Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” a Call for Americans to Take Action

in History, Politics | March 15th, 2017

Say, for exam­ple, that a gang of obscene­ly rich mer­ce­nar­ies with ques­tion­able ties and his­to­ries had tak­en pow­er with the intent to destroy insti­tu­tions so they could loot the coun­try, fur­ther impov­er­ish and dis­em­pow­er the cit­i­zen­ry, and pros­e­cute, imprison, and demo­nize dis­si­dents and eth­nic and reli­gious minori­ties. Such a sce­nario would cry out, one might think, for civ­il action on a nev­er-before-seen scale. Mil­lions, one might imag­ine, would either storm the cas­tle or refuse to obey the com­mands of their new rulers. We might describe this sit­u­a­tion as a top­sy-turvy turn of events, should, say, such an awful thing come to pass.

Top­sy-turvy is exact­ly the phrase Howard Zinn used in his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the U.S. dur­ing the Viet­nam War, when he saw a sit­u­a­tion like the one above, one that had also obtained, he said, in Hitler’s Ger­many and Stalin’s Rus­sia.

“I start,” he said, open­ing a debate, in 1970, at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty with philoso­pher Charles Frankel on the ques­tion of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence,

from the sup­po­si­tion that the world is top­sy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong peo­ple are in jail and the wrong peo­ple are out of jail, that the wrong peo­ple are in pow­er and the wrong peo­ple are out of pow­er, that the wealth is dis­trib­uted in this coun­try and the world in such a way as not sim­ply to require small reform but to require a dras­tic real­lo­ca­tion of wealth.

And with this pre­am­ble, which you can hear read by Matt Damon in the video above, the his­to­ri­an and activist began to make his case that civ­il dis­obe­di­ence “is not our prob­lem…. Our prob­lem is civ­il obe­di­ence.”

We rec­og­nize this for Nazi Ger­many. We know that the prob­lem there was obe­di­ence, that the peo­ple obeyed Hitler. Peo­ple obeyed; that was wrong. They should have chal­lenged, and they should have resist­ed; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stal­in’s Rus­sia we can under­stand that; peo­ple are obe­di­ent, all these herd­like peo­ple.

But “Amer­i­ca is dif­fer­ent” than oth­er world empires, says Zinn, antic­i­pat­ing the usu­al claims of excep­tion­al­ism. No, he says, it isn’t. “It is not that spe­cial. It real­ly isn’t.” Lat­er in his speech, Zinn calls the “vot­ing process” a “sham.”

Total­i­tar­i­an states love vot­ing. You get peo­ple to the polls and they reg­is­ter their approval. I know there is a difference—they have one par­ty and we have two par­ties. We have one more par­ty than they have, you see.

What is called for, he argued, is not a return to the past nor a rejig­ger­ing of the polit­i­cal machin­ery, but a polit­i­cal con­scious­ness that rec­og­nizes com­mon strug­gles across bor­ders:

Peo­ple in all coun­tries need the spir­it of dis­obe­di­ence to the state, which is not a meta­phys­i­cal thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of dec­la­ra­tion of inter­de­pen­dence among peo­ple in all coun­tries of the world who are striv­ing for the same thing.

Damon’s read­ing took place dur­ing the 2012 per­for­mance in Voic­es of a People’s His­to­ry, a now-year­ly event that since 2003 has dra­ma­tized “the extra­or­di­nary his­to­ry of ordi­nary peo­ple who built the move­ments that made the Unit­ed States what it is today, end­ing slav­ery and Jim Crow, protest­ing war and the geno­cide of Native Amer­i­cans, cre­at­ing unions and the eight hour work day, advanc­ing women’s rights and gay lib­er­a­tion, and strug­gling to right wrongs of the day.”

The words of Howard Zinn fea­ture promi­nent­ly in all these events, and “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence”—which was pub­lished as an essay two years after the 1970 debate—has proven a pop­u­lar choice. In 2004 at the sec­ond Voic­es of a People’s His­to­ry, Wal­lace Shawn (above) read the text, and Zinn him­self was in atten­dance. Shawn is best known for his com­ic turns in Woody Allen’s Man­hat­tan, Louis Malle’s My Din­ner With Andre, and Rob Rein­er’s The Princess Bride, and he can’t help but bring his wry humor to the read­ing sim­ply by sound­ing like him­self.

