A Collection of Sun Ra’s Business Cards from the 1950s: They’re Out of This World
One of the hardest things to master as an independent musician is the art of promotion. Though many artists are extroverts and attention-seekers, many more are by nature introverted, or at least inner-directed, and disinclined to embrace the tools of the marketing trade. In days of yore, when such things as major record labels still roamed the earth at large, much of the promotion could be left up to those majestic, lumbering beasts. These days, when the majority of working musicians have to keep their day jobs and learn to do their own production, styling, booking, and PR, it’s essential to get over any squeamishness about blowing your own horn. If you’re looking for pointers, consider the example of self-invented musical genius Sun Ra, a master of self-promotion.
No one better understood what Sun Ra was up to than Sun Ra himself, and he knew how to sell his very out-there free jazz movement to a public used to more mundane presentations. As Mike Walsh at Mission Creep succinctly puts it, “nothing about Sun Ra’s six-decade musical career could be called normal.” He more or less re-invented what it meant to be a jazz musician and bandleader. It was in the 1950s that he really came into his own. After working steadily as a touring sideman for several other musicians, the man born Herman Blount changed his name first to Le Sony’r Ra, then Sun Ra, and put together his famous “Arkestra.”
His shows began to incorporate the elaborate costuming he became known for, and he would often stop the music “to lecture on his favorite subjects,” writes Jez Nelson at The Guardian, “Egyptology and space. He began to claim he had been abducted by aliens and was in fact from Saturn.” The act was both deadly serious space opera (he rehearsed his band for 12 hours at a stretch, after all) and absurdist schtick, and it both transported audiences to new worlds and made them laugh out loud.
Sun Ra’s business cards from the 50s capture this tonal spectrum between avant-garde performance art and high-concept free jazz comedy. Advertising new releases, a band-for-hire, and ongoing local Chicago residencies, they combine the strict professionalism of a working bandleader with the wordplay and silliness Ra loved: he calls his coterie “Atonites,” which psychology professor Robert L. Campbell reads as meaning both “worshippers of Aton,” Egyptian sun god, and “performers of atonal music.” Audiences are invited to “Dance the Outer Space Way. Hear songs sung the Outer Space Way by Clyde ‘Out of Space’ Williams” (onetime singer with the band). And the card at the top of the post makes perhaps the simplest, most compelling pitch of them all: “Why buy old sounds?” Indeed.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Learn How to Code for Free: A DIY Guide for Learning HTML, Python, Javascript & More
This week, we’re launching the beginning of a new, ongoing series. We’re creating guides that will teach you how to learn important subjects on your own, using free resources available on the web. Want an example? Just look below. Here you’ll find a list of free resources–online courses, instructional videos, YouTube channels, textbooks, etc.–that will teach how to code for free. If we’re missing great items, please add your suggestions in the comments below.
This collection is just a start, and it will continue to grow over time. In the meantime, if there are other guides you’d like to see us develop in the coming weeks, please let us know in the comments section too. We’re happy to get your feedback.
How to Code (Software)
- Codecademy: A free site for learning everything from Making a Website to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tutorials to design projects of their own choosing. The site also makes it easy to track your progress. Other topics you can learn include: Create an Interactive Website, Ruby, Javascript, HTML & CSS, SQL and more. Register and sign up for all classes here. (See our post on Codecademy here.)
- Code School: Code School courses are built around a creative theme and storyline so that it feels like you’re playing a game, not sitting in a classroom. The site offers a set of free courses covering JavaScript, jQuery, Python, Ruby and more.
- Free Code Camp: An open source community that helps you learn to code. You can work through self-paced coding challenges, build projects, and earn certifications. According to Wired, the site “features a sequence of online tutorials to help the absolute beginner learn become a web developer, starting with building a simple webpage. Students move on to programming with JavaScript and, eventually, learning to build complete web applications using modern frameworks such as Angular and Node.”
- The Odin Project: Made by the creators of Viking Code School, an online coding bootcamp, the Odin Project offers free coding lessons in web development. Topics include: HTML, CSS, JavaScript & jQuery, Ruby programming, Ruby on Rails. Find an introduction to the curriculum here.
