The CIA Assesses the Power of French Post-Modern Philosophers: Read a Newly Declassified CIA Report from 1985

in History, Philosophy, Politics | June 16th, 2017

We might assume that phi­los­o­phy is an ivory tow­er dis­ci­pline that has lit­tle effect on the unlove­ly oper­a­tions of gov­ern­ment, dri­ven as they are by the con­cerns of mid­dle class wal­lets, upper class stock port­fo­lios, and the ever-present prob­lem of pover­ty. But we would be wrong. In times when pres­i­dents, cab­i­net mem­bers, or sen­a­tors have been thought­ful and well-read, the ideas of thinkers like Fran­cis Fukuya­ma, Leo Strauss, Jur­gen Haber­mas, and John Rawls—a favorite of the pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent—have exer­cised con­sid­er­able sway. Few philoso­phers have been as his­tor­i­cal­ly influ­en­tial as the Ger­man thinker Carl Schmitt, though in a thor­ough­ly destruc­tive way. Then there’s John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Aris­to­tle… even Socrates, who made him­self a thorn in the side of the pow­er­ful.

But when it comes to the most­ly French school of thinkers we asso­ciate with postmodernism—Michel Fou­cault, Roland Barthes, the Jacques Lacan and Der­ri­da, and many others—such influ­ence is far less direct. The work of these writ­ers has been often dis­missed as friv­o­lous and incon­se­quen­tial, speak­ing a lan­guage no one under­stands to out of touch coastal elites on the left edge of the spec­trum. Per­haps this is so in the Unit­ed States, where pow­er is often the­o­rized but rarely rad­i­cal­ly cri­tiqued in main­stream pub­li­ca­tions. But it has not been so in France. At least not accord­ing to the CIA, who close­ly mon­i­tored the effects of French phi­los­o­phy on the coun­try’s domes­tic and for­eign pol­i­cy dur­ing their long-run­ning cul­ture war against Com­mu­nism and “anti-Amer­i­can­ism,” and who, in 1985, com­piled a research paper to doc­u­ment their inves­ti­ga­tions. (See a sam­ple page above.)

Recent­ly made avail­able to the pub­lic in a “san­i­tized copy” through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request, the doc­u­ment, titled “France: Defec­tion of the Left­ist Intel­lec­tu­als,” shows itself sur­pris­ing­ly approv­ing of the polit­i­cal direc­tion post-struc­tural­ist thinkers had tak­en. Vil­lano­va Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy and author of Rad­i­cal His­to­ry and the Pol­i­tics of Art Gabriel Rock­hill sum­ma­rizes the tenor of the agency’s assess­ment in the L.A. Review of Books’ Philo­soph­i­cal Salon:

…the under­cov­er cul­tur­al war­riors applaud what they see as a dou­ble move­ment that has con­tributed to the intel­li­gentsia shift­ing its crit­i­cal focus away from the US and toward the USSR. On the left, there was a grad­ual intel­lec­tu­al dis­af­fec­tion with Stal­in­ism and Marx­ism, a pro­gres­sive with­draw­al of rad­i­cal intel­lec­tu­als from pub­lic debate, and a the­o­ret­i­cal move away from social­ism and the social­ist par­ty. Fur­ther to the right, the ide­o­log­i­cal oppor­tunists referred to as the New Philoso­phers and the New Right intel­lec­tu­als launched a high-pro­file media smear cam­paign against Marx­ism.

The “spir­it of anti-Marx­ism and anti-Sovi­etism,” write the agents in their report, “will make it dif­fi­cult for any­one to mobi­lize sig­nif­i­cant intel­lec­tu­al oppo­si­tion to US poli­cies.” The influ­ence of “New Left intel­lec­tu­als” over French cul­ture and gov­ern­ment was such, they sur­mised, that “Pres­i­dent [Fran­cois] Mitterrand’s notable cool­ness toward Moscow derives, at least in part, from this per­va­sive atti­tude.”

