Nina Simone Song “Color Is a Beautiful Thing” Animated in a Gorgeous Video

in Music | May 13th, 2020

Four years (or what seems like a life­time) ago, con­tro­ver­sy erupt­ed over the cast­ing of actress Zoe Sal­dana, with dark­ened skin, as icon­ic pianist and singer Nina Simone in the biopic Nina. Accu­sa­tions of racism and col­orism met the film, his­tor­i­cal atti­tudes hun­dreds of years in the mak­ing that Simone her­self fought through­out her career, espe­cial­ly after she joined the Civ­il Rights move­ment in the 1960s and active­ly made her per­son­al strug­gles with racism cen­tral to her polit­i­cal state­ments.

“You can­not under­stand Nina Simone’s life and lega­cy with­out tak­ing stock of her iden­ti­ty as a dark-skinned black woman,” says Vox’s Vic­to­ria Massie. “That fact was inex­tri­ca­bly linked to her life’s tra­jec­to­ry, her art and her politics—to every­thing that made Nina fear­less­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly Nina.” Her daugh­ter Simone Kel­ly put it this way:

We all have a sto­ry. My moth­er suf­fered. We can go all the way back to when she was a child and peo­ple told her her nose was too big, her skin was too dark, her lips were too wide. It’s very impor­tant the world acknowl­edges my moth­er was a clas­si­cal musi­cian whose dreams were not real­ized because of racism.

Simone car­ried the wounds of those expe­ri­ences through­out her life, and she sought to heal them through music that affirmed the expe­ri­ence of oth­er young, dark-skinned girls who faced sim­i­lar obsta­cles.

The out­stand­ing nar­ra­tive “Four Women,” from 1966’s Wild is the Wind, artic­u­lates the dif­fer­ent treat­ment its char­ac­ters receive based on skin col­or. The Vil­lage Voice’s Thu­lani Davis called the song “an instant­ly acces­si­ble analy­sis of the damn­ing lega­cy of slav­ery.” The famous “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” writ­ten for Simone’s friend and men­tor Lor­raine Hans­ber­ry, became an anthem of the Civ­il Rights move­ment in the 1970s.

Years lat­er, in “Col­or is a Beau­ti­ful Thing,” Simone revis­it­ed the theme in a short, repet­i­tive one-minute piece that is instant­ly sing-along-able. The song comes from her 1982 album Fod­der on My Wings, just re-released last month by Verve. “Col­or is a Beau­ti­ful Thing” is per­fect­ly tai­lored for young chil­dren, who will respond with joy not only to Simone’s rol­lick­ing piano but to the beau­ti­ful­ly ani­mat­ed video above.

Fod­der on My Wings is an over­looked album, Shel­don Pearce writes at Pitch­fork, “about per­son­al freedom—about lib­er­at­ing her­self from her past and find­ing the lib­er­ty to cre­ate as she pleased. It was Simone’s means of work­ing through fear—of death, manip­u­la­tion, dis­crim­i­na­tion.” In the lin­er notes, she her­self writes, “What I did on this album was try to get myself deep into joy.”

The method above is mantra-like, the song’s refrain “like some­thing she’s try­ing to inter­nal­ize, a coda to 1969’s ‘To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black.” Simone nev­er seemed to over­come her own pain, but her gift—in addi­tion to her musi­cal brilliance—was to freely share the lessons she learned in the strug­gle, the bit­ter and the sweet, and to teach new gen­er­a­tions of artists.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

Watch a New Nina Simone Ani­ma­tion Based on an Inter­view Nev­er Aired in the U.S. Before

Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)

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

William Blake Illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Literature, Original Stories from Real Life (1791)

in Art, Literature, Philosophy | May 13th, 2020

Most of us know Mary Woll­stonecraft as the author of the 1792 pam­phlet A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Women, and as the moth­er of Franken­stein author Mary Shel­ley. Few­er of us may know that two years before she pub­lished her foun­da­tion­al fem­i­nist text, she wrote A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Men, a pro-French Rev­o­lu­tion, anti-monar­chy argu­ment that first made her famous as a writer and philoso­pher. Per­haps far few­er know that Woll­stonecraft began her career as a pub­lished author in 1787 with Thoughts on the Edu­ca­tion of Daugh­ters (though she had yet to raise chil­dren her­self), a con­duct man­u­al for prop­er behav­ior.

A huge­ly pop­u­lar genre dur­ing the first Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, con­duct man­u­als bore a mis­cel­la­neous char­ac­ter, incul­cat­ing a bat­tery of mid­dle-class rules, beliefs, and affec­ta­tions through a mix of ped­a­gogy, alle­go­ry, domes­tic advice, and devo­tion­al writ­ing. Young women were instruct­ed in the prop­er way to dress, eat, pray, laugh, love, etc., etc.

It may seem from our per­spec­tive that a rad­i­cal fire­brand like Woll­stonecraft would shun this sort of thing, but her mor­al­iz­ing was typ­i­cal of mid­dle-class women of her time, even of pio­neer­ing writ­ers who sup­port­ed rev­o­lu­tions and women’s polit­i­cal and social equal­i­ty.

Wollstonecraft’s assump­tions about class and char­ac­ter come into relief when placed against the views of anoth­er famous con­tem­po­rary, far more rad­i­cal fig­ure, William Blake, who was then a strug­gling, most­ly obscure poet, print­er, and illus­tra­tor in Lon­don. In 1791, he received a com­mis­sion to illus­trate a sec­ond edi­tion of Wollstonecraft’s third book, a fol­low-up of sorts to her Thoughts on the Edu­ca­tion of Daugh­ters. The 1788 work—Orig­i­nal Sto­ries from Real Life; with Con­ver­sa­tions, Cal­cu­lat­ed to Reg­u­late the Affec­tions, and Form the Mind to Truth and Good­ness—is a more focused book, using a series of vignettes woven into a frame sto­ry.