- Google’s Python Class: A free class (used within Google itself) for people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python. The class includes written materials, lecture videos, and lots of code exercises to practice Python coding.
- Google’s C++ Course: Welcome to Google’s C++ Class. This class includes written materials, lecture videos, examples, and exercises to practice C++ coding.
- Coding for Kids from Code.org: Code.org, a non-profit, has created a fun way for students to learn the basics of coding. They’ve launched Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code, a tutorial designed to teach students how to write JavaScript. There’s also a version that teaches code with Minecraft, and a separate beginner’s tutorial for kids between the ages of 6 and 10.
- Online Computer/Coding Courses from Major Universities:
- You can find dozens of free courses, covering all facets of coding, listed in our collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses. The courses come from top universities.
- Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on Coding are regularly offered through providers like Coursera, edx, Udacity, Alison, FutureLearn, MIT, and Khan Academy. Udemy itself has a short course called “The Best Free Resources To Learn How To Program.”
- Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science: Get free access to Harvard’s popular introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Combines courses typically known elsewhere as “CS1” and “CS2.”
- Stanford’s Free Course on Developing Apps with iOS: If you’re looking to develop apps for iPhone or iPad, this handy Stanford course will go a long way.
- YouTube Channels for Learning Coding: Channels you might want to visit include:
- Coder’s Guide: Features videos on HTML web development, cross-platform Java programming, beginner .net programming with Visual Basic and client side JavaScript web development.
- Code Course: Learn to code and build things with easy to follow tutorials. A number of videos focus on PHP. Find more materials on the channel’s web site.
- LearnCode.academy: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CSS Layouts, Responsive Design etc.
- DevTips: Web design and web development.
- The New Boston: Programming, web design, networking, video game development, graphic design, etc.
- The Google Developers Channel: Offers lessons, talks, the latest news & best practices in subjects like Android, Chrome, Web Development, Polymer, Performance, iOS & more.
- You can find more YouTube Channels here: 33 Useful Youtube-channels for learning Web Design and Development.
- Free Programming Textbooks from Github: Access 500+ “free programming books that cover more than 80 different programming languages on the popular web-based Git repository hosting service.”
- Free Computer Science Textbooks: On our site, find a list of free textbooks (aka open textbooks) written by knowledgable scholars.
Sources that helped us create this list above include: Inc., Learn to Code with Me, and WebBuildDesign.
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Read More...Charlie Chaplin Gets Strapped into a Dystopian “Rube Goldberg Machine,” a Frightful Commentary on Modern Capitalism
I get into a lot of conversations these days about how we used to consider technological progress good by definition, but now — despite or maybe because of the farther-progressed-than-ever state of our technology — we feel a bit wary about it all. We line up for the latest smartphone, but as we do we reflect upon how it increasingly looks we’ll never line up for the jetpacks, flying cars, and moon colonies we dreamed of in childhood. We enjoy our phones, but we resent them as well, remembering those long-ago assurances that technology would increase our leisure, not fill it with anxiety about insufficiently rapid responses, nagging leftover work, and missed-out-on information of every kind. When did the trust between our tech and ourselves break down?
Not so recently, it turns out — or rather, not just recently. The human-technology relationship goes through its good times and its bad patches, and at any given time some of us like the direction its progress looks to be moving in more than others do. You may have heard of one particularly well-known technological critic of the early twentieth century, a cartoonist by the name of Rube Goldberg. More likely, you’ve heard of the preposterously elaborate machines he drew in his cartoons.
One representative example, an “automatic suicide device for unlucky stock speculators,” involves the ring of a phone (“probably a message from your broker saying you are wiped out”) which wakes up a dozing office manager whose stretching hits a lever which launches a toy glider which hits a dwarf whose jumping up and down in pain works a jack which lifts up a pig to the level of a potato, and when he eats the potato… well, in any case, the process ends up, some time later, pulling the trigger of a gun mounted right over the tickertape machine. “If the telephone call is not from your broker,” Goldberg notes, you’ll never find out the mistake because you’ll be dead anyway.
