and interpretation to the great stories.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Of course if you haven’t read Kavalier and Clay yet, go read it at once, what on earth have you been waiting for? Then read this. It is even a little crazier, maybe. Crazy like a genius.
Suffer the Little Children, by Donna Leon. The 16th of Leon’s Venetian mystery novels is one of the finest. I reviewed this book for the Manchester Guardian
Some young adult books I like — I had to read a lot of them this spring, and these stood out:
The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. This one has already won the Newbery Award and gone to Kiddilit Booksellers Heaven forever, so it doesn’t need my endorsement… but it’s a lovely, funny, sweet book, set in a truly godforsaken desert town in California.
Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata. A novel that goes with its young heroine to one of the prison camps where our government sent all our citizens of Japanese ancestry in 1942 after Pearl Harbor. It’s a beautiful book, understated and strong and tender. If you read it you won’t forget it.
Charles Mann, 1491. A brilliant survey of what we know about the human populations of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans, and a brief, often scathing history of how we’ve handled our knowledge. The author is not an archeologist or anthropologist, but he has done his homework, and is a fine reporter and summarizer, writing with clarity and flair, easy to read but never talking down. Discussing intensely controversial subjects such as dates of settlement and population sizes, he lets you know where he stands, but presents both sides fairly. A fascinating, mind-expanding book.
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I have never eaten an Idaho potato since I read Pollan’s article about what potato fields are “treated” with, in his earlier book The Botany of Desire. This one is scary in a different way. It probably won’t stop you from eating anything, indeed it is a real celebration of (real) food; but the first section is as fine a description of the blind, incalculable power of Growth Capitalism as I ever read. (Did you know that cattle can’t digest corn, and have to be chemically poisoned in order to produce “cornfed beef”? So, there being lots and lots of grass, why feed them corn? Read the book!) There are some depressing bits in the section on “organic” food, too, but the last section, where he hunts and gathers his dinner, is funny and often touching.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich tries to get by on minimum wage, in three different towns, working as a waitress, a house cleaner, in a Wal-Mart… Yes, it came out eight years ago, and yes, it’s just as true now, if not truer. (I just read in my hometown paper that 47% of working people in Portland have to rely on food stamps. Not “welfare queens” — people with jobs, working people.) She writes her story with tremendous verve and exactness. It reads like a novel, and leaves you all shook up.
[Le Guin devoted this list to “Some Graphic Novels,” and wrote about her difficulty finding good “grown-up stuff.” Though most of it was not to her taste (“gross-out violence, or horror, or twee, or sexist, or otherwise not down my alley”), she kept “hoping, because the form seems to me such a hugely promising and adventurous one.” Below are two graphic novels she did like. Another, Age of Bronze, she mentioned above in her 2006 list.]
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis I and II, and her other books. (The movie of Persepolis was charming but it really didn’t add much to the book.) I admire her drawing, which is deceptively simple but very subtly designed, using the pure contrast-power of black-and-white. The drawings and the text combine so seamlessly that I’m not aware of looking back and forth between them, I’m just taking it all in at once — Which I think is pretty much my ideal for a graphic narrative?
Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat I and II. Three connected stories in each volume. The first two stories in the first volume are pure delight. They are funny and wise and show you a world you almost certainly never knew existed. The rabbi is a dear, the rabbi’s daughter is a dear, and the rabbi’s cat is all cat, all through, all the way down. (I wondered why Sfar drew him so strangely, until I looked at the photograph of Sfar’s cat on the cover.) The second volume isn’t quite as great, but the first story in it is awfully funny and well drawn, with the most irresistible lion, and it’s all enjoyable. Sfar’s imagination and color are wonderful. His publisher should be pilloried in Times Square for printing the art in Vol II so small that you literally need a magnifying glass to read some of the continuity. — I gather that Sfar and Satrapi are friends. Are we on the way to having a great school of graphic novels by Foreigners Living in Paris?
Related Content:
Ursula Le Guin Gives Insightful Writing Advice in Her Free Online Workshop
Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Story, “The End” Dramatized: A Rare Audio Treat
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Clever Supercut of Writers Struggling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Barton Fink to The Royal Tenenbaums
Quite patiently, Ben Watts cut apart and stitched together scenes from 53 films (find a complete list here) showing characters suffering through writer’s block. Adaptation, Barton Fink, Shakespeare in Love, The Royal Tenenbaums, and, yes, Throw Momma From the Train–they’re among the films featured in the 4‑minute supercut above. If you give the clip a little time, you’ll see that the supercut has an arc to it. It tells a tale, and has an ending that Hollywood would love.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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:
Watch a 44-Minute Supercut of Every Woody Allen Stammer, From Every Woody Allen Film
A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side
Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles
Read More...Young Patti Smith Rails Against the Censorship of Her Music: An Animated, NSFW Interview from 1976
The latest installment from Blank on Blank’s series of animated videos drops us inside the bohemian Portobello Hotel in London. It’s May, 1976, and we hear a young Patti Smith railing against the censorship of her music, using some colorful–that is to say, NSFW–words. She talks Rimbaud. The poetry and combat of rock. The dreams and hallucinations that feed her music. The stuff that would eventually earn her the cred to be called The Godmother of Punk.
