Discover The Plastics, the Influential Japanese New Wave Band from the 1980s
Brian Eno famously said of the Velvet Underground that, though their debut album didn’t sell well, everyone who bought a copy started a band. One could, perhaps, make a similar remark about a new wave band called The Plastics, who formed a decade or so later on the other side of the Pacific. They recorded for only five years, from the mid-nineteen-seventies to the early eighties, but wide swaths of all Japanese popular music released since bear marks of their influence. According to Underground, co-founder Toshio Nakanishi, who sang and played guitar, is “now considered one of the most well-known Japanese musicians of all time.”
“One day in 1976,” writes Neojaponisme’s W. David Marx, the 20-year-old Nakanishi “gathered his friends at Harajuku’s most famous cafe, Leon, and decided they needed to form a band. They did not own any instruments, but music seemed an obvious means of expression.” They began by covering the likes of Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party” and Connie Francis’ “Vacation” at fashion parties, but were soon advised by the visiting David Bowie to write songs of their own; subsequent well-timed encounters with the work of bands like the Sex Pistols and Devo gave them an idea of how to do it.
“The Plastics’ reliance on the latest Western musical trends was a common practice in the Tokyo music scene, but unlike their predecessors, the band was able to be in dialogue with their favorite Western artists in real time.”
Marx quotes Nakanishi writing in his autobiography that “YMO’s record label plotted to make them international, but we forged all of those developments ourselves and the label just followed up.” Those developments included the members’ associations with Western musical figures as various as Mark Mothersbaugh, Brian Ferry, Bob Marley, and Iggy Pop. When the group’s guitarist Hajime Tachibana, who also worked as a graphic designer, created Japanese tour programs for Talking Heads, David Byrne ended up with a Plastics demo tape in hand, which he passed along to the B‑52s, who passed it along to their manager, who signed them. The height of their exposure to Western audiences came in 1982, when SCTV aired the music video for their song “Top Secret Man” on its “Midnight Video Special.”
Clad in checkerboard-and-neon retro fashions, singing nonsensically catchy lyrics, and busting extravagantly herky-jerky dance moves against void-like backdrops, the members of The Plastics come off in the “Top Secret Man” as near-parodic embodiments of the new wave musical aesthetic. That they also happened to be Japanese surely added, for Western viewers those four decades ago, a certain layer of cross-cultural absurdity. “Indeed, is the disparity between the East and West which sets the Plastics apart from their contemporaries,” says Undeground, “their lyrics citing Bauhaus and Russian avant-garde, technology and American consumerism through their remote, Japanese lens.” (Marx quotes Byrne’s observation that “the very name Plastics was a tip off: an ironic take on the common Western perception of Japanese products being ‘plastic,’ and therefore inferior copies of better made Western items.”)
Having spent the decade since the war both absorbing Western popular culture and achieving an almost futuristically advanced level of development, the Japan of the early eighties had actually become an ideal place to develop new wave’s signature incongruity of D.I.Y and high tech. Plastics Masahide Sakuma even worked on the development of Roland’s TR-808, and before that drum machine went on to shape the sound of entire genres of music around the world, his band owned the very first model. Alas, Sakuma and Nakanishi both died in the twenty-tens, and with them the possibility of a true Plastics reunion. But it would be a surprise if their three albums — Welcome Plastics, Origato Plastico, and the West-oriented set of remakes Welcome Back — don’t still have more than a few new bands, Eastern or Western, to inspire.
Related content:
Ryuichi Sakamoto, RIP: Watch Him Create Groundbreaking Electronic Music in 1984
The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Complete Concert
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...When There Were Three Popes at Once: An Animated Video Drawn in the Style of Medieval Illuminated Manuscript
Pope Francis, who’s been head of the Catholic Church for a decade now, is officially Pontiff number 266. But if you scroll through Wikipedia’s list of popes, you’ll see quite a few entries without numbers, their rows cast in a disreputable-looking darker shade of gray. The presence of several such unofficial Popes usually indicates particularly interesting times in the history of the Church, and thus the history of Western civilization itself. The new TED-Ed video above, written by medieval history professor Joëlle Rollo-Koster, tells of the only period in which three popes vied simultaneously for legitimacy. This was The Western Schism — or the Papal Schism, or the Great Occidental Schism, or the Schism of 1378.