“The surrealism of Goldberg’s cartoon inventions,” writes Brendan O’Connor at The Verge, while meant to entertain, “also reveals a dark skepticism of the era in which they were made. The machines were symbols, Goldberg wrote, of ‘man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.’ ” They had a strong appeal in that “era of increasing automation, and increasing concern about automation, exemplified in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times. One of the film’s dystopian curiosities, the Billows Feeding Machine, invented by Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, has a distinctly Rube Goldbergian quality to it — this is likely no coincidence, as Goldberg and Chaplin were friends.”
In the clip at the top, we see the Billows Feeding Machine in action, not quite fulfilling its promise to “eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead.” The disappointed higher-ups render their verdict: “It’s no good — it isn’t practical.” A modern-day J. Widdecombe Billows would know better how to respond to them: it’s still in beta.
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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...World Science U Lets You Take Free Physics Courses from Leading Minds in the Field
Two years ago, World Science U debuted on the net, promising to bring free science courses to anyone, from high schoolers to retirees. (We wrote about it here.) The courses would be taught by the top scientists in their fields, featuring lectures, animations, interactive exercises, feedback, and even virtual office hours. At the time, however, Brian Greene’s project to bring the latest in research on string theory, particle physics, dark energy, relativity and more featured only two courses.
Since then, World Science U has taken off. It now offers “Science Unplugged,” a series of short videos that offer answers to layperson questions about science; “Master Classes” which are short classes about various subjects (mostly in physics) that take a few hours to complete; and “University Courses” which take eight to ten weeks to complete and are designed for the more advanced learner. These latter two offerings offer certificates upon completion.
The current roster of lectures is impressive: MIT’s Alan Guth teaches Inflationary Cosmology; U. Chicago’s Michael Turner (who coined the term “dark energy”) presents the Dark Side of the Universe; Stanford’s Andrei Linde takes you into the Multiverse; and Caltech’s Maria Spiropulu probes Nature’s Constituents, to name a few Master Classes. Meanwhile Brian Greene currently teaches two of the university courses: “Special Relativity: A Math-Based Introduction” and (highlighted above) “Space, Time and Einstein: A Conceptual Tour of Special Relativity.”
All of the courses are absolutely free but the videos are only available if you register with World Science U.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Watch the Trailer for a “Fully Painted” Van Gogh Film: Features 12 Oil Paintings Per Second by 100+ Painters
Loving Vincent, an homage to Vincent van Gogh, promises to be “the first fully painted feature film in the world.” What does that mean exactly? According to filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, every frame of Loving Vincent will be an oil painting on canvas, created with the same techniques Van Gogh used over a century ago. To make these frames, Kobiela and Welchman plan to hire skilled painters and put them through a 3‑week intensive training course, teaching each to paint like Van Gogh himself. Or so that’s how they explained things during their Kickstarter campaign several years ago.
Although production is still ongoing, you can see the first fruits of their labors. Above, watch a trailer for Loving Vincent, which features (according to the Youtube blurb accompanying the video) “12 oil paintings per second, all done by over 100 painters trained in the same style.”
If you’re a talented painter and want to contribute to making this original film (you can get an idea of what that looks like below), please visit the Loving Vincent website and scroll down to the recruitment section. The site also includes other material that takes you inside the making of this innovative film.
Enjoy…
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Read More...New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian
By Scott Saul:
Richard Pryor is a legendary comic, and for good reason. He had extraordinary gifts as a mimic, storyteller, physical comedian, satirist, and improvising actor — gifts he brought together in an act that had the dangerous electricity of an uninsulated wire. Meanwhile he established a feedback loop between his act and his personal life, making use of all those stage chops to draw comedy out of a life that was painfully full of self-sabotage, mayhem, and various forms of abuse.
It was my task, as Pryor’s biographer, to probe the legends of his life, starting with the vivid stories he told of his formative years in the red-light district of Peoria, Illinois. In his stage act and reminiscences, Pryor related how he’d been raised in a brothel by a grandmother and father who worked, respectively, as madam and pimp, and how he had both suffered at their hands and learned from them. He told, too, how he’d made his way in a larger world that, while brutal, was also touched with grace — that grace he felt when he ventured onstage, at school or in a club, and started to find himself as a performer.
