A Free Short Course on How Pixar Uses Physics to Make Its Effects

in Animation, Film, Technology | February 24th, 2017

A new com­put­er-ani­mat­ed spec­ta­cle that makes us rethink the rela­tion­ship between imag­i­na­tion and tech­nol­o­gy seems, now, to come out every few months. Audi­ences have grown used to var­i­ous com­put­er ani­ma­tion stu­dios all com­pet­ing to wow them, but not so long ago the very notion of enter­tain­ing ani­ma­tion made with com­put­ers sound­ed like sci­ence fic­tion. All that changed in the mid-1980s when a young ani­ma­tor named John Las­seter breathed life into the CGI stars of such now sim­ple-look­ing but then rev­o­lu­tion­ary shorts as The Adven­tures of André and Wal­ly B. and Luxo Jr., the lat­ter being the first inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion by a cer­tain Pixar Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios.

We know Pixar today as the out­fit respon­si­ble for Toy Sto­ry, The Incred­i­bles, WALL‑E, and oth­er ground­break­ing com­put­er-ani­mat­ed fea­tures, each one more impres­sive than the last. How do they do it? Why, with ever-larg­er and more high­ly skilled cre­ative and tech­no­log­i­cal teams, of course, all of whom work atop a basic foun­da­tion laid by Las­seter and his pre­de­ces­sors in the art of com­put­er ani­ma­tion, in the search for answers to one ques­tion: how can we get these dig­i­tal machines to con­vinc­ing­ly sim­u­late our world?

After all, even imag­i­nary char­ac­ters must emote, move around, and bump into one anoth­er with con­vic­tion, and do it in a medi­um of light, wind, water, and much else at that, all ulti­mate­ly under­gird­ed by the laws of physics.

Thanks to Pixar and their com­pe­ti­tion, not a few mem­bers of the past cou­ple gen­er­a­tions have grown up dream­ing of mas­ter­ing com­put­er ani­ma­tion them­selves. Now, in part­ner­ship with online edu­ca­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion Khan Acad­e­my, they have a place to start: Pixar in a Box, a series of short inter­ac­tive cours­es on how to “ani­mate bounc­ing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make vir­tu­al fire­works explode,” which vivid­ly demon­strates that “the sub­jects you learn in school — math, sci­ence, com­put­er sci­ence, and human­i­ties — are used every day to cre­ate amaz­ing movies.” The effects course gets deep­er into the nit­ty-grit­ty of just how com­put­er ani­ma­tors have found ways of tak­ing real phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na and “break­ing them down into mil­lions of tiny par­ti­cles and con­trol­ling them using com­put­er pro­gram­ming.”

It all comes down to devel­op­ing and using par­ti­cle sys­tems, pro­grams designed to repli­cate the motion of the real par­ti­cles that make up the phys­i­cal world. “Using par­ti­cles is a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of real physics,” says Pixar Effects Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor Matt Wong, “but it’s an effec­tive tool for artists. The more par­ti­cles you use, the clos­er you get to real physics. Most of our sim­u­la­tions require mil­lions and mil­lions of par­ti­cles to cre­ate believ­able water,” for instance, which requires a lev­el of com­put­ing pow­er scarce­ly imag­in­able in 1982, when Pixar’s own effects artist Bill Reeves (who appears in the one of these videos) first used a par­ti­cle sys­tem for a visu­al effect in Star Trek II. These effects have indeed come a long way, but as any­one who takes this course will sus­pect, com­put­er ani­ma­tion has only begun to show us the worlds it can real­ize.

For more Pixar/Khan Acad­e­my cours­es, please see the items in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my Offer a Free Online Course on Sto­ry­telling

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Ani­ma­tions from Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Sto­ry­telling … Makes for an Addic­tive Par­lor Game

Free Online Physics Cours­es

A Rare Look Inside Pixar Stu­dios

The Beau­ty of Pixar

The First 3D Dig­i­tal Film Cre­at­ed by Ed Cat­mull, Co-Founder of Pixar (1970)

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

Bertrand Russell Writes an Artful Letter, Stating His Refusal to Debate British Fascist Leader Oswald Mosley (1962)

in History, Letters | February 23rd, 2017

Image by Nation­al Por­trait Gallery, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Chang­ing the minds of oth­ers has nev­er count­ed among human­i­ty’s eas­i­est tasks, and it seems only to have become an ever-stiffer chal­lenge as his­to­ry has ground along. Increas­ing­ly many, as Yale pro­fes­sor David Bromwich recent­ly argued in the Lon­don Review of Books, “have had no prac­tice in using words to influ­ence peo­ple unlike them­selves. That is an art that can be lost. It depends on a quan­tum of acci­den­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion that is miss­ing in a life of organ­ised con­tacts.” We might find our­selves in rea­son­ably fruit­ful debates with basi­cal­ly like-mind­ed friends, acquain­tances, and strangers on the inter­net, but can we ever con­vince, or be con­vinced by, some­one tru­ly dif­fer­ent from us?