However one labels it, “the origins of this papal predicament began in 1296, when France’s King Philip IV decided to raise taxes on the church.” So begins the narrator of the video, which animates the historical scenes he describes in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript. (It includes many amusing details, though I haven’t managed to spot any aggressive rabbits or snails, to say nothing of butt trumpets.) Pope Boniface VIII, the Church’s leader at the time, responded with the Unam Sanctam, “a radical decree asserting the pope’s total supremacy over earthly rulers.” The clash between the two resulted in the death of Boniface, who was eventually replaced in 1305 by Clement V.
As “a French diplomat seeking peace in the war between England and his homeland,” Clement strategically moved the seat of the papacy to Avignon. Seven popes later, the papacy moved back to Italy — not long before the death of Gregory XI, the Pontiff who moved it. Out of the chaotic process of selecting his successor came Pope Urban VI, who turned out to be “a reformer who sought to limit the cardinals’ finances.” Those cardinals then “denounced Urban as a usurper” and elected Pope Clement VII to replace him. But Urban refused to relinquish his position, and in fact “entrenched himself in Rome while Clement and his supporters returned to Avignon.”
This began the schism, splitting Western Christendom between the capitals of Avignon and Rome. Each capital kept its line going, replacing popes who die and perpetuating the situation in which “European rulers were forced to choose sides as both popes vied for spiritual and political supremacy.” Only in 1409 did a group of cardinals attempt to put an end to it, electing a new pope themselves — who went unrecognized, of course, by the existing popes in Rome and Avignon. The schism went on for nearly 40 years, underscoring the alliterative truth that “even those who are supposed to be pious are prone to petty power struggles.” Most popes, like any figures of power, must feel lonely at the top — but that’s surely better than when it’s too crowded there.
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Animated: Stephen Fry & Ann Widdecombe Debate the Catholic Church
Pope John Paul II Takes Batting Practice in California, 1987
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...A Kubrick Scholar Discovers an Eerie Detail in The Shining That’s Gone Unnoticed for More Than 40 Years
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining pulls off the uncommon feat of inhabiting a genre without falling victim to its vices. But exactly which genre does it inhabit? Horror? Meta-horror? Supernatural thriller? Psychological drama? Most of the pictures made for these broad fields of cinema share a dispiriting lack of re-watchability, especially those reliant on the device of the twist ending: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, for example, which now, 24 years after its release, is enjoyed primarily as an artifact of its cultural era. But over the past four decades The Shining has only become a richer viewing experience, and one that continues to yield heretofore unseen details.
In the new video above (and an associated Twitter thread), Kubrick scholar Filippo Ulivieri exposes one such detail — or rather, a whole series of them. Throughout his performance as the Overlook Hotel’s increasingly troubled caretaker Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson keeps looking directly at the camera. “I’m not talking about when he looks at the camera because he’s talking to someone else,” says Uliveri. “I’m talking about all the times in which Jack Torrance looks at the camera, but there’s no one to look at.”
All are “very brief moments, captured by a few frames of film,” or even just one. But given how many times it happens (much more often than the one fourth-wall-breaking glance already acknowledged by Shining exegetes), as well as Kubrick’s well-known perfectionist attention to detail, all this can hardly be an accident.
Despite the existence of documentary footage that shows Kubrick explicitly telling Nicholson to look down at the camera in one shot, this choice has remained, as it were, overlooked. But what to make of it? It could mean that “we are not safe from Jack’s fury. He knows where we are; he may come for us next.” Yet he also looks at the camera well before descending into insanity. “Who is looking at Jack? Ghosts. The ghosts of the Overlook Hotel.” Perhaps “Jack felt their presence from the very beginning. So the camera in The Shining must be… well, a ghost itself.” But if the subjective camera represents the ghostly point of view, “does that mean that I am a ghost, too?” And more importantly for fans, does that mean Kubrick outdid Shyamalan nearly twenty years before The Sixth Sense came out?
