Hear The Rite of Spring Conducted by Igor Stravinsky Himself: A Vintage Recording from 1929

in Music | December 4th, 2017

Though more than a cen­tu­ry of musi­cal change has passed since its infa­mous­ly near-riotous debut at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, The Rite of Spring remains a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge for any con­duc­tor. “I remem­ber the first time I con­duct­ed the ‘Rite’ more than half a cen­tu­ry ago,” the late Rafael Früh­beck de Bur­gos told The Los Ange­les Times in 2013, the year of the pagan bal­let and orches­tral work’s cen­te­nary. “I need­ed two weeks to pre­pare it. This piece, no mat­ter how many times you have per­formed it, is a mon­ster who can eat you in one moment. There are so many places that are dan­ger­ous. This will nev­er be a nor­mal piece.”

Sei­ji Oza­wa, who has record­ed The Rite of Spring with the Chica­go and Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tras, knows that full well. In Absolute­ly on Music, his book of con­ver­sa­tions with nov­el­ist Haru­ki Muraka­mi, he address­es the “fias­co” of that very first per­for­mance: “The piece itself is part­ly to blame, but it could well be that the orches­tra was­n’t ful­ly pre­pared to per­form it. The piece is full of musi­cal acro­bat­ics. I wish I had asked Pierre Mon­teux about it direct­ly. We were very close for a while.” He means the con­duc­tor of The Rite of Spring’s debut, who went on to record it in 1929, just as soon as elec­tron­ic micro­phones made it pos­si­ble to do so.

So, how­ev­er, did Stravin­sky him­self, whose own 1929 record­ing with the Walther Straram Con­certs Orches­tra, per­form­ing again in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, you can hear at the top of the post. But this record, as Peter Gut­mann writes at Classicalnotes.net, is “not by the com­pos­er of the Rite. No, I haven’t uncov­ered a fraud. It’s indeed Stravin­sky who wields the baton, but in the 16 years since the pre­miere he had under­gone a vast change of artis­tic per­son­al­i­ty. No longer the wild fire­brand who had scan­dal­ized musi­cal soci­ety, he had con­vert­ed to neo­clas­si­cism, and that’s just the type of read­ing he leads here – dis­pas­sion­ate, man­i­cured and ret­i­cent, with the final sac­ri­fi­cial dance down­right labored.” You can com­pare Stravin­sky’s first record­ing to Mon­teux’s first record­ing, with the Grand Orchestre Sym­phonique, just below.

That 1929 record hard­ly marked the end of Mon­teux’s rela­tion­ship with the piece: “When Stravin­sky first played him the music for The Rite, Mon­teux had to go and sit down in anoth­er room, con­clud­ing that he would stick to con­duct­ing Brahms,” writes WQXR’s Phil Kline. But after first con­duct­ing it, he worked with the com­pos­er on score touch-ups and became the lead­ing pro­po­nent of The Rite as a con­cert work,” ulti­mate­ly record­ing it not just once but four times. Recent gen­er­a­tions, of course, have most­ly come to know The Rite of Spring through Leopold Stokowski’s ver­sion in Dis­ney’s Fan­ta­sia, a ren­di­tion Stravin­sky called “exe­crable.” But if the sheer, bru­tal-seem­ing uncon­ven­tion­al­i­ty of the piece shocked its Parisian audi­ence in 1913, we in the 21st cen­tu­ry, lis­ten­ing to the many inter­pre­ta­tions that have come out in the past 89 years, might well find our­selves star­tled at how many pos­si­bil­i­ties The Rite of Spring still con­tains.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Hear 46 Ver­sions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Min­utes: A Clas­sic Mashup

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion for Its 100th Anniver­sary

Hear Igor Stravinsky’s Sym­phonies & Bal­lets in a Com­plete, 32-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist

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.

Andy Warhol’s Seven Hand-Illustrated Books: Charming, Little-Known, and Now Available to the World (1952–1959)

in Art, Books | December 1st, 2017

Got a knack for draw­ing, paint­ing, sculpt­ing, cre­at­ing hand­made objects of any kind? You’re maybe more like­ly to mon­e­tize your skill—with an Etsy or Pin­ter­est account, for example—than move to New York and try to make a go of it. Were such con­ve­nient means of set­ting up shop avail­able in the late 40’s, when Andy Warhol stud­ied art edu­ca­tion and com­mer­cial art at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh and Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly, one won­ders whether the often bedrid­den, intro­vert­ed artist might have found it more appeal­ing to work from home in Pitts­burgh, and stay there.

Instead, he moved to New York and became a suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial artist by using his illus­tra­tion skills to mar­ket him­self. Before he was a “bell­wether of post-war and con­tem­po­rary art” with those famous silkscreen paint­ings in the 60s; before he made those famous films, dis­cov­ered (and invent­ed the con­cept of) art stars, and man­aged the Vel­vet Under­ground, Warhol cre­at­ed sev­en hand­made books “as part of his strat­e­gy to woo clients and forge friend­ships.” So writes Taschen books, who have col­lect­ed and reprint­ed Warhol’s art books in a sin­gle edi­tion. (Five of the sev­en have nev­er before been repub­lished.)

Warhol reserved the sig­na­ture books for “his most val­ued con­tacts. These fea­tured per­son­al, unique draw­ings and quirky texts reveal­ing his fond­ness for—among oth­er subjects—cats, food, myths, shoes, beau­ti­ful boys, and gor­geous girls.”