These obser­va­tions stand in con­trast to the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of “left-lean­ing intel­lec­tu­als of the imme­di­ate post­war peri­od,” writes Rock­hill, who “had been open­ly crit­i­cal of US impe­ri­al­ism” and active­ly worked against the machi­na­tions of Amer­i­can oper­a­tives. Jean-Paul Sartre even played a role in “blow­ing the cov­er of the CIA sta­tion offi­cer in Paris and dozens of under­cov­er oper­a­tives,” and as a result was “close­ly mon­i­tored by the Agency and con­sid­ered a very seri­ous prob­lem.” By the mid-eight­ies, the Agency stat­ed, tri­umphant­ly, “there are no more Sartres, no more Gides.” The “last clique of Com­mu­nist savants,” they write, “came under fire from their for­mer pro­teges, but none had any stom­ach for fight­ing a rear­guard defense of Marx­ism.” As such, the late Cold War peri­od saw a “broad­er retreat from ide­ol­o­gy among intel­lec­tu­als of all polit­i­cal col­ors.”

A cer­tain weari­ness had tak­en hold, brought about by the inde­fen­si­ble total­i­tar­i­an abus­es of the “cult of Stal­in­ism” and the seem­ing inescapa­bil­i­ty of the Wash­ing­ton Con­sen­sus and the multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ratism engen­dered by it. By the time of Communism’s col­lapse, U.S. philoso­phers waxed apoc­a­lyp­tic, even as they cel­e­brat­ed the tri­umph of what Fran­cis Fukuya­ma called “lib­er­al democ­ra­cy” over social­ism. Fukuyama’s book The End of His­to­ry and the Last Man made its star­tling the­sis plain in the title. There would be no more rev­o­lu­tions. Har­vard thinker Samuel Hunt­ing­ton declared it the era of “endism,” amidst a rash of hyper­bol­ic argu­ments about “the end of art,” the “end of nature,” and so on. And, in France, in the years just pri­or to the fall of the Berlin wall, the pre­vi­ous­ly vig­or­ous philo­soph­i­cal left, the CIA believed, had “suc­cumbed to a kind of list­less­ness.”

While the agency cred­it­ed the dif­fi­dence of post-struc­tural­ist philoso­phers with sway­ing pop­u­lar opin­ion away from social­ism and “hard­en­ing pub­lic atti­tudes toward Marx­ism and the Sovi­et Union,” it also wrote that “their influ­ence appears to be wan­ing, and they are unlike­ly to have much direct impact on polit­i­cal affairs any time soon.” Is this true? If we take seri­ous­ly crit­ics of so-called “Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics,” the answer is a resound­ing No. As those who close­ly iden­ti­fy post­mod­ern phi­los­o­phy with sev­er­al recent waves of left­ist thought and activism might argue, the CIA was short­sight­ed in its con­clu­sions. Per­haps, bound to a Manichean view fos­tered by decades of Cold War maneu­ver­ing, they could not con­ceive of a pol­i­tics that opposed both Amer­i­can and Sovi­et empire at once.

And yet, the retreat from ide­ol­o­gy was hard­ly a retreat from pol­i­tics. We might say, over thir­ty years since this curi­ous research essay cir­cu­lat­ed among intel­li­gence gath­er­ers, that con­cepts like Foucault’s biopow­er or Derrida’s skep­ti­cal inter­ro­ga­tions of iden­ti­ty have more cur­ren­cy and rel­e­vance than ever, even if we don’t always under­stand, or read, their work. But while the agency may not have fore­seen the per­va­sive impact of post­mod­ern thought, they nev­er dis­missed it as obscu­ran­tist or incon­se­quen­tial sophistry. Their new­ly-released report, writes Rock­hill, “should be a cogent reminder that if some pre­sume that intel­lec­tu­als are pow­er­less, and that our polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions do not mat­ter, the orga­ni­za­tion that has been one of the most potent pow­er bro­kers in con­tem­po­rary world pol­i­tics does not agree.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