The two chil­dren in the nar­ra­tive, 14-year-old Mary and 12-year-old Car­o­line, receive lessons from their rel­a­tive Mrs. Mason, who instructs them on a dif­fer­ent virtue and moral fail­ing in each chap­ter by using sto­ries and exam­ples from nature. The two pupils “are moth­er­less,” notes the British Library, “and lack the good habits they should have absorbed by exam­ple. Mrs. Mason intends to rec­ti­fy this by being with them con­stant­ly and answer­ing all their ques­tions.” She is an all-know­ing gov­erness who explains the world away with a phi­los­o­phy that might have sound­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly harsh to Blake’s ears.

For exam­ple, in the chap­ter on phys­i­cal pain, Mary is stung by sev­er­al wasps. After­ward, her guardian begins to lec­ture her “with more than usu­al grav­i­ty.”

I am sor­ry to see a girl of your age weep on account of bod­i­ly pain; it is a proof of a weak mind—a proof that you can­not employ your­self about things of con­se­quence. How often must I tell you that the Most High is edu­cat­ing us for eter­ni­ty?… Chil­dren ear­ly feel bod­i­ly pain, to habit­u­ate them to bear the con­flicts of the soul, when they become rea­son­able crea­tures. This is say, is the first tri­al, and I like to see that prop­er pride which strives to con­ceal its suf­fer­ings…. The Almighty, who nev­er afflicts but to pro­duce some good end, first sends dis­eases to chil­dren to teach them patience and for­ti­tude; and when by degrees they have learned to bear them, they have acquired some virtue.

Blake like­ly found this line of rea­son­ing off-putting, at the least. His own poems “were not children’s lit­er­a­ture per se,” writes Stephanie Metz at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tennessee’s Roman­tic Pol­i­tics project, “yet their sim­plis­tic lan­guage and even some of their con­tent responds to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of didac­tic fic­tion and children’s poet­ry.” Blake wrote express­ly to protest the ide­ol­o­gy found in con­duct man­u­als like Wollstonecraft’s: “He calls atten­tion to society’s abuse of chil­dren in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways, show­ing how soci­ety cor­rupts their inher­ent inno­cence and imag­i­na­tion while also fail­ing to care for their phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al needs.”

For Blake, children’s big emo­tions and active imag­i­na­tions made them supe­ri­or to adults. “Sev­er­al of his poems,” Metz writes, “show the ways in which children’s innate nature has already been taint­ed by their par­ents and oth­er soci­etal forms of author­i­ty, such as the church.” Giv­en his atti­tudes, we can see why “mod­ern inter­preters of the illus­tra­tions for Orig­i­nal Sto­ries have detect­ed a pic­to­r­i­al cri­tique” in Blake’s ren­der­ing of Wollstonecraft’s text, as the William Blake Archive points out. Blake “appears to have found her moral­i­ty too cal­cu­lat­ing, ratio­nal­is­tic, and rigid. He rep­re­sents Wollstonecraft’s spokesper­son, Mrs. Mason, as a dom­i­neer­ing pres­ence.”

Nonethe­less, as always, Blake’s work is more than com­pe­tent. The style for which we know him best emerges in some of the prints. We see it, for exam­ple, in the chis­eled face, bulging eyes, and well-mus­cled arms of the stand­ing fig­ure above. For the most part, how­ev­er, he keeps in check his exu­ber­ant desire to cel­e­brate the human body. “Only a year ear­li­er,” writes Brain Pick­ings, “Blake had fin­ished print­ing and illu­mi­nat­ing the first few copies of his now-leg­endary Songs of Inno­cence and Expe­ri­ence.” Two of the songs “were inspired by Wollstonecraft’s trans­la­tion of C.G. Salzmann’s Ele­ments of Moral­i­ty, for which Blake had done sev­er­al engrav­ings.”

If he had mis­giv­ings about illus­trat­ing Wollstonecraft’s Orig­i­nal Sto­ries, we must infer them from his illus­tra­tions. But plac­ing Blake’s most famous book of poet­ry next to Wollstonecraft’s pious, didac­tic works of moral instruc­tion pro­duces some jar­ring con­trasts, show­ing how two tow­er­ing lit­er­ary fig­ures from the time (though not both at the time) con­ceived of child­hood, social class, edu­ca­tion, and moral­i­ty in vast­ly dif­fer­ent ways. Learn more about Blake’s illus­tra­tions at Brain Pick­ings, read an edi­tion of Woll­stonecraft’s Orig­i­nal Sto­ries here, and see all of Blake’s illus­tra­tions at the William Blake Archive.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fan­tas­ti­cal “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books”: The Images Are Sub­lime, and in High Res­o­lu­tion

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

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

Decoding Korean Cinema: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (ep. 43)

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | May 13th, 2020

We’re see­ing a lot of Kore­an media in Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture nowa­days, what with Par­a­site win­ning the Oscar for best pic­ture and K‑Pop and K‑Dramas find­ing an increas­ing Amer­i­can cult fol­low­ing. This is not an acci­dent: The Kore­an gov­ern­ment has as an explic­it goal the growth of “soft pow­er” through export­ed cul­tur­al prod­ucts. This Kore­an Wave (Hal­lyu) was aimed fore­most at Asia but has reached us as well. Suzie Hyun-jung Oh joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to explore the con­text for this spread and fig­ure out what exact­ly feels for­eign to Amer­i­can audi­ences about Kore­an media.

This is our first attempt to get at the zeit­geist of anoth­er cul­ture to bet­ter under­stand its media, and the pri­ma­ry focus of our immer­sion (the part of the wave that’s not aimed at teens) was film: In addi­tion to the work of Bong Joon-ho, we touch on The Hand­maid­en, A Train to Busan, The Burn­ing, A Taxi Dri­ver, Lucid Dream­ing, Among the Gods, and oth­ers.

We also talk a lit­tle about Kore­an teen cul­tur­al prod­ucts, fam­i­ly life and reli­gion in Korea, the aes­thet­ic of cute­ness, M*A*S*H, and whether Amer­i­cans will read sub­ti­tles.