Bertrand Rus­sell doubt­ed it. In 1962, long before the struc­tures of the inter­net allowed us to build tighter echo cham­bers than ever before, the Nobel-win­ning philoso­pher “received a series of let­ters from an unlike­ly cor­re­spon­dent — Sir Oswald Mosley, who had found­ed the British Union of Fas­cists thir­ty years ear­li­er,” writes Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va.

“Mosley was invit­ing — or, rather, pro­vok­ing — Rus­sell to engage in a debate, in which he could per­suade the moral philoso­pher of the mer­its of fas­cism.” Even at the age of 89, with lit­tle time and much else to do, Rus­sell declined with the utmost force and clar­i­ty in a piece of cor­re­spon­dence fea­tured on Let­ters of Note:

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your let­ter and for your enclo­sures. I have giv­en some thought to our recent cor­re­spon­dence. It is always dif­fi­cult to decide on how to respond to peo­ple whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repel­lent to one’s own. It is not that I take excep­tion to the gen­er­al points made by you but that every ounce of my ener­gy has been devot­ed to an active oppo­si­tion to cru­el big­otry, com­pul­sive vio­lence, and the sadis­tic per­se­cu­tion which has char­ac­terised the phi­los­o­phy and prac­tice of fas­cism.

I feel oblig­ed to say that the emo­tion­al uni­vers­es we inhab­it are so dis­tinct, and in deep­est ways opposed, that noth­ing fruit­ful or sin­cere could ever emerge from asso­ci­a­tion between us.

I should like you to under­stand the inten­si­ty of this con­vic­tion on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I val­ue in human expe­ri­ence and human achieve­ment.

Yours sin­cere­ly,

Bertrand Rus­sell

Rus­sell passed on eight years lat­er, in 1970, and Mosley a decade there­after. “His final mes­sage to the British peo­ple appeared in a let­ter to the New States­man writ­ten only a week ear­li­er,” remem­bers jour­nal­ist Hugh Pur­cell in that news­pa­per. It con­cerned an arti­cle’s descrip­tion of the “Olympia ral­ly,” the 1934 deba­cle that lost the British Union of Fas­cists much of what pub­lic sup­port it enjoyed. “The largest audi­ence ever seen at that time assem­bled to fill the Olympia hall and hear the speech,” Mosley insist­ed. “A small minor­i­ty deter­mined by con­tin­u­ous shout­ing to pre­vent my speech being heard. After due warn­ing our stew­ards removed with their bare hands men among whom were some armed with such weapons as razors and knives. The audi­ence were then able to lis­ten to a speech which last­ed for near­ly two hours.”

The New States­men, print­ing Mosley’s let­ter posthu­mous­ly, ran it under this intro­duc­tion: “Through­out his life he was intent on per­suad­ing peo­ple that their view of his­to­ry was mis­tak­en.” Despite his unceas­ing efforts, he ulti­mate­ly per­suad­ed few — and it would hard­ly have required as keen an observ­er as Rus­sell to see that some­one like Mosley cer­tain­ly was­n’t about to let him­self be per­suad­ed by any­one else.

via Let­ters of Note/Brain Pick­ings and The Bertrand Rus­sell Archives, McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing in a Healthy Democ­ra­cy

Lis­ten to ‘Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian,’ Bertrand Russell’s Pow­er­ful Cri­tique of Reli­gion (1927)

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Face to Face with Bertrand Rus­sell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish’

How Bertrand Rus­sell Turned The Bea­t­les Against the Viet­nam War

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

How Did Nietzsche Become the Most Misunderstood & Bastardized Philosopher?: A Video from Slate Explains

in Philosophy | February 23rd, 2017

Is there a more mis­un­der­stood philoso­pher than Friedrich Niet­zsche? Grant­ed, the ques­tion makes two assump­tions: 1) That peo­ple read phi­los­o­phy 2) That peo­ple read Friedrich Niet­zsche. Per­haps nei­ther of these things is wide­ly true. Many peo­ple get their phi­los­o­phy from film and tele­vi­sion: Good Will Hunt­ing, True Detec­tive, Com­ing to Amer­i­ca.… There’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with that. I don’t read med­ical books. Most of my knowl­edge of med­i­cine comes from hos­pi­tal dra­mas. (If you ever hear me make unsourced med­ical claims, please remind me of this.)