12 Mil­lion Declas­si­fied CIA Doc­u­ments Now Free Online: Secret Tun­nels, UFOs, Psy­chic Exper­i­ments & More

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self (UC Berke­ley, 1980–1983)

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

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

How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition

in History | June 15th, 2017

In the ancient world, the lan­guage of philosophy—and there­fore of sci­ence and medicine—was pri­mar­i­ly Greek. “Even after the Roman con­quest of the Mediter­ranean and the demise of pagan­ism, phi­los­o­phy was strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Hel­lenic cul­ture,” writes phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor and His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy with­out any Gaps host Peter Adam­son. “The lead­ing thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek lit­er­a­ture.” And in the east­ern empire, “the Greek-speak­ing Byzan­tines could con­tin­ue to read Pla­to and Aris­to­tle in the orig­i­nal.”

Greek thinkers also had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in Egypt. Dur­ing the build­ing of the Library of Alexan­dria, “schol­ars copied and stored books that were bor­rowed, bought, and even stolen from oth­er places in the Mediter­ranean,” writes Aileen Das, Pro­fes­sor of Mediter­ranean Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan. “The librar­i­ans gath­ered texts cir­cu­lat­ing under the names of Pla­to (d. 348/347 BCE), Aris­to­tle and Hip­pocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), and pub­lished them as col­lec­tions.” The scroll above, part of an Aris­totelian tran­scrip­tion of the Athen­ian con­sti­tu­tion, was believed lost for hun­dreds of years until it was dis­cov­ered in the 19th cen­tu­ry in Egypt, in the orig­i­nal Greek. The text, writes the British Library, “has had a major impact in our knowl­edge of the devel­op­ment of Athen­ian democ­ra­cy and the work­ings of the Athen­ian city-state in antiq­ui­ty.”

Alexan­dria “rivalled Athens and Rome as the place to study phi­los­o­phy and med­i­cine in the Mediter­ranean,” and young men of means like the 6th cen­tu­ry priest Sergius of Reshaina, doc­tor-in-chief in North­ern Syr­ia, trav­eled there to learn the tra­di­tion. Sergius “trans­lat­ed around 30 works of Galen [the Greek physi­cian]” and oth­er known and unknown philoso­phers and ancient sci­en­tists into Syr­i­ac. Lat­er, as Syr­i­ac and Ara­bic came to dom­i­nate for­mer Greek-speak­ing regions, the Greek texts became intense objects of focus for Islam­ic thinkers, and the caliphs spared no expense to have them trans­lat­ed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed, often con­tract­ing with Chris­t­ian and Jew­ish schol­ars to accom­plish the task.

The trans­mis­sion of Greek phi­los­o­phy and med­i­cine was an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non, which involved bilin­gual speak­ers from pagan, Chris­t­ian, Mus­lim, and Jew­ish back­grounds. This move­ment spanned not only reli­gious and lin­guis­tic but also geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries, for it occurred in cities as far apart as Bagh­dad in the East and Tole­do in the West.

In Bagh­dad, espe­cial­ly, by the 10th cen­tu­ry, “read­ers of Ara­bic,” writes Adam­son, “had about the same degree of access to Aris­to­tle that read­ers of Eng­lish do today” thanks to a “well-fund­ed trans­la­tion move­ment that unfold­ed dur­ing the Abbasid caliphate, begin­ning in the sec­ond half of the eighth cen­tu­ry.” The work done dur­ing the Abbasid period—from about 750 to 950—“generated a high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage and a mas­sive amount of source mate­r­i­al,” we learn in Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s The Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion. Such mate­r­i­al “would feed sci­en­tif­ic research for the fol­low­ing cen­turies, not only in the Islam­ic world but beyond it, in Greek and Latin Chris­ten­dom and, with­in it, among the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tions as well.”

