Stream 35 Hours of Classic Blues, Folk, & Bluegrass Recordings from Smithsonian Folkways: 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie & More

in Music | August 14th, 2017

Image of Woody Guthrie by Al Aumuller, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Mar­shall McLuhan’s chest­nut “the medi­um is the mes­sage” con­tains some of the most impor­tant the­o­ry about mass media to have emerged in the past cen­tu­ry. In its hon­or, we might pro­pose anoth­er slogan—less con­cep­tu­al­ly tidy and alliterative—that brings to mind the argu­ments of crit­i­cal the­o­rists like Theodor Adorno: “the econ­o­my is the culture”—the eco­nom­ic mech­a­nisms that gov­ern the “cul­ture indus­try,” as Adorno would say, deter­mine the kinds of pro­duc­tions that sat­u­rate our shared envi­ron­ment. In a pure­ly cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ist mod­el, we con­sume culture—that which is mar­ket­ed most aggres­sive­ly and dis­trib­uted most plentifully—and often dis­card it just as quick­ly. In an econ­o­my that doesn’t make prof­it the ful­crum of its every move, things go oth­er­wise. The lines between con­sumers, cre­ators, and com­mu­ni­ties become blurred in weird and won­der­ful ways.

This can hap­pen in decen­tral­ized envi­ron­ments like the wilds of the ear­ly inter­net. And it can hap­pen in insti­tu­tions that code it into their design. The Smith­son­ian is one of those insti­tu­tions. The pub­lic col­lec­tions in its vast net­work of muse­ums has remained, out­side of spe­cial exhibits and films, free and “open access” for every­one. And one of their key cul­tur­al con­tri­bu­tions, the Smith­son­ian Cen­ter for Folk­life and Cul­tur­al Her­itage, has devot­ed itself since its found­ing in the late six­ties to “cul­ture of, by, and for the peo­ple.”

Even if you’ve nev­er tak­en the time to delve into their cura­to­r­i­al efforts (and you should), you’ll know their work through Folk­ways Record­ings, the record label cre­at­ed in  by Moses Asch—founder of Folk­ways Records in 1949. After he passed away in 1986, Asch’s fam­i­ly donat­ed over 2,000 records, his entire discog­ra­phy, to the Smith­son­ian, with the pro­vi­so that they always remain in print, whether or not they made a buck.

This has meant that schol­ars and fans of folk from all over the world have always been able to find the work of Pete Seeger, The Carter Fam­i­ly, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Bel­ly, to name but a few of the label’s “stars.” There are many more: Bill Mon­roe, Doc Wat­son, Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten, Rev­erend Gary Davis…. So many names in the pan­theon of folk giants Robert Crumb immor­tal­ized in his col­or­ful, and unusu­al­ly taste­ful, Heroes of Blues, Jazz, and Coun­try. But Folk­ways has pre­served much more besides. Kentucky’s Old Reg­u­lar Bap­tist Church’s a capel­la hymns, Kil­by Snow’s auto­harp, Snooks English’s New Orleans street singing, Alice Ger­rard and Hazel Dick­ens’ 60s inter­pre­ta­tions of tra­di­tion­al blue­grass…. Music that appealed to small but cul­tur­al­ly rich com­mu­ni­ties in its day, and that may have dis­ap­peared along with those com­mu­ni­ties in the scrum of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, dom­i­nat­ed as it is by mass enter­tain­ments.

The small, region­al cre­ations, some tee­ter­ing on genius, some haunt­ing in their art­less­ness, are crit­i­cal doc­u­ments of old Amer­i­ca, the hollers, deserts, streets, swamps, low coun­try, back coun­try, moun­tains, val­leys….  Hear it all in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above (or access it here), 837 tracks of Folk­ways record­ings. Smith­son­ian Folk­ways is per­haps best known for its North Amer­i­can artists, but it has released record­ings from all over the world. Rather than cre­at­ing com­modi­ties, the insti­tu­tion func­tions as a repos­i­to­ry of glob­al cul­tur­al mem­o­ry, col­lect­ing and pre­serv­ing “people’s music.” Since Asch’s endow­ment, Folk­ways has cre­at­ed an addi­tion­al six labels under its umbrel­la and released over 300 new record­ings. In 2003, they part­nered with the Amer­i­can Folk­life Cen­ter for the “Save Our Sounds” project, which aims to pre­serve record­ings like those made by Thomas Edi­son on wax cylin­ders. Folk­ways opens a win­dow on an alter­nate world where cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion is not a per­pet­u­al strug­gle for rat­ings, reviews, and sales dom­i­nance.

