Space Sex is Serious Business: A Hilarious Short Animation Addresses Serious Questions About Human Reproduction in Space
Back in the late 80s, there was a rumor floating around that Earth Girls Are Easy.
40 some years of scientific and social advancement have shifted the conversational focus.
We’re just now beginning to understand that Space Sex is Serious Business.
Particularly if SpaceX CEO Elon Musk achieves his goal of establishing a permanent human presence on Mars.
Surely at some point in their long travels to and residence on Mars, those pioneers would get down to business in much the same way that rats, fruit flies, parasitic wasps, and Japanese rice fish have while under observation on prior space expeditions.
Meanwhile, we’re seriously lacking in human data.
A pair of human astronauts, Jan Davis and Mark Lee, made history in 1992 as the first married couple to enter space together, but NASA insisted their relations remained strictly professional for the duration, and that a shuttle’s crew compartment is too small for the sort of antics a nasty-minded public kept asking about.
In an interview with Mens Health, Colonel Mike Mullane, a veteran of three space missions, confirmed that a spacecraft’s layout doesn’t favor romance:
The only privacy would have been in the air lock, but everybody would know what you were doing. You’re not out there doing a spacewalk. There’s no reason to be in there.
Shortly after Davis and Lee returned to earth, NASA formalized an unspoken rule prohibiting husbands and wives from venturing into space together. It did little to squelch public interest in space sex.
One wonders if NASA’s rule has been rewritten in accordance with the times. Air lock aside, might same sex couples remain free to swing what hetero-normative marrieds (arguably) cannot?
This is but one of hundreds of space sex questions begging further consideration.
Some of the most serious are raised in Tom McCarten’s witty collage animation for FiveThirtyEight, above.
Namely how damaging will cosmic radiation and microgravity prove to human reproduction? As more humans toy with the possibility of leaving Earth, this question feels less and less hypothetical.
Maggie Koerth-Baker, who researched and narrates the animated short, notes that Musk portrayed the risks of radiation as minor during a presentation at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, and breathed not a peep as to the effects of microgravity.
Yet scientific studies of non-human space travelers document a host of reproductive issues including lowered libido, atypical hormone levels, ovulatory dysfunction, miscarriages, and fetal mutations.
On its webpage, NASA provides some information about the Reproduction, Development, and Sex Differences Laboratory of its Space Biosciences Research Branch, but remains mum on topics of pressing concern to, say, students in a typical middle school sex ed class.
Like achieving and maintaining erections in microgravity.
In Physiology News Magazine, Dr. Adam Watkins, associate professor of Reproductive and Developmental Physiology at the University of Nottingham, suggests that internal and external atmospheric changes would make such things, pardon the pun, hard:
Firstly, just staying in close contact with each other under zero gravity is hard. Secondly, as astronauts experience lower blood pressure while in space, maintaining erections and arousal are more problematic than here on Earth.
The exceptionally forthright Col Mullane has some contradictory first hand experience that should come as a relief to all humankind:
A couple of times, I would wake up from sleep periods and I had a boner that I could have drilled through kryptonite.
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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. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Bob Dylan Goes Punk on Late Night with David Letterman, Playing “Jokerman” with the Latino Punk Band, the Plugz (1984)
Listen to Bob Dylan’s studio albums all you like; you don’t know his music until you hear the live versions. That, at least, is the conclusion at which I’ve arrived after spending the better part of the past year listening through Dylan’s studio discography. This is not to put him into the mold of the Grateful Dead, whose studio albums come a distant second in importance to their vast body of live recordings. It was surely the songs preserved on the likes of Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, and Love and Theft, after all, that won Dylan the Nobel Prize. But in a sense he’s never stopped writing these same songs, often subjecting them to brazen stylistic and lyrical changes when he launches into them onstage.
This self-reinterpretation occasionally produces what Dylan’s fans consider a new definitive version. Perhaps the most agreed-upon example is “Jokerman,” the opener to his 1983 album Infidels (and the basis for one of his earliest MTV music videos), which he performed the following year on the still-new Late Night with David Letterman.