But back to Niet­zsche…. If few peo­ple read phi­los­o­phy in gen­er­al and Niet­zsche in par­tic­u­lar, why is his name so well-known, why are his ideas so bad­ly man­gled? Because some of the peo­ple who read a lit­tle Niet­zsche write films and tele­vi­sion shows. In many of them, he emerges as a twist­ed nihilist with no scru­ples and lit­tle regard for human life. In the most infa­mous case of Niet­zsche-twist­ing, the philosopher’s sis­ter extract­ed from his books what she want­ed them to say, which sound­ed very much like the ideas of the Nazis who lat­er quot­ed him.

Nietzsche’s mas­tery of the apho­rism and his fierce­ly polem­i­cal nature have made him supreme­ly quotable: “God is dead,” “What does not kill us, makes us stronger.” And so on. Bring the con­text of these state­ments to bear and they sound noth­ing like what we have imag­ined. The video above from Shon Arieh-Lerer and Daniel Hub­bard explains how Niet­zsche became “the most absurd­ly bas­tardized philoso­pher in Hol­ly­wood.” It leads with a telling­ly hilar­i­ous clip from The Sopra­nos in which A.J. calls the philoso­pher “Niche” and Tony tells him, “even if God is dead, you’re still gonna kiss his ass.”

We might half expect Tony to embrace the Ger­man philoso­pher. The way Nietzsche’s been inter­pret­ed seems to jus­ti­fy the prin­ci­ples of sociopaths. This should not be so. “In real­i­ty,” the video’s pro­duc­ers write at Slate, “Niet­zsche was a very sub­tle thinker.” The two biggest mis­con­cep­tions about Niet­zsche, that he was a nihilist and an anti-Semi­te, get his phi­los­o­phy griev­ous­ly wrong. Niet­zsche “wrote let­ters to his fam­i­ly and friends telling them to stop being anti-Semit­ic” (and call­ing anti-Semi­tes “abort­ed fetus­es.”) He famous­ly broke off his intense friend­ship with Richard Wag­n­er in part because of Wagner’s anti-Semi­tism. His work is not kind to Judaism, but he rages against anti-Semi­tism.

Far from endors­ing nihilist ideas, Niet­zsche feared their rise and con­se­quences. So how did he become “a dar­ling of Nazis and sad teenagers?” The car­i­ca­ture arose in part because read­ers from his day to ours have, like Tony Sopra­no, found his com­plete and total rejec­tion of Judeo-Chris­t­ian moral­i­ty too shock­ing to get beyond, mis­char­ac­ter­iz­ing it as tan­ta­mount to the rejec­tion of all human val­ues. On the con­trary, Niet­zsche argued for the “reval­u­a­tion” of val­ues, “the exact oppo­site of what one might expect,” he wrote,” not at all sad and gloomy, but much more like a new and bare­ly describ­able type of light, hap­pi­ness, relief, amuse­ment, encour­age­ment, dawn.”

Of course, the fact that Nietzsche—or a butchered ver­sion thereof—was co-opt­ed by the Nazis did more to sul­ly his name than any­thing he actu­al­ly wrote. “By the time Niet­zsche made his way into Amer­i­can pop cul­ture,” says Arieh-Lerer, “we were pre­dis­posed to get­ting him wrong.” Niet­zsche may have had some strange qua­si-mys­ti­cal con­cep­tions, and he believed in a def­i­nite hier­ar­chy of cul­tures, but he was not a racist or a psy­chopath. He has been as mis­un­der­stood as many of the sad teenagers who love him. Per­haps you will be moved to read him for your­self after see­ing his reha­bil­i­ta­tion above. If so, we can point you toward online edi­tions of near­ly all of his books here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Did Niet­zsche Real­ly Mean When He Wrote “God is Dead”?

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

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

Watch Leonard Bernstein Conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Using Only His Eyebrows

in Music, Random | February 23rd, 2017

Per­haps you’ll recall the episode from Sein­feld when Bob Cobb, a con­duc­tor for The Police Orches­tra, insists that every­one call him “mae­stro”–and only “mae­stro.” The pre­ten­tious­ness of the sug­ges­tion makes for some good com­e­dy, that’s for sure.

But occa­sion­al­ly the hon­orif­ic title is fit­ting. Here’s one such instance. Above, watch Leonard Bern­stein con­duct the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra, lead­ing them through Haydn’s Sym­pho­ny No. 88 … with only his eye­brows and small facial ges­tures. No baton, thank you. A mae­stro indeed.