Earlier biographers had wondered how much Pryor had embellished his past in building his act around his life story. In my research I discovered a motherlode of material — family photos, court records, newspaper articles, and more — that not only corroborated the outlines of Pryor’s story but also filled in the picture and gave it a historical depth. I could see, for instance, how Pryor’s taboo-busting comedy was rooted in his childhood environment, a black working-class underground where taboos were busted on a regular basis, and hypocrisies called to account. You can watch a short, four-minute film above that sets the story of the young Richard and his family against the backdrop of “Roarin’ Peoria.”
Ultimately, I discovered so much in my research into Pryor’s formative years that I felt it couldn’t be contained in the book I was writing (in which Pryor’s first two decades in Peoria make up only one of five sections). So I built a digital companion where you can explore over 200 documents from “Richard Pryor’s Peoria”. Here you can see, through the young Richard’s report card, how he struggled in the confines of Peoria schools. You can see, through the divorce case of his parents, how his mother (contrary to reports that she abandoned him) tried, unsuccessfully, to steal Richard away from his grandmother and father, and from the red-light district itself. You can see, through the paper trail of Richard’s formidable grandmother Marie, how she fought — with wiliness and blunt force — against her abusive husband and against the system of Jim Crow. And you can visit the various scenes of Richard’s youth, from his family’s tavern and the community center where he first took the stage to the sometimes raucous, sometimes stylish clubs where he got his start as an entertainer.
Richard Pryor was an exceptional human being — a genius who changed the rules of comedy in America — and the website aims to show how the seeds of that genius were planted. At the same time, it suggests how Pryor’s life story makes richer sense when set against larger historical backdrops: the story of how the Midwest’s premier “Sin City” became, during the Cold War, a leading “All-American City”; the story of how black neighborhoods were demolished in “urban renewal” efforts (Pryor’s childhood home was itself targeted by a wrecking ball so that Peoria might be linked to an interstate highway); and, most of all, the story of how black Americans, while locked into segregation in the Midwest, defied that system in inventive and forceful ways.
This post is by Scott Saul, the author of Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins), now out in paperback. He teaches American history and literature at UC-Berkeley, and also is the host of the Chapter & Verse podcast. Follow him on Twitter @scottsaul4.
Read More...The 120 Minutes Archive Compiles Clips & Playlists from 956 Episodes of MTV’s Alternative Music Show (1986–2013)
In the first couple years after MTV’s 1981 debut, the fledgling cable network more or less reproduced the 70’s album-oriented rock radio format with video accompaniment, to the exclusion of a number of emerging popular artists (a fact David Bowie bemoaned in ’83). In the mid-80s, the network diversified: Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” broke the color barrier in 1984, and in the following years, the network moved toward edgier music with shows like Headbanger’s Ball in ’85 (originally Heavy Metal Mania) and, a few years later, Yo! MTV Raps.
In 1986, another show appeared that solidified MTV’s status—for a few years at least—as a genuine source for new, “alternative” music, before that term became an empty marketing word. Tucked away in a midnight to 2 A.M. slot, 120 Minutes initially “guided viewers through the late ‘80s college rock landscape, which was largely inspired by trends happening in the UK at the time.”
So writes Tyler at Tylerc.com, who hosts the hugely impressive 120 Minutes Archive, a recreation of the 27-year run of the two-hour music video, news, and interview show that broke many an “alternative” artist in the U.S. and gave many more a platform to promote their music, causes, and personalities. Enter the archive here.
I well remember staying up late, the volume turned down as low as possible so as not to wake the family, and catching videos for the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” (above) and R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World (As We Know It),” among so many other bands art-pop, new wave, post-punk, industrial, etc. The show was like a video analogue to Trouser Press—and browsing the online database of that “’bible’ of alternative rock” will give you a good sense of 120 Minutes’ breadth. Though it featured a very healthy mix of hardcore, electronic, and new wave music from both sides of the pond, the show often seemed to be dominated by British bands like the Cure (whose Robert Smith once guest hosted), Depeche Mode, the Psychedelic Furs, and (second from top) Big Audio Dynamite, Mick Jones’ post-Clash project, which Lou Reed discusses briefly in the clip at the top from his 1986 stint as a guest host. (See several more clips of his hosting here.)