Related content:
Watch Jack Nicholson Get Maniacally Into Character for The Shining’s Iconic Axe Scene
Room 237: New Documentary Explores Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Those It Obsesses
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Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch a Japanese Artisan Make a Noh Mask, Creating an Astonishing Character From a Single Block of Wood
Noh actors undergo years of rigorous training to perfect their performance technique.
The ancient classical art requires actors’ faces to be obscured by rigid masks carved from single blocks of hinoki wood. A thorough command of posture, physical gesture, and voice is essential for conveying the characters’ emotions.
The quality of the mask is of utmost importance, too.
Nakamura Mitsue, a maker of traditional Noh masks, whose interest in human faces and portraiture originally led her to study western art, notes that the creator must possess a high degree of skill if the mask is to function properly. The best masks will suggest different attitudes from different angles.
Terasu, or an upwards tilt conveys happy emotions, while the downward tilt of kumorasu expresses darker feelings and tears.
The most expertly carved masks’ eyes will appear to shift as the actor changes position.
The full range of human expression is the most difficult to achieve with delicate-featured female Noh masks.
“I used to change its direction and stare at it in the mirror all night,” Ms. Nakamura writes on her website, recalling how her mentor, the celebrated craftsman Yasuemon Hori, taught her how to carve Ko-Omote, a mask representing the youngest woman in the Noh canon.
When creating a mask of a beautiful girl or child I feel very happy but when creating an onryo (ghost spirit) I can feel sorrow or anger.
Ms. Nakamura’s dedication, expertise and patience are on abundant display in the wordless Process X video, above.
She is, as the New York Times notes, one of a growing number of female practitioners:
When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.
Like many other Japanese women of her generation, she did as expected, marrying and having children shortly after completing her education. She began studying mask making when her children began school, waiting until they were 18 to leave her marriage. By then, she was well positioned to support herself as a professional nō-men-shi (Noh mask maker.)
A single mask by a respected nō-men-shi can take a month to complete, but can fetch a price in the neighborhood of ¥500,000.
Ms. Nakamura labors in a workshop in her traditional-style home in Kyoto.
Her tools and supplies are equally old-fashioned — a mixture of seashell powder and rice glue, a mortar and pestle, a chisel that she wields perilously close to her knees and slipper-clad feet…
As Jason Haidar writes in Kansai Scene:
It may be no coincidence that Ms. Nakamura wields a chisel so naturally and with such skill, One of the main chisels used for carving Noh masks is called a tou, which is another word meaning samurai sword. Ms. Nakamura always credited her parents for encouraging her to learn a skill that could allow her to support herself without a husband, and this modern thinking could be attributed to her family being of samurai lineage. After the reforms of the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) that saw the ushering in of modern Japan, her ancestors learned the importance of being self-sufficient, independent, and having a diverse range of skills – values which were passed down to her.
Explore a gallery of Mitsue Nakamura’s Noh masks here. Click on specific images to learn about each mask’s purpose in Noh, recognized by UNESCO as having “Intangible Cultural Heritage”.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Behold the Bridges in India Made of Living Tree Roots
Living green walls and upcycled building materials are welcome environmentally-conscious design trends, but when it comes to sustainable architecture, the living root bridges made by indigenous Khasi and Jaintia people in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya have them beat by centuries.
These traditional plant-based suspension bridges make it much easier for villagers to travel to neighboring communities, markets and outlying farms by spanning the dense tropical rainforest’s many gorges and rivers.
Their construction requires patience, as builders train the aerial roots of well-situated, mature rubber fig trees into position using bamboo, old tree trunks, and wire for support, weaving more roots in as they become available.
This multi-generational construction project can take up to 30 years to complete. The carefully-tended bridges become sturdier with age, as the roots that form the deck and handrails thicken.
The village of Nongriat has one bridge that has been in place for 200-some years. An upper bridge, suspended directly overhead, is a hundred years younger.
As village head and lifelong resident Wiston Miwa told Great Big Story, above, when he was a child, people were leery of using the newer bridge, worried that it was not yet strong enough to be safe. Six decades later, villagers (and tourists) traverse it regularly.
Architect Sanjeev Shankar, in a study of 11 living root bridges, learned that new structures are loaded with stones, planks, and soil to test their weight bearing capacity. Some of the oldest can handle 50 pedestrians at once.