As Vulture’s Matthew Giles puts it, Letterman was fast becoming “a comedy sensation, bringing a new level of sarcasm, irony, and Bud Melman-centric humor to a late-night format still reliant on the smooth unflappability of Johnny Carson.” Dylan had been going in the other direction, “having frustrated his audience with the musically slick, lyrically hectoring series of evangelical Christian albums that he’d released in the late 70s and early 80s.”
By 1984, “Dave was far more of a counterculture hero than Bob.” But Dylan had been surreptitiously preparing for his next musical transformation: many were the nights he would “leave his Malibu home and slip into shows by the likes of L.A. punk stalwarts X, or check out the Santa Monica Civic Center when the Clash came to town.” For accompaniment on the Letterman gig he brought drummer J.J. Holiday, as well as Charlie Quintana and bassist Tony Marsico of the LA punk band the Plugz, with whom he’d been spent the previous few months jamming. It isn’t until they take Letterman’s stage that Dylan tells the band what to open with: bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talking.”
Just above, you can see Dylan’s rehearsal for the Letterman show. It features five tracks–“I Once Knew a Man,” “License to Kill,” “Treat Her Right,” “My Guy,” and a rendition of “Jokerman” that turns the original’s reggae into stripped-down, hard-driving rock. The stylistic change seems to infuse the 42-year-old Dylan with a new sense of musical vitality. As for the song itself, its lyrics — cryptic even by Dylan’s standards — take on new meanings when charged by the young band’s energy. But even in this highly contemporary musical context, Dylan keeps it “classic” by bringing out the harmonica for a final solo, though not without some confusion as to which key he needed. If anything, that mix-up makes the song even more punk — or maybe post-punk, possibly new wave, but in any case thoroughly Dylan.
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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...Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate: 7 Courses Helps Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months
During the pandemic, Google launched a series of Career Certificates that will “prepare learners for an entry-level role in under six months.” One such certificate focuses on User Experience Design, or what’s called UX Design, the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful experiences to users.
Offered on the Coursera platform, the User Experience (UX) Design Professional Certificate features seven courses, including the Foundations of User Experience, Start the UX Design Process, Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes, and Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts. In total, this program “includes over 200 hours of instruction and hundreds of practice-based activities and assessments that simulate real-world UX design scenarios and are critical for success in the workplace. The content is highly interactive and developed by Google employees with decades of experience in UX design.” Upon completion, students can directly apply for jobs with Google and over 130 U.S. employers, including Walmart, Best Buy, and Astreya. You can start a 7‑day free trial and explore the courses. If you continue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That translates to about $235 after 6 months.
Explore the User Experience (UX) Design Professional Certificate by watching the video above. Learn more about the overall Google career certificate initiative here. And find other Google professional certificates here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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Read More...Read the Original Serialized Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)
In the second decade of the 20th century, American editor Margaret C. Anderson published The Little Review, a monthly literary journal of modernist and experimental prose, poetry, and art. Four years into its existence, at the beginning of 1918, Anderson announced to her readers this:
“I have just received the first three instalments [sic] of James Joyce’s new novel which is to run serially in The Little Review, beginning with the March number.
It is called “Ulysses”.
It carries on the story of Stephen Dedalus, the central figure in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.
It is, I believe, even better than the “Portrait”.
So far it has been read by only one critic of international reputation. He says: “It is certainly worth running a magazine if one can get stuff like this to put in it. Compression, intensity. It looks to me rather better than Flaubert”.
This announcement means that we are about to publish a prose masterpiece.”
February 2, 2022 marked the 100th anniversary of Ulysses, the day on which the full novel, first serialized in The Little Review, was published. Joyce, like many of The Little Review’s British and European writers, came to Anderson through her fellow editor Ezra Pound. Anderson might have sensed the greatness that was to come and she knew the danger in that greatness. In the end, publishing Ulysses would make her an enemy of the state.