In the 90s, 120 Minutes became a showcase for much more homegrown product as the “blender of post-punk, goth, industrial, and jangle-rock gave way… to a coalesced grunge movement” after the seismic debut of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, with the likes of Mudhoney, Soundgarden, the Dandy Warhols, and the Smashing Pumpkins taking over for much of the British new wave. Those who came of age in the 90s will remember the show’s host Matt Pinfield’s obsessive, rock critic’s approach to “the rise and fall of alternative rock.” Soon, the show became a heavily eclectic mix: Brit pop arrived (along with the baggy Madchester of the Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, etc.), and “post-grunge bands, left of center singer-songwriters, west coast ska-inspired bands, and alternative hip hop acts” joined the playlist.
The mid-nineties seem like golden years in retrospect. Flush with cash, record companies threw money at anything vaguely Nirvana-shaped, which enabled a number of excellent bands and artists to break out of their local scenes and into larger studios and stages like the traveling circus of Lollapalooza. (The situation also produced a drag of derivative, dumbed-down awfulness.) Scroll through the playlists Tyler C has compiled for 1994, for example, a year I fondly, mostly, remember, to get a sense of the range of artists and genres the show embraced by this time—from the hammering industrial-metal of Ministry (above) to the hazy, ethereal psych-folk of Mazzy Star (below). Post-Nirvana “alternative rock” went so mainstream that the network eventually ran a companion show every weeknight called Alternative Nation, so named despite the fact that “alternative” came to mean precisely the opposite of the outsider status it had once described.
The boom times couldn’t last. As the millennium waned, so did the heyday of alt-rock music videos. Reality TV and bubblegum pop took over. “In the era of TRL,” writes Tyler C, “the future of 120 Minutes on MTV was uncertain.” As MTV relegated music videos—once its raison d’etre—to the margins, 120 Minutes became MTV’s “de facto rock show,” then moved to MTV 2, then off the air altogether in 2003 after a 17-year run. Then, as indie rock ascended to popularity, the show was revived for a 2003–2011 run as Subterranean and again as 120 Minutes until 2013.
Though Tyler C’s exhaustive archive contains few actual clips from the show, it does document 120 Minutes’ entire history, from its underground late 80s inception, through the mainstream 90s, and into the subdued 2000’s, with playlists from each episode and, writes Buzzfeed, “histories of what bands played, descriptions of tours the show appeared on, and anecdotes where possible.” You can watch full episodes of the show’s last couple years with Matt Pinfield on MTV Hive (Many, like this one, broadcast from New York’s Cake Shop).
The archive, Tyler told Buzzfeed, resonates with Gen X’ers because “it’s all about nostalgia”—and I can certainly testify to that effect—and appeals to younger people “because that era of music in the ’90s was so important. It was the age of EVERYTHING alternative.” For those of us who lived through the decade, and who aged out of MTV’s demographic around the time that Tyler aged in, it’s also an opportunity to catch up with later seasons of the show we probably missed. They may be as essential someday—in their own way—as the ones we so wistfully recall.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Producer Tony Visconti Breaks Down the Making of David Bowie’s Classic “Heroes,” Track by Track
Those familiar with David Bowie lore may know one or two things about the recording of his seminal 1978 track “Heroes.” One is that the recording studio did, in fact, look out over the Berlin Wall and the lovers that Bowie saw made it into the lyrics (“I can remember standing by the wall/And the guns shot above our heads/And we kissed as though nothing could fall”). The other is the microphone set up in Hansa’s expansive recording studio: one next to Bowie’s mouth, another 15 — 20 feet away, and another at the far end of the room to catch the reverb. (Hands up how many of us learned about that when Steve Albini copied it for Nirvana’s “All Apologies”? Anybody?) But as this video above with producer Tony Visconti shows, that’s only a few of the magical inventions and daring decisions made for this recording. The session contains lessons for any young producer endlessly fiddling about with their ProTools and the millions of choices afforded by a $2.99 synth app for the iPad.