They are inti­mate and charm­ing, show­ing a side of the artist we don’t often see—but one we do see of so many con­tem­po­rary illus­tra­tors. His hand-drawn illus­tra­tions have a very 21st cen­tu­ry feel to them in their obses­sion with cats, cakes, fash­ion, and hap­py, nude zaftig beau­ties. Cre­at­ed between 1952 and 59, they could have come from any num­ber of illus­tra­tion or design sites. It’s easy to imag­ine a cur­rent-day Warhol mak­ing a liv­ing sell­ing work like this online.

Had he been able to do so, might he have become a dif­fer­ent kind of artist entire­ly? It’s impos­si­ble to say. I can imag­ine a num­ber of peo­ple for whom I might buy copies of Love Is a Pink Cake, 25 Cats Named Sam, or À la Recherche du Shoe Per­du, as a hol­i­day gift. But Warhol didn’t make copies of these books. He saved the mass pro­duc­tion for his lat­er gallery work. Instead the hand­made call­ing cards remain “lit­tle-known, much-cov­et­ed jew­els in the Warhol crown,” ear­ly exam­ples of “the artists’ off-the-wall char­ac­ter as well as his accom­plished drafts­man­ship, bound­less cre­ativ­i­ty, and innu­en­do-laced humor.”

You might not know it from can­vas­es like Eight Elvis­es, the Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe series, or Campbell’s Soup Cans, but Warhol had a par­tic­u­lar tal­ent for light, whim­si­cal hand-drawn illus­tra­tion. It’s a side of him­self he showed few peo­ple once he became the Andy Warhol most of us know. Thanks to Taschen’s new book, a recent gallery show­ing of Warhol’s draw­ings, a 2012 Chron­i­cle col­lec­tion of his quirky illus­tra­tions from the 50s, and, well, Pin­ter­est, it’s a side of him that can now belong to every­one.

You can now get your own copy of Andy Warhol: Sev­en Illus­trat­ed Books 1952–1959.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Bet­ter World

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Miyaza­ki Meets Warhol in Campbell’s Soup Cans Reimag­ined by Design­er Hyo Taek Kim

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

The “Humans of New York” Photo Project Becomes a 13-Part Video Documentary Series: Watch It Free Online

in Books, Creativity, Film, Life, Photography, Travel | December 1st, 2017

New York, New York—there are many ways of assess­ing whether or not you’ve “made” it here—these days it includes an appear­ance on pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bran­don Stan­ton’s wild­ly pop­u­lar blog, Humans of New York, in which a spon­ta­neous street por­trait is anchored by a per­son­al quote or longer anec­dote.

Fol­low­ing sev­er­al books and a UN-spon­sored world tour to doc­u­ment humans in over twen­ty coun­tries, the project has mor­phed into a 13-episode docu-series as part of Facebook’s orig­i­nal video con­tent plat­form.

Aid­ed by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Michael Crom­mett, Stan­ton elic­its his cus­tom­ary blend of uni­ver­sal and spe­cif­ic truths from his inter­view sub­jects. Extend­ing the moment into the video realm affords view­ers a larg­er win­dow onto the com­plex­i­ties of each human’s sit­u­a­tion.

Take episode four, “Rela­tion­ships,” above:

An ample, unadorned woman in late-mid­dle age recalls being swept off her feet by a pas­sion that still burns bright…

An NYU grad stares uncom­fort­ably in her pur­ple cap and gown as her divorced par­ents air var­i­ous regrets…

A cou­ple with mis­matched views on mar­riage are upstaged by a spon­ta­neous pro­pos­al unfold­ing a few feet away…

La Vie en Rose holds deep mean­ing for two cou­ples, despite rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent loca­tions, pre­sen­ta­tions, and ori­en­ta­tions.

A lit­tle girl has no prob­lem call­ing the shots around her spe­cial fel­la…

I love you, New York!!!

Oth­er themes include Mon­ey, Time, Pur­pose, and Par­ent­ing.

One of the great plea­sures of both series and blog is Stanton’s open-mind­ed­ness as to what con­sti­tutes New York and New York­ers.

Some inter­views take place near such tourist-friend­ly locales as Bethes­da Foun­tain and the Wash­ing­ton Square Arch, but just as many tran­spire along­side notice­ably Out­er Bor­ough archi­tec­ture or the blast­ed cement heaths apron­ing its less sought after pub­lic schools.

Those who live here will nod with recog­ni­tion at the cher­ry blos­som self­ies, “show­time” in the sub­way, and the Bush­wick vibe of the groom who pro­posed to his bride at Coney Island, under the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eat­ing Con­test Wall of Fame.

Dit­to the appear­ance of such local celebri­ties as Jim­my Webb, emer­i­tus man­ag­er of the punk bou­tique, Trash and Vaude­ville and Black­wolf the Drag­on­mas­ter, the city’s unof­fi­cial wiz­ard.

Below, Stan­ton explains his goal when con­duct­ing inter­views and demon­strates how a non-threat­en­ing approach can soft­en strangers to the point of can­dor.

It’s well know ’round these parts that cer­tain seg­ments of the local pop­u­lace would gnaw off limbs to be immor­tal­ized by Stan­ton, but he cleaves to the pure serendip­i­ty of his selec­tion process. Ask­ing to have your pic­ture tak­en ensures that it won’t be. Luck puts you in front of his lens. Shar­ing your truth is what makes you human.