Over at the Modernist Journals Project, you can read every single issue of The Little Review (and other such magazines) to place this revolutionary novel in context. The March 1918 issue which begins the journey of Dedalus and Leopold Bloom also features works by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Jessica Dismorr, and Arthur Symons; letters (and some hate mail) from readers; advertisements for other literary magazines like The Quill, The Pagan, and The Egoist; ads for restaurants in Greenwich Village, and one for the Berlitz School of Languages; and a final appeal for more readers.
The most interesting of these sections is Pound’s screed against American obscenity laws. The Little Review had already had an issue confiscated by the US Post Office. In 1917, a Wyndham Lewis story about a soldier who gets a girl pregnant and abandons her was declared obscene, both for “lewdness” and its anti-war stance. Pound suspected the government was targeting Anderson and her co-editor (and lover) Jane Heap for their support of anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with their anti-war stances.
The Wyndham Lewis incident had made it difficult for Anderson and Heap to find a publisher, so they knew some of the risks in beginning the serial. Soon enough they ran into trouble. Ulysses consists of 18 chapters or “Episodes”. The US government seized the issues featuring Episode 8 (“Lestrygonians”), Episode 9 (“Scylla and Charybdis”), and Episode 12 (“Cyclops”) and burned them. But it was Episode 13, “Nausicaa,” that led to charges being filed against the publishers. The chapter, which features a girl exposing herself and Leopold Bloom masturbating to orgasm (but written in such a, well, Joycean way that most would just miss it), was too much for some.
The trial that followed was a travesty, including a judge ruling that the offensive sections of “Nausicaa” not be read out loud because a woman was present. When it was pointed out that the woman was the publisher Anderson herself, he declared “she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing”. Anderson and Heap were found guilty, forced to discontinue publishing “Ulysses” and fined one hundred dollars.
The Little Review printed a section of Episode 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”) and then stopped. Anderson thought of giving up the magazine, but turned over control to Heap. The magazine continued publishing until 1929, but removed their motto: “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste.”
James Joyce did not stop, however, and Sylvia Beach—an ex-pat living in Paris and running the bookstore Shakespeare and Co.—published the full novel in 1922. Americans would have to wait one more year, 1923, to read this “obscene” novel.
Anderson was correct however—-she had a major role in promoting this “prose masterpiece.” And one hundred years later, Puritanical Americans are still banning and burning books, which is only resulting, like it did for Joyce’s novel, in sending the works into the Best Seller lists.
Related content:
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook
James Joyce’s Crayon Covered Manuscript Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Bialetti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Popular Coffee Maker
Which coffee maker is most deeply embedded in American culture? I would nominate the humble Mr. Coffee, a device referenced on Cheers as well as Seinfeld, in the work of Raymond Carver as well as that of the Bloodhound Gang (to say nothing of the 1970s mass-media phenomenon that was its commercials starring Joe DiMaggio). But I would also urge my fellow Americans to ask themselves when last they actually used one, or at least used one to satisfying results. Italy, by contrast, knows what it is to take a coffee maker to heart. As one study found, nine out of ten Italian households possesses, in one form or another, the same basic model: the Bialetti Moka Express.
As Ted Mills wrote here with confidence last month, “many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one.” Enter coffee Youtuber and The World Atlas of Coffee author James Hoffmann, whose introductory video proved popular enough to launch a mini-series that takes a deep dive into the mechanics and variations on the nearly 90-year-old “moka pot.”
In the second episode, just above, Hoffman performs a series of experiments varying elements of the simple device — starting temperature, grind size, heat power — in order to determine how it makes the best cup of coffee.
In episode three, Hoffman (who clearly knows a thing or two about not just coffee, but how to name a Youtube video to algorithmic advantage) refines “the ultimate moka pot technique.” Much depends, of course, on factors like what sort of beans you buy, as well as subjective considerations like how you want your coffee to taste — your preferred “flavor profile,” as they now say. The longtime moka pot user will inevitably feel his/her way to his/her own idiosyncratic procedure and set of accessories, and will more than likely also accrue a formidable collection of moka pots themselves. Here Hoffman lines up ten of them, half of which are just different sizes of the classic Moka Express, its silhouette recognizable at any scale.