Some arti­cles and oth­er resources that helped us:

• “Kore­an Media Hits The Big Time In North Amer­i­ca” by Lau­ren Orsi­ni
• “Kore­an Wave (Hal­lyu) – The Rise of Korea’s Cul­tur­al Econ­o­my & Pop Cul­ture” by Mar­tin Roll
• “‘Par­a­site’ Was a Tri­umph for a Film Indus­try Trapped Between the U.S. and Chi­na” by Aynne Kokas
• “Hulu is Not Here for your ‘Par­a­site’ Sub­ti­tle Com­plaints” by Lisa Res­pers France
• “Why Is K‑Pop’s Pop­u­lar­i­ty Explod­ing in the Unit­ed States?” by Jon Mat­sumo­to
• The come­di­an PK on the impos­si­bil­i­ty of North Kore­an com­e­dy
• The Late Cap­i­tal­ism of K‑Pop a video by Cuck Phi­los­o­phy
• Suzie’s K‑Pop Playlist (made 10 years ago, doc­u­ment­ing its first wave)
• Read teen media online: tapas (seri­al­ized nov­els) or man­wha (visu­al nov­els)
• Clips from the K‑drama Cin­derel­la and the Four Knights that con­vey its odd fla­vor.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

16 Ways the World Is Getting Remarkably Better: Visuals by Statistician Hans Rosling

in Data, Environment, Health, TED Talks | May 12th, 2020

It cer­tain­ly may not feel like things are get­ting bet­ter behind the anx­ious veils of our COVID lock­downs. But some might say that opti­mism and pes­simism are prod­ucts of the gut, hid­den some­where in the bac­te­r­i­al stew we call the micro­bio­me. “All prej­u­dices come from the intestines,” pro­claimed not­ed suf­fer­er of indi­ges­tion, Friedrich Niet­zsche. Maybe we can change our views by chang­ing our diet. But it’s a lit­tle hard­er to change our emo­tions with facts. We turn up our noses at them, or find them impos­si­ble to digest.

Niet­zsche did not con­sid­er him­self a pes­simist. Despite his stom­ach trou­bles, he “adopt­ed a phi­los­o­phy that said yes to life,” notes Rea­son and Mean­ing, “ful­ly cog­nizant of the fact that life is most­ly mis­er­able, evil, ugly, and absurd.” Let’s grant that this is so. A great many of us, I think, are inclined to believe it. We are ide­al con­sumers for dystopi­an Niet­zsche-esque fan­tasies about super­men and “last men.” Still, it’s worth ask­ing: is life always and equal­ly mis­er­able, evil, ugly, and absurd? Is the idea of human progress no more than a mod­ern delu­sion?

Physi­cian, sta­tis­ti­cian, and one­time sword swal­low­er Hans Rosling spent sev­er­al years try­ing to show oth­er­wise in tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries for the BBC, TED Talks, and the posthu­mous book Fact­ful­ness: Ten Rea­sons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Bet­ter Than You Think, co-writ­ten with his son and daugh­ter-in-law, a sta­tis­ti­cian and design­er, respec­tive­ly. Rosling, who passed away in 2017, also worked with his two co-authors on soft­ware used to ani­mate sta­tis­tics, and in his pub­lic talks and book, he attempt­ed to bring data to life in ways that engage gut feel­ings.

Take the set of graphs above, aka, “16 Bad Things Decreas­ing,” from Fact­ful­ness. (View a larg­er scan of the pages here.) Yes, you may look at a set of mono­chro­mat­ic trend lines and yawn. But if you attend to the details, you’ll can see that each arrow plum­met­ing down­ward rep­re­sents some pro­found ill, man­made or oth­er­wise, that has killed or maimed mil­lions. These range from legal slavery—down from 194 coun­tries in 1800 to 3 in 2017—to small­pox: down from 148 coun­tries with cas­es in 1850 to 0 in 1979. (Per­haps our cur­rent glob­al epi­dem­ic will war­rant its own tri­umphant graph in a revised edi­tion some decades in the future.) Is this not progress?

What about the steadi­ly falling rates of world hunger, child mor­tal­i­ty, HIV infec­tions, num­bers of nuclear war­heads, deaths from dis­as­ter, and ozone deple­tion? Hard to argue with the num­bers, though as always, we should con­sid­er the source. (Near­ly all these sta­tis­tics come from Rosling’s own com­pa­ny, Gap­min­der.) In the video above, Dr. Rosling explains to a TED audi­ence how he designed a course on glob­al health in his native Swe­den. In order to make sure the mate­r­i­al mea­sured up to his accom­plished stu­dents’ abil­i­ties, he first gave them a ques­tion­naire to test their knowl­edge.

Rosling found, he jokes, “that Swedish top stu­dents know sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly less about the world than a chim­panzee,” who would have scored high­er by chance. The prob­lem “was not igno­rance, it was pre­con­ceived ideas,” which are worse. Bad ideas are dri­ven by many ‑isms, but also by what Rosling calls in the book an “over­dra­mat­ic” world­view. Humans are ner­vous by nature. “Our ten­den­cy to mis­in­ter­pret facts is instinctive—an evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tion to help us make quick deci­sions to avoid dan­ger,” writes Katie Law in a review of Fact­ful­ness.