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:

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed at Har­vard in 1973)

Hear What is Jazz?: Leonard Bernstein’s Intro­duc­tion to the Great Amer­i­can Art Form (1956)

Leonard Bern­stein Demys­ti­fies the Rock Rev­o­lu­tion for Curi­ous (if Square) Grown-Ups in 1967

“Stop It and Just DO”: Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Advice on Overcoming Creative Blocks, Written by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse (1965)

in Art, Creativity, Letters | February 22nd, 2017

A quick fyi: this video is a lit­tle not safe for work.

You know you want to cre­ate some­thing, but how on Earth to get it out of your mind and into real­i­ty? Some­times you sim­ply can’t see the way for­ward, a sit­u­a­tion in which every cre­ator finds them­selves soon­er or lat­er. When the sculp­tor Eva Hesse hit a cre­ative block in 1965, she wrote of her prob­lem to a close friend, the con­cep­tu­al artist Sol Lewitt. He emphat­i­cal­ly sug­gest­ed that she “just stop think­ing, wor­ry­ing, look­ing over your shoul­der,” and fur­ther­more that she stop

won­der­ing, doubt­ing, fear­ing, hurt­ing, hop­ing for some easy way out, strug­gling, grasp­ing, con­fus­ing, itch­ing, scratch­ing, mum­bling, bum­bling, grum­bling, hum­bling, stum­bling, num­bling, ram­bling, gam­bling, tum­bling, scum­bling, scram­bling, hitch­ing, hatch­ing, bitch­ing, moan­ing, groan­ing, hon­ing, bon­ing, horse-shit­ting, hair-split­ting, nit-pick­ing, piss-trick­ling, nose stick­ing, ass-goug­ing, eye­ball-pok­ing, fin­ger-point­ing, alley­way-sneak­ing, long wait­ing, small step­ping, evil-eye­ing, back-scratch­ing, search­ing, perch­ing, besmirch­ing, grind­ing, grind­ing, grind­ing away at your­self. Stop it and just

DO

You can read Lewit­t’s reply in full, which offers much more col­or­ful advice and sup­port­ing ver­biage besides (as well as a far bold­er “DO” than HTML can ren­der), at Let­ters of Note. Though per­son­al­ly tai­lored to Hesse and her dis­tinc­tive sen­si­bil­i­ties, Lewit­t’s sug­ges­tions also show the poten­tial for wider appli­ca­tion: “Try and tick­le some­thing inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ ” “Don’t wor­ry about cool, make your own uncool.” “If you fear, make it work for you — draw & paint your fear & anx­i­ety.” “Prac­tice being stu­pid, dumb, unthink­ing, emp­ty.” “Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what hap­pens but main­ly relax and let every­thing go to hell — you are not respon­si­ble for the world — you are only respon­si­ble for your work — so DO IT.”

Though all this has plen­ty of impact on the page, it has an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind when per­formed by actor (and cham­pi­on let­ter-read­er) Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch, as seen and heard in the Let­ters Live video above. Putting on a not-over­done New York accent, the Eng­lish star of Sher­lock and The Imi­ta­tion Game deliv­ers with all nec­es­sary force Lewit­t’s advice to “leave the ‘world’ and ‘ART’ alone and also quit fondling your ego,” to “emp­ty your mind and con­cen­trate on what you are doing,” to know “that you don’t have to jus­ti­fy your work — not even to your­self.” Be warned that this cre­ative coach­ing ses­sion does gets a lit­tle NSFW at times, but then, so do some of the finest works of art — and so do the truths we need to hear to make them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Famous Writ­ers Deal With Writer’s Block: Their Tips & Tricks

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Let­ter to the High School That Burned Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads a Let­ter Alan Tur­ing Wrote in “Dis­tress” Before His Con­vic­tion For “Gross Inde­cen­cy”

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Albert Camus’ Touch­ing Thank You Let­ter to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher

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

Rare Recordings of Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg & More Now Available in a Digital Archive Created by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

in Art, Internet Archive, Poetry | February 22nd, 2017

Image via Chris­ti­aan Ton­nis

Amer­i­cans can be quite igno­rant of the rich­ness of our coun­try’s cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Part of this igno­rance, I sus­pect, comes down to prej­u­dice. Inno­v­a­tive Amer­i­can artists through­out his­to­ry have come from groups often demo­nized and mar­gin­al­ized by the wider soci­ety. The dom­i­nance of cor­po­rate com­merce also impov­er­ish­es the cul­tur­al land­scape. Poet­ry and exper­i­men­tal art don’t sell much, so some peo­ple think they have lit­tle val­ue.