Less familiar models take center stage in the fourth episode, “The Moka Pot Variations.” In it Hoffman puts to the test the Bialetti’s double-cream espresso-making Brikka; their cappuccino-capable Mukka; the tiny, discontinued Cuor di Moka, with its correspondingly avid fan base; and finally something called the Kamira, which looks less like a coffee maker than a piece of recycled industrial art. Even apart from these, a variety of companies now make a variety of moka pots, every single one of which has no doubt at least a few serious coffee drinkers swearing by it. I myself have a weakness for Bialetti’s Moka Alpina; whether it makes a superior brew I couldn’t say, but the jauntiness of that Tyrolean feather is hardly debatable.
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The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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...In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More
A century ago, the popular English novelist W.L. George sat down and put his mind to envisioning the world we live in today. That world has not, alas, turned out to be one in which his books are much read, but in his day a great many readers were moved by his social cause-driven fiction and reportage. One might compare him to Upton Sinclair, his contemporary on the other side of the Atlantic. In the Paris-born-and-raised George’s ancestral homeland, George Orwell described him as an author of what G.K. Chesterton called “good bad books,” singling out for praise his 1920 novel Caliban amid the “shoddy rubbish” of his wider oeuvre.
Still even authors of rubbish — and perhaps especially authors of rubbish — can sense the shape of things to come. For its edition of May 7, 1922, the New York Herald commissioned George to share that sense with their readers. In response he described a world in which “commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace,” reducing the separation of America and Europe to eight hours, and whose passenger steamers and railroads will have consequently fallen into obsolescence. “Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system,” resulting in generations who’ll never have seen “a wire outlined against the sky.”
That goes for the transmission of electricity as well, since George credits (a bit hastily, it seems) the possibility of wireless power systems of the kind researched by Nikola Tesla. In 2022, coal will take a distant backseat to the tides, the sun, and radium, and “it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed.” As for the cinema, “the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only need to know how to smile but also how to talk.”
Other women, however, have proven just as capable as George had imagined: “All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts, and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.” Georges foresees the birth-control pill, but also the “pill lunch.” Unlike some reformers, he hesitates to declare the abolition of the family, but he does imagine the “majority of mankind” occupying modular homes in high-rise communal dwellings (“I have a vision of walls, furniture, and hangings made of more or less compressed papier-mâché”), all gathered in climate-controlled cities set under glass.
On the whole, in 2022, “the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago.” Indeed, he suspects that a glimpse of our reality wouldn’t much surprise “the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station.” It could even be dull, what with complete settlement and development leaving “no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day.” In 1922, George could write that “in fiction, America leads the world by sincerity, faith and fearlessness,” and believe that “in 2022 American literature will be a literature of culture. The battle will be over and the muzzle off. There will be no more things one can’t say, and things one can’t think.” Whatever the inspirations of his prophecy, they must not have told him about social media.
You can find a copy of George’s original article over at the Library of Congress.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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...Rare Arabic 78 RPM Records Enter the Public Domain
Public Domain Day is not just about the famous works that get released—-this year Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises were the best known-—but the archives that suddenly open up when any potential argument over copyright bypasses its sell-by date.
For example, Harvard’s Loeb Music Library has just released a selection from its 600-volume 78rpm collection of Arab and Arab-American music from the early 20th Century. The Library’s collection spans roughly 1903 to the 1950s and is not just a record of the aesthetics and the time of the Nahdah Era (the Arab Renaissance), but it also serves as a history of the still-young music industry. Among the RCA, Columbia, and Victor labels, you will also find many independent (and bootleg!) labels.