“While we still need these instincts, they can also trip us up.” Mag­ni­fied by glob­al, col­lec­tive anx­i­eties, weaponized by can­ny mass media, the ten­den­cy to pes­simism becomes real­i­ty, but it’s one that is not sup­port­ed by the data. This kind of argu­ment has become kind of a cot­tage indus­try; each pre­sen­ta­tion must be eval­u­at­ed on its own mer­its. Pre­sum­ably enlight­ened opti­mism can be just as over­sim­pli­fied a view as the dark­est pes­simism. But Rosling insist­ed he wasn’t an opti­mist. He was just being “fact­ful.” We prob­a­bly shouldn’t get into what Niet­zsche might say to that.

via Simon Kuesten­mach­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Against All Odds: A Gen­tle Intro­duc­tion to Sta­tis­tics Host­ed by Har­vard Geneti­cist Par­dis Sabeti (Free Online Course)

David Byrne Launch­es Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful, an Online Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Arti­cles by Byrne, Bri­an Eno & More

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

Radiohead’s “Spectre” Played Against the Title Sequence of the 2015 James Bond Film, Spectre

in Film, Music | May 12th, 2020

Com­man­der James Bond, CMG, RNVR — code name 007 — is both cool and uncool. Though hard­ly a set­ter of youth­ful trends, he has always embod­ied mas­cu­line com­pe­tence and unflap­pa­bil­i­ty of a rel­a­tive­ly time­less and quin­tes­sen­tial­ly British kind. Thanks to the long-run­ning Bond film series’ efforts to grad­u­al­ly increase the char­ac­ter’s com­plex­i­ty, the Bond who first appears in Ian Flem­ing’s 1953 nov­el Casi­no Royale may at first look sim­ple, even car­toon­ish to read­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry. But despite all the changes of the lead­ing man and the shifts in audi­ence expec­ta­tions over the decades, one of the fran­chise’s tasks has remained con­stant: to exude this Bon­di­an uncool cool, whose dis­tinc­tive tone must be set with just the right theme song.

Sched­uled for release this fall, the 25th Bond film No Time to Die fea­tures a theme song by the teenage singer Bil­lie Eil­ish, whose dark-pop style may neat­ly suit the return per­for­mance by Daniel Craig. As soon as he made his debut as Bond in 2006’s Casi­no Roy­ale, an adap­ta­tion of Flem­ing’ first nov­el, Craig imme­di­ate­ly earned the dis­tinc­tion of the most trou­bled Bond yet.

Three Bond pic­tures lat­er, the pro­duc­ers must have real­ized that a haunt­ed secret needs a haunt­ed theme song, and so com­mis­sioned a piece of the ghost­ly yet huge­ly pop­u­lar, at once cool and uncool work of Radio­head. You can hear Radio­head­’s theme song as it appears in the open­ing of 2015’s Spec­tre (a ref­er­ence, every Bond fan knows, to the glob­al crime syn­di­cate SPECTRE, or Spe­cial Exec­u­tive for Counter-intel­li­gence, Ter­ror­ism, Revenge and Extor­tion) in the video above.

Or rather, the video shows how Radio­head­’s “Spec­tre” might have appeared in the 24th Bond pic­ture. After the band record­ed the song, the film’s pro­duc­tion team reject­ed it as too melan­choly for the title sequence — per­haps inevitably, in ret­ro­spect, giv­en how Radio­head­’s songs lend them­selves to the con­struc­tion of a “gloom index” — and opt­ed instead for a high­er-flown (and ulti­mate­ly Oscar-win­ning) num­ber sung by Sam Smith.  “There have been many reject­ed themes over the years by many notable artists,” writes James Bond Radio’s Jack Lugo. “Some reject­ed themes end up as B‑sides (such as Pulp’s “Tomor­row Nev­er Lies”) or get re-worked with dif­fer­ent lyrics on their albums (see Ace of Base’s “The Juve­nile”).” Nev­er hes­i­tant to put their music online, Radio­head ulti­mate­ly released “Specter” on their Sound­cloud page.

“Reac­tion was under­stand­ably mixed,” writes Lugo. But after watch­ing a few fan assem­blies of the song and Spec­tre’s title sequence, he describes him­self as hav­ing “dis­cov­ered a new­ly found appre­ci­a­tion for the song.” Fol­low­ing along with the lyrics as Thom Yorke sings them made, for him, “a world of a dif­fer­ence.” The words “cap­ture the dark­ness, para­noia, and refusal to trust that’s inher­ent to the Bond char­ac­ter (at least as he’s por­trayed by Daniel Craig),” and as a whole “the song speaks to some­one who wants bad­ly to love and care for some­one but is restrained and restrict­ed by chance, cir­cum­stances, and also just by the nature of his char­ac­ter.” Had it been used in the film, Radio­head­’s song would have cast these themes into stark­er relief, empha­siz­ing the deep­er the­mat­ic inquiry at the core of Spec­tre, a study, as it were, of human bondage.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

James Bond: 50 Years in Film (and a Big Blu-Ray Release)

Autonomous Fly­ing Robots Play the Theme From the James Bond Movies

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Per­forms Songs from His New Sound­track for the Hor­ror Film, Sus­piria

The 10 Most Depress­ing Radio­head Songs Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence: Hear the Songs That Ranked High­est in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

The Secret Rhythm Behind Radiohead’s “Video­tape” Now Final­ly Revealed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

How Music Unites Us All: Herbie Hancock & Kamasi Washington in Conversation

in Music | May 12th, 2020

For the indef­i­nite time being, we live with fear atop anx­i­ety, anx­ious­ly look­ing for order in the past and in the future. But some peo­ple with new­found leisure in their coro­n­avirus iso­la­tion have returned to what mat­ters to them most here and now, and start­ed to imag­ine a world no pol­i­cy pro­pos­al can describe. The inter­net has giv­en us greater and greater access to peo­ple who have been doing this all along. Even before the cur­rent pan­dem­ic, artists like Her­bie Han­cock and Kamasi Wash­ing­ton were expand­ing our notions of the pos­si­ble in music and in life.

After leav­ing Miles Davis and going solo, Han­cock was some­times unfair­ly derid­ed as a pop­u­lar­iz­er. In 1974, after his first gold record Head Hunters came out, crit­ic Lee Under­wood gave him the back­hand­ed nick­name “Mr. Com­mu­ni­cate-With-A-Wider-Audi­ence.” But as an ear­ly adopter of syn­the­siz­er tech­nol­o­gy, he was instru­men­tal in keep­ing jazz in the spot­light through­out the 70s and inte­gral to its influ­ence on 80s pop. Like­wise, Wash­ing­ton has been on the van­guard of a resur­gent jazz as con­ver­sant with hip hop as it is with its fore­bears.