Imag­ine if we were to invert these atti­tudes in pub­lic opin­ion: Amer­i­can poet­ry and art allow us to gain new per­spec­tives from peo­ple and parts of the coun­try we don’t know well; to enlarge and chal­lenge our reli­gious and polit­i­cal under­stand­ing; to expe­ri­ence a very dif­fer­ent kind of econ­o­my, built on aes­thet­ic inven­tion and free intel­lec­tu­al enter­prise rather than sup­ply, demand, and prof­it. Cre­ativ­i­ty and finance are not, of course, mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. But to con­sis­tent­ly favor one at the expense of the oth­er seems to me a great loss to every­one.

We find our­selves now in such a sit­u­a­tion, as pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, and the Cor­po­ra­tion for Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing face severe cuts or pos­si­ble de-fund­ing.

Such a polit­i­cal move would dev­as­tate many of the insti­tu­tions that fos­ter and pre­serve the country’s art and cul­ture, and rel­e­gate the arts to the pri­vate sphere, where only sums of pri­vate mon­ey deter­mine whose voic­es get heard. We can, how­ev­er, be very appre­cia­tive of pri­vate insti­tu­tions who make their col­lec­tions pub­lic through open access libraries like the Inter­net Archive.

One such col­lec­tion comes from the Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives Unit of Deck­er Library at the Mary­land Insti­tute Col­lege of Art (MICA), one of the old­est art col­leges in the U.S., and one of the most high­ly regard­ed. They have dig­i­tal­ly donat­ed to Archive.org “a num­ber of rare and pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased audio record­ings,” they write in a press release, “span­ning the 1960s through the late 1990s” and con­sist­ing of “over 700 audio­cas­sette tapes” doc­u­ment­ing “lit­er­a­ture and poet­ry read­ings, fine art and design lec­tures, race and cul­ture dis­cus­sions” and col­lege events.

These include (enter the archive here) a two hour poet­ry read­ing from Allen Gins­berg in 1978, at the top, with sev­er­al oth­er read­ings and talks from Gins­berg in the archive, the read­ing below it from Eileen Myles in 1992, and read­ings and talks above and below from Amiri Bara­ka, Anne Wald­man, and William S. Bur­roughs. The col­lec­tion rep­re­sents a “strong focus on lit­er­a­ture and poet­ry,” and fea­tures “a sym­po­sium on the Black Moun­tain poets.” Giv­en the school’s mis­sion, you’ll also find in the archive “a large selec­tion of talks and lec­tures by visu­al artists, such as Elaine de Koon­ing, Alice Neel, Gor­don Parks, Ad Rhine­hart and Ben Shahn.”

Col­lec­tions like this one from MICA and the Inter­net Archive allow any­one with inter­net access to expe­ri­ence in some part the breadth and range of Amer­i­can art and poet­ry, no mat­ter their lev­el of access to pri­vate insti­tu­tions and sources of wealth. But the inter­net can­not ful­ly replace or sup­plant the need for pub­licly fund­ed arts ini­tia­tives in com­mu­ni­ties nation­wide.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An 18-Hour Playlist of Read­ings by the Beats: Ker­ouac, Gins­berg & Even Bukows­ki Too

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Hear Allen Gins­berg Teach “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”: Audio Lec­tures from His 1977 & 1981 Naropa Cours­es

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

Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: An Animated Introduction to the Most Insightful Study of American Democracy

in Philosophy, Politics | February 22nd, 2017

We can­not right­ly see our­selves with­out hon­est feed­back. Those who sur­round them­selves with syco­phants and peo­ple just like them only hear what they want to hear, and nev­er get an accu­rate sense of their capa­bil­i­ties and short­com­ings. And so the best feed­back often comes from peo­ple out­side our in-groups. This can be as true of nations as it can be of indi­vid­u­als, pro­vid­ed our crit­ics are char­i­ta­ble, even when unspar­ing­ly hon­est, and that they take a gen­uine inter­est in our well-being.

These qual­i­ties well describe one of the sharpest crit­ics of the Unit­ed States in the past two cen­turies. Alex­is de Toc­queville, aris­to­crat­ic French lawyer, his­to­ri­an, and polit­i­cal philoso­pher, who trav­eled to the fledg­ling coun­try in 1831 to observe a nation then in the grip of a pop­ulist fever under Andrew Jack­son, a pres­i­dent who became noto­ri­ous for his expro­pri­a­tion of indige­nous land, ruth­less relo­ca­tion poli­cies, and embrace of South­ern slav­ery. But the groups who flour­ished under Jackson’s rule did so with a tremen­dous enthu­si­asm that the French thinker admired but also viewed with a very skep­ti­cal eye.