Harvard’s website notes:
Arab record companies, such as Baidaphon and Cairophon, are only a few among many other American (Columbia, Victor), European (Odeon, Orfeon), and Arab-American companies (Al-Chark, Alamphon) that recorded and released these notable Arab voices. Songs and performers from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Al-Maghrib exhibit the rich tradition of Arabic musical forms, namely the art of al-mawwāl (vocal improvisation), qaṣīdah (sung poems), muwashshaḥ (Andalusian sung poetry), ṭaqṭūqah (pop songs) and taqsīm (instrumental improvisation. Religious chants are also an important piece of the Arabic musical tradition. The collection includes Qur’anic recitation of Al-shaykh Ṭāhā Al-Fashnī and a rare record of a woman reciter Wadūdah Al-Minyalawī alongside Christian hymns of Father Gigis ʻAzīz Al-Jizzīnī.
A selection of recordings are available here for both online listening and download, using the Aviary Platform.
All this is happening due to the Music Modernization Act of 2018, which differs in its public-domain release dates by a few years compared to print and film. According to Citizen DJ, a website we told you about several years ago, “all sound recordings published before January 1, 1923 entered the public domain on January 1, 2022.”
The trick of course is getting access to all of these recordings. The Library of Congress runs a site called The National Jukebox, with access to thousands of 78rpm records from Victor and Columbia labels. That allows you to listen but not download.
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections also has a page noting “Ten Notable Pre-1923 Recordings”, which benefits from its curation. It features important early works like Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” one of the most popular “race records” (i.e. vocal blues sung by Black performers) of 1920; Enrico Caruso’s “Vesti La Giubba,” which features the tenor at the height of his career; and Vess L. Ossman’s recording of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which helped popularize the composer. Also see our recent post: 400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...17th-Century Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate: How “Buddhist Emoji” Made the Sūtra Legible for Those Who Couldn’t Read
Even with 21st-century teaching aids, the written Japanese language isn’t the sort of thing one picks up in a few weeks’ study. A few hundred years ago it would’ve been much more difficult still, especially for those engaged in learning the sūtras or scriptures of Buddhism. “The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early modern era,” writes The Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes, “with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sūtra recitation (dokyō) becoming an art form in the following century.” Imported from India and rewritten in classical Chinese with few clues as to how its words should actually be spoken, the Buddhist canon of east Asia set a mighty challenge even before the perfectly literate.
As for the illiterate — of whom, in complete contrast to modern-day Japan, there were many — what chance did they stand? Salvation, or at any rate a chance at salvation, arrived in the 17th century in the form of texts written just for them. “Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sūtras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language,” writes Dukes. “The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable.” Geared toward an agricultural “readership,” this system drew its imagery from what they knew: farming tools, domestic animals, and even figures of myth.
The sections here come from a 20th-century example of this type of publication, variously Mekura-kyō or Monmō-kyō, held by the British Library. It contains a rendition of the text of the Heart Sūtra, the most widely known piece of scripture in the canon of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and as the Kyoto National Musem’s Eikei Akao puts it, “probably the best-known, most well-loved sutra in Japan.” (You may also remember the 37-minute version performed by beatboxing Buddhist monk Yogetsu Akasaka, which we previously featured here on Open Culture.) Not long ago, the United States Library of Congress posted this Heart Sūtra for the illiterate to its Facebook page. The occasion? World Emoji Day.
“Because these pictures represent sounds, rather than objects or ideas, they don’t really act as pictograms the way emoji do,” admits the writer of the Library of Congress’ post. “But in their icon-like appearance, succinct and functional, they do bear a resemblance to our use of emoji today.” It was then reblogged on Language Log, one of whose commenters offered some explanation of the system as seen in the pictures: “The Sanskrit phrase ‘Prajñāpāramitā’ is rendered ‘Hannyaharamita’ in Japanese. ‘Hannya’ here is written with a drawing of the hannya demon mask from Noh. ‘Harami’ appears to be a picture of a body (mi) in an abdomen (hara), and then ‘ta’ is a picture of a ricefield (tanbo, the “ta” of many Japanese names, like Tanaka and Toyota).” Hands have been wringing about the potential of internet communication to deliver us into a “post-literate” society; perhaps these curious chapters in the history of the Japanese language show us where to go from there.