Watch Humans of New York: The Series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Humans of New York: Street Pho­tog­ra­phy as a Cel­e­bra­tion of Life

Inter­act with The New York Times Four-Part Doc­u­men­tary, “A Short His­to­ry of the High­rise”

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

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Are the Most Effective Strategies for Learning a Foreign Language?: Six TED Talks Provide the Answers

in Language Lessons, TED Talks | December 1st, 2017

Ear­li­er this week we fea­tured the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s list of lan­guages ranked by how long they take to learn. Now that you have a sense of the rel­a­tive life invest­ment required to learn the tongue or tongues of your choice, how about a few words of advice on how to start? Or per­haps we’d do bet­ter, before the how, to con­sid­er the why. “A lot of us start with the wrong moti­va­tion to learn a lan­guage,” says Ben­ny Lewis in his TED Talk “Hack­ing Lan­guage Learn­ing.” Those moti­va­tions include “just to pass an exam, to improve our career prospects, or in my case for super­fi­cial rea­sons, to impress peo­ple.”

Real lan­guage learn­ing, on the oth­er hand, comes from pas­sion for a lan­guage, for “the lit­er­a­ture and the movies and being able to read in the lan­guage, and of course, to use it with peo­ple.” But Lewis, who now brands him­self as “The Irish Poly­glot,” says he got a late start on lan­guage-learn­ing, con­vinced up until his ear­ly twen­ties that he sim­ply could­n’t do it.

He cites five flim­sy defens­es he once used, and so many oth­ers still do, for their mono­lin­gual­ism: lack of a “lan­guage gene or tal­ent,” being “too old to learn a sec­ond lan­guage,” not hav­ing the resources to “trav­el to the coun­try right now,” and not want­i­ng to “frus­trate native speak­ers” by using the lan­guage before attain­ing flu­en­cy.

None of these, how­ev­er, seem to have occurred to Tim Don­er, who went viral at six­teen years with a video where­in he spoke twen­ty lan­guages that he taught him­self. He dis­cuss­es that expe­ri­ence, and the fas­ci­na­tions and tech­niques that got him to that point and now well past it, in his talk “Break­ing the Lan­guage Bar­ri­er.” At first put off by the drudgery of French class­es in school, he only began to grasp the nature of lan­guage itself, as a kind of sys­tem break­able into mas­ter­able rules, when he began study­ing Latin.

Want­i­ng to under­stand more about the con­flict between Israel and Pales­tine, Don­er decid­ed to find his way into the sub­ject through Hebrew, and specif­i­cal­ly through rap music record­ed in it. Using lan­guage study as a means of deal­ing with his insom­nia, he dis­cov­ered tech­niques to expand into oth­er lin­guis­tic realms, such as the method of loci (i.e., remem­ber­ing words by asso­ci­at­ing them with places), learn­ing vocab­u­lary in batch­es of sim­i­lar sounds rather than sim­i­lar mean­ings, and seek­ing out the for­eign-lan­guage learn­ers and speak­ers all around him — a rel­a­tive­ly easy task for a New York­er like Don­er, but applic­a­ble near­ly every­where.

In “How to Learn Any Lan­guage in Six Months,” Chris Lons­dale deliv­ers, and with a pas­sion bor­der­ing on fury, a set of use­ful prin­ci­ples like “Focus on lan­guage con­tent that is rel­e­vant to you,” “Use your new lan­guage as a tool to com­mu­ni­cate from day one,” “When you first under­stand the mes­sage, you will uncon­scious­ly acquire the lan­guage.” This res­onates with the advice offered by the much more laid-back Sid Efro­movich in “Five Tech­niques to Speak any Lan­guage,” includ­ing an encour­age­ment to “get things wrong and make mis­takes,” a sug­ges­tion to “find a stick­ler” to help you iden­ti­fy and cor­rect those mis­takes, and a strat­e­gy for over­com­ing the pro­nun­ci­a­tion-hin­der­ing lim­i­ta­tions of the “data­base” of sounds long estab­lished in your brain by your native lan­guage.

Your native lan­guage, in fact, will play the role of your most aggres­sive and per­sis­tent ene­my in the strug­gle to learn a for­eign one — espe­cial­ly if your native lan­guage is as wide­ly used, to one degree or anoth­er, as Eng­lish. And so Scott Young and Vat Jaisw­al, in their talk “One Sim­ple Method to Learn Any Lan­guage,” pro­pose an absolute “no-Eng­lish rule.” You can get results using it with a con­ver­sa­tion part­ner in your home­land, while trav­el­ing for the pur­pose of lan­guage-learn­ing, and espe­cial­ly if you’ve relo­cat­ed to anoth­er coun­try per­ma­nent­ly.

With the rule in place, you’ll avoid the sor­ry fate of one fel­low Young and Jaisw­al know, “an Amer­i­can busi­ness­man who went to Korea, mar­ried a Kore­an women, had chil­dren in Korea, lived in Korea for twen­ty years, and still could­n’t have a decent con­ver­sa­tion in Kore­an.” As an Amer­i­can liv­ing in Korea myself, I had to laugh at that: I could name at least three dozen long-term West­ern expa­tri­ates I’ve met in that very same sit­u­a­tion. In my case, I spent a few years devel­op­ing self-study habits for Kore­an and a cou­ple oth­er lan­guages while still in Amer­i­ca, and so did­n’t have to imple­ment them on the fly after mov­ing here.