Part of a “bilin­gual gen­er­a­tion,” as John Lewis writes at The Guardian, flu­ent in the old and new, Wash­ing­ton built cul­tur­al bridges as the musi­cal direc­tor for Kendrick Lamar’s ground­break­ing To Pimp a But­ter­fly. And both Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton have worked with pro­duc­er Fly­ing Lotus, the grand-nephew of Alice Coltrane and grand­son of singer-song­writer Mar­i­lyn McLeod. In their col­lab­o­ra­tions with oth­er artists and their career-span­ning world tours, they know their sub­ject inti­mate­ly when they talk about music as a unit­ing force, a fact we’ve all remarked on as peo­ple in infect­ed areas emerge from win­dows to ser­e­nade their neigh­bors.

Maybe music is even more pow­er­ful than we allow in our com­mu­nal­ly joy­ful appre­ci­a­tion of Ital­ian opera singers on bal­conies. Not only does it unite gen­er­a­tions and gen­res, as Wash­ing­ton says in his short, ani­mat­ed con­ver­sa­tion with Han­cock above, it shuts down big­otry. When racists hear James Brown, he jokes, they become tem­porar­i­ly embar­rassed out of their hate. (“I’ll go back to being a big­ot when the song is over.”) Han­cock replies that “music has a job to do,” and it’s to keep peo­ple togeth­er. How does it do this? Not only through mutu­al appre­ci­a­tion but also mutu­al cre­ation.

“Music, and the arts in gen­er­al,” says Han­cock, can com­bine cul­tures, reli­gions, and oth­er dif­fer­ences unique­ly such that “what comes out is some­thing that nei­ther one can take cred­it for. What comes out is a third thing. So it’s like one plus one equals three. That’s a new kind of math,” he says, and laughs. Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton both draw from sources of spir­i­tu­al wis­dom that inform their music and broad­er views. Hancock’s Bud­dhist prac­tice con­sti­tutes for him, he said in his Har­vard Nor­ton Lec­tures in 2014, a way of “being open to the myr­i­ad oppor­tu­ni­ties that are avail­able on the oth­er side of the fortress.”

Wash­ing­ton, whom The Fad­er hyper­bol­i­cal­ly calls “the wis­est man on earth,” casu­al­ly shared his phi­los­o­phy of pos­si­bil­i­ty in a recent inter­view. Tran­scend­ing prej­u­dice requires more than dig­ging James Brown togeth­er. Maybe we need to read­just our whole per­spec­tive, he sug­gests:

I’m kind of a sci­ence-fic­tion guy and was think­ing, “One day we’re going to trav­el to all these places and see the uni­verse.” So there’s a side of myself that’s real­ly infat­u­at­ed with all the amaz­ing things that I will do and the world can do — the idea of our end­less poten­tial. And the oth­er side sees the strug­gle and is always prob­lem-solv­ing and pok­ing holes, because I think of myself as being able to plug those holes. I imag­ine the world as a place of nev­er-end­ing strug­gle because I have end­less poten­tial.

It’s a quote that calls to mind the Bodhisattva’s vows. And what do we do? we might demand of this vision­ary vague­ness. What do we do with the spec­ta­cles of gross neg­li­gence, cor­rup­tion, and crim­i­nal mis­man­age­ment all around us? His answer involves accep­tance as much as action.

We don’t live in the whole world so we have a whole lot of con­trol — ulti­mate con­trol — over our lit­tle pock­et. The peo­ple who seem to have a lot of pow­er don’t actu­al­ly have a lot of pow­er; some­one like Trump only has the pow­er peo­ple give him and at any point we can take that back.

We might imag­ine the larg­er con­ver­sa­tion between Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton, who began a tour togeth­er last year, elab­o­rat­ing on ways to act local­ly but think with lim­it­less poten­tial, to emerge from fortress­es of prej­u­dice and exer­cise col­lec­tive pow­er. We would do well to pay atten­tion to artists now, espe­cial­ly those like Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton who have been sound­track­ing the future for decades, and who seem to think that it still has a chance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

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

Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards, Cookbook & Wine Guide Re-Issued as Beautiful Art Books

in Art, Books | May 11th, 2020

Main­tain­ing an aggres­sive­ly upward-waxed mus­tache; mak­ing a sur­re­al­ist film with Luis Buñuel that Buñuel described as “noth­ing more than a des­per­ate impas­sioned call for mur­der”; bring­ing an anteater on The Dick Cavett Show: Sal­vador Dalí can be described as a mas­ter of atten­tion-grab­bing gam­bits, by his admir­ers and detrac­tors alike. No won­der, then, that he appears to have some seri­ous admir­ers at Taschen. Known as a pub­lish­er of books that draw a great deal of press for their bound­ary-push­ing size, con­tent, and pro­duc­tion val­ues, Taschen would seem to be a nat­ur­al home for Dalí’s lega­cy, or at least the parts of it that fit between two cov­ers.

Besides his well-known and much-reprint­ed paint­ings, Dalí left behind a body of work also includ­ing not just film but sculp­ture, pho­tog­ra­phy, archi­tec­ture, and books. His first pub­lished vol­ume, 1938’s The Trag­ic Myth of the Angelus of Mil­let, offers a “para­noiac-crit­i­cal” inter­pre­ta­tion of the tit­u­lar pas­toral paint­ing by Jean-François Mil­let. In the 1940s he wrote, among oth­er books, The Secret Life of Sal­vador Dalí, a kind of auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and Hid­den Faces, a nov­el set among aris­toc­ra­cy in France, Moroc­co, and Cal­i­for­nia.

It was in the 1970s that Dalí’s lit­er­ary efforts took a less pre­dictable turn: 1973 saw the pub­li­ca­tion of his Les Din­ers de Gala, a cook­book fea­tur­ing such recipes as “Veal Cut­lets Stuffed with Snails,” “Thou­sand Year Old Eggs,” and “Tof­fee with Pine Cones.” In 1978 came The Wines of Gala, a per­son­al guide to “Wines of Friv­o­li­ty,” “Wines of Sen­su­al­i­ty,” “Wines of Aes­theti­cism,” and oth­ers besides. In recent years, Taschen has reprint­ed Dalí’s food and wine books with char­ac­ter­is­tic hand­some­ness. Those two now sit in the Taschen Dalí col­lec­tion along­side Dalí: The Paint­ings, the most com­plete such col­lec­tion ever pub­lished, and Dalí Tarot, a pack­age that includes not just the Dalí-designed tarot deck orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1984 but a com­pan­ion book by tarot schol­ar Johannes Fiebig.