Related contrast:
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The World’s Largest Collection of Tibetan Buddhist Literature Now Online
A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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...Scandinavian Film & Television: A Free Online Course from the University of Copenhagen
Image via Wikimedia Commons
“In many ways Scandinavian film and television is a global cultural brand, connected with and exporting some of the cultural and social values connected to a liberal and progressive welfare society.” From the University of Copenhagen, this free course deals with the social, institutional and cultural background of film and television in Scandinavia and in a broader European and global context. Spanning 5 weeks and taught by professor Eva Novrup Redvall, Scandinavian Film and Television covers the early cinematic work of Danish director Carl Dreyer, the films of Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, Scandinavian new wave cinema, and finally more contemporary productions. You can enroll for free here.
Scandinavian Film and Television will be added to our list 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Read More...An Opera Singer & Cabaret Artist Record an Astonishing Version of David Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure”
On the surface of things, Anthony Roth Costanzo, the internationally-recognized countertenor and Justin Vivian Bond, the subversive performance artist best known for their creation Kiki DuRane, “an alcoholic battle-axe with a throat full of razor-blades,” would have little reason to share a mic, let alone inhabit the same stage.
Leave surfaces behind!
Their genre-defying, just released album, Only An Octave Apart, explores the depths that lurk beneath them, finding common cause between their chosen art forms and then some. The album’s title, a nod to the opening number of a Metropolitan Opera television special starring comedian Carol Burnett and operatic soprano Beverly Sills, is just the tip of the iceberg.
As they state in the program notes for a recent appearance with the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center:
We each sound different from what you would expect when you look at us. The juxtaposition of our voices, personalities, and repertoire subverts notions of high and low, be it in terms of pitch, cultural echelon, or degrees of camp — not to mention the difference in height.
If you thought David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sent things into the stratosphere when they joined forces on “Under Pressure,” listen to Costanzo and Bond’s take, above.
Their Dido’s Lament / White Flag Medley smashes the musical binary with a delicacy that is given room to grow.
Costanzo begins with two and a half soaring minutes from Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas.
Introducing the number at Jazz at Lincoln Center, he recalled how Dido & Aeneas was one of his first professional opera gigs at 19. No, he wasn’t cast as the fatally distraught Queen of Carthage, a diva role he’s eyed for years, but rather the Second Woman and First Witch.
(“Second Woman / First Witch…sounds like the story of my life,” Bond marveled. “I own it! Can you imagine if you were First Woman and Second Witch?”)
Costanzo got his chance at Dido in the summer of 2020 when, with performance venues still closed due to the pandemic, he hatched an idea to cart Philharmonic musicians and guest singers around the city’s five Boroughs in a rented pickup dubbed the NY Phil Bandwagon. 80-some free performances later, he felt ready to record.
When Bond joins in, it’s with English singer-songwriter Dido’s 2003 chart topper, White Flag, which also speaks to the pains of love. The sincerity of the performers causes a gorgeous alchemical reaction to soften the positions of more than a few staunch opera-phobes and pop-deniers.
(“The wonderful thing about the opera,” Bond cracks, “is when you wake up, you’re at the opera!”)
Their Egyptian Sun mash up is born of an even cannier pairing — The Bangles’ mid-80s hit, Walk Like An Egyptian and Philip Glass’ ancient Egypt-themed minimalist modern opera, Akhnaten, in which Costanza recently starred, making his first entrance nude and flecked with gold.
Other treasures from this fruitful collaboration include skillful intertwinings of Tom Jobim’s Bossa nova favorite Águas de Março (Waters of March) with Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella-themed confection La Cenerentola, and Gluck’s 18th-century masterpiece, Orfeo ed Euridice with Don’t Give Up, a “message of hope in the bleakest of moments” and a hit for Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush when Bond was a year out of college…and Costanzo was four.
Listen to Only an Octave Apart in its entirety on YouTube or Spotify.
Anthony Ross Costanzo will reprise his role as the revolutionary pharaoh, Akhnaten, at the Metropolitan Opera later this spring.
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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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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