It’s not entire­ly a utopi­an vision. There is the dan­ger of a pater­nal­iz­ing approach. Cura­tors like Asch, Har­ry Smith, John and Alan Lomax, and hun­dreds more seri­ous enthu­si­asts and ethno­g­ra­phers have their own agen­das, inter­ests, bias­es, and blind spots. What we under­stand now as tra­di­tion­al Delta blues, for exam­ple, is a prod­uct of selec­tion bias—it excludes many artists and vari­eties that didn’t catch on with col­lec­tors. Still Folk­ways reme­dies much of this short­com­ing by includ­ing work from a broad spec­trum of unknown com­posers, inter­preters, and per­form­ers. There may be no form of mod­ern folk music today that hasn’t been craft­ed and mold­ed by the music indus­try, which might mean, by def­i­n­i­tion, that there is no mod­ern folk music. For such a thing to exist—the “people’s music”—perhaps more demo­c­ra­t­ic economies and insti­tu­tions must pre­vail.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 17,000+ Tra­di­tion­al Folk & Blues Songs Curat­ed by the Great Musi­col­o­gist Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Hous­es Over 17,400 Folk Record­ings From 1946 to the 1990s

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Woody Guthrie at 100: Cel­e­brate His Amaz­ing Life with a BBC Film

Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing the Bawdy Prison Blues Song “Uncle Bud” (1940)

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

An Animated Look at Vladimir Nabokov’s Passion for Butterfly Collecting: “Literature & Butterflies Are the Two Sweetest Passions Known to Man”

in Literature, Museums, Science, Travel | August 14th, 2017

Lit­er­a­ture and but­ter­flies are the two sweet­est pas­sions known to man. — Vladimir Nabokov

A 1941 fam­i­ly road trip along Route 66 plant­ed the seeds for Vladimir Nabokov’s nov­el Loli­ta.

It also enriched the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry’s but­ter­fly col­lec­tion by some 300 North Amer­i­can spec­i­mens.

The author, an avid ama­teur lep­i­dopter­ist, indulged his hob­by along the way, deposit­ing but­ter­flies col­lect­ed on this and oth­er trips in glas­sine envelopes labeled with the name of the towns where the crea­tures encoun­tered his net. Upon his return, he decid­ed to donate most of his haul to the museum’s Lep­i­doptera col­lec­tion, where he was as an eager vol­un­teer.

Years lat­er, Suzanne Rab Green, a Tiger Moth spe­cial­ist and assis­tant cura­tor at the muse­um, uncov­ered Nabokov’s spec­i­mens packed in a vin­tage White Owl cig­ar box.

Rec­og­niz­ing that this col­lec­tion had lit­er­ary val­ue as well as sci­en­tif­ic, Green decid­ed to sort it by loca­tion rather than species, pre­serv­ing the care­ful­ly hand-let­tered envelopes along with the frag­ile wings and tho­rax­es.

Using Google Earth, she retraced Nabokov’s 3‑week jour­ney for the museum’s Shelf Life series, dig­i­tal­ly pin­ning his finds along­side vin­tage post­cards of Get­tys­burg, Yosemite Nation­al Park, and the Grande Tourist Lodge in Dal­las, Texas—all fer­tile col­lec­tion sites, at least in 1941.

But­ter­flies remained a life­long obses­sion for the author. He served for six years as cura­tor of Harvard’s Muse­um of Com­par­a­tive Zoology’s Lep­i­doptera wing and devel­oped an evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry relat­ed to his study of the Poly­omma­tus blues Green men­tions in the 360° video above. (Be aware, the 360° fea­ture will not work in Safari).

