Franz Kafka Story Gets Adapted into an Award-Winning Australian Short Film: Watch Two Men

in Film, Literature | November 18th, 2016

“When you go walk­ing by night up a street and a man, vis­i­ble a long way off — for the street mounts uphill and there is a full moon — comes run­ning toward you, well, you don’t catch hold of him, not even if he is a fee­ble and ragged crea­ture, not even if some­one chas­es yelling at his heels, but you let him run on.” Good advice, you might think, “for it is night, and you can’t help it if the street goes uphill before you in the moon­light, and besides, these two have maybe start­ed that chase to amuse them­selves, or per­haps they are both chas­ing a third, per­haps the first is an inno­cent man and the sec­ond wants to mur­der him and you would become an acces­so­ry.”

Or “per­haps they don’t know any­thing about each oth­er and are mere­ly run­ning sep­a­rate­ly home to bed, per­haps they are night birds, per­haps the first man is armed. And any­how, haven’t you a right to be tired, haven’t you been drink­ing a lot of wine? You’re thank­ful that the sec­ond man is now long out of sight.” So goes the entire­ty of “Passers-by,” a very short sto­ry — one might now use the label “flash fic­tion” — writ­ten some­time between 1908 and 1913 by none oth­er than Franz Kaf­ka. If short sto­ries make more suit­able bases for fea­ture-length films than nov­els do, sure­ly extra-short sto­ries do the same for short films. Direc­tor Dominic Allen test­ed that idea in 2009 with Two Men, the adap­ta­tion of “Passers-by” above.

Allen has also made the bold move of trans­plant­i­ng the sto­ry from Kafka’s home turf of a vague and alle­gor­i­cal Europe to the Kim­ber­ley, the north­ern tip of West­ern Aus­tralia and one of the first set­tled parts of the con­ti­nent — not by Euro­peans, but prob­a­bly by pre-Indone­sians of 41,000 years ago. “My hope was that by retelling a hun­dred year old philo­soph­i­cal tale set in Euro­pean city at night in such a dif­fer­ent con­text as deep in the Aus­tralian Kim­ber­ley in the heat of a sun­ny day and by hav­ing it retold by a mod­ern Indige­nous thinker,” writes Allen, “I would affirm an ele­ment of human­i­ty’s com­mon­al­i­ty.”

Two Men also hap­pened to win him the Emerg­ing Aus­tralian Film­mak­er Award at the Mel­bourne Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val and the 2009 Inside Film Ris­ing Tal­ent Award, but his oth­er more imme­di­ate goals includ­ed cel­e­brat­ing “the robust and healthy youth of Fitzroy Cross­ing,” the town in which he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors filmed, and to “rein­force Kafka’s point that it’s impos­si­ble to ever tru­ly know anoth­er’s moti­va­tions.” Or, in the local­ly inflect­ed words of the short­’s motion­less observ­er-nar­ra­tor, “You just bloody nev­er know.”

Two Men will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kaf­ka: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Lit­er­ary Genius

Franz Kaf­ka: The Ani­mat­ed Short Film

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Kafka’s Para­ble, “Before the Law”

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

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

Prague’s Franz Kaf­ka Inter­na­tion­al Named World’s Most Alien­at­ing Air­port

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.

Watch Soundbreaking, PBS’ 8‑Part Documentary Exploring the History of Recorded Music (Free for a Limited Time)

in Music | November 18th, 2016

Update: After mak­ing the videos avail­able for a cou­ple of weeks, PBS has now tak­en them down. If you’re real­ly inter­est­ed in watch­ing Sound­break­ing, you can pur­chase it in DVD for­mat. It’s worth it.

From Novem­ber 14 through Novem­ber 23, PBS is air­ing an eight-part series, Sound­break­ing, which explores the art of record­ing music and the moments when new sounds were born. The series fea­tures “more than 160 orig­i­nal inter­views with some of the most cel­e­brat­ed record­ing artists of all time,” high­light­ing the “cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy” that trans­formed the way we make music. You can now stream 3 of the first 8 episodes online, with the rest soon to come. If there are any geo-restric­tions, we apol­o­gize in advance.

Watch the first episode, “The Art of Record­ing,” up top. Leg­endary pro­duc­ers like Bri­an Eno, Daniel Lanois, Quin­cy Jones, Tony Vis­con­ti, Rick Rubin and George Mar­tin all make appear­ances.

• Episode 2: Paint­ing With Sound (right above)
• Episode 3: The Human Instru­ment

A new episode should appear each day. To find them, click here and then scroll down.

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:

265 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Abbey Road Stu­dios, Cour­tesy of the New Google Site “Inside Abbey Road”

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

Zen Master Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influential Thinker

in Philosophy, Psychology | November 17th, 2016

The twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pro­duced a fair few thinkers on the human mind whose obser­va­tions still res­onate today. The Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and psy­chother­a­pist Carl Gus­tav Jung cer­tain­ly appears in that group, as does the British philoso­pher and inter­preter of Bud­dhism Alan Watts, and though not a week goes by when I don’t hear their words cit­ed, I sel­dom hear the words of both of them cit­ed by the same per­son. Though near­ly two gen­er­a­tions (among oth­er things) sep­a­rat­ed Watts and Jung, the two men did once meet, in 1958, as Watts trav­eled through Europe with his father. Three years lat­er, Jung passed on and Watts record­ed the lec­ture above.