Dalí’s wife and savvy busi­ness man­ag­er Gala — she of all those din­ners and wines — would sure­ly approve of the skill and taste that Taschen has put into pack­ag­ing even the artist’s minor work as a viable 21st-cen­tu­ry prod­uct. Well-heeled Dalí enthu­si­asts will sure­ly con­tin­ue to pay Taschen prices for such pack­ages, and even the less well-heeled ones can’t help but won­der what future reprints are on the table: lav­ish new edi­tions of Hid­den Faces, The Secret Life, or even 1948’s 50 Secrets of Mag­ic Crafts­man­ship (with its endorse­ment of pow­er nap­ping)? Dare we hope for the defin­i­tive Sal­vador Dalí Bible?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

Sal­vador Dali’s 1978 Wine Guide, The Wines of Gala, Gets Reis­sued: Sen­su­al Viti­cul­ture Meets Sur­re­al Art

The Most Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Sal­vador Dalí’s Paint­ings Pub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful New Book by Taschen: Includes Nev­er-Seen-Before Works

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Illus­trat­ed by Sal­vador Dalí in 1969, Final­ly Gets Reis­sued

Sal­vador Dalí’s Illus­tra­tions for The Bible (1963)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Little Richard Burst Into the “Then-Macho World of Rock” and “Changed it Forever”

in Music | May 11th, 2020

If Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe was the God­moth­er of Rock and Roll, then Lit­tle Richard, who passed away Sat­ur­day at the age of 87 from bone can­cer, deserves to be its God­fa­ther. This is no emp­ty hon­orif­ic, despite the fact that Tharpe was already tour­ing the coun­try as a teenage gospel prodi­gy in 1932 when Richard Pen­ni­man was born in Macon Geor­gia, and “oth­er musi­cians,” includ­ing Chuck Berry, Fats Domi­no, Bo Did­dley, and Elvis Pres­ley, “had already been min­ing a sim­i­lar vein by the time [Lit­tle Richard] record­ed his first hit, ‘Tut­ti Frutti’—a rau­cous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its mean­ing hard to miss,” writes Tim Wein­er in a New York Times obit­u­ary.

Lit­tle Richard “raised the ener­gy lev­el sev­er­al notch­es and cre­at­ed some­thing not quite like any music that had been heard before—something new, thrilling and more than a lit­tle dan­ger­ous.” Tak­ing his lessons from Tharpe, he brought the dynamism of the gospel he was raised to sing and the pro­fane rhythms of the blues into a high-volt­age syn­the­sis. Lit­tle Richard’s rep­u­ta­tion needs no bur­nish­ing. He has nev­er been neglect­ed by his­to­ri­ans of rock and roll. Nonethe­less, it is star­tling to rec­og­nize, as gui­tar great Ver­non Reid wrote in a Twit­ter trib­ute: “No Jimi, No Bea­t­les No Bowie, No Bolan. NO GLAM, No Fred­die, No Prince, No Elton, No Pre­ston No Sly, No Ste­vie, WITHOUT Lit­tle Richard!”

Lit­tle Richard’s life sto­ry mir­rors his ear­ly hero Roset­ta Tharpe’s in sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant ways. Not only were they two of the most wide­ly influ­en­tial stars to emerge from the black church and onto sec­u­lar stages, but they were also the music’s first stars to live open­ly gay lives, for a time, before suc­cumb­ing to church and social pres­sures and return­ing to the clos­et. For Tharpe, that meant end­ing a long rela­tion­ship with her roman­tic and tour­ing part­ner Marie Knight and agree­ing “to par­tic­i­pate in a spec­ta­cle of a wed­ding endorsed and encour­aged by the record label for prof­it,” writes Lyn­nee Denise, “in front a pay­ing crowd of 25,000 pay­ing guests.”

Lit­tle Richard famous­ly walked away from his explo­sive career in 1957 to mar­ry, adopt a son, and become a mis­sion­ary. The mar­riage, and re-con­ver­sion, didn’t last. After four years, he was divorced fol­low­ing an arrest for “approach­ing men in a restroom,” notes France 24. “Richard—resentful that rock ‘n’ roll was tak­ing off with­out him—soon returned to music with a tri­umphant tour of Eng­land.” (See him in a fierce per­for­mance in France above from 1966.) Then he went back to the church and nev­er left. “By the late 1980s he had man­aged to merge his reli­gious life and his stage per­sona, tour­ing as a preach­er and offi­ci­at­ing at flashy celebri­ty wed­dings.”

He became some­thing of a car­i­ca­ture of him­self in lat­er years, appear­ing as a high-camp fig­ure in TV and film. Through­out his life, Richard iden­ti­fied open­ly as gay or bisex­u­al, recount­ing sto­ries of orgies and telling Pent­house in 1995, “I’ve been gay my whole life.” He also preached against LGTBTQ peo­ple, call­ing same-sex attrac­tion “unnat­ur­al.” The L.A. Times’ Richard Cromelin under­states the case in writ­ing, “he var­i­ous­ly mod­i­fied his sto­ry and renounced and/or denied his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.” Depend­ing on how one saw it, he was either divine­ly “healed” of his life­long sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, or he was trag­i­cal­ly beset by ingrained reli­gious self-hatred.