In anoth­er read­ing of Zinn’s speech, Grey’s Anato­my actor and out­spo­ken activist Jesse Williams takes on the text, intro­duced by a record­ing of the 2004 intro­duc­tion to Shawn’s read­ing. These three dif­fer­ent read­ings from three very dif­fer­ent actors and per­son­al­i­ties all have one thing in com­mon: their audi­ences all seem to rec­og­nize the sit­u­a­tion Zinn described in 1970 as entire­ly rel­e­vant to their own in 2004, 2012, 2014, and… per­haps, also in 2017.

Read Zin­n’s full remarks here and see new per­for­mances from this year’s Voic­es of a Peo­ple’s His­to­ry at their web­site.

You can find Zin­n’s essay pub­lished in the col­lec­tion: The Zinn Read­er: Writ­ings on Dis­obe­di­ence and Democ­ra­cy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 21 Hours of Lec­tures & Talks by Howard Zinn, Author of the Best­selling A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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

The Fiction of the Science: A Meditation on How Artists & Storytellers Can Advance Technology

in Art, Creativity, Sci Fi, Technology | March 13th, 2017

In ele­men­tary school, a play­ful teacher gave us an assign­ment. Every­one was to dream up some sort of amaz­ing inven­tion, then draw both a design and an adver­tise­ment for it.

It seemed most of my class­mates were primed for a future in which sneak­ers would come equipped with ful­ly oper­a­tional, built-in wings.

I suc­cumbed to peer pres­sure and turned in an ad show­ing a laugh­ing, air­borne boy, taunt­ing an earth­bound adult by dan­gling his be-winged sneak­er-clad foot just a few inch­es out of reach.

My Fleet Foot was award­ed a good grade, but I felt no pas­sion for it. The inven­tion that tru­ly cap­tured me was the one depict­ed in my favorite illus­tra­tion from Pat­apoufs et Fil­if­ers, the fun­ny French children’s book my father had passed down, about a war between fat and thin peo­ple. The thin char­ac­ters were indus­tri­ous and high­ly dri­ven, but the fat ones knew how to live, loung­ing in feath­er beds beside wall spig­ots dis­pens­ing hot choco­late.

Those spig­ots were—then and now—a tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment I would love to see real­ized.

Robert Wong, are you lis­ten­ing?

In the Fic­tion of Sci­ence, the short film above, Wong, a graph­ic design­er and Google Cre­ative Lab’s VP, shows how sto­ry­telling can put the spurs to those with the train­ing and know-how to ush­er these wild-sound­ing advance­ments into the real world.

Case in point, the cell phone.

Mar­tin Coop­er, an engi­neer at Motoro­la, is wide­ly regard­ed as the father of the mobile phone, but when we take a broad­er view, the cell phone actu­al­ly has two dad­dies: Coop­er and Wah Ming Chang, the artist respon­si­ble for many of Star Trek’s icon­ic props, includ­ing the phas­er, the tri­corder and the com­mu­ni­ca­tor—a “portable trans­ceiv­er device in use by Starfleet crews since the mid-22nd cen­tu­ry.”

(Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Coop­er was a huge Star Trek fan.)

Touch screens and 3D fab­ri­ca­tions born of hand ges­tures are among the many cre­ative fic­tions that have quick­ly become real­i­ty as sci­ence and art inter­min­gle on movie sets and in the lab.