Indeed this “Byzan­tine human­ism,” as it’s called, “helped the clas­si­cal tra­di­tion sur­vive, at least to the large extent that it has.” As ancient texts and tra­di­tions dis­ap­peared in Europe dur­ing the so-called “Dark Ages,” Ara­bic and Syr­i­ac-speak­ing schol­ars and trans­la­tors incor­po­rat­ed them into an Islam­ic philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion called fal­safa. The moti­va­tions for fos­ter­ing the study of Greek thought were com­plex. On the one hand, writes Adam­son, the move was polit­i­cal; “the caliphs want­ed to estab­lish their own cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny,” in com­pe­ti­tion with Per­sians and Greek-speak­ing Byzan­tine Chris­tians, “benight­ed as they were by the irra­tional­i­ties of Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy.” On the oth­er hand, “Mus­lim intel­lec­tu­als also saw resources in the Greek texts for defend­ing, and bet­ter under­stand­ing their own reli­gion.”

One well-known fig­ure from the peri­od, al-Kin­di, is thought to be the first philoso­pher to write in Ara­bic. He over­saw the trans­la­tions of hun­dreds of texts by Chris­t­ian schol­ars who read both Greek and Ara­bic, and he may also have added his own ideas to the works of Plot­i­nus, for exam­ple, and oth­er Greek thinkers. Like Thomas Aquinas a few hun­dred years lat­er, al-Kin­di attempt­ed to “estab­lish the iden­ti­ty of the first prin­ci­ple in Aris­to­tle and Plot­i­nus” as the the­is­tic God. In this way, Islam­ic trans­la­tions of Greek texts pre­pared the way for inter­pre­ta­tions that “treat that prin­ci­ple as a Cre­ator,” a cen­tral idea in Medieval scholas­tic phi­los­o­phy and Catholic thought gen­er­al­ly.

The trans­la­tions by al-Kin­di and his asso­ciates are grouped into what schol­ars call the “cir­cle of al-Kin­di,” which pre­served and elab­o­rat­ed on Aris­to­tle and the Neo­pla­ton­ists. Thanks to al-Kindi’s “first set of trans­la­tions,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, “learned Mus­lims became acquaint­ed with Pla­to’s Demi­urge and immor­tal soul; with Aris­totle’s search for sci­ence and knowl­edge of the caus­es of all the phe­nom­e­na on earth and in the heav­ens,” and many more ancient Greek meta­phys­i­cal doc­trines. Lat­er trans­la­tors work­ing under physi­cian and sci­en­tist Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son “made avail­able in Syr­i­ac and/or Ara­bic oth­er works by Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Theophras­tus, some philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings by Galen,” and oth­er Greek thinkers and sci­en­tists.

This tra­di­tion of trans­la­tion, philo­soph­i­cal debate, and sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery in Islam­ic soci­eties con­tin­ued into the 10th and 11th cen­turies, when Aver­roes, the “Islam­ic schol­ar who gave us mod­ern phi­los­o­phy,” wrote his com­men­tary on the works of Aris­to­tle. “For sev­er­al cen­turies,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado’s Robert Pas­nau, “a series of bril­liant philoso­phers and sci­en­tists made Bagh­dad the intel­lec­tu­al cen­ter of the medieval world,” pre­serv­ing ancient Greek knowl­edge and wis­dom that may oth­er­wise have dis­ap­peared. When it seems in our study of his­to­ry that the light of the ancient phi­los­o­phy was extin­guished in West­ern Europe, we need only look to North Africa and the Near East to see that tra­di­tion, with its human­is­tic exchange of ideas, flour­ish­ing for cen­turies in a world close­ly con­nect­ed by trade and empire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy 

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

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Comparison of the Same Streets & Landmarks

in History | June 15th, 2017

The New York­er has post­ed a very neat split-screen tour of the same streets in New York City, let­ting you see the Big Apple in the 1930s and today. Times Square, Cen­tral Park, the Brook­lyn Bridge–they’re all on dis­play. What a dif­fer­ence 80 years make.