He also wooed his wife, Vera, by mak­ing charm­ing and keen­ly observed draw­ings of but­ter­flies for her.

An avowed ene­my of sym­bols and alle­go­ry, Nabokov pre­vent­ed but­ter­flies from occu­py­ing too sig­nif­i­cant a role in his fic­tion­al oeu­vre, though he gushed unabashed­ly in his mem­oir, Speak, Mem­o­ry:

Let me also evoke the hawk­moths, the jets of my boy­hood! Col­ors would die a long death on June evenings. The lilac shrubs in full bloom before which I stood, net in hand, dis­played clus­ters of a fluffy gray in the dark—the ghost of pur­ple. A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neigh­bor­ing mead­ow. In many a gar­den have I stood thus in lat­er years—in Athens, Antibes, Atlanta—but nev­er have I wait­ed with such a keen desire as before those dark­en­ing lilacs. And sud­den­ly it would come, the low buzz pass­ing from flower to flower, the vibra­tional halo around the stream­lined body of an olive and pink Hum­ming­bird moth poised in the air above the corol­la into which it had dipped its long tongue…. Through the gusty black­ness, one’s lantern would illu­mine the stick­i­ly glis­ten­ing fur­rows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbib­ing the sweets, their ner­vous wings half open but­ter­fly fash­ion, the low­er ones exhibit­ing their incred­i­ble crim­son silk from beneath the lichen-gray pri­maries. “Cato­cala adul­tera!” I would tri­umphant­ly shriek in the direc­tion of the light­ed win­dows of the house as I stum­bled home to show my cap­tures to my father.

Despite the author’s stat­ed dis­taste for overt sym­bol­ism, a few but­ter­flies did man­age to flut­ter onto the pages of his best known work, result­ing in at least one the­sis papers that makes a case for Loli­ta as butterfly—irresistible, beau­ti­ful, eas­i­ly ensnared….

Did I ever men­tion that her bare arm bore the 8 of vac­ci­na­tion? That I loved her hope­less­ly? That she was only four­teen? An inquis­i­tive but­ter­fly passed, dip­ping, between us.

- Loli­ta, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

Track Nabokov’s cross-coun­try but­ter­fly col­lect­ing trip, cour­tesy of the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delight­ful But­ter­fly Draw­ings

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Great­est (and Most Over­rat­ed) Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Take Vladimir Nabokov’s Quiz to See If You’re a Good Reader–The Same One He Gave to His Stu­dents

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

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

An Online Guide to 350 International Art Styles & Movements: An Invaluable Resource for Students & Enthusiasts of Art History

in Art | August 14th, 2017

If you majored in art his­to­ry, you no doubt have last­ing mem­o­ries, and pos­si­bly painful ones, of long nights spent in the library mem­o­riz­ing the names and sig­nal char­ac­ter­is­tics of var­i­ous art move­ments. What a shame, you might well think when look­ing back, that a sub­ject as fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant as the trans­for­ma­tion of human cre­ativ­i­ty over time could become such a chore. Now that you’re free to learn about art his­to­ry in what­ev­er man­ner and order you like, why not start in Mono­skop’s expan­sive online guide to art styles and move­ments?

As “a wiki for col­lab­o­ra­tive stud­ies of the arts, media and human­i­ties,” Mono­skop has long offered a wide selec­tion of down­load­able books, videos, sound record­ings, and oth­er mate­ri­als invalu­able for any­one with an inter­est in the arts, espe­cial­ly the mod­ern arts.

Its move­ment-and-style guide “brings togeth­er some 350 art styles and move­ments from the 1860s until today. Besides the canon­i­cal isms of mod­ern art, it expands the list with move­ments usu­al­ly treat­ed as sec­ondary to the visu­al art canon, such as Let­trism, Sit­u­a­tion­ism, Sound art, Expand­ed cin­e­ma, Neo­ism, or Soft­ware art, and does not leave out non-West­ern art either.”