Humans are not the only creatures making the crossing. Bark deer and clouded leopards are also known travelers. Squirrels, birds, and insects settle in for permanent stays.
The Khasi people follow an oral tradition, and have little written documentation regarding their history and customs, including the construction of living root bridges.
Architect Ferdinand Ludwig, a champion of Baubotanik — or living plant construction — notes that there is no set design being followed. Both nature and the villagers tending to the growing structures can be considered the architects here:
When we construct a bridge or a building, we have a plan – we know what it’s going to look like. But this isn’t possible with living architecture. Khasi people know this; they are extremely clever in how they constantly analyze and interact with tree growth, and accordingly adapt to the conditions…How these roots are pulled, tied and woven together differ from builder to builder. None of the bridges looks similar.
The bridges, while remote, are becoming a bucket list destination for adventurers and ecotourists, Nongriat’s double bridge in particular.
The BBC’s Zinara Rathnayake reports that such outside interest has provided villagers with an additional source of income, as well as some predictable headaches — litter, inappropriate behavior, and overcrowding:
Some root bridges see crowds of hundreds at a time as tourists clamber for selfies, potentially overburdening the trees.
The Living Bridge Foundation, which works to preserve the living root bridges while promoting responsible ecotourism is seeking to have the area designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...John Singer Sargent’s Scandalous Paintings: An Introduction to Madame X and Dr. Pozzi at Home
Henry James, perhaps the most famous American expatriate novelist of the nineteenth century, won a great deal of his fame with The Portrait of a Lady. John Singer Sargent, perhaps the most famous American expatriate painter of the nineteenth century, won a great deal of his fame with a portrait of a lady — but not before it seemed to kill his illustrious career at a stroke. When it was first shown to the public at the Paris Salon of 1884, Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X drew a range of reactions from bitter dismissal to near-violent anger. But today, as Great Art Explained host James Payne says in the new video above, “it is genuinely hard to see what the fuss was about.”
“Twenty years before, in 1865, Manet had shown Olympia at the Salon, to a scandalized Paris. So why the shock now? The difference was that Manet’s Olympia was a prostitute, like the women in Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting also on display in 1884. But Madame X was part of French high society.” She was, all those first viewers would have known, the socialite, banker’s wife, and “professional beauty” Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Her rumored penchant for infidelities wouldn’t have been unusual for her particular place and time, but her background as the New Orleans-born daughter of a European Creole family certainly would have.
Beholding Madame X, “Parisians were forced to confront their own decadence, which they preferred not to acknowledge, and this was where Sargent went wrong. The salons were a sacrosanct part of French culture, and he, a foreigner, was flaunting immorality in their faces with a painting of another foreigner, an exotic one at that.” He’d already stirred up a certain amount of controversy three years earlier with Dr. Pozzi at Home, another full-length portrait that portrayed its subject – the highly accomplished and notoriously handsome gynecologist Samuel-Jean Pozzi — in a manner whose sheer informality verges on the concupiscent.
Payne thus regards Dr. Pozzi and Madame X as “male-female versions of the same type. They are both flamboyant peacock figures, with a streak of vanity and a knack for seduction. There is something in the way they are posed which is unconventional. They have an indirect gaze, and they both have supreme confidence verging on arrogance.” That only Sargent could have — or, at least, would have — captured and transmitted those qualities with such directness wasn’t appreciated quite so much at the time. Ostracized in Paris, where he’d been a sought-after portraitist to the wealthy, he packed up Madame X and set off for London, where he soon rebuilt his career. The advice to do so came from none other than Henry James, who knew a thing or two about advantageous relocation.
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When John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” Scandalized the Art World in 1884
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...A Brief History of the Concept Album: From Woody Guthrie, to the Beatles and Pink Floyd, to Taylor Swift
Though Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band holds something of an honorary cultural position as “the first concept album,” the Beatles themselves didn’t hear it that way. The term “concept album,” as defined by Polyphonic host Noah Lefevre in his new video above, denotes “a set of tracks which hold a larger meaning when together than apart, usually achieved through adherence to a central theme.” Despite being one of the finest collections of songs committed to a single vinyl disc in the nineteen-sixties, Sgt. Pepper’s does — apart from its opening and closing tracks — reflect few pains taken to assure a thematic unity.