What made Jung such an impor­tant observ­er of human­i­ty? Watts points to “one fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that under­lay all his work and that was most extra­or­di­nar­i­ly exem­pli­fied in Jung him­self as a per­son,” which he calls Jung’s “recog­ni­tion of the polar­i­ty of life. That is to say, his resis­tance to what is to my mind the dis­as­trous and absurd hypoth­e­sis, that there is in this uni­verse a rad­i­cal and absolute con­flict between good and evil, light and dark­ness that can nev­er nev­er nev­er be har­mo­nized.”

He goes on to talk for a lit­tle under an hour about about Jung him­self, Jung’s influ­ence on his own work as a “com­par­a­tive philoso­pher,” and the con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vance of Jung’s ideas to the mod­ern world — all of which he ties togeth­er in an inte­grat­ed trib­ute to this “inte­grat­ed char­ac­ter.”

“There is a nice Ger­man word, hin­tergedanken, which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind,” says Watts. “Jung had a hin­tergedanken in the back of his mind that showed in the twin­kle in his eye. It showed that he knew and rec­og­nized what I some­times call the ele­ment of irre­ducible ras­cal­i­ty in him­self. And he knew it so strong­ly and so clear­ly, and in a way so lov­ing­ly, that he would not con­demn the same thing in oth­ers, and would there­fore not be led into those thoughts, feel­ings, and acts of vio­lence towards oth­ers which are always char­ac­ter­is­tic of the peo­ple who project the dev­il in them­selves upon the out­side, upon some­body else, upon the scape­goat.” And so, whether we enter into this field of thought through Watts, through Jung, or through any­one else, it always seems to comes back to the ancient Greeks: “Know thy­self.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Man­u­script The Red Book: A Whis­pered Intro­duc­tion

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Carl Jung’s Fas­ci­nat­ing 1957 Let­ter on UFOs

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.

Philosopher Richard Rorty Chillingly Predicts the Results of the 2016 Election … Back in 1998

in Literature, Philosophy, Politics | November 17th, 2016

Twen­ty years ago a strong aca­d­e­m­ic left in uni­ver­si­ties all over the world spoke to polit­i­cal cul­ture the way that a glob­al­ized nation­al­ist far-right seems to now. Among pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als in the U.S., Richard Rorty’s name held par­tic­u­lar sway. Yet in his con­trar­i­an 1998 book Achiev­ing Our Coun­try, Rorty argued against the par­tic­i­pa­tion of phi­los­o­phy in pol­i­tics. A mem­ber of the so-called “Old Left,” or what he called the “reformist left,” Rorty took on the “Cul­tur­al Left” in ways we now hear in (often bit­ter) debates between sim­i­lar camps. In the course of his attacks, he made the uncan­ny pre­dic­tion above.

The cul­tur­al left, wrote Rorty, had come “to give cul­tur­al pol­i­tics pref­er­ence over real pol­i­tics, and to mock the very idea that demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions might once again be made to serve social jus­tice.” He fore­saw cul­tur­al pol­i­tics on the left as con­tribut­ing to a tidal wave of resent­ment that would one day result in a time when “all the sadism which the aca­d­e­m­ic left has tried to make unac­cept­able to its stu­dents will come flood­ing back.”

As demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions fail, he writes in the quote above:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unor­ga­nized unskilled work­ers, will soon­er or lat­er real­ize that their gov­ern­ment is not even try­ing to pre­vent wages from sink­ing or to pre­vent jobs from being export­ed. Around the same time, they will real­ize that sub­ur­ban white-col­lar workers—themselves des­per­ate­ly afraid of being downsized—are not going to let them­selves be taxed to pro­vide social ben­e­fits for any­one else.

At that point, some­thing will crack. The non­sub­ur­ban elec­torate will decide that the sys­tem has failed and start look­ing around for a strong­man to vote for—someone will­ing to assure them that, once he is elect­ed, the smug bureau­crats, tricky lawyers, over­paid bond sales­men, and post­mod­ernist pro­fes­sors will no longer be call­ing the shots. A sce­nario like that of Sin­clair Lewis’ nov­el It Can’t Hap­pen Here may then be played out. For once a strong­man takes office, nobody can pre­dict what will hap­pen. In 1932, most of the pre­dic­tions made about what would hap­pen if Hin­den­burg named Hitler chan­cel­lor were wild­ly overop­ti­mistic.

One thing that is very like­ly to hap­pen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Amer­i­cans, and by homo­sex­u­als, will be wiped out. Joc­u­lar con­tempt for women will come back into fash­ion. The words [slur for an African-Amer­i­can that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jew­ish per­son that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the work­place. All the sadism which the aca­d­e­m­ic Left has tried to make unac­cept­able to its stu­dents will come flood­ing back. All the resent­ment which bad­ly edu­cat­ed Amer­i­cans feel about hav­ing their man­ners dic­tat­ed to them by col­lege grad­u­ates will find an out­let.