Even so, I still must con­stant­ly refine my lan­guage-learn­ing strat­e­gy, incor­po­rat­ing rou­tines like those laid out by Eng­lish poly­glot Matthew Youlden in “How to Speak any Lan­guage Eas­i­ly”: seek­ing out exploitable sim­i­lar­i­ties between the lan­guages I know and the ones I want to know bet­ter, say, or find­ing sources of con­stant “pas­sive” lin­guis­tic input. Per­son­al­ly, I like to lis­ten to pod­casts not just in for­eign lan­guages, but that teach one for­eign lan­guage through anoth­er. And just as Eng­lish-learn­ers get good lis­ten­ing prac­tice out of TED Talks like these, I seek them out in oth­er lan­guages: Kore­an, Japan­ese, Span­ish, or wher­ev­er good old lin­guis­tic pas­sion leads me next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

215 Hours of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons on Spo­ti­fy: French, Chi­nese, Ger­man, Russ­ian & More

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

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.

The Codex Quetzalecatzin, an Extremely Rare Colored Mesoamerican Manuscript, Now Digitized and Put Online

in Art, History | November 30th, 2017

To para­phrase Don­ald Rums­feld, there are known knowns in the art world, and there are unknown knowns. The Codex Quet­za­le­catzin, a rare col­ored Mesoamer­i­can man­u­script, recent­ly went from a unknown known (a French col­lec­tor owned it, and before them William Ran­dolph Hearst, and many oth­ers, for sev­er­al cen­turies) to a known known (the French col­lec­tor donat­ed it to the Library of Con­gress).

Bet­ter still, the Library has scanned the illus­trat­ed document–essentially a map of Mex­i­co City and Puebla, drawn up for both Span­ish col­o­niz­ers and indige­nous peo­ple to lay claim to the land–in super hi-res for the pub­lic and schol­ars world­wide to pore over. It dates from between 1570 and 1595.

Accord­ing to John Hessler of the Library’s Worlds Revealed blog, the map depicts the land owned by the de Leon fam­i­ly.

As is typ­i­cal for an Aztec, or Nahu­atl, codex of this ear­ly date, it relates the extent of land own­er­ship and prop­er­ties of a fam­i­ly line known as “de Leon,” most of the mem­bers of which are depict­ed on the man­u­script. With Nahu­atl styl­ized graph­ics and hiero­glyphs, it illus­trates the family’s geneal­o­gy and their descent from Lord-11 Quet­za­le­catzin, who in 1480, was the major polit­i­cal leader of the region. It is from him the Codex derives one of its many names.

The map is one of 450 sur­viv­ing pic­to­r­i­al man­u­scripts of the Mesoamer­i­can peri­od, and con­tains nat­ur­al pig­ments such as Maya blue and cochineal red (made from insects).

If it wasn’t so tied in to bloody Span­ish colo­nial­ism, you could say the Codex looks like a video game map, a la Leg­end of Zel­da. But instead it shows a region in tran­si­tion, between the old order and a new world pop­u­lat­ed by Catholic church­es, and is all the more fas­ci­nat­ing.

Click here to find the dig­i­tized ver­sion of the Codex Quet­za­le­catzin at the Library of Con­gress.

via LoC

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Codex Seraphini­anus, the Strangest Book Ever Pub­lished

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

An Espresso Maker Made in Le Corbusier’s Brutalist Architectural Style: Raw Concrete on the Outside, High-End Parts on the Inside

in Architecture, Food & Drink | November 30th, 2017

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture flour­ished in North Amer­i­ca and Europe (both West and East) and many coun­tries beyond. Made out of raw con­crete, Bru­tal­ist buildings–usually munic­i­pal build­ings, cam­pus­es, and hous­ing projects–have an almost unfin­ished look to them. The first and most famous exam­ple of this archi­tec­tur­al style is the Unité d’habi­ta­tion, the hous­ing com­plex built by Le Cor­busier in Mar­seille between 1947 and 1952.

Though Bru­tal­ism has since fall­en out of fash­ion, it might be poised for a come­back, espe­cial­ly if this new espres­so machine is any indi­ca­tion. After a suc­cess­ful Kick­starter cam­paign this sum­mer (rais­ing $145k), the Nor­we­gian-Cal­i­forn­ian design firm Mon­taag Prod­ucts is putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es on a bru­tal­ist espres­so mak­er.

They want­ed to design a machine made out of “com­plete­ly hon­est mate­ri­als.” Hence the raw con­crete. Inside the espres­so mak­er, how­ev­er, they’ve used mate­ri­als typ­i­cal­ly found inside $1300 Ital­ian machines, accord­ing to Food & Wine. You can pre-order the machine at Indiegogo for $799. It should be ready in March (or there­abouts).

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:

Wake Up & Smell the Cof­fee: The New All-in-One Cof­fee-Mak­er/Alarm Clock is Final­ly Here!