Each move­ment or style’s entry pro­vides, among oth­er infor­ma­tion, the major artists, events, and texts (includ­ing, of course, “man­i­festos” and procla­ma­tions) asso­ci­at­ed with it, the media its works used, and links to all the rel­e­vant items both with­in and out­side of Mono­skop’s col­lec­tions. It also includes relat­ed his­tor­i­cal images, such as Futur­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Anton Giulio Bra­gagli­a’s 1911 Salu­tan­do, De Sti­jl painter Piet Mon­dri­an’s 1920 Com­po­si­tion with Yel­low, Red, Black, Blue, and Gray, George Seu­rat’s Pointil­lism-defin­ing 1884 A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te, or stills from com­put­er art pio­neers Lil­lian Schwartz and Ken Knowl­ton’s 1970 ani­ma­tion Pix­il­la­tion.

You may arrive in Mono­skop’s guide to art styles and move­ments intend­ing only to learn about one style or move­ment, but none of them devel­oped in iso­la­tion. The orga­ni­za­tion makes it easy enough to see the con­nec­tions that a dip in to research Arts and Crafts could well fin­ish up, who knows how lat­er, in Pre­ci­sion­ism, Neo-Dada, or the afore­men­tioned Expand­ed Cin­e­ma (an intrigu­ing term; if you don’t know the art to which it refers, you can fol­low that link and find out). Or maybe you are cur­rent­ly a stu­dent major­ing in art his­to­ry, and you need some­thing a bit more inter­est­ing than your text­book to solid­i­fy in your mind the nature of and con­nec­tions between all these artis­tic ven­tures, influ­en­tial or minor, long-lived or flash-in-the-pan — in which case, book­mark Mono­skop’s guide right away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art Visu­al­ized in a Mas­sive 130-Foot Time­line

Take a Trip Through the His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art with the Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Apple’s Hypercard Software, the Innovative 1980s Precursor to Hypertext, Now Made Available by Archive.org

in Apple, Internet Archive, Software | August 14th, 2017

Archive.org is on a bit of a roll late­ly. After recent­ly mak­ing avail­able 25,000+ dig­i­tized 78rpm records from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, they’ve turned around and put online Apple Hyper­card soft­ware. When Hyper­card was released in 1987, The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Apple to Intro­duce Unusu­al Soft­ware,” which began:

Apple Com­put­er Inc. will intro­duce an unusu­al data­base and man­age­ment infor­ma­tion pro­gram Tues­day that the com­pa­ny hopes will help it main­tain its lead in tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing com­put­ers easy to use.

The new soft­ware, known as Hyper­card, will enable users of Apple’s Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers to orga­nize infor­ma­tion on com­put­er­ized file cards that can be linked to oth­er file cards in intri­cate ways. The pro­gram will be includ­ed for no charge with each Mac­in­tosh sold, start­ing this month.

Hyper­card made its appear­ance pre­cise­ly when Apple also released “a com­mu­ni­ca­tions device, known as a modem, that will enable the Mac­in­tosh to send doc­u­ments to and from fac­sim­i­le machines.” Some of us still use modems today. Hyper­card, not so much. At least not direct­ly.

As Hyper­card’s cre­ator Bill Atkin­son indi­cates above, Hyper­card start­ed work­ing with the hyper­text con­cept that’s now preva­lent on the web today. Think those links you find in HTML. On Archive.org, you can find and play with Hyper­card soft­ware, or what they call emu­lat­ed Hyper­card stacks. (They also host a library of emu­lat­ed soft­ware for the ear­ly Mac­in­tosh com­put­er). Read more about Archive.org’s Hyper­card project on their blog here.

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:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Free: You Can Now Read Clas­sic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Adam Savage Takes Us Inside Jack White’s Third Man Records, the First New Record-Pressing Plant in the US in 30 Years

in Music | August 13th, 2017

Jack White, best known as the front­man of The White Stripes, launched Third Man Records in 2001, which has since posi­tioned itself as “an inno­va­tor in the world of vinyl records and a bound­ary push­er in the world of record­ed music, aim­ing to bring tan­gi­bil­i­ty and spon­tane­ity back into the record busi­ness.”