Below you can find oth­er his­tor­i­cal videos and pho­tos of NYC … and Lon­don and Berlin too. Enjoy.

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:

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

1905 Video Shows New York City Sub­way Trav­el­ing From 14th St. to 42nd Street

Ear­ly Films of New York City

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

1927 Lon­don Shown in Mov­ing Col­or

Ennio Morricone’s Iconic Song, “The Ecstasy of Gold,” Spellbindingly Arranged for Theremin & Voice

in Music | June 6th, 2017

You know Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecsta­sy Of Gold,” a musi­cal com­po­si­tion first made famous in Ser­gio Leone’s 1966 spaghet­ti west­ern The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It has since been cov­ered by every­one from Metal­li­ca, to Yo-Yo Ma. And now you can add Ger­man elec­tron­ic musi­cian Car­oli­na Eyck to the list.

Above, watch Eyck take “The Ecsta­sy Of Gold” in new, intrigu­ing direc­tions, using a theremin and a voice loop­er. It’s pret­ty mes­mer­iz­ing.

Below, watch Car­oli­na’s intro­duc­tion to the theremin. And down in the Relat­eds, find much more on the theremin, includ­ing vin­tage footage of Russ­ian inven­tor Leon Theremin giv­ing a demo of the new­fan­gled elec­tron­ic instru­ment.

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:

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

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

“Some­where Over the Rain­bow” Played on a 1929 Theremin

A New Theme Park Based on Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro Set to Open in 2020

in Animation, Film, Travel | June 5th, 2017

Is a frame of ref­er­ence nec­es­sary to appre­ci­ate Dis­ney World? Can you enjoy a ride in a spin­ning teacup if you have no work­ing knowl­edge of Alice in Won­der­land? What sort of mag­ic might the Mag­ic King­dom hold for those who’ve nev­er heard of Cin­derel­la or Peter Pan?

Now imag­ine if the theme park’s scope was nar­rowed to a sin­gle film.

You’ve got until 2020 to sneak in a view­ing of the Hayao Miyaza­ki film, My Neigh­bor Totoro, before Ghi­b­li Park, a 500-acre amuse­ment park on the grounds of Japan’s 2005 World’s Fair site, opens.

To date, Miyaza­k­i’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li has pro­duced more than a dozen fea­ture-length ani­mat­ed films. That’s a lot of raw mate­r­i­al for attrac­tions.

Por­co Rosso’s 1930s sea­planes have ride writ­ten all over them, and think of the Haunt­ed Man­sion-esque thrills that could be wrung from Spir­it­ed Away’s bath­house.

How about a Jun­gle Cruise-style ram­ble through the coun­try­side in Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle?

An under­wa­ter adven­ture with gold­fish princess Ponyo?

Pre­pare for a very long wait if you’re join­ing the queue for those. It’s being report­ed that Ghi­b­li Park will focus exclu­sive­ly on a sin­gle film, 1988’s My Neigh­bor Totoro.

(Care to take a guess what its Mouse Ears will look like?)

The film’s theme of respect for the nat­ur­al world is good news for the area’s exist­ing flo­ra. The gov­er­nor of Japan’s Aichi Pre­fec­ture, where Ghi­b­li Park is to be sit­u­at­ed, has announced that it will be laid out in such a way as to pre­serve the trees.

Pre­sum­ably the film’s icon­ic cat bus and fast grow­ing cam­phor tree, above, will be pow­ered by the green­est of ener­gies.

Pre­view the sort of won­ders in store by tour­ing the life­size house of My Neigh­bor Totoro’s human char­ac­ters, Sat­su­ki and Mei, below.

via NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Essence of Hayao Miyaza­ki Films: A Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Human­i­ty at the Heart of His Ani­ma­tion

Hayao Miyazaki’s Mas­ter­pieces Spir­it­ed Away and Princess Mononoke Imag­ined as 8‑Bit Video Games

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She’ll be appear­ing onstage in New York City in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, open­ing lat­er this week. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Bob Dylan Potato Chips, Anyone?: What They’re Snacking on in China

in Food & Drink, Music | June 5th, 2017

They sound tasty. The rub? You have to trav­el to Chi­na to get them.