If you’re inspired to take an active part in this rev­o­lu­tion, Google Cre­ative Lab is cur­rent­ly tak­ing appli­ca­tions for The Five, a one-year paid pro­gram for five lucky inno­va­tors, drawn from a pool of artists, design­ers, film­mak­ers, devel­op­ers, and oth­er tal­ent­ed, mul­ti-dex­trous mak­ers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Sto­ry­telling

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

John Berg­er (RIP) and Susan Son­tag Take Us Inside the Art of Sto­ry­telling (1983)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er whose play Zam­boni Godot is play­ing in New York City through March 18. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch The Strange Woman, the 1946 Noir Film Starring Hedy Lamarr

in | March 10th, 2017

The Strange Woman is a noir film direct­ed by Edgar G. Ulmer and star­ring Hedy Lamarr.  In its orig­i­nal review of the film, The New York Times wrote:

Undoubt­ed­ly every actress this side of ten yearns for a tour de force and Hedy Lamarr, who plays the title role in “The Strange Woman” … can con­sid­er that yearn­ing whol­ly real­ized. For the somber dra­ma of a Suave sin­ner in Ban­gor, Me., of a cen­tu­ry ago affords Miss Lamarr her meati­est assign­ment in years, a chance at large chunks of choice dia­logue and an oppor­tu­ni­ty to wear a wardrobe that won’t go unno­ticed by the ladies. But as a study of a sin­gu­lar distaff tem­pera­ment set off by a coterie of ruined males, this adap­ta­tion of Ben Ames Williams’ best-sell­ing nov­el of a few years back has a way of telegraph­ing its punch­es. A reveal­ing dis­sec­tion of a preda­to­ry femme fatale it nev­er­the­less lacks moti­va­tion for some of its sup­port­ing play­ers, pace and sus­pense to make it com­plete­ly mov­ing dra­ma.

In its own write-up on the film, the web­site Film Noir of the Week calls The Strange Woman “a film unfair­ly neglect­ed in the fil­mog­ra­phy of Edgar G. Ulmer. It also is the least talked about of the ‘tril­o­gy’ of femme fatale ‘hero­ine’ pic­tures made in 1946, the oth­er two being the famous Gil­da and the infa­mous Decoy.”

Now in the pub­lic domain, you can watch The Strange Woman above. It’s also housed in our col­lec­tion of 60+ Free Noir films, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

You’ll also find an anoth­er Edgar Ulmer noir film there, Detour.

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!

A Digital Archive of Modernist Magazines (1890 to 1922): Browse the Literary Magazines Where Modernism Began

in Art, Literature | March 7th, 2017

The sto­ry of lit­er­ary mod­ernism in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world is most often told through a small col­lec­tion of Great Works of Art. These poems and nov­els appeared sud­den­ly after the shock and car­nage of World War I, as Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans faced the psy­cho­log­i­cal after­math of mech­a­nized mod­ern com­bat and its sense­less capac­i­ty for mass destruc­tion. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land sur­veyed the wreck­age of Euro­pean cul­ture and tra­di­tion, James Joyce’s Ulysses showed us his­to­ry as a “night­mare” from which its pro­tag­o­nist is “try­ing to awake,” Vir­ginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room showed the mod­ern self as noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of mem­o­ries and per­cep­tions, emp­tied of sol­id exis­tence….

These so-called “high mod­ernist” works all appeared in 1922, when “most schol­ars con­sid­er mod­ernism to be ful­ly fledged.” So writes the Mod­ernist Jour­nals Project (MJP), a joint effort by Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tul­sa, with a num­ber of grants and awards from local sources and the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties.

The project start­ed small in 1996 and has since bloomed into a major resource for schol­ars and read­ers. As the MJP’s mot­to has it, mod­ernism began not with the major works that have come to define it most; “mod­ernism began in the mag­a­zines,” small pub­li­ca­tions with lim­it­ed read­er­ships that often piqued lit­tle inter­est out­side their com­mu­ni­ties.

In many of these mag­a­zines, such as Har­ri­et Monroe’s Poet­ry—still around today—we can see bridges between Vic­to­ri­an and mod­ernist poet­ry. The first issue of Poet­ry from 1912 (top), for exam­ple, fea­tures famous Vic­to­ri­an poet William Vaugh­an Moody next to emerg­ing lit­er­ary dynamo Ezra Pound, who edit­ed Eliot’s The Waste Land ten years lat­er. Although the expo­nents of mod­ernism are often divorced from a polit­i­cal con­text, many mod­ernist writ­ers appeared ear­ly in “lit­tle mag­a­zines” like The Mass­es, fur­ther up, “per­haps the most vibrant and inno­v­a­tive mag­a­zine of its day.”