After estab­lish­ing a phys­i­cal loca­tion in Nashville in 2009, Third Man Records opened a sec­ond site in Detroit, and now a new vinyl press­ing plant in the Motor City, pro­vid­ing a home to eight Ger­man-made record press­ing machines. Jack White told CBS, “One day, I want this place to be like what I had heard about Hen­ry Ford want­ed for Ford Motor com­pa­ny. Which was you pour in raw mate­ri­als on this side and out the oth­er side of the fac­to­ry pop out cars.”

Above you can get a half hour tour of the new record plant from Myth­buster’s Adam Sav­age. Enjoy.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand­made Ani­ma­tion Shows You “How To Make a 1930 Para­mount Record”

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

Watch A Sin­gle Life: An Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short About How Vinyl Records Can Take Us Mag­i­cal­ly Through Time

Video Essayist Kogonada Makes His Own Acclaimed Feature Film: Watch His Tributes to Its Inspirations Like Ozu, Linklater & Malick

in Architecture, Film | August 11th, 2017

We’ve fea­tured the work of many cin­e­ma-lov­ing video essay­ists (myself includ­ed) here on Open Cul­ture, none of it more artis­tic than that of a man who goes by the name of Kog­o­na­da. Whether deal­ing with the films of auteurs like Stan­ley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alfred Hitch­cock, or Wes Ander­son, he finds new and strik­ing ways — often free of tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tion, and some­times even free of spo­ken words alto­geth­er — to show us how their cin­e­mat­ic visions work, and in so doing to cre­ate new cin­e­mat­ic visions of his own. But when, we Kog­o­na­da fans have long won­dered, would this mys­te­ri­ous fel­low make a movie of his own?

The answer arrived at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val in the form of Colum­bus, Kog­o­nada’s fea­ture direc­to­r­i­al debut. “Colum­bus gets its title from the city where it’s set — Colum­bus, Indi­ana, home to a remark­able col­lec­tion of renowned works of mod­ern archi­tec­ture,” writes the New York­er’s Richard Brody, one of the many crit­ics to have already lav­ished praise on the new­ly released pic­ture.

“Those build­ings pro­vide an extra­or­di­nary premise for the dra­ma, which is a vision­ary trans­for­ma­tion of a famil­iar genre: a young adult’s com­ing-of-age sto­ry. For once, that trope doesn’t involve a sex­u­al awak­en­ing or a fam­i­ly rev­e­la­tion; it’s the tale of an intel­lec­tu­al blos­som­ing, thanks to a new friend­ship that aris­es amid trou­bled cir­cum­stances.”

Those trou­bled cir­cum­stances have to do with the par­ents of the two main char­ac­ters: Casey, a recent high-school grad­u­ate who’s stayed in town to care for a moth­er try­ing to kick a metham­phet­a­mine habit, and Jin, a fortysome­thing trans­la­tor who’s flown in from his home in Korea (birth­place of both the Mid­west-raised Kog­o­na­da and the film’s Los Ange­les-raised star John Cho) to watch over his father, an archi­tec­tur­al the­o­rist plunged into a coma by a stroke. “These par­al­lel lines meet when Casey offers to show the stranger her town,” writes Rolling Stone’s Peter Tra­vers in his review. “ ‘Meth and mod­ernism are real­ly big here,’ she tells Jin, as he becomes increas­ing­ly intrigued by this girl who sees the art and the human­i­ty in build­ings.”

Soon Jin and Casey take “baby steps toward a rela­tion­ship, in a man­ner that recalls Richard Lin­klater’s Before Sun­rise.” That film, and its suc­ces­sors Before Sun­set and Before Mid­night, fig­ure heav­i­ly into Kog­o­nada’s video essay on Lin­klater, “On Cin­e­ma & Time.” Oth­er influ­ences, cit­ed by crit­ics as well as Kog­o­na­da him­self, include Ter­ence Mal­ick, whose way with the ele­men­tal he exam­ined in “Fire & Water,” and Yasu­jiro Ozu, whose films got him think­ing about cin­e­ma in the first place. As he put it to Indiewire, he start­ed by think­ing he would “try to fig­ure out what it is about his films that ini­tial­ly felt very unim­pres­sive, but kept haunt­ing me,” to under­stand why Ozu “isn’t easy to just reduce to some­thing — he cer­tain­ly is not this sort of tra­di­tion­al­ist, he’s cer­tain­ly not a west­ern mod­ernist, he is some­thing else and what­ev­er he was explor­ing and offer­ing felt so rel­e­vant, even today.”