When Bowie added his vocals at the end of the recording session, there was only one track left on the tape, having filled up the 23 other tracks with the band’s backing track, Eno’s synths, extra percussion, three (!) tracks of Robert Fripp commanding the gods through his guitar pickup and feedback, and more. If they didn’t like the take, they’d erase over it with the new one. Those were the analog days. But as Visconti says, that scary decision electrified Bowie. As an artist, everything was at stake. It’s like they knew they were making a song for the ages. Maybe it’s Visconti’s 20/20 hindsight, but they were right.
This small segment above is part of a longer three-hour tour through Visconti’s career, recorded in 2011 for the Red Bull Academy lecture series. Visconti talks about working with Marc Bolan, Morrissey, Paul McCartney and others, along with his thoughts on producing, and a great deal about Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy.” (The second half of the talk is here.)
But there’s so much more to be discovered among those 24 audio tracks of “Heroes.” In this wonderful BBC documentary from 2012 (also see up top), Visconti sits down with the digitally transferred master tapes and takes us through the construction of the song. Here we get to hear Robert Fripp’s raw guitar tracks which sound so incredibly abrasive it’s hard to believe they exist in the song; Visconti’s “cowbell,” which is him hitting a pipe outside in the yard; Eno’s synth in a briefcase, the EMS Synthi‑A; and numerous painterly daubs of audio that all make up the mix. And then there’s that vocal, which Visconti lets play without any of the music, a song for the history books, a voice that couldn’t be constrained to just one mic. The video unfortunately couldn’t be embedded on our site, but it’s definitely worth your time.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...John Cleese on The Importance of Making and Embracing Mistakes
Creative Commons image by Paul Boxley
In his essay “The Relativity of Wrong,” Isaac Asimov argues persuasively against the common belief that “’right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” Instead, he says, “it seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts,” and that certain ideas can be true in a sense, but still in need of further correction with new information. I can’t testify as to the strength of his argument when it comes to theoretical physics, but as far as basic inductive reasoning goes it seems perfectly sound to me, and a point worth making frequently. We don’t experience a world of binaries, but one full of “fuzziness” and near misses of all kinds.
As in science—argues former Monty Python member, comedy writer, and intellectual gadfly John Cleese—so in business. Cleese gave a motivational speech called “The Importance of Mistakes” in 1988 to an audience of 500 businessman at the British-American Chamber of Commerce, a demographic he has addressed remotely since 1972 with a series of business training videos made by his company, Video Arts. (“Better job training through entertainment,” as Kate Callen at UPI describes the company’s mission. Videos have titles like “Meetings, Bloody Meetings,” and “If Looks Could Kill.”)
In “The Importance of Mistakes,” Cleese explains that we do not veer wildly off course into total wrongness every time we make an error. Instead, our mistakes provide us with opportunities for feedback, which enables us to make course corrections, where we will inevitably make another mistake, receive more feedback, etc., until we hit the mark. These metaphors are not mine; Cleese uses a story called Gordon the Guided Missile as his primary example—which he dubiously claims was “the first nursery story I ever remember my mother reading to me”:
Gordon the guided missile sets off in pursuit of its target. It immediately sends out signals to discover if it is on the right course to hit that target. Signals come back: “No, you are not on course. So change it. Up a bit and slightly to the left.” And Gordon changes course as instructed and then, rational little fellow that he is, sends out another signal. “Am I on course now?” Back comes the answer, “No, but if you adjust your present course a bit further up and a bit further to the left, you will be.” He adjusts his course again and sends out another request for information. Back comes the answer, “No, Gordon, you’ve still got it wrong. Now you must come down a bit and a foot to the right.” And the guided missile goes on and on making mistakes, and on and on listening to feedback and on and on correcting its behavior until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. And we applaud the missile for its skill. If, however some critic says, “Well, it certainly made a lot of mistakes on the way”, we reply, “Yes, but that didn’t matter, did it? It got there in the end.” All its mistakes were little ones, in the sense that they could be immediately corrected. And as a results of making many hundreds of mistakes, eventually the missile succeeded in avoiding the one mistake which really would have mattered: missing the target.
The story illustrates, Cleese says, the importance of a “tolerant attitude towards mistakes”—even, a “positive attitude.” To take any other view would be to behave “irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully.” Cleese more or less recommends his audience adopt Asimov’s scientific perspective on error: mistakes are not disastrously irrecoverable missteps, but ways of learning how to get things “less wrong.”