Found­ed in 1911 as an illus­trat­ed social­ist month­ly, The Mass­es’ pol­i­cy was “to do as it Pleas­es and Con­cil­i­ate Nobody, not even its Read­ers.” The mag­a­zine pub­lished Carl Sand­burg, Louis Unter­mey­er, Amy Low­ell, Upton Sin­clair, and Sher­wood Ander­son, among many oth­ers. But mod­ernism took root on var­ied ter­rain, such that at the same time as The Mass­es rep­re­sent­ed major lit­er­ary change, so too did The Smart Set, found­ed in 1900 “as a mag­a­zine for and about New York’s social elite.” This mag­a­zine soon “evolved into some­thing much more important—an expres­sion of pop­u­lar mod­ernism,” pub­lish­ing F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Joseph Con­rad, James Joyce and oth­ers.

The edi­tor­ship in 1913 of Willard Hunt­ing­ton Wright “estab­lished The Smart Set’s high lit­er­ary cre­den­tials” with fig­ures like Pound and W.B. Yeats. Wright “would up near­ly bank­rupt­ing the jour­nal” before H.L. Menck­en and George Jean Nathan took over the fol­low­ing year. Next to The Smart Set in con­tem­po­rary impor­tance are mag­a­zines like The Ego­ist, which grew out of an ear­li­er short-lived “week­ly fem­i­nist review,” The Free­woman.

Begun in 1913 as The New Free­woman by Free­woman edi­tor Dora Mars­den, and lat­er edit­ed by Har­ri­et Weaver, The Ego­ist is only one exam­ple of the cru­cial impor­tance female edi­tors and writ­ers had in bring­ing lit­er­ary mod­ernism to fruition. The Ego­ist even­tu­al­ly took on Eliot as its lit­er­ary edi­tor and pub­lished his sem­i­nal essay “Tra­di­tion and the Indi­vid­ual Tal­ent.”

Oth­er pub­li­ca­tions crit­i­cal to the growth of mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture were The Lit­tle Review, Des Imag­istes—a series of antholo­gies orga­nized and edit­ed by Pound—and the W.E.B. Du Bois-edit­ed The Cri­sis, the NAACP’s offi­cial jour­nal, which pub­lished work from Jessie Faucet, Charles Ches­nutt, Coun­tee Cullen, Langston Hugh­es, James Wel­don John­son, Jean Toomer, and many oth­er fig­ures cen­tral to the Harlem Renais­sance. You’ll find dozens of issues of these and many oth­er mod­ernist jour­nals from the peri­od, rep­re­sent­ed as scanned images and PDFs at the Mod­ernist Jour­nals Project. At the MJP home­page, you also find biogra­phies of the authors and artists who appear in these jour­nals’ pages, as well as book excerpts and essays about the peri­od of the “lit­tle mag­a­zines,” when the mod­ernists who became famous in the twen­ties, and house­hold names decades lat­er, dis­cov­ered new forms and cre­at­ed new lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Down­load Influ­en­tial Avant-Garde Mag­a­zines from the Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry: Dadaism, Sur­re­al­ism, Futur­ism & More

Down­load 336 Issues of the Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine The Storm (1910–1932), Fea­tur­ing the Work of Kandin­sky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy & More

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

Banksy Opens a Hotel with the Worst View in the World: Visit the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem

in Art, Life, Politics, Travel | March 6th, 2017

Quirky, artist-cus­tomized guest rooms equipped with wifi, fridge, and safes…

Leather couch­es and “an air of unde­served author­i­ty” in the com­mu­nal areas…

VIPs who spring for the Pres­i­den­tial suite will enjoy access to a tiki bar, library, and Dead Sea min­er­als for use in a plunge bath spa­cious enough for four…

Sounds like the sort of hotel cater­ing to well-heeled hip­sters in San Fran­cis­co, Brook­lyn, or Shored­itch…

…but Beth­le­hem?

The artist Banksy’s lat­est mas­sive-scale project may nev­er find its way onto Palestine’s offi­cial tourism site, but it’s no joke. The ful­ly func­tion­ing hotel is set to open for online book­ings on March 11.