Cof­fee Entre­pre­neur Rena­to Bialet­ti Gets Buried in the Espres­so Mak­er He Made Famous

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot: Choose Your Sound­track

Physics & Caf­feine: Stop Motion Film Uses a Cup of Cof­fee to Explain Key Con­cepts in Physics

What Books Did Wunderkind Philosopher J.S. Mill Read Between Ages 3 and 7?: Plato’s Apology (in Ancient Greek), Cervantes’ Don Quixote & Much More

in Books, Philosophy | November 30th, 2017

I left much of my read­ing of C.S. Lewis behind, but one quote of his will stay with me for life: “It is a good rule,” he advised, “after read­ing a new book, nev­er to allow your­self anoth­er new one till you have read an old one in between.” I believe his advice is invalu­able for main­tain­ing a bal­anced per­spec­tive and achiev­ing a healthy crit­i­cal dis­tance from the tumult of the present.

Read­ing works of ancient writ­ers shows us how alike the mores and the crises of the ancients were to ours, and how vast­ly dif­fer­ent. Those sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences can help us eval­u­ate cer­tain cur­rent ortho­dox­ies with greater wis­dom. And that’s not to men­tion count­less his­to­ri­ans, nov­el­ists, poets, play­wrights, crit­ics, and philoso­phers from the past few hun­dred years, or sev­er­al decades, who have much to teach us about where our mod­ern ideas came from and how much they’ve devi­at­ed from their prece­dents.

For exam­ple, 19th cen­tu­ry lib­er­al polit­i­cal philoso­pher John Stu­art Mill is now wide­ly admired by con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­tar­i­an writ­ers and aca­d­e­mics as a pro­po­nent of indi­vid­ual eco­nom­ic lib­er­ty, the free mar­ket, and a flat tax. And they are not wrong, he was all of that, in his ear­ly thought. (Mill lat­er sup­port­ed sev­er­al social­ist caus­es.) Many of his oth­er polit­i­cal views might be denounced by quite a few as the excess­es of cam­pus activist left­ism. Adam Gop­nik sum­ma­rizes the Vic­to­ri­an philosopher’s gen­er­ous slate of posi­tions:

Mill believed in com­plete equal­i­ty between the sex­es, not just women’s col­leges and, some­day, female suf­frage but absolute par­i­ty; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slav­ery, votes for the work­ing class­es, and the right to birth con­trol (he was arrest­ed at sev­en­teen for help­ing poor peo­ple obtain con­tra­cep­tion), and in the com­mon intel­li­gence of all the races of mankind. He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of ter­ror­ism; argued for teach­ing Ara­bic, in order not to alien­ate poten­tial native rad­i­cals.…

Can peo­ple to Mill’s left on eco­nom­ics learn some­thing from him? Sure. Can peo­ple to his right on near­ly every­thing else learn a thing or two? It’s worth a shot. Mill cham­pi­oned engag­ing those with whom we dis­agree (he great­ly admired Thomas Car­lyle; the two could­n’t have been more dif­fer­ent in many respects). He also argued vig­or­ous­ly for “’lib­er­ty of the press’ as one of the secu­ri­ties against cor­rupt or tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment.” Before nod­ding your head in agree­ment—read Mill’s argu­ments. He might not agree with you.

And what did John Stu­art Mill read? In Chap­ter One of his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Mill gives a detailed account of his clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion from ages 3–7, dur­ing which time he read “the whole of Herodotus,” “the first six dia­logues of Pla­to,” “part of Lucian,” all in their orig­i­nal Greek, of course, as any young gen­tle­man of the time would. Mil­l’s father, Scot­tish philoso­pher James Mill, inten­tion­al­ly set out to cre­ate a genius with this advanced course of study.

Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly excerpt­ed the pas­sage, and turned the many books Mill men­tions into a list called “Ear­ly Edu­ca­tion.” You can find all of the titles below, includ­ing the ancients men­tioned and over two dozen “mod­ern” works (that is, since the time of the Renais­sance) Mill read as a child in Eng­lish, includ­ing Cer­vantes’ mam­moth Don Quixote. Most of us will have to make do with trans­la­tions of the Greek texts, but take heart, even Mill “learnt no Latin until my eighth year.” The list shows not only Mill’s daunt­ing pre­coc­i­ty, but also how essen­tial clas­si­cal texts were to well-edu­cat­ed Euro­peans of any age.

It also high­lights what kinds of texts were val­ued by Mil­l’s soci­ety, or at least by his father. All of the authors but one are men, all of them are Euro­peans, most of the works are his­to­ries and biogra­phies. Giv­en Mill’s broad views, his own rec­om­mend­ed read­ing list might look dif­fer­ent. Nonethe­less, Mil­l’s account of his extra­or­di­nary ear­ly years gives us a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the rel­a­tive breadth of a lib­er­al edu­ca­tion in 19th cen­tu­ry Britain. What ancient authors did you read as a young stu­dent? Or do you read now, between books, essays, arti­cles, or Twit­ter­storms du jour?