Some clarification: Cleese means to validate only “those mistakes which, at the time they were committed, did have a chance.” A reasonably good try, in other words. There are some absolutes in the world, after all, and there are “true copper bottomed mistakes, like spelling the word ‘rabbit with three m’s or … starting a land war in Asia.” But the point stands. We’re usually in the realm of in-between, and instead of letting the anxiety of indeterminacy overwhelm us, Cleese recommends we take risks and “gain the confidence to contribute spontaneously to what’s happening,” thus overcoming inhibitions and the fear of looking ridiculous.
Cleese delivered this speech to a body of people not typically known for acting spontaneously. And while it seems to me that these days top executives can make egregious errors (or commit egregious fraud) and land squarely on their feet, I wonder if those on the tiers below have the privilege of daring to make errors in most industries. In any case, whether an assembly of corporate managers can afford to loosen up, the rest of us probably can, if we’re willing to adopt a “positive attitude” toward mistakes and consistently—scientifically, even—view them as opportunities to learn.
All of this requires a fine balance of the confidence to screw up and the humility to take constructive feedback when you do. “Healthy behavior actually arises out of confidence,” Cleese observed in an interview after his speech, and yet, “the worst problem in management—in fact, the worst problem in life—is the ego.”
Read many more excerpts from Cleese’s speech here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)
Popular entertainment has romanticized the idea of the road trip as a wholly spontaneous adventure, but for mid-century African American motorists, planning was essential. The lodgings, restaurants, and tourist attractions where they could be assured of a warm welcome were often few and far between in the era of segregation.
The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, first printed in 1936, was an invaluable resource for travelers of color, particularly when their route took them outside of urban areas. In the pre-Internet age, publisher Victor Green, a Harlem-dwelling mailman, relied on readers to supply feedback and new locations for subsequent editions:
There are thousands of first class business places that we don’t know about and can’t list, which would be glad to serve the traveler, but it is hard to secure listings of these places since we can’t secure enough agents to send us the information. Each year before we go to press the new information is included in the new edition. When you are traveling please mention the Green Book, in order that they might know how you found their place of business, as they can see that you are strangers. If they haven’t heard about this guide, ask them to get in touch with us so that we might list their place. If this guide has proved useful to you on your trips, let us know. If not, tell us also as we appreciate your criticisms and ideas in the improvement of this guide from which you benefit. There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.
- from the introduction to the 1949 edition
The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has digitized 21 volumes of its Green Book collection for your browsing pleasure. It’s a trip back in time.
1936’s premier edition is geared toward visitors spending time in and around New York City. In appearance, it resembles a church bulletin or community theater program, with business card ads for beauty salons specializing in marcel waving and restaurants serving Southern home cooking. Publisher Green extols the wonders of Coney Island, Chinatown, and the Theatrical District, even as he notes that “the colored show houses are in Harlem.” He also seeks to give readers a laugh with “How to Keep From Growing Old,” a driver-specific list that could be read aloud from the passenger seat for the merriment of everyone in the car. (“In sloppy weather, drive close to pedestrians. Dry cleaners appreciate this.”)
The Green Book soon swelled to include national listings, as tourists and business travelers heeded Green’s call to beef up the info.
1961’s 25th anniversary edition includes a history of the enterprise, a fair amount of typos, newsy updates on the staff, and a renewed promise to list the best places on the moon, should lunar travel become an option.
Armchair travelers can take the NYPL’s digitized collection out for a spin by entering coordinates into a mapping feature for 1947 or 1956.
Starting in my Indiana hometown with sights set on Manhattan took me to the Cottage Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, the Jones Restaurant in Grafton, West Virginia, and the beautifully named Trott Inn in Philadelphia, before I finally lay my virtual head at the America Hotel. (These days, it would be the Millennium Broadway.)
Enjoy your trip. In the words of Victor Green, “let’s all get together and make motoring better.”
Related Content:
Robert Penn Warren Archive Brings Early Civil Rights to Life
Vintage 1930s Japanese Posters Artistically Market the Wonders of Travel
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She documented her misadventures on the road in No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late Follow her @AyunHalliday
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