Vis­i­tors should be pre­pared to put a $1000 deposit on their cred­it cards at check in, a secu­ri­ty mea­sure aimed at those who might be tempt­ed to walk off with art­work by Sami Musa, Dominique Petrin, or the hotel’s famous founder.

Guests are also cau­tioned to con­tain their excite­ment about their upcom­ing stay when pass­ing through cus­toms at Tel Aviv air­port, where trav­el­ers who blab about their inten­tions to vis­it the West Bank are often sub­ject­ed to extra scruti­ny. One won­ders how many Tel Aviv TSA offi­cers would get the appeal of stay­ing in a hotel that boasts of its ter­ri­ble views of the wall divid­ing Pales­tine from Israel.

The hotel’s prox­im­i­ty to the wall pro­vides both its name and its raison‑d’etre. Banksy is mark­ing the cen­te­nary of British con­trol of Pales­tine by entic­ing vis­i­tors to edu­cate them­selves, using his cus­tom­ary humor and lack of polemic as the launch­ing pad.

To that end, a muse­um and gallery on the premis­es will be open to the pub­lic, offer­ing “a warm wel­come to peo­ple from all sides of the con­flict and across the world.” (The hotel’s FAQ coun­ters the notion that the project is an anti-Semit­ic state­ment, issu­ing a zero-tol­er­ance pol­i­cy where fanati­cism is con­cerned.)

One of the hotel’s most orig­i­nal ameni­ties is its in-house graf­fi­ti sup­plies store, staffed by experts ready to dis­pense “local advice and guid­ance” to vis­i­tors eager to con­tribute to the Wall’s pro­lif­er­at­ing street art. (For inspi­ra­tion, refer to Banky’s work from a 2015 trip to Gaza, below.)

Arm­chair trav­el­ers can check out Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel here.

The online reser­va­tions desk will open for busi­ness on March 11, the same day the gallery and muse­um open to the pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Always Bank­able Banksy

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is now play­ing in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Stream 8,000 Vintage Afropop Recordings Digitized & Made Available by The British Library

in Music | March 3rd, 2017

Sta­bil­i­ty or cul­tur­al vital­i­ty: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the oth­er. The Repub­lic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a tur­bu­lent his­to­ry, yet its musi­cians have also enjoyed roles as “pio­neers in the cre­ation of African pop­u­lar music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne’s Graeme Coun­sel, who over the past decade has made a series of trips to the Guinean cap­i­tal of Conakry on a mis­sion to pre­serve the great vari­ety of music, part of the tra­di­tion now broad­ly labeled “Afropop,” record­ed dur­ing the decades of state-spon­sored cul­tur­al abun­dance after the coun­try gained inde­pen­dence from France in 1958.

“Under the lead­er­ship of music lover Pres­i­dent Ahmed Sék­ou Touré,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, “the gov­ern­ment was soon send­ing out gui­tars, sax­o­phones, and brass instru­ments to 35 state-fund­ed pre­fec­ture orches­tras as part of a new authen­tic­ité pol­i­cy.

This direc­tive encour­aged a cul­tur­al revival that mixed tra­di­tion­al sounds with con­tem­po­rary music, par­tic­u­lar­ly Cuban and Latin rhythms.” The effort had its own record label called Syli­phone, which record­ed and dis­trib­uted this new Guinean music until the mid-1980s, and the pow­er­ful radio sig­nal of Radiod­if­fu­sion Télévi­sion Guinée (RTG) turned lis­ten­ers on to it well beyond the new coun­try’s bor­ders.

Coun­sel, already a col­lec­tor of Syli­phone records, dis­cov­ered dur­ing his PhD research in 2001 that the Guinean gov­ern­ment still held a col­lec­tion of that era’s music (though “a large part of the archive had been destroyed in 1985 when the RTG was bombed by Guinean artillery dur­ing an unsuc­cess­ful coup”). Apply­ing for and receiv­ing, ulti­mate­ly, three rounds of fund­ing from the British Library’s Endan­gered Archives Pro­gramme, he set about dig­i­tiz­ing and cat­a­loging the unex­pect­ed­ly numer­ous and per­haps expect­ed­ly dis­or­ga­nized and poor­ly main­tained reels of mag­net­ic tape he found, work­ing through bureau­crat­ic has­sles, coups d’é­tat, and even a mas­sacre.