And now a ques­tion for any read­ers flu­ent in Chi­nese. Can you trans­late the text on the bag? We would be curi­ous to know what’s the pitch for these chips. Feel free to put any trans­la­tions in com­ments sec­tion below.

via @stevesilberman

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:

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

Two Leg­ends Togeth­er: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram, 1963

Jeff Bridges Nar­rates a Brief His­to­ry of Bob Dylan’s and The Band’s Base­ment Tapes

Cab Calloway Stars in “Minnie the Moocher,” a Trippy Betty Boop Cartoon That’s Ranked as the 20th Greatest Cartoon of All Time (1932)

in Animation, Jazz, Music, Video - Arts & Culture | June 2nd, 2017

The cast of Dave Fleis­ch­er’s 1932 car­toon, Min­nie the Moocher, above, are a far cry from the can­dy-col­ored ponies and sim­per­ing drag­ons pop­u­lat­ing today’s car­toon uni­verse.

There’s not much of a nar­ra­tive, and the clos­est thing to a moral is an unspo­ken “don’t be cokey.”

Who cares?

The lyrics to band­leader Cab Cal­loway’s crossover hit were ample excuse to send a rebel­lious Bet­ty Boop and her anthro­po­mor­phized pal, Bim­bo, on a trip­py jaunt through the under­world.

While there’s no evi­dence of Bet­ty or Bim­bo hit­ting the pipe, one won­ders what the ani­ma­tors were smok­ing to come up with such an imag­i­na­tive palette of ghouls.

The ghosts are pris­on­ers sport­ing chain gang stripes.

A witch with an out­sized head pre­fig­ures Miyaza­k­i’s com­mand­ing old ladies.

A blank-sock­et­ed mama cat, leached dry by her equal­ly eye­less kit­tens, con­jures the sort of night­mare vision that appealed to Hierony­mus Bosch.

The most benign pres­ence is a phan­tas­magoric wal­rus, mod­eled on a roto­scoped Cal­loway. The Hi De Ho Man cut a far svel­ter pres­ence in the flesh, as evi­denced by the live action sequence that intro­duces the car­toon.

Betty’s home sweet home offers near­ly as weird a land­scape as the one she and Bim­bo flee at film’s end.

Its many inor­gan­ic inhab­i­tants would have felt right at home in PeeWee’s Play­house, as would a self-sac­ri­fic­ing flow­er­ing plant, who suc­cumbs to a sam­ple of the hasenpf­ef­fer Betty’s immi­grant moth­er unsuc­cess­ful­ly urges on her. As for Bet­ty’s father, Fleis­ch­er struck a blow for teenagers every­where by hav­ing his head morph into a gramo­phone on which a bro­ken record (or rather, cylin­der) plays.

Min­nie the Moocher was vot­ed the 20th great­est car­toon of all time, in a 1994 sur­vey of 1,ooo ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als. We hope you enjoy it now, as the ani­ma­tors did then, and audi­ences did way back in 1932.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

Duke Ellington’s Sym­pho­ny in Black, Star­ring a 19-Year-old Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Hear 2,000 Record­ings of the Most Essen­tial Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Edu­ca­tion

Bam­bi Meets Godzil­la: #38 on the List of The 50 Great­est Car­toons of All Time

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She’ll be appear­ing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Manchester Benefit Concert Is Streaming Live Now

in Music | June 2nd, 2017

Just a quick fyi: The Man­ches­ter Ben­e­fit con­cert is hap­pen­ing now, and stream­ing live on YouTube. Cold­play, Phar­rell Williams, Justin Bieber, Katy Per­ry, Miley Cyrus, Niall Horan, Ush­er, and Ari­ana Grande will all per­form. Click play above to stream the live video feed.