Kog­o­nada’s video essays “Way of Ozu” and “Pas­sage­ways” reveal not just the Japan­ese mas­ter’s use of archi­tec­tur­al spaces, but Kog­o­nada’s inter­est in such spaces. Colum­bus brings the depth of that inter­est to the fore: “The direc­tor pro­vokes aware­ness of the Mod­ernist Colum­bus by treat­ing it as one of the film’s char­ac­ters,” writes Archi­tec­tur­al Record’s Dante A. Ciampaglia. “It’s both pro­tag­o­nist and neme­sis for Casey and Jin as they wan­der the city, explore its archi­tec­tur­al boun­ty, and find it both reflect­ing inner strug­gles and inspir­ing epipha­nies.” As Kog­o­na­da him­self puts it, “I think that’s the thing that inter­ests me, the rela­tion­ship between emp­ty spaces and life itself.” May he find many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore it onscreen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

How Richard Lin­klater (Slack­er, Dazed and Con­fused, Boy­hood) Tells Sto­ries with Time: Six Video Essays

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Positive Psychology: A Free Online Course from Harvard University

in | August 11th, 2017

A quick fyi: Tal Ben-Sha­har teach­es a course on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy at Har­vard. And it’s appar­ent­ly one of the most pop­u­lar cours­es the uni­ver­si­ty has ever offered. Above you can watch the 30 lec­tures in an admit­ted­ly grainy for­mat. In 2006, NPR wrote: “Twice a week, some 900 stu­dents attend Tal Ben-Sha­har’s class on what he calls “how to get hap­py.” … His class offers research from the rel­a­tive­ly new field of pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy, which focus­es on what makes peo­ple hap­py, rather than just their patholo­gies.”

The Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy lec­tures have been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

The Foun­da­tions of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: Free Cours­es from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A Crash Course on Psy­chol­o­gy: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Ray Bradbury Reveals the True Meaning of Fahrenheit 451: It’s Not About Censorship, But People “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

in Books | August 10th, 2017

Even those of us who’ve nev­er read Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 know it as a sear­ing indict­ment of gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. Or at least we think we know it, and besides, what else could the sto­ry of a dystopi­an future where Amer­i­ca has out­lawed books whose main char­ac­ter burns the few remain­ing, secret­ed-away vol­umes to earn his liv­ing be about? It turns out that Brad­bury him­self had oth­er ideas about the mean­ing of his best-known nov­el, and in the last years of his life he tried pub­licly to cor­rect the pre­vail­ing inter­pre­ta­tion — and to his mind, the incor­rect one.

“Fahren­heit 451 is not, he says firm­ly, a sto­ry about gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship,” wrote the Los Ange­les Week­ly’s Amy E. Boyle John­son in 2007. “Nor was it a response to Sen­a­tor Joseph McCarthy, whose inves­ti­ga­tions had already instilled fear and sti­fled the cre­ativ­i­ty of thou­sands.” Rather, he meant his 1953 nov­el as “a sto­ry about how tele­vi­sion destroys inter­est in read­ing lit­er­a­ture.” It’s about, as he puts it above, peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” John­son quotes Brad­bury describ­ing tele­vi­sion as a medi­um that “gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” spread­ing “fac­toids” instead of knowl­edge. “They stuff you with so much use­less infor­ma­tion, you feel full.”