“Noth­ing would deter me,” writes Coun­sel in a series of essays (part one, part two, part three) on the project, “not the author­i­ties’ indif­fer­ence towards the sound archive, not the recal­ci­trance of their atti­tudes, nor the tragedies of every­day life in Guinea. Noth­ing.” The fruits of his labors have now become avail­able at the British Library’s online Syli­phone archive, which boasts over 8,000 Guinean Afropop tracks record­ed over 26 years. Meier names among the “leg­endary” music it makes avail­able “the loose rhythms of the Bem­beya Jazz Nation­al, the horn-heavy melodies of the Super Boiro Band, the Latin-influ­enced beats of Orchestre de la Pail­lote, and the all-women Cuban-infused les Ama­zones de Guinée.” Those musi­cians’ names may not ring a bell for you now, but a lit­tle time with the archive will guar­an­tee a long-term inabil­i­ty to get their songs out of your head.

Find the 8,000 record­ings here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing Is Rhythm

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Blues & Folk Record­ings

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.

Hear a Rare Poetry Reading by Captain Beefheart (1993)

in Music, Poetry | March 1st, 2017

When I find myself in times of musi­cal trou­ble, Cap­tain Beef­heart comes to me. His Mar­cel Duchamp-meets-James Brown shtick goes places no oth­er exper­i­men­tal prog-blues-jazz artist ever has—places of absur­dist vir­tu­os­i­ty where the gap between the artist and the mask dis­ap­pears, where words and music have rela­tion­ships that defy phys­i­cal laws. Many have tried, but few have so well suc­ceed­ed in the wild ambi­tion to make sur­re­al­ist verse cohere in songs that defy all tra­di­tion­al arrange­ments. For my exper­i­men­tal rock dime, no one has mas­tered the art so well as Beef­heart and his Mag­ic Band.

In fact, every musi­cian, I believe, should some­times ask them­selves, “what would Cap­tain Beef­heart do?” But what about Beefheart’s rela­tion­ship with the oth­er arts? We prob­a­bly know that the man also named Don Van Vli­et was a pro­lif­ic abstract painter through­out his career, the medi­um he chose for the last 28 years of his life after he hung up his sax­o­phone in 1982. But did his “strange uncle of post-punk” musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties trans­late into poet­ry, a relat­ed but quite dif­fer­ent art than that of even the most abstract song­writ­ing?

Well, if Bob Dylan can win a Nobel Prize—and why not?—I see no rea­son why we can’t con­sid­er the work of Cap­tain Beef­heart lit­er­ary art. And in addi­tion to his extra­or­di­nary Dadaist songs, Beef­heart penned restrained, mas­ter­ful­ly imag­is­tic poems with wry humor and crys­talline intel­li­gence. His work sure­ly belongs in Alan Kaufman’s Out­law Bible of Amer­i­can Poet­ry right next to that of Dylan, Tom Waits, Pat­ti Smith, Tupac Shakur, Gil Scott-Heron, Jim Mor­ri­son, the Beats, and dozens more non-musi­cal writ­ers. But it seems that Beefheart’s lit­er­ary genius has been most­ly over­looked.

That’s unfor­tu­nate. In tense, vivid­ly observed poems like “A Tin Peened Rein­deer,” he approach­es the ellip­ti­cal mys­tery of Wal­lace Stevens and the baroque lan­guage of John Ash­bery. Late songs like “The Thou­sandth and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole” con­dense the grotesque imag­i­nary of Dali into a few stag­ger­ing lines. Yet we don’t get a col­lec­tion of Beef­heart read­ings until 1993, when he appeared in a short doc­u­men­tary by Anton Cor­bi­jn called Some Yo Yo Stuff.