Other contenders for the first concept album, in Lefevre’s telling, include Woody Guthrie’s 1940 Dust Bowl Ballads, Frank Sinatra’s 1955 In the Wee Small Hours, Johnny Cash’s 1959 Songs of Our Soil, and The Ventures’ 1964 The Ventures in Space. Part of the question of designation has to do with technology: we associate the album with the twelve-inch long-playing record, which didn’t come on the market until 1948. (Dust Bowl Ballads had to sprawl across two 78 rpm three-disc sets.)
And even then, it was almost two decades before the LP “caught on as the default format for musical releases, allowing musicians to have more scope and vision for their albums” — that, thanks to expansive gatefold sleeves, could literally be made visible. There began what I’ve come to think of as the heroic era of the album as an art form.
This era was marked by releases like The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, The Who’s Tommy, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and later The Wall. “The seventies were a golden age for the concept album,” Lefevre adds. “It was a time when musicians had the space and budget to experiment, and when new technologies were pushing music into entirely unexpected places.” Partially demolished by punk and majestically revived by hip-hop, the concept album remains a viable form today, essayed by major twenty-first century pop artists from The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar to Taylor Swift and BTS — none of whom have quite managed to capture the entire zeitgeist in the manner of Sgt. Pepper’s, granted, but certainly not for lack of trying.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Last Playlist,” Which He Created for His Own Funeral: Erik Satie, Bill Evans, Debussy, Ravel & More
Ryuichi Sakamoto died last March, three months after his final live performance, and two months after the release of his final album 12. It’s safe to say that life, for him, was more or less synonymous with music, and indeed he prepared music to extend even beyond his life’s end. A prolific recording artist, both solo and in collaboration, he no doubt left a great deal of unreleased material in the vault (or so his fans all hope). He also curated the music of others, an occasional pursuit that culminated in the newly released playlist that Sakamoto created to be played at his own funeral.
“The 33-track playlist features some of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s favorite music,” writes NME’s Surej Singh, “including works from Bach, Debussy and Ravel, and opens with an 11-minute piece ‘Haloid Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)’ from Sakamoto’s frequent collaborator Alva Noto.”
Its two and a half hours of music also include the work of others with whom Sakamoto worked in life, like David Sylvian, as well as other composers and performers spanning various eras and genres: Ennio Morricone, Bill Evans, Laurel Halo, Nino Rota, and Erik Satie.
Whatever the obvious differences between all the pieces Sakamoto chose to play for those who came to pay their respects, the serious listener can hear resonances both between them and with Sakamoto’s own oeuvre. As those who’ve listened to his discography understand, Sakamoto worked in an ever-widening range of forms — pop, dance, ambient, orchestral, and many more besides — yet always came up with music that was immediately recognizable as his own. While he lived, he never stopped assimilating new influences. Even though he’s now gone, the influence of his work will exert itself for generations to come, as will its power as a gateway to vast and diverse musical realms.
You can hear the playlist above, or via this Spotify playlist.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...
Watch Young David Attenborough Encounter Animals in Their Natural Habitats: Video from the 1950s and 1960s
Experience long ago conferred the mantle of authority on broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author David Attenborough, age 97.
In his late 20s, he landed at the BBC, producing live studio broadcasts that ran the gamut from children’s shows, ballet performances and archeological quizzes to programs focused on cooking, religion and politics.
When an educational show starring animals from the London Zoo became a hit with viewers, the powers that be built on its popularity with a fresh take — a show that sent the intrepid young Attenborough around the world, seeking animals in their native habitats. He was accompanied by cameraman Charles Lagus and two zoologists, whom he quickly supplanted as host.
It made for thrilling viewing in an era when wildlife tourism was available to a very few.
The New York Times notes that many of the creatures who cropped up onscreen in these early Zoo Quest episodes were shipped back to London Zoo:
It is not the kind of mission we approve of nowadays, but without it the West might never have gotten interested in wildlife to begin with. We started by shooting exotic species for their skins and bones and trapping them for our zoos, and only recently moved to worrying about their survival in the wild and the health of the planet in general. This history is symbolized by the transformation of Attenborough himself from a talking and writing crocodile hunter to the greatest living advocate of the global ecosystem.