Maybe none of this should mat­ter much in assess­ing Lit­tle Richard’s musi­cal lega­cy, except for the fact that his sud­den appear­ance as a gay artist in the “then-macho world of rock,” as France 24 puts it, changed that world irrev­o­ca­bly. Lit­tle Richard’s flam­boy­ance and teas­ing ambiva­lence became a hall­mark of pop cul­ture; his per­sona informed the stage career of near­ly every queer and sex­u­al­ly ambigu­ous super­star to fol­low. As a “sex­u­al­ly flu­id black man com­ing from the US south,” he gave black artists per­mis­sion to exper­i­ment with iden­ti­ty and defy rigid stereo­types imposed by a lega­cy of slav­ery. There’s also no get­ting around the fact that “Tut­ti Frut­ti,” the song that “intox­i­cat­ed legions of teenage fans eager to break loose from but­toned-up mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca,” was orig­i­nal­ly a song about anal sex. You can read those excised lyrics at Bill­board. They involve the phras­es “good booty” and “grease it.”

Like one of his most tal­ent­ed of his many off­spring, Prince, Lit­tle Richard some­how found a life­long home in a reli­gion that reject­ed his sex­u­al desire. This has been dif­fi­cult for many of his fans to under­stand. Per­haps he was enact­ing this com­pli­cat­ed, lib­er­at­ing, like­ly tor­tu­ous strug­gle to rec­on­cile the irrec­on­cil­able while onstage scream­ing bloody mur­der and gen­er­al­ly tear­ing the roof off the place. In what­ev­er way Lit­tle Richard ulti­mate­ly came to terms with his pres­ence in music he claimed to have invent­ed (despite Sis­ter Roset­ta), and yet also called “demon­ic,” it’s unde­ni­able that the past six­ty years or so of pop cul­ture would nev­er have hap­pened with­out him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The Woman Who Invent­ed Rock n’ Roll: An Intro­duc­tion to Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

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

The Case for a Universal Basic Income in the Time of COVID-19

in Current Affairs, Economics | May 11th, 2020

The idea of Uni­ver­sal Basic Income (UBI) has been the sub­ject of much debate in the past few years. The can­di­da­cy of Andrew Yang for U.S. Pres­i­dent brought the issue to nation­al promi­nence, where it has remained dur­ing the spread of COVID-19. What is UBI? Put sim­ply, it pro­pos­es that the gov­ern­ment give every cit­i­zen a cer­tain amount of mon­ey each month to cov­er, at the least, basic liv­ing expens­es. As the video above by YouTube chan­nel Kurzge­sagt explains, those cit­i­zens are then free to live their lives as they like.

Unlike most wel­fare state mod­els, UBI usu­al­ly does not involve any means test­ing. In most schemes, every cit­i­zen, no mat­ter their cur­rent wealth or income, receives the ben­e­fit. (Though most stud­ies of the pro­gram have only giv­en it to poor or unem­ployed ben­e­fi­cia­ries.) Those who do not need the mon­ey can do what­ev­er they want with it, but so too can those who need it. UBI ensures that peo­ple do not have go home­less or hun­gry if they lose their liveli­hood, and that they can sur­vive with­out pater­nal­ist state agen­cies breath­ing down their necks.

UBI is not a new idea but dates back at least to Thomas Paine, whose Com­mon Sense inspired the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and whose Rights of Man defend­ed the French a few years lat­er. As Paine argued in anoth­er, lit­tle-read, pam­phlet, Agrar­i­an Jus­tice, no one could be tru­ly free if they had no means of sub­sis­tence. Since cap­i­tal­ism had placed most of those means under pri­vate own­er­ship, he rea­soned, cit­i­zens should be com­pen­sat­ed for being deprived of resources that belonged to them by nat­ur­al right as much as to any­one else.

This philo­soph­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion doesn’t always enter into the con­ver­sa­tion, which is often framed in more prag­mat­ic terms as a polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic expe­di­ent in times of cap­i­tal­ist cri­sis: in times, for exam­ple, like the present moment. The COVID-19 cri­sis has inten­si­fied calls for a UBI, as mil­lions of lay­offs point toward the inevitabil­i­ty of a depres­sion. Push­ing peo­ple back to work dur­ing the pan­dem­ic seems to be the only thing the U.S. gov­ern­ment plans to do, but no amount of coer­cion can stop the virus from forc­ing clo­sures all over again.

Even the famous­ly lib­er­tar­i­an econ­o­mist Mil­ton Fried­man once embraced a ver­sion of UBI—as an alter­na­tive to the lib­er­al social pro­grams he loathed. Under Richard Nixon, of all peo­ple, such a pol­i­cy almost came into being in 1969. Nei­ther Fried­man nor Nixon believed in the nat­ur­al right of all cit­i­zens to a share in the prof­its of a state’s nat­ur­al resources. But they could see the wis­dom of ensur­ing mil­lions of U.S. cit­i­zens weren’t rel­e­gat­ed to liv­ing in des­ti­tu­tion.

The pro­gram required test­ing, so the admin­is­tra­tion set up a tri­al run. “Tens of mil­lions of dol­lars were bud­get­ed to pro­vide a basic income for more than 8,500 Amer­i­cans” in five states across the coun­try, writes Rut­ger Breg­man at The Cor­re­spon­dent. Researchers want­ed to know: 1. if those who received a basic income would work sig­nif­i­cant­ly less, 2. if the pro­gram would be too expen­sive, and 3. if it would prove “polit­i­cal­ly unfea­si­ble.” The find­ings? “No, no, and maybe.”

The chief objec­tion, idle­ness, held no water. As the chief data ana­lyst for the Den­ver exper­i­ment put it at the time, “The ‘lazi­ness’ con­tention is just not sup­port­ed by our find­ings.” The two groups who did cut back on hours, 20-some­things and moth­ers of young chil­dren, were peo­ple who most need­ed the mon­ey so they could go to col­lege or devote time to their kids. Oth­er­wise, recip­i­ents did not quit their jobs and lay around watch­ing TV.

Yet there remains a pow­er­ful species of human busy­body who can­not rest until they’re sure everyone’s work­ing. Such peo­ple con­tin­ue to object—whether in good faith or not—that “just giv­ing peo­ple mon­ey” will turn every­one into a slack­er, as though most peo­ple were only moti­vat­ed by the threat of star­va­tion. And so, tri­als con­tin­ue decades lat­er. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Helsin­ki recent­ly con­duct­ed a two-year study in Fin­land with a ran­dom selec­tion of 2,000 unem­ployed peo­ple across the coun­try. Each par­tic­i­pant was giv­en €560 (about $607) a month to ease their bur­den, and received the funds whether or not they sought or found a job.