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!

The Story of Habitat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Playing Game (1986)

in Games, Technology | May 26th, 2017

Long before World of War­craft, before Everquest and Sec­ond Life, and even before Ulti­ma Online, com­put­er-gamers of the 1980s look­ing for an online world to explore with oth­ers of their kind could fire up their Com­modore 64s, switch on their dial-up modems, and log into Habi­tat. Brought out for the Com­modore online ser­vice Quan­tum Link by Lucas­film Games (lat­er known as the devel­op­er of such clas­sic point-and-click adven­ture games as Mani­ac Man­sion and The Secret of Mon­key Island, now known as Lucasarts), Habi­tat debuted as the very first large-scale graph­i­cal vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty, blaz­ing a trail for all the mas­sive­ly mul­ti­play­er online role-play­ing games (or MMORPGs) so many of us spend so much of our time play­ing today.

Designed, in the words of cre­ators Chip Morn­ingstar and F. Ran­dall Farmer, to “sup­port a pop­u­la­tion of thou­sands of users in a sin­gle shared cyber­space,” Habi­tat pre­sent­ed “a real-time ani­mat­ed view into an online sim­u­lat­ed world in which users can com­mu­ni­cate, play games, go on adven­tures, fall in love, get mar­ried, get divorced, start busi­ness­es, found reli­gions, wage wars, protest against them, and exper­i­ment with self-gov­ern­ment.” All that hap­pened and more with­in the ser­vice’s vir­tu­al real­i­ty dur­ing its pilot run from 1986 to 1988. The fea­tures both cau­tious­ly and reck­less­ly imple­ment­ed by Habi­tat’s devel­op­ers, and the feed­back they received from its users, laid down the tem­plate for all the more advanced graph­i­cal online worlds to come.

At the top of the post, you can watch Lucas­film’s orig­i­nal Habi­tat pro­mo­tion­al video promise a “strange new world where names can change as quick­ly as events, sur­pris­es lurk at every turn, and the keynotes of exis­tence are fan­ta­sy and fun,” one where “thou­sands of avatars, each con­trolled by a dif­fer­ent human, can con­verge to shape an imag­i­nary soci­ety.” (All per­formed, the nar­ra­tor notes, “with the coop­er­a­tion of a huge main­frame com­put­er in Vir­ginia.”) The form this soci­ety even­tu­al­ly took impressed Habi­tat’s cre­ators as much as any­one, as Farmer writes in his “Habi­tat Anec­dotes” from 1988, an exam­i­na­tion of the most mem­o­rable hap­pen­ings and phe­nom­e­na among its users.

Farmer found he could group those users into five now-famil­iar cat­e­gories: the Pas­sives (who “want to ‘be enter­tained’ with no effort, like watch­ing TV”), the Active (whose “biggest prob­lem is over­spend­ing”), the Moti­va­tors (the most valu­able users, for they “under­stand that Habi­tat is what they make of it”), the Care­tak­ers (employ­ees who “help the new users, con­trol per­son­al con­flicts, record bugs” and so on), and the Geek Gods (the vir­tu­al world’s all-pow­er­ful admin­is­tra­tors). Some­times every­one got along smooth­ly, and some­times — inevitably, giv­en that every­one had to define the prop­er­ties of this brand new medi­um even as they expe­ri­enced it — they did­n’t.