De Toc­queville pub­lished his obser­va­tions and analy­ses of the Unit­ed States in a now-famous book, Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca. Though we’ve come to take the idea of democ­ra­cy for grant­ed, for the young French­man, a child of Napoleon­ic Europe, it was “a high­ly exot­ic and new polit­i­cal option,” as Alain de Bot­ton tells us in his ani­mat­ed video intro­duc­tion above. De Toc­queville “pre­scient­ly believed that democ­ra­cy was going to be the future all over the world, and so he want­ed to know, ‘what would that be like?’”

With a grant from the French gov­ern­ment, De Toc­queville trav­eled the coun­try (then less than half its cur­rent size) for nine months, get­ting to know its peo­ple and cus­toms as best he could, and mak­ing a series of gen­er­al obser­va­tions that would form the vignettes and argu­ments in his book. He was “par­tic­u­lar­ly alive to the prob­lem­at­ic and dark­er sides of democ­ra­cy.” De Bot­ton dis­cuss­es five crit­i­cal insights from Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca. See three of them below, with quotes from De Toc­queville him­self.

1. Democ­ra­cy Breeds Mate­ri­al­ism.

For De Toc­queville one kind of materialism—the exces­sive pur­suit of wealth—disposed the coun­try to anoth­er, “a dan­ger­ous sick­ness of the human mind”—the denial of a spir­i­tu­al or intel­lec­tu­al life. “While man takes plea­sure in this hon­est and legit­i­mate pur­suit of well-being,” he wrote, “it is to be feared that in the end he may lose the use of his most sub­lime fac­ul­ties, and that by want­i­ng to improve every­thing around him, he may in the end degrade him­self.”

De Toc­queville, says De Bot­ton, observed that “mon­ey seemed to be quite sim­ply the only achieve­ment that Amer­i­cans respect­ed” and that “the only test of good­ness for any item was how much mon­ey it hap­pens to make.”

2. Democ­ra­cy Breeds Envy & Shame

“When all the pre­rog­a­tives of birth and for­tune have been abol­ished,” wrote De Toc­queville, “when every pro­fes­sion is open to every­one, an ambi­tious man may think it is easy to launch him­self on a great career and feel that he has been called to no com­mon des­tiny. But this is a delu­sion which expe­ri­ence quick­ly cor­rects.” Unable to rise above his cir­cum­stances, and yet believ­ing that he should be equal to his neigh­bors in achieve­ments, such a per­son may blame him­self and feel ashamed, or suc­cumb to envy and ill will.

De Toc­queville was far too opti­mistic about the abol­ish­ment of “pre­rog­a­tives of birth and for­tune,” but many Amer­i­cans might rec­og­nize them­selves still in his gen­er­al pic­ture, in which “the sense of unlim­it­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty could ini­tial­ly encour­age a sur­face cheer­ful­ness.” And yet, De Bot­ton notes, “as time passed and the major­i­ty failed to raise them­selves, Toc­queville not­ed that their mood dark­ened, that bit­ter­ness took hold and choked their spir­its, and that their hatred of them­selves and their mas­ters grew fierce.”

3. Tyran­ny of the Major­i­ty

De Toc­queville, De Bot­ton says, thought that “demo­c­ra­t­ic cul­ture… often ends up demo­niz­ing any asser­tion of dif­fer­ence, and espe­cial­ly cul­tur­al supe­ri­or­i­ty, even though such atti­tudes might be con­nect­ed with real mer­it.” In such a state, “soci­ety has an aggres­sive lev­el­ing instinct.”

It wasn’t only attacks on high cul­ture that De Toc­queville feared, but what he called the “Omnipo­tence of the Major­i­ty,” a phrase he used to denote the pow­er of pub­lic opin­ion as an almost total­i­tar­i­an means of social con­trol. In vol­ume two of his study, pub­lished in 1840, De Toc­queville devot­ed par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to “the pow­er which that major­i­ty nat­u­ral­ly exer­cis­es over the mind…. By what­ev­er polit­i­cal laws men are gov­erned in the ages of equal­i­ty, it may be fore­seen that faith in pub­lic opin­ion will become for them a species of reli­gion, and the major­i­ty its min­is­ter­ing prophet.”

From this pre­dic­tion, De Toc­queville fore­saw “two ten­den­cies; one lead­ing the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the oth­er pro­hibit­ing him from think­ing at all.”

De Bot­ton goes on to dis­cuss two close­ly relat­ed cri­tiques: democracy’s sus­pi­cion of all author­i­ty and its under­min­ing of free thought. Rather than encoun­ter­ing the kind of mar­ket­place of ideas the coun­try prides itself on fos­ter­ing, he found in few places “less inde­pen­dence of mind, and true free­dom of dis­cus­sion, than in Amer­i­ca.” The crit­i­cism is harsh, and De Toc­queville did not flat­ter his hosts often, and yet for all of its “inher­ent draw­backs,” De Bot­ton writes at the School of Life, the French­man “isn’t anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic.”