He did­n’t much like radio either: just two years before Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury wrote to his sci-fi col­league Richard Math­e­son bemoan­ing its con­tri­bu­tion to “our grow­ing lack of atten­tion,” and its cre­ation of a “hop­scotch­ing exis­tence” that “makes it almost impos­si­ble for peo­ple, myself includ­ed, to sit down and get into a nov­el again.” For the aban­don­ment of read­ing he saw in soci­ety, and from which he extrap­o­lat­ed in his book, he blamed not the state but the peo­ple, an enter­tai­ment-as-opi­ate-addict­ed “demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety whose diverse pop­u­la­tion turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cab­in and blacks dis­ap­prove of Lit­tle Black Sam­bo,” lead­ing to wide­spread cen­sor­ship and even­tu­al­ly the burn­ing of all read­ing mate­r­i­al.

But books still do face chal­lenges (and the FBI even had its eye on Brad­bury and his genre), chal­lenges only an intel­li­gent, non-numbed pub­lic can beat back. “I get let­ters from teach­ers all the time say­ing my books have been banned tem­porar­i­ly,” says Brad­bury in the clip above. “I say, don’t wor­ry about it, put ’em back on the shelves. You keep putting them back and they keep tak­ing them off, and you final­ly win.” The authors, even Brad­bury, can’t help, but he would always tell these lit­er­ar­i­ly-mind­ed peo­ple who wrote to him in dis­tress the same thing: “You do the job. You’re the librar­i­an. You’re the teacher. Stand firm and you’ll win. And they always do.”

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:

Father Writes a Great Let­ter About Cen­sor­ship When Son Brings Home Per­mis­sion Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Cen­sored Book, Fahren­heit 451

Who Was Afraid of Ray Brad­bury & Sci­ence Fic­tion? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959)

Ray Brad­bury: “I Am Not Afraid of Robots. I Am Afraid of Peo­ple” (1974)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Century of Global Warming Visualized in a 35 Second Video

in Environment | August 10th, 2017

Antti Lip­po­nen, a researcher at the Finnish Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Insti­tute, gath­ered his­tor­i­cal data from NASA and pro­duced a short video effec­tive­ly show­ing that, from 1900 through 2016, the tem­per­a­ture has steadi­ly got­ten warmer world­wide. Each spoke of the wheel rep­re­sents one of 191 dif­fer­ent coun­tries. And the hot­ter the col­or (e.g. oranges and reds), the warmer the tem­per­a­ture. You can get a clos­er look at the his­tor­i­cal pro­gres­sion here. The mate­ri­als have been released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license on Flickr.

Note: If you want to bet­ter under­stand the sci­ence of Glob­al Warm­ing, we’d rec­om­mend watch­ing the lec­tures from this free Glob­al Warm­ing course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go:

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!

via Yale Envi­ron­ment 360

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Ani­ma­tions Show the Melt­ing Arc­tic Sea Ice, and What the Earth Would Look Like When All of the Ice Melts

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Sup­port the City Threat­ened by Cli­mate Change: A Poignant New Sculp­ture

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

Rebecca Solnit Picks 13 Songs That Will Remind Us of Our Power to Change the World, Even in Seemingly Dark Times

in Books, Music, Politics | August 10th, 2017

Image by Shawn, via Flickr Com­mons

Apoc­a­lypses have always been pop­u­lar as mass belief and enter­tain­ment. Maybe it’s a col­lec­tive desire for ret­ri­bu­tion or redemp­tion, or a kind of ver­ti­go humans expe­ri­ence when star­ing into the abyss of the unknown. Bet­ter to end it all than live in neu­rot­ic uncer­tain­ty. Maybe we find it impos­si­ble to think of a future world exist­ing hun­dreds, thou­sands, mil­lions of years after our deaths. As Rebec­ca Sol­nit observes in Hope in the Dark: Untold His­to­ries, Wild Pos­si­bil­i­ties, “peo­ple have always been good at imag­in­ing the end of the world, which is much eas­i­er to pic­ture than the strange side­long paths of change in a world with­out end.” What if the world nev­er ends, but goes on for­ev­er, chang­ing and evolv­ing in unimag­in­able ways?

This is the baili­wick of sci­ence fic­tion, but also the domain of his­to­ry, a hind­sight view of cen­turies past when wars, tyran­ni­cal con­quests, famines, and dis­eases near­ly wiped out entire populations—when it seemed to them a near cer­tain­ty that noth­ing would or could sur­vive the present hor­ror. And yet it did.