“At first, dur­ing ear­ly test­ing, we found out that peo­ple were tak­ing stuff out of oth­ers’ hands and shoot­ing peo­ple in their own homes,” Farmer writes. Lat­er, a Greek Ortho­dox Min­is­ter opened Habi­tat’s first church, but “I had to even­tu­al­ly put a lock on the Church’s front door because every time he dec­o­rat­ed (with flow­ers), some­one would steal and pawn them while he was not logged in!” This cit­i­zen-gov­erned vir­tu­al soci­ety even­tu­al­ly elect­ed a sher­iff from among its users, though the design­ers could nev­er quite decide what pow­ers to grant him. Oth­er sur­pris­ing­ly “real world” insti­tu­tions devel­oped, includ­ing a news­pa­per whose user-pub­lish­er “tire­less­ly spent 20–40 hours a week com­pos­ing a 20, 30, 40 or even 50 page tabloid con­tain­ing the lat­est news, events, rumors, and even fic­tion­al arti­cles.”

Though devel­op­ing this then-advanced soft­ware for “the ludi­crous Com­modore 64” posed a seri­ous tech­ni­cal chal­lenge, write Farmer and Morn­ingstar in their 1990 paper “The Lessons of Lucas­film’s Habi­tat,” the real work began when the users logged on. All the avatars need­ed hous­es, “orga­nized into towns and cities with asso­ci­at­ed traf­fic arter­ies and shop­ping and recre­ation­al areas” with “wilder­ness areas between the towns so that every­one would not be jammed togeth­er into the same place.” Most of all, they need­ed inter­est­ing places to vis­it, “and since they can’t all be in the same place at the same time, they need­ed a lot of inter­est­ing places to vis­it. [ … ] Each of those hous­es, towns, roads, shops, forests, the­aters, are­nas, and oth­er places is a dis­tinct enti­ty that some­one needs to design and cre­ate. Attempt­ing to play the role of omni­scient cen­tral plan­ners, we were swamped.”

All this, the cre­ators dis­cov­ered, required them to stop think­ing like the engi­neers and game design­ers they were, giv­ing up all hope of rig­or­ous cen­tral plan­ning and world-build­ing in favor of fig­ur­ing out the trick­er prob­lem of how, “like the cruise direc­tor on an ocean voy­age,” to make Habi­tat fun for every­one. Farmer faces that ques­tion again today, hav­ing launched the open-source Neo­Hab­i­tat project ear­li­er this year with the aim of reviv­ing the Habi­tat world for the 21st cen­tu­ry. As much progress as graph­i­cal mul­ti­play­er online games have made in the past thir­ty years, the con­clu­sion Farmer and Morn­ingstar reached after their expe­ri­ence cre­at­ing the first one holds as true as ever: “Cyber­space may indeed change human­i­ty, but only if it begins with human­i­ty as it real­ly is.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Long Live Glitch! The Art & Code from the Game Now Released into the Pub­lic Domain

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. 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.

An Animated History of Tea

in Animation, Food & Drink, History, K-12 | May 26th, 2017

Self pro­claimed tea geek, Shu­nan Teng’s knowl­edge of her cho­sen sub­ject extends well beyond the prop­er way to serve and pre­pare her best-loved bev­er­age.

Her recent TED-Ed les­son on the His­to­ry of Tea, above, hints at cen­turies of blood­shed and mer­ce­nary trade prac­tices, dis­creet­ly masked by Steff Lee’s benign ani­ma­tion.

Addic­tion, war, and child labor—the last, a grim ongo­ing real­i­ty…. Med­i­tate on that the next time you’re enjoy­ing a nice cup of Dar­jeel­ing, or bet­ter yet, matcha, a prepa­ra­tion whose West­ern buzz is start­ing to approx­i­mate that of the Tang dynasty.

Even die-hard cof­fee loy­al­ists with lit­tle patience for the rit­u­al­is­tic niceties of tea cul­ture can indulge in some fas­ci­nat­ing triv­ia, from the inven­tion of the clip­per ship to the pos­si­ble health ben­e­fits of eat­ing rather than drink­ing those green leaves.

Test your TQ post-les­son with TED-Ed’s quiz, or this one from Tea Drunk, Teng’s authen­tic Man­hat­tan tea house.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

10 Gold­en Rules for Mak­ing the Per­fect Cup of Tea (1941)

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She’ll be appear­ing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.