His aim is “to get us to be real­is­tic” about demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety and its ten­den­cies to inhib­it rather than enlarge many free­doms. As Arthur Gold­ham­mer observes at The Nation, De Toc­queville believed that “True free­dom lay not in the pur­suit of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic aims, but “in ‘slow and tran­quil’ action in con­cert with oth­ers shar­ing some col­lec­tive pur­pose.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing in a Healthy Democ­ra­cy

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

Slavoj Žižek Expounds on His Hatred of Teaching, Grading Papers, and Particularly Holding Office Hours

in Education | February 21st, 2017

“Those who can, do,” so we often used to hear, “and those who can’t, teach.” Nowa­days the sit­u­a­tion seems to have trans­formed into some­thing more like, “Those who can, do, at least in the occa­sion­al free moments when they don’t have to teach.” At first you just take a teach­ing gig on the side to sup­ple­ment your real career, and before you know it teach­ing has usurped that real career almost entire­ly. We’ve all heard com­plaints from aca­d­e­m­ic friends about the seem­ing­ly unbreak­able cycle of lec­tur­ing, grad­ing, and hold­ing office hours, but how many have put it in terms as stark as Slavoj Žižek does in the inter­view above?

“I hate, I hate, I hate — okay, talks are okay, but I hate giv­ing class­es,” says the Sloven­ian philoso­pher-crit­ic-show­man at a 2014 Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati Col­lege of Design, Archi­tec­ture, Art and Plan­ning con­fer­ence devot­ed to his work. “I’m proud to say, I did teach a cou­ple of semes­ters here, and all the grad­ing was pure bluff. I even open­ly told the stu­dents. I told them, I remem­ber — at the New School, for exam­ple, in New York, ‘If you don’t give me any of your shit­ty papers, you’ll get an A. If you give me a paper, I may read it and not like it, you can get a low­er grade.’ And it worked — I got no papers.” And so he solves the prob­lem of grad­ing.

But what of office hours? These he calls “the main rea­son I don’t want to teach,” because “stu­dents, they’re like oth­er peo­ple; the major­i­ty are bor­ing idiots, so I can­not imag­ine a worse expe­ri­ence than some idiot comes and starts to ask you ques­tions.” In oth­er coun­tries one might find a way to endure it, but “the prob­lem is, here in Unit­ed States, stu­dents tend to be so open that if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you per­son­al ques­tions, like pri­vate prob­lems, could you help them, and so on. What should I tell them? ‘I don’t care. Kill your­self. Not my prob­lem.’ ”

These teach­ing expe­ri­ences led Žižek’s to one con­clu­sion: “I like uni­ver­si­ties with­out stu­dents.” But not every­one cheers his pro­nounce­ment: “When­ev­er some­thing like this pops up, I wor­ry that some peo­ple will see it and say, ‘You see? That’s what I’ve been say­ing about those ivory tow­er types all along,’ ” writes one anony­mous aca­d­e­m­ic in response. “Žižek is an out­lier, in terms of both his stature and his atti­tude. Most work­ing aca­d­e­mics can’t get away with being dis­mis­sive of stu­dents, and even if we could, almost all of us would­n’t.”

Slate’s Rebec­ca Schu­man argues that the “real prob­lem with Žižek isn’t that he feels this way or that he says these things aloud. It’s that he does so and peo­ple think it’s hilar­i­ous. It’s that his view is, believe it or not, a com­mon ‘super­star’ view of stu­dents — so com­mon, in fact, that if you work at a research uni­ver­si­ty and actu­al­ly like teach­ing, you should maybe pre­tend you don’t, lest you appear not ‘seri­ous’ enough about your research.” A semi-fre­quent crit­ic of Žižek, most recent­ly of his endorse­ment of Don­ald Trump (“after all, the two thrice-mar­ried, out­spo­ken old­er gen­tle­men do have quite a bit in com­mon, a fact that would sure­ly hor­ri­fy them both”), Schu­man knows that the fault lies nev­er so much with the provo­ca­teur him­self as it does with our ten­den­cy to take his provo­ca­tions at face val­ue.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Answers the Ques­tion “Should We Teach Chil­dren to Believe in San­ta Claus?”

Slavoj Žižek Calls Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness a Form of “Mod­ern Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

Philoso­phers (Includ­ing Slavoj Žižek) and Ethi­cists Answer the Ques­tion: Is It OK to Punch Nazis?