This may be no con­so­la­tion to the vic­tims of vio­lence and plague, but the world has gone on for the liv­ing, peo­ple have adapt­ed and sur­vived, even under the cur­rent, very real threats of nuclear war and cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change. And through­out his­to­ry, both small and large groups of peo­ple have changed the world for the bet­ter, though it hard­ly seemed pos­si­ble at the time. Sol­nit’s book chron­i­cles these his­to­ries, and last year, she released a playlist as a com­pan­ion for the book.

Hope in the Dark makes good on its title through a col­lec­tion of essays about “every­thing,” writes Alice Gre­go­ry at The New York Times, “from the Zap­atis­tas to weath­er fore­cast­ing to the fall of the Berlin Wall.” The book is “part his­to­ry of pro­gres­sive suc­cess sto­ries, part extend­ed argu­ment for hope as a cat­a­lyst for action.” Sol­nit wrote the book in 2004, dur­ing the reelec­tion of George W. Bush—a time when pro­gres­sives despaired of ever see­ing the end of chick­en­hawk sabre-rat­tling, wars for prof­it, pri­va­ti­za­tion of the pub­lic sphere, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, theo­crat­ic polit­i­cal projects, cur­tail­ing of civ­il rights, or the dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism the admin­is­tra­tion whole­heart­ed­ly embraced (as Nao­mi Klein’s The Shock Doc­trine detailed). Plus ça change.…

In March of last year, Hay­mar­ket Books reis­sued Hope in the Dark, and on Novem­ber 10th, Sol­nit post­ed a link to a free down­load of the book on Face­book. It was down­loaded over 30,000 times in one week. Along with oth­er pro­gres­sive intel­lec­tu­als like Klein and Richard Rorty, Solnit—who became inter­na­tion­al­ly known for the term “mansplain­ing” in her essay, then book, Men Explain Things to Me—has now been cast as a “Cas­san­dra fig­ure of the left,” Gre­go­ry writes. But she rejects the dis­as­trous futil­i­ty inher­ent in that anal­o­gy:

If you think of a kind of ecol­o­gy of ideas, there are more than enough peo­ple telling us how hor­rif­ic and ter­ri­ble and bad every­thing is, and I don’t real­ly need to join that project. There’s a whole oth­er project of try­ing to coun­ter­bal­ance that — some­times we do win and this is how it worked in the past. Change is often unpre­dictable and indi­rect. We don’t know the future. We’ve changed the world many times, and remem­ber­ing that, that his­to­ry, is real­ly a source of pow­er to con­tin­ue and it doesn’t get talked about near­ly enough.

If we don’t hear enough talk about hope, maybe we need to hear more hope­ful music, Sol­nit sug­gests in her Hope in the Dark playlist. Thir­teen songs long, it moves between Bey­on­cé and The Clash, Iggy Pop and Ste­vie Nicks, Black Flag and Big Free­dia.

While the selec­tions speak for them­selves, she offers brief com­men­tary on each of her choic­es in a post at Powell’s. Beyoncé’s “For­ma­tion,” Sol­nit writes, “refor­mu­lates, dig­ging deep into the past of sor­row and suf­fer­ing and injus­tice and pulling us all with her into a future that could be dif­fer­ent.” Pat­ti Smith’s anthem “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” feels like hope, Sol­nit says: “it’s right about the pow­er we have, which oblig­es us to act, and which many duck by pre­tend­ing we’re help­less.” Maybe that’s what apoc­a­lypses are all about—making us feel small and pow­er­less in the face of impend­ing doom. But there are oth­er kinds of reli­gion, like that of Lee Williams’ “Steal My Joy.” It’s a “gor­geous gospel song,” writes Sol­nit. “Joys­teal­ers are every­where. Nev­er sur­ren­der to them.” That sounds like an ide­al exhor­ta­tion to imag­ine and fight for a bet­ter future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Langston Hugh­es Cre­ates a List of His 100 Favorite Jazz Record­ings: Hear 80+ of Them in a Big Playlist

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