In Greek

Aesop–The Fables

Xenophon–The Anaba­sis, Memo­ri­als of Socrates, The Cry­opadeia 

Herodotus–The His­to­ries

Dio­genes Laer­tius–some of The Lives of Philoso­phers

Lucian–various works

Isocrates–parts of To Demon­i­cus and To Nic­o­cles 

Pla­to--Euthy­phro, Apol­o­gy, Crito, Phae­do, Craty­lus, Theaete­tus

 

In Eng­lish

William Robert­son–The His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, The His­to­ry of the Reign of the Emper­or Charles V, The His­to­ry of Scot­land Dur­ing the Reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI

David Hume–The His­to­ry of Eng­land

Edward Gib­bon–The His­to­ry of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Robert Watson–The His­to­ry of the Reign of Philip II, King of Spain

Robert Wat­son and William Thomp­son–The His­to­ry of the Reign of Philip III, King of Spain

Nathaniel Hooke–The Roman His­to­ry, from the Build­ing of Rome to the Ruin of the Com­mon­wealth 

Charles Rollin–The Ancient His­to­ry of the Egyp­tians, Carthagini­ans, Assyr­i­ans, Baby­lo­ni­ans, Medes and Per­sians, Mace­do­nians and Gre­cians

Plutarch–Par­al­lel Lives

Gilbert Bur­net--Bish­op Bur­net’s His­to­ry of His Own Time

The Annu­al Reg­is­ter of World Events, A Review of the Year (1758–1788)

John Mil­lar–An His­tor­i­cal View of the Eng­lish Gov­ern­ment

Johann Lorenz von Mosheim–An Eccle­si­as­ti­cal His­to­ry

Thomas McCrie–The Life of John Knox

William Sewell–The His­to­ry of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Chris­t­ian Peo­ple Called Quak­ers 

Thomas Wight and John Rut­ty–A His­to­ry of the Rise and Progress of Peo­ple Called Quak­ers in Ire­land

Philip Beaver–African Mem­o­ran­da

David Collins–An Account of the Eng­lish Colony in New South Wales

George Anson–A Voy­age Round the World

Daniel Defoe–Robin­son Cru­soe

The Ara­bi­an Nights and Ara­bi­an Tales

Miguel de Cer­vantes–Don Quixote

Maria Edge­worth–Pop­u­lar Tales

Hen­ry Brooke–The Fool of Qual­i­ty; or the His­to­ry of Hen­ry, Earl of More­land

via Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Harold Bloom Cre­ates a Mas­sive List of Works in The “West­ern Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Leo Strauss: 15 Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

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

Carl Van Vechten’s 9,000 Portraits of Great 20th Century Cultural Icons: Billie Holiday, Orson Welles, Dizzy Gillespie & Beyond

in History, Photography | November 30th, 2017

Image above and below by Carl Van Vecht­en, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Amer­i­cans have long con­sid­ered New York City, at least dur­ing its rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive eras or in its rel­a­tive­ly expen­sive areas, a haven for every type of artist and mem­bers of all sub­cul­tures. The den­si­ty of its pop­u­la­tion, by Amer­i­can stan­dards, also presents its denizens with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cross between one artis­tic or sub­cul­tur­al realm and anoth­er with ease — or with geo­graph­i­cal ease, any­way. Few New York fig­ures crossed as many such bound­aries as cre­ative­ly in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry as a Cedar Rapids-born writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er named Carl van Vecht­en.

“When Van Vecht­en first arrived in New York, in 1906, there were few signs that he would ever attempt to appoint him­self bard of Harlem,” writes Kele­fa San­neh in a New York­er piece on Van Vecht­en’s life. “He was a self-con­scious­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed exile from the Mid­west, and he was quick­ly hired by the Times as a music and dance crit­ic.” In addi­tion, to his crit­i­cism, “he also pub­lished a series of mis­chie­vous nov­els that were notable main­ly, one crit­ic observed, for their ‘annoy­ing man­ner­isms.’ ” (The crit­ic? Prob­a­bly the author him­self.) And the longer Van Vecht­en lived in New York, “the more inter­est­ed he became in the sights and sounds of Harlem, where rau­cous and inven­tive night clubs were thriv­ing under Pro­hi­bi­tion.”

The white Van Vecht­en wrote a nov­el about black life in Harlem, insist­ing on a title that I doubt I can even type here. It expressed what San­neh calls “his con­vic­tion that Negro cul­ture was the essence of Amer­i­ca,” which went with “his simul­ta­ne­ous fas­ci­na­tion with the avant-garde and the broad­ly pop­u­lar; and his string of sex­u­al rela­tion­ships with men, which were an open secret dur­ing his life. Van Vechten’s tastes were var­ied: his bib­li­og­ra­phy includes an eru­dite cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the house cat, and in his lat­er decades he became an accom­plished por­trait pho­tog­ra­ph­er.” Black, white, or oth­er­wise, near­ly every major fig­ure in the Amer­i­can cul­ture of the day seems to have sat for his cam­era: actors, writ­ers, musi­cians, intel­lec­tu­als, archi­tects, mag­nates, and many oth­er types besides.

Some of the sub­jects of Van Vecht­en’s over 9,000 por­traits, all brows­able online at Yale’s Bei­necke Rare Book and Man­u­script Library, were his friends: Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hugh­es, for instance, both of whom expressed great enthu­si­asm for Van Vecht­en’s writ­ing on black cul­ture. Oth­ers cre­at­ed that black cul­ture, now known as the Harlem Renais­sance: Dizzy Gille­spie, Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, James Bald­win. Oth­ers made up the cul­ture of glob­al celebri­ty, then only in its infan­cy: Orson Welles, Lotte Ley­na, Lau­rence Olivi­er.

They, and more so Van Vecht­en him­self, knew that to become an icon in the 20th cen­tu­ry, you need­ed to do much more than excel in the human realm: you had to tran­scend it, ascend­ing into that of the image. If you suf­fi­cient­ly fas­ci­nat­ed Van Vecht­en, it seems, he was only too glad to help you on your way there. See thou­sands of his por­traits at this Yale web­site.