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

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glasses

in Music | February 21st, 2017

Robert Tiso takes stemmed wine glass­es and turns them into a mag­i­cal musi­cal instrument–or what he calls the “glass harp.” As his web­site explains, “each glass is tuned by adding a pre­cise amount of water (watch a tuto­r­i­al here), while the sound is pro­duced by rub­bing the fin­ger­tips around the rims, sim­u­lat­ing the fric­tion of a vio­lin bow.” Above you can watch him play Bach’s “Toc­ca­ta and Fugue in D minor” (BWV 565), the free sheet music for which you can find here. And if you head over to Tiso’s YouTube chan­nel, you can watch him tack­le Rav­el, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Pachel­bel, and much more. 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!

via @WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All of Bach is Putting Bach’s Com­plete Works Online: 150 Done, 930 to Come

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

JS Bach’s The Well-Tem­pered Clavier Artis­ti­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed with Puls­ing Neon Lights

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Creates a Playlist of Protest Music for Our Troubled Times

in Music | February 21st, 2017

Pho­to by Steve Jurvet­son, via Flickr Com­mons

In 1992 Ice‑T’s met­al band Body Count mas­tered the art of shock pol­i­tics when the song “Cop Killer” put them “at the cen­tre of a nation­al out­rage.” But their polit­i­cal feroc­i­ty may have seemed much dimin­ished when, in 2015, they released a tongue-in-cheek update of Sui­ci­dal Ten­den­cies’ “Insti­tu­tion­al­ized” in which Ice‑T rails against his wife, bad tech sup­port, and an inter­rupt­ed ham sand­wich while on the set of Law & Order.

The past year’s events have jolt­ed Body Count back into fight­ing form. Their recent release “No Lives Mat­ter” com­bines top­i­cal social cri­tique with “Cop Killer”-style con­fronta­tion in a pum­mel­ing track rem­i­nis­cent of anoth­er 90s rap-met­al activist stal­wart. Ice‑T may have moved on from L.A. gang life to com­fort­able TV star­dom, but few would deny him his street cred or his con­tin­ued abil­i­ty to size up the sit­u­a­tion of the Amer­i­can under­class.

Anoth­er rap­per-slash-actor (slash-poet-slash-com­pos­er) has entered the world of protest music from a decid­ed­ly dif­fer­ent sphere. Now inter­na­tion­al­ly famous for his musi­cal Hamil­ton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work doesn’t speak truth to pow­er as much as it makes pow­er speak its truth. Hamil­ton, writes Mary Grace Garis at Bus­tle, “is a sear­ing reminder that Amer­i­ca is very much found­ed by immi­grants fac­ing per­se­cu­tion, and that our free­dom, like­wise, was fought for by immi­grants.”

Their musi­cal venues and polit­i­cal visions may span a wide Venn dia­gram, but like Body Count’s lat­est, Hamil­ton draws on both con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal rhetoric and music from the hey­day of “con­scious” hip-hop and alter­na­tive. Miran­da has wide­ly shared his influ­ences in his HAMthol­o­gy Playlist, and he remade sev­er­al of the show’s songs with some of his idols on The Hamil­ton Mix­tape. Con­tin­u­ing his cura­to­r­i­al role, and hav­ing “learned how to use the Spo­ti­fy thingy on my day off,” Miran­da now brings his fans the playlist above, which he calls “Rise Up Eyes Up Wise Up.”

The new mix begins with The Hamil­ton Mix­tape’s “Immi­grants (We Get the Job Done)” and moves on to a thor­ough­ly eclec­tic but SFW mix of Green Day, Tal­ib Kweli, Regi­na Spek­tor, Bob Dylan, Ruben Blades, and many oth­ers. It’s down­tem­po protest music, overall—no Body Count or Rage Against the Machine. Even Green Day’s entry is a bal­lad, “Are We the Wait­ing” from Amer­i­can Idiot. But then again, Hamil­ton’s fans often tend toward the down­tem­po end of the spec­trum. Let a thou­sand protest songs bloom, I say.

Miran­da announced the playlist on a new Twit­ter account, where he’s received a cou­ple hun­dred replies, includ­ing one from a fan who put the mix on Google Play. For those so inspired to revis­it or hear for the first time Hamil­ton’s reimag­in­ing of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment, find the orig­i­nal cast record­ing below. If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

via Bus­tle

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miran­da Reimag­ines Hamil­ton as a Girl on Drunk His­to­ry

Alexan­der Hamil­ton: Hip-Hop Hero at the White House Poet­ry Evening

“Alexan­der Hamil­ton” Per­formed with Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage

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