The audio is part of a longer, two-hour interview with Mick Gold, which is available through Amazon and iTunes. Enjoy.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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:
Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag
Patti Smith’s Cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Strips the Song Down to its Heart
Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Mapplethorpe
Read More...Call Me Burroughs: Hear William S. Burroughs Read from Naked Lunch & The Soft Machine in His First Spoken Word Album (1965)
Image by Christiaan Tonnis, via Wikimedia Commons
Where did you first hear the voice of William S. Burroughs? Weary yet vigorous, flat yet powerful, wry yet haunting, it has, to a good-sized segment of several generations now, defined a cadence for the counterculture. Many of those enthusiasts (most of whom would have come to know the grand old man of the Beat Generation’s postmodernist wing through his writing, like the novels Naked Lunch and Junky) had their first genuine Burroughs listening experience through the record album Call Me Burroughs, first released in 1965, and more recently re-issued by Superior Viaduct.
In these sessions, recorded in the basement of The English Bookshop in Paris, Burroughs reads from Naked Lunch as well as Nova Express, the third book in the “Nova Trilogy” that the author considered a “mathematical continuation” of his best-known work. Both emerged as the fruits of the “cut-up” technique of literary composition Burroughs developed with artist Brion Gysin, creating new texts out of decontextualized and reassembled pieces of existing text found in the mass media.
“Burroughs believed that language and image were viral and that the mass-dissemination of information was part of an arch-conspiracy that restricted the full potential of the human mind,” writes Glenn O’Brian at Electronic Beats. “With cut-up, Burroughs found a means of escape; an antidote to the sickness of ‘control’ messages that mutated their original content. If mass media already functioned as an enormous barrage of cut-up material, the cut-up method was a way for the artist to fight back using its same tactics.”
Call Me Burroughs, which at one point became a deep-out-of-print collector’s item, has now come available free on Spotify. (You can download its free software here.) You can also stream it on Youtube. Counterculture chronicler Barry Miles notes that the Beatles all had copies (and Paul McCartney, particularly impressed with it, went on to hire its producer himself), and “art dealer Robert Fraser bought ten copies to give to friends such as Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithful and Keith Richards’ dealer had copies, as did numerous painters and writers.” So whatever inspiration you draw from this “talisman of cool in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s,” as Greil Marcus once called it, you’ll certainly join a long line of distinguished listeners.
Call Me Burroughs will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
Related Content:
William S. Burroughs Reads & Sings His Experimental Prose in a Big, Free 7‑Hour Playlist
William S. Burroughs Teaches a Free Course on Creative Reading and Writing (1979)
William S. Burroughs Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Birth of London’s 1950s Bohemian Coffee Bars Documented in a Vintage 1959 Newsreel
I live in Seoul, by some measures the most coffee shop-saturated city in the world. But modern coffee life here (which I recently wrote about for the Los Angeles Review of Books) only really developed after Starbucks came to town around the turn of the 21st century. We’ve now got more Starbucks locations per capita than anywhere else, and even so, the homegrown Korean chains well outnumber those under the green mermaid. To understand how the coffee-house culture we know across the world today took its shape, we have to look back to London in the late 1950s, specifically as captured in the Look at Life newsreel on the city’s bohemian coffee house boom just above.
“Coffee is big business,” says its narrator, over a montage of neon signs advertising places like The Coffee House, Las Vegas Coffee Bar, Heaven & HELL Coffee Lounge, and La Roca. “The coffee bar boom in Britain began in 1952, when the first espresso machine arrived from Italy and was set up here, in London’s Soho.” The city’s many entrepreneurs vigorously seized the opportunity — maybe too vigorously, since “for every three coffee bars that opened up, two closed down.” They hadn’t planned on a few different factors, including overhead high enough that “if a character sits for half an hour over one cup of coffee, his share of the rent, heat, light, and service mount to the point where the management is paying him.”
They should’ve counted themselves lucky that the likes of me and my generation weren’t alive back then to, on a similarly single coffee, spend half the day typing on our laptops. But London’s midcentury coffee houses soon learned to diversify, offering Look at Life plenty–in its vivid colors and with its broad sense of humor–of life to look at: we see coffee bars hopping with live music and those who dance to it; jukebox coffee bars geared toward pompadoured hipsters; the film industry-beloved coffee bar in which T.S. Eliot once wrote the immortal line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”; an “invisible coffee house” behind whose false newsstand front “curious characters congregate”; the Moka, which William S. Burroughs once shut down with his cut-up techniques; and even the famous Le Macabre, decorated with countless skeletal mementos mori.
The newsreel also finds its way to a coffee shop established by a newspaper where “university students and other assorted eggheads meet to put the world right — or more often left,” which reminds me of Guardian Coffee, a pop-up coffee house in a shipping-container complex in London’s Shoreditch (in some sense, the Soho of the 21st century) co-run by the eponymous newspaper, which I visited on my last trip to England. The Guardian Coffee experiment has since ended, but the Guardian has retained its interest in the beverage itself, as evidenced by recent articles like Rosie Spinks’ “The Caffeine Curse: Why Coffee Shops Have Always Signaled Urban Change.”