Por­traits in order of appear­ance on this page include: Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, Orson Welles, James Bald­win, Gertrude Stein, and Dizzy Gille­spie. All come cour­tesy of the Van Vecht­en Col­lec­tion at Library of Con­gress.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 1932 Illus­trat­ed Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cot­ton Club to the Savoy Ball­room

Dis­cov­er Langston Hugh­es’ Rent Par­ty Ads & The Harlem Renais­sance Tra­di­tion of Play­ing Gigs to Keep Roofs Over Heads

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Por­traits: Mick Jag­ger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simp­son & Many Oth­ers (1970–1987)

200,000 Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

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.

A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes to Learn Foreign Languages: From Easiest to Hardest

in Language Lessons | November 29th, 2017

Do you want to speak more lan­guages? Sure, as Sal­ly Struthers used to say so often, we all do. But the require­ments of attain­ing pro­fi­cien­cy in any for­eign tongue, no doubt unlike those cor­re­spon­dence cours­es pitched by that All in the Fam­i­ly star turned day­time TV icon, can seem frus­trat­ing­ly demand­ing and unclear. But thanks to the research efforts of the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute, the cen­ter of for­eign-lan­guage train­ing for the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment for the past 70 years, you can get a sense of how much time it takes, as a native or native-lev­el Eng­lish speak­er, to mas­ter any of a host of lan­guages spo­ken all across the world.

The map above visu­al­izes the lan­guages of Europe (at least those deemed diplo­mat­i­cal­ly impor­tant enough to be taught at the FSI), col­or­ing them accord­ing the aver­age time com­mit­ment they require of an Eng­lish speak­er. In pink, we have the Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries. The red coun­tries speak Cat­e­go­ry I lan­guages, those most close­ly relat­ed to Eng­lish and thus learn­able in 575 to 600 hours of study: the tra­di­tion­al high-school for­eign lan­guages of Span­ish and French, for instance, or the less com­mon­ly taught but just about as eas­i­ly learn­able Por­tuguese and Ital­ian. If you’d like a lit­tle more chal­lenge, why not try your hand at Ger­man, whose 750 hours of study puts it in Cat­e­go­ry II — quite lit­er­al­ly, a cat­e­go­ry of its own?

In total, the FSI ranks lan­guages into six cat­e­gories of dif­fi­cul­ty, includ­ing Eng­lish’s Cat­e­go­ry 0. The high­er up the scale you go, the less rec­og­niz­able the lan­guages might look to an Eng­lish-speak­ing monoglot. Cat­e­go­ry III con­tains no Euro­pean lan­guages at all (though it does con­tain Indone­sian, wide­ly regard­ed as one of the objec­tive­ly eas­i­est lan­guages to learn). Cat­e­go­ry IV offers a huge vari­ety of lan­guages from Amhar­ic to Czech to Nepali to Taga­log, each demand­ing 44 weeks (or 1100 hours) of study. Then, at the very sum­mit of the lin­guis­tic moun­tain, we find the switched-up gram­mar, high­ly unfa­mil­iar scripts, and poten­tial­ly mys­ti­fy­ing cul­tur­al assump­tions of Cat­e­go­ry V, “lan­guages which are excep­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult for native Eng­lish speak­ers.”

To that most for­mi­da­ble group belong Ara­bic, Chi­nese both Man­darin and Can­tonese, Kore­an, and — this with an aster­isk mean­ing “usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry” — Japan­ese. Now if, like me, you con­sid­er study­ing for­eign lan­guages one of your main pur­suits, you know that pos­sess­ing a gen­uine inter­est in a lan­guage — in its mechan­ics, in its ongo­ing evo­lu­tion, in the cul­tures that cre­at­ed it and the cul­tures it in turn cre­ates — can do won­ders to get you through even the most aggra­vat­ing dif­fi­cul­ties on the long jour­ney to com­mand­ing it. Then again, I’m also a native Eng­lish speak­er who chose to move to Korea, where I study not just the Category‑V Kore­an but the Category‑V* Japan­ese through Kore­an; you might want to take with a grain of salt the words, in any lan­guage, of so obvi­ous a masochist.

You’ll find the full For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute lan­guage dif­fi­cul­ty rank­ing list below. No mat­ter which cat­e­go­ry you’d like to take on, you can get a start at our Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons col­lec­tion, many of whose mate­ri­als come pro­duced by the FSI itself.

Cat­e­go­ry I: 23–24 weeks (575–600 hours)

Lan­guages close­ly relat­ed to Eng­lish

Afrikaans

Dan­ish

Dutch

French

Ital­ian

Nor­we­gian

Por­tuguese

Roman­ian

Span­ish

Swedish

Cat­e­go­ry II: 30 weeks (750 hours)

Lan­guages sim­i­lar to Eng­lish

Ger­man

Cat­e­go­ry III: 36 weeks (900 hours)

Lan­guages with lin­guis­tic and/or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences from Eng­lish

Indone­sian

Malaysian

Swahili

Cat­e­go­ry IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours)

Lan­guages with sig­nif­i­cant lin­guis­tic and/or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences from Eng­lish