“The scheme was not strict­ly speak­ing a uni­ver­sal basic income tri­al because the recip­i­ents came from a restrict­ed group and the pay­ments were not enough to live on,” points out Guardian cor­re­spon­dent Jon Hen­ley. Nonethe­less, the researchers found that recip­i­ents were sig­nif­i­cant­ly less stressed than a con­trol group—and that they could make dif­fer­ent choic­es than they might oth­er­wise. “Some said the basic income allowed them to go back to the life they had before they became unem­ployed,” the study authors write. “While oth­ers said it gave them the pow­er to say no to low-paid inse­cure jobs, and thus increased their sense of auton­o­my.”

Oth­er find­ings also showed how UBI could rad­i­cal­ize our rela­tion­ship to work. “Free­lancers and artists and entre­pre­neurs had more pos­i­tive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties for them to start busi­ness­es.” Peo­ple pro­vid­ing unpaid care for oth­ers felt their time was more val­ued. “The secu­ri­ty of the basic income allowed them to do more mean­ing­ful things, as they felt it legit­imized this kind of care work.” The find­ings are being tak­en seri­ous­ly by many Euro­pean gov­ern­ments.

In Spain, Scot­land, and else­where, lead­ers are propos­ing or con­sid­er­ing some form of UBI to com­bat mas­sive unem­ploy­ment due to the pan­dem­ic. While the idea may have lit­tle polit­i­cal future in the U.S. at the moment, where pri­or­i­ties are to use the country’s wealth to fur­ther enrich the wealthy, UBI is becom­ing tremen­dous­ly pop­u­lar else­where. (A recent poll found sup­port among 71% of Euro­peans sur­veyed.) No one believes UBI is a panacea for the world’s ills, but as the Wired video above argues, there may be no bet­ter time than now to make the case for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

To Save Civ­i­liza­tion, the Rich Need to Pay Their Tax­es: His­to­ri­an Rut­ger Breg­man Speaks Truth to Pow­er at Davos and to Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son

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

Take a Virtual Tour of the Mütter Museum and Its Many Anatomically Peculiar Exhibits

in Biology, History, Museums, Science | May 11th, 2020

A few months before Philaelphia’s Müt­ter Muse­um, exer­cis­ing now famil­iar COVID-19 pre­cau­tions, closed its doors to the pub­lic, it co-spon­sored a parade to hon­or the vic­tims to the pre­vi­ous century’s Span­ish Flu pan­dem­ic, as well as “those who keep us safe today.”

The event was part of a tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion, Spit Spreads Death: The Influen­za Pan­dem­ic of 1918–19 in Philadel­phia.

Anoth­er tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion, Going Viral: Infec­tion Through the Ages, opened in Novem­ber, and now seems even stronger proof that the muse­um, whose 19th-cen­tu­ry dis­play cab­i­nets are housed in the his­toric Col­lege of Physi­cians, is as con­cerned with the future as it is with the past.

For now, all tours must be under­tak­en vir­tu­al­ly.

Above, cura­tor Anna Dhody, a phys­i­cal and foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gist and Direc­tor of the Müt­ter Research Insti­tute, gives a brief intro­duc­tion to some of the best known arti­facts in the per­ma­nent col­lec­tion.

The muse­um’s many antique skulls and med­ical odd­i­ties may invite com­par­isons to a ghoul­ish sideshow attrac­tion, an impres­sion Dhody cor­rects with her warm, mat­ter-of-fact deliv­ery and respect­ful acknowl­edg­ment of the humans whose sto­ries have been pre­served along with their remains:

Mary Ash­ber­ry, an achon­droplas­tic dwarf, died from com­pli­ca­tions of a Cesare­an sec­tion, as doc­tors who had yet to learn the impor­tance of ster­il­iz­ing instru­ments and wash­ing hands, attempt­ed to help her deliv­er a baby who proved too big for her pelvis. (The baby’s head was crushed as well. Its skull is dis­played next to its mother’s skele­ton.)

Madame Dimanche is rep­re­sent­ed by a wax mod­el of her face, instant­ly rec­og­niz­able due to the 10-inch cuta­neous horn that began grow­ing from her fore­head when she was in her 70s. (It was even­tu­al­ly removed in an ear­ly exam­ple of suc­cess­ful plas­tic surgery.)

Albert Ein­stein and the con­joined twins Chang and Eng Bunker are among the house­hold names grac­ing the museum’s col­lec­tion.

One of the most recent addi­tions is the skele­ton of artist and dis­abil­i­ty aware­ness advo­cate Car­ol Orzel, who edu­cat­ed the pub­lic and incom­ing Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia med­ical stu­dents about fibrodys­pla­sia ossi­f­i­cans pro­gres­si­va (FOP), a rare dis­or­der that turned her mus­cle and con­nec­tive tis­sue to bone. She told her physi­cian, Fred­er­ick Kaplan, below, that she want­ed her skele­ton to go to the Müt­ter, to join that of fel­low FOP suf­fer­er, Har­ry East­lack… pro­vid­ed some of her prized cos­tume jew­el­ry could be dis­played along­side. It is.

Get bet­ter acquaint­ed with the Müt­ter Museum’s col­lec­tion through this playlist.

The exhib­it Spit Spreads Death is cur­rent­ly slat­ed to stay up through 2024. While wait­ing to vis­it in per­son, you can watch an ani­ma­tion of the Span­ish flu’s spread, and explore an inter­ac­tive map show­ing the demo­graph­ics of the infec­tion.

h/t Tanya Elder

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

Take a Long Vir­tu­al Tour of the Lou­vre in Three High-Def­i­n­i­tion Videos

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of The Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence, the World-Famous Col­lec­tion of Renais­sance Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Here lat­est project is a series of free down­load­able posters, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to wear masks in pub­lic and wear them prop­er­ly. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.