In Borneo in 1956, in search for Komodo dragons, he paused for an encounter with an orangutan, above, and also a big whiff of durian, the spiky, odiferous fruit whose aroma famously got it banned from Singapore’s elegant Raffles Hotel, with taxis, planes, subways, and ferries following suit.
Soon thereafter, the six-episode hunt for the Komodo dragon finds Attenborough in Java, masking his nerves as he uses a cutlass, a willingness to climb trees, and a cloth sack to get the better of a fully grown python.
(Once the serpent was settled at the London Zoo, he made the trek to the BBC for an in-studio appearance.)
You’ll note that this episode is in color.
Although Zoo Quest filmed in color, it aired ten years before color broadcasts were available to UK viewers, so most of the folks watching at home assumed it had been shot in black and white.
In 1960, Attenborough used the latest — now severely outmoded-looking– technology to capture the first audio recording of the indri, Madagascar’s largest lemur for Attenborough’s Wonder of Song.
This audio victory led him to wonder if he could be the first to film an indri.
Frustrated by the thick canopy overhead, Attenborough resorted to playback, successfully tempting the animals to not only come closer, but do so while vocalizing.
Mating calls?
No. Attenborough deduced that they were the indris’ “battle songs”, issued as a warning to the perceived threat of unfamiliar indris.
In 2011, Attenborough returned to Madagascar, listening respectfully to Joseph, a local hunter turned conservationist, who explains how the local populace no longer think of indri as a food source, but rather a symbol of their commitment to preserving the natural world around them. Joseph’s relationship with the indri affords Sir David a rare opportunity, as the indri feed from his hand:
Fifty years ago, I spent days and days and days searching through the forest, with these firing their noise overhead but now this group is so accustomed to seeing people around that I have been right close up to them, something I never believed could have be possible.
Read more about David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest experiences in his memoir, Adventures of a Young Naturalist, and watch a playlist of documentaries for the BBC here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...James Brown’s Historic Concert, Staged 24 Hours After Martin Luther King’s Assassination, Is Now Restored and Free to Watch Online
Thanks to James Brown’s official YouTube channel, you can now watch a remastered and restored version of a historic concert. The channel prefaces the concert with these words:
On April 5th 1968, James Brown gave a free concert at The Boston Garden which became a thing of legend. Only 24 hours earlier civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King had been assassinated resulting in widespread violence across the United States. The mayor of Boston was persuaded to let the concert go ahead and it was broadcast live across the city by WGBH-TV. Featuring inspiring speeches and legendary performances, James Brown’s concert is said to have contributed majorly to maintaining calm and peace throughout the city that night.
To learn more about the performance, see our separate post: James Brown Saves Boston After Martin Luther King’s Assassination, Calls for Peace Across America (1968)
The setlist, complete with time stamps, appears below:
00:00 Intro
01:57 If I Ruled The World
05:40 James Brown Speech
12:55 Tom Atkins Speech
17:45 Kevin White Speech
20:59 That’s Life
24:22 Kansas City
28:45 Soul Man (Bobby Byrd)
31:08 You’ve Got To Change Your Mind (feat. Bobby Byrd)
35:51 I’m In Love (Bobby Byrd)
38:22 Sweet Soul Music (Bobby Byrd)
40:23 Mustang Sally (Bobby Byrd)
43:36 Medley: It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World / Lost Someone / Bewildered
57:30 Tell Mama (Marva Whitney)
59:36 Check Yourself (Marva Whitney)
01:05:02 Chain Of Fools (Marva Whitney)
01:07:38 I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Marva Whitney)
01:10:24 Maceo Parker Comedy Routine
01:20:20 Get It Together
01:27:30 There Was A Time
01:38:40 I Got The Feelin’
01:42:40 Try Me
01:45:35 Medley: Cold Sweat / Ride The Pony / Cold Sweat
01:57:20 Maybe The Last Time
02:01:32 I Got You (I Feel Good)
02:02:04 Please, Please, Please
02:04:34 I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)
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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.
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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.
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