Alban­ian

Amhar­ic

Armen­ian

Azer­bai­jani

Ben­gali

Bosn­ian

Bul­gar­i­an

Burmese

Croa­t­ian

Czech

*Eston­ian

*Finnish

*Geor­gian

Greek

Hebrew

Hin­di

*Hun­gar­i­an

Ice­landic

Khmer

Lao

Lat­vian

Lithuan­ian

Mace­don­ian

*Mon­go­lian

Nepali

Pash­to

Per­sian (Dari, Far­si, Tajik)

Pol­ish

Russ­ian

Ser­bian

Sin­hala

Slo­vak

Sloven­ian

Taga­log

*Thai

Turk­ish

Ukrain­ian

Urdu

Uzbek

*Viet­namese

Xhosa

Zulu

Cat­e­go­ry V: 88 weeks (2200 hours)

Lan­guages which are excep­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult for native Eng­lish speak­ers

Ara­bic

Can­tonese (Chi­nese)

Man­darin (Chi­nese)

*Japan­ese

Kore­an

* Usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

215 Hours of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons on Spo­ti­fy: French, Chi­nese, Ger­man, Russ­ian & More

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

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.

Mister Rogers, Sesame Street & Jim Henson Introduce Kids to the Synthesizer with the Help of Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby & Bruce Haack

in K-12, Music | November 29th, 2017

Does your child have a musi­cal instru­ment? That’s good. Tak­en a few music lessons? Even bet­ter. If they’re so inclined, learn­ing music is one of the best things kids can do for their devel­op­ing brains, whether or not they make a career of the endeav­or. But one doesn’t need clas­si­cal train­ing or jazz chops to make music, or even to become a musi­cian. Those skills have served many an elec­tron­ic musi­cian, sure, but many oth­ers have cre­at­ed mov­ing, com­plex music with inge­nu­ity, fine­ly-tuned ears, tech smarts, and wild­ly exper­i­men­tal atti­tudes.

Then there are elec­tron­ic artists, like Bruce Haack, Her­bie Han­cock, and Thomas Dol­by, who com­bined fine musi­cian­ship with all of the above qual­i­ties and made peo­ple stop and won­der, peo­ple who were not nec­es­sar­i­ly fans of elec­tron­ic music, and who did­n’t know very much about it.

None of these artists felt it beneath them to bring their art fur­ther down to earth, to the lev­el of the kids who watched Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood or Sesame Street. On the con­trary, they’re nat­ur­al edu­ca­tors, with a performer’s instinct for tim­ing and audi­ence and a geek’s instinct for high­light­ing the coolest tech­ni­cal bits. But leave it to Mis­ter Rogers him­self, above, to cel­e­brate the music and the play­ful­ness of syn­the­sized sound in his mild-man­nered Cole Porter-ish way, to the accom­pa­ni­ment of a good-old fash­ioned piano and one of his mother’s sig­na­ture hand­knit sweaters, in green.

Above, we have the weird wonky Haack, a musi­cal prodi­gy who stud­ied at Juil­liard, and who loved noth­ing more than mak­ing children’s records with his part­ner, children’s dancer Esther Nel­son, and cre­at­ing musi­cal instru­ments from house­hold objects and hand­wired cir­cuit­ry that was acti­vat­ed by human touch. Fred Rogers was so tak­en with Haack’s play­ful­ness that he had the com­pos­er and Nel­son on a long seg­ment of his show. You may or may not know that Haack’s work was inspired by pey­ote and that he record­ed a rock opera called The Elec­tric Lucifer about a war between heav­en and hell, but you’ll prob­a­bly sense there’s more to him than meets the eye. Rogers and the kids are mes­mer­ized (see Part 2 of the seg­ment here.)

Her­bie Hancock’s appear­ance on Sesame Street oper­ates much more on a get to know you lev­el than the gestalt dance ther­a­py per­for­mance art of Haack and Nel­son. He jams out; charms future Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Tatyana Ali by turn­ing her name into high-pitched cho­rus of voic­es; and explains the many func­tions of his Fairlight CMI, a dig­i­tal syn­the­siz­er born in the same year as the young actress. The tech­nol­o­gy isn’t near­ly as inter­est­ing as Haack’s home­made curios, giv­en that every one of the Fairlight func­tions can be fit into an app these days. The joy lies in watch­ing the kids warm to Han­cock and the then-new tech­nol­o­gy.

When it comes to Thomas Dolby’s appear­ance on the Jim Hen­son Company’s The Ghost of Faffn­er Hall pro­gram, we are in the posi­tion of the child audi­ence. Dol­by, with his pecu­liar Eng­lish inten­si­ty, plays a mad sci­en­tist char­ac­ter who stares into the cam­era as he demon­strates his col­lec­tion of syn­the­siz­ers, ana­log and dig­i­tal, for view­ers. Dolby’s per­for­mance might have been aid­ed by some real kids to play off of, but his “fly in a match­box” exam­ple will eas­i­ly help you and your young ones under­stand the basic prin­ci­ples at work in syn­the­siz­ing sound. These play­ful tuto­ri­als were made for kids in 1968, 83, and 89 respec­tive­ly, and maybe they can still work mag­ic on young 21st cen­tu­ry minds. But, as Fred Rogers says, “grownups like to play too, sure. And if you look and lis­ten care­ful­ly through this world, you’ll find lots of things that are play­ful.” Few grownups have been bet­ter author­i­ties on the sub­ject.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music: 1983 Doc­u­men­tary Offers a Fun & Edu­ca­tion­al Intro­duc­tion to Elec­tron­ic Music

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

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