“As the coffee shop has become a byword for what everyone hates about urban change and gentrification – first come the creatives and their coffee shops, then the young professionals, then the luxury high-rises and corporate chains that push out original residents – it’s worth asking if that charge is fair,” Spinks writes. “As the function of the coffee house in London has evolved over time, was its early iteration so radically different than the ones many of us type and sip away in today?” And whatever form they take, coffee houses remain, as Look at Life calls them, “bright — or dim — fanciful, imaginative new additions to the British scene.” Or the American scene, or the Korean scene, or indeed the global scene.
Related Content:
The Curious Story of London’s First Coffeehouses (1650–1675)
“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Creates Ad for Coffee in the 1650s
The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Glass: The Oscar-Winning “Perfect Short Documentary” on Dutch Glassmaking (1958)
You’ll find many a bold claim on Wikipedia, even on the page for Bert Haanstra’s Glass, a 1958 short documentary on glassmaking in the Netherlands, which, as of this writing, mentions that the film “is often acclaimed to be the perfect short documentary.” Just the sort of thing you’d want to take with a grain of salt, right? But if you watch Glass itself, which won the 1959 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, you might find yourself joining in on that supposed chorus of acclaim.
Prashant Parvatneni at The Essential Mystery calls Glass “at once a passionate celebration of human labour and craftsmanship and a biting critique of the mechanistic mass-production of objects. On the very surface this documentary can appear as a demonstrative film keenly elucidating the very basic processes that go into the making of handmade glassware and juxtaposing it with the process of bottle-making in a mechanised factory.
Yet this very juxtaposition coupled with a Haanstra’s strong stylistic intervention takes the film into a polemical space.” Taking a slightly different tone, Colossal’s Christopher Jobson highlights the jazz of the traditional half, and the “whimsical score of more synthesized music” in the modern half. “Also,” he adds, “there’s a ton of great smoking!”
Jobson doesn’t mention that these guys also somehow manage to keep smoking even while blowing glass — an impressive feat indeed, and just one of the impressive qualities on display in Glass’ brief runtime. Eventually, the footage turns back from the factory to the workshop, and soon it begins oscillating between the two, cutting to the jazzy rhythm and even making the machines and workmen into musical instruments of a kind. The Dutch glassmaking industry has surely changed in the past half-century, but students of Dutch film can’t ignore the work of Haanstra, who in addition to this and other documentaries short and long, directed features including Fanfare, still one of the most popular films in the Netherlands ever. But as any film historian might suspect — and here comes another bold claim — Glass will outlive them all.
Glass will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
via Colossal
Related Content:
Why Man Creates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Winning Animated Look at Creativity (1968)
Oscar-Winning Animated Short, The Dot and the Line, Celebrates Geometry and Hard Work (1965)
36 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Discovering Electronic Music: 1983 Documentary Offers a Fun & Educational Introduction to Electronic Music
The late sixties and seventies produced an explosion of electronic music that arrived on the scene as an almost entirely new art form. So much so that when composer Wendy Carlos released an album of Bach compositions played on the Moog synthesizer, it was as though she had invented another genre of music, rather than played baroque pieces on a new instrument. We had foremothers like Delia Derbyshire, experimental bands like Silver Apples and Suicide, innovators like Brian Eno and David Bowie and Kraftwerk, disco pioneers like Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer… the list of electronic musicians at work creating the genre before the 1980s could go on and on.
You won’t learn any of that from the 1983 documentary above, Discovering Electronic Music, which is not at all to damn the short film; on the contrary, what this presentation offers us is something entirely different from the usual survey course in great men and women of commercial music. With an understated, pedagogical tone, Discovering Electronic Music gently leads its viewers through a thoughtful introduction to electronic music itself—what it consists of, how it differs from acoustic music, what kind of equipment produces it, and how that equipment works.
There are many musicians featured here, but none of them stars. They demonstrate, with competency and professionalism, the ways various electronic instruments and (now seemingly prehistoric) computer systems work. We do hear lots of classical music played on synthesizers, though not by the enigmatic and reclusive Wendy Carlos. And we hear modern compositions as well, though few you’re likely to recognize, from “Jean-Claude Risset, Douglas Leedy, F.R. Moore, Stephan Soomil, Rory Kaplan, Geral Strang and more forgotten geniuses of early electronic music,” writes Electronic Beats.
Early in the film, its presenter talks about the specifically modern appeal of electronic music: composers can work directly with sound like a sculptor or painter, rather than composing on paper and waiting to hear that written music performed by musicians. Much of Discovering Electronic Music shows us composers and musicians doing just that, with the thoroughly matter-of-fact manner of the most compellingly dry public television documentaries and with the strangely soothing quality common to both Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Bob Ross’s painting lessons. Like the sound of the analog synthesizers and antique computer sequencers it features, the documentary has an eerie beauty all its own.
Find more documentaries in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Related Content:
How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music
The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)
Two Documentaries Introduce Delia Derbyshire, the Pioneer in Electronic Music
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Receive our Daily Email
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