You can watch that film at the top of the post, and in the videos below it, hear Van Vli­et read poems and song lyrics in record­ings from his time with Cor­bi­jn. Both in the film and in the read­ings, it is evi­dent that the mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis that killed Beef­heart in 2010 had ren­dered speech dif­fi­cult for him. But with patient lis­ten­ing, we hear that his sparkling wit and absur­dist genius remained at full strength, as in anoth­er, long 1993 inter­view with Dutch radio host Co De Kloet.

Beef­heart earned a rep­u­ta­tion as an auto­crat­ic-yet-capri­cious band­leader (record­ing a tongue-in-cheek spo­ken word piece on the sub­ject in ear­li­er years). But in inter­views, he came across as hum­ble, sweet-tem­pered, and gen­tle, and as an artist whose work was an authen­tic out­growth of his per­son­al­i­ty. These qual­i­ties shine through in even the goofi­est, most out-there poems and lyrics.

Fur­ther up, hear Beef­heart read the poems and songs “Fallin’ Ditch,” “The Tired Plain,” “Skele­ton Makes Good,” “Safe Sex Drill,” and “Gill,” and in the playlist below, he reads all of those plus his poem, “Tulip,” a short mod­ernist gem rem­i­nis­cent of both Ezra Pound and William Car­los Williams:

It could be
a tremen­dous black upside-down tulip
it could be
a black fish­es’ tail
it could be a day, artis­ti­cal­ly crimped
and buoy­ant
in its taped togeth­er way

Cap­tain Beef­heart’s poems will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

via Ubuweb

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cap­tain Beef­heart Issues His “Ten Com­mand­ments of Gui­tar Play­ing”

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969)

Hear Pat­ti Smith Read 12 Poems From Sev­enth Heav­en, Her First Col­lec­tion (1972)

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

Watch Earth, a Landmark of Soviet Cinema (1930)

in Film | February 24th, 2017

Today we’re adding to our list of Free Movies a 1930 Sovi­et silent film by direc­tor Alexan­der Dovzhenko. It’s called Earth, and it’s the third install­ment in Dovzhenko’s “Ukraine Tril­o­gy.”

When The Guardian cre­at­ed its list of the Top 10 Silent Movies of all time, it put Earth in the #9 slot. About the film writer Pamela Hutchin­son said:

Earth, capped by that avowed­ly sec­u­lar title, is a lyri­cal, car­nal movie about birth, death, sex and rebel­lion. Offi­cial­ly, this Sovi­et-era Ukrain­ian silent is a paean to col­lec­tive farm­ing, craft­ed around a fam­i­ly dra­ma, but its direc­tor, Alexan­der Dovzhenko, was a born rene­gade, for whom plots were far less impor­tant than poet­ry…

Earth is the final part of Dovzhenko’s silent tril­o­gy (fol­low­ing the nation­al­ist fan­ta­sy Zvenig­o­ra (1928) and the avant-garde anti-war film Arse­nal (1929), and is brim­ming with exu­ber­ant youth, but haunt­ed by the shad­ow of death.…

Sketched as trib­ute to the boons of col­lec­tivi­sa­tion, but released as those schemes were falling out of favour, Earth was con­demned on its home turf on polit­i­cal grounds. It was also snipped by cen­sors who object­ed to the nudi­ty, and the infa­mous scene in which farm­ers uri­nate into their trac­tor’s radi­a­tor. But while there was dis­may and cen­sure in the Sovi­et Union, crit­ics else­where were over­awed…

It’s the lat­ter impres­sion that endures. Dovzhenko’s sym­bol­ism is both rich and auda­cious. His scope com­pris­es vast pas­toral land­scapes, and inti­mate fleshy naked­ness. Per­haps its most cel­e­brat­ed sequence is the mag­nif­i­cent open­ing scene: the painful coun­ter­point between a dying man, his infant grand­chil­dren and the burst­ing fruit of his orchard. This is liv­ing cin­e­ma, as refresh­ing and vital as the film’s own cli­mac­tic down­pour.

You can watch Earth above, and find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Silent Films, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch Sovi­et Avant-Garde Com­posers Cre­ate Syn­the­sized Music with Hand-Drawn Ani­ma­tions (1934)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Ad sample

in | February 23rd, 2017