He also then argues, how­ev­er, that this sadism will not sole­ly be the result of “eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty and inse­cu­ri­ty,” and that such expla­na­tions would be “too sim­plis­tic.” Nor would the strong­man who comes to pow­er do any­thing but wors­en eco­nom­ic con­di­tions. He writes next, “after my imag­ined strong­man takes charge, he will quick­ly make his peace with the inter­na­tion­al super­rich.”

Rorty blamed the Marx­ist New Left for “retreat­ing from prag­ma­tism into the­o­ry,” wrote The New York Times in its review of Achiev­ing Our Coun­try. He felt the cul­tur­al left had aban­doned the “Amer­i­can exper­i­ment as sec­u­lar, anti-author­i­tar­i­an and infi­nite in pos­si­bil­i­ties,” such as “Whit­man ide­al­ized as lov­ing rela­tion­ships and Dewey as good cit­i­zen­ship.” The Times wrote then that Rorty’s pre­dic­tions above were a form of “intel­lec­tu­al bul­ly­ing.” We can take our dystopi­an futures from sci-fi nov­el­ists and film­mak­ers, but when philoso­phers “harus­pi­cate or scry,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Dry Sal­vages,” we tend to dis­miss it as the “usu­al / Pas­times and drugs, and fea­tures of the press.”

The emi­nent Stan­ford pro­fes­sor exhort­ed his con­tem­po­raries to leave behind “semi­con­scious anti-Amer­i­can­ism” and embrace prag­mat­ic civ­il engage­ment, and did so by offer­ing up exam­ples from Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy that all had fierce activist strains. Exco­ri­at­ing one kind of life of the mind, Rorty can’t help but offer anoth­er. “What does Rorty offer as a solu­tion?” asked the Times review, “Not real­ly very much.” Per­haps not to politi­cians. But to the post­mod­ern aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers he accused, he offers up as counter exam­ples Walt Whit­man, John Dewey, and—as Rorty not­ed in an inter­view—James Bald­win, whose “use of the phrase… achiev­ing our coun­try” inspired his book’s title, Achiev­ing Our Coun­try.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopi­an Nov­el Fea­tures a Fascis­tic Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Who Promis­es to “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again”

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

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

Metallica Playing “Enter Sandman” on Classroom Toy Instruments

in Music | November 17th, 2016

Things get­ting too seri­ous around here? You want it lighter? Here’s Metal­li­ca play­ing “Enter Sand­man” on class­room toy instru­ments. It fea­tures James Het­field on the toy clar­inet, Lars Ulrich on the Fish­er Price Drum and toy cym­bals, Kirk Ham­mett on the Melod­i­ca, and Robert Tru­jil­lo on the Baby Elec­tric Axe. They’re joined by Jim­my Fal­lon on the kazoo. Next up, stun­ning, breath­tak­ing time­lapse films of boats sail­ing through Venet­ian canals.

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

Metallica’s Bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo Plays Metal­li­ca Songs Fla­men­co-Style, Joined by Rodri­go y Gabriela

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

A Blue­grass Ver­sion of Metallica’s Heavy Met­al Hit, “Enter Sand­man”

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

Iconic Footage of Jimi Hendrix Playing “Hey Joe” Rendered in the Style of Moebius, with the Help of Neural Network Technology

in Animation, Music, Technology | November 17th, 2016

We are less than a year into neur­al net­work tech­nol­o­gy, and Google’s Deep Dream soft­ware is already yield­ing impres­sive results beyond the dog-slugs of its first videos. YouTu­ber Lulu xXX has been play­ing around with blend­ing art with music videos, and is onto some­thing with this clip that mesh­es icon­ic live footage of the Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence (fea­tured below) with the art of Jean Giraud aka Moe­bius.

The French car­toon­ist and illus­tra­tor was a big fan of Hen­drix. He designed the cov­ers of a French com­pi­la­tion LP of Hendrix’s first two albums, and includ­ed him in sev­er­al art prints, where the musi­cian is a cool, often angel­ic pres­ence.

So Lulu xXX right­ly chose Moe­bius’ par­tic­u­lar style through which to process this icon­ic “Hey Joe” footage record­ed in 1967. As you see, when the neur­al net­work is fed more line-based work, it tru­ly does get close to “Moe­bius ani­mates Hen­drix.” Watch the side-by-side ver­sion below and let us know what you thinks works best.

In a few more years, this video may seem charm­ing­ly naive as neur­al net­work­ing improves. Think how Pixar evolved, or how video games devel­oped. The results may be so good that we won’t know if we’re see­ing some­thing hand­made or a per­fect sim­u­la­tion. We might have to lean over and ask our Jimi Hen­drix holo­gram to tell us the truth.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed con­tent:

Moe­bius Gives 18 Wis­dom-Filled Tips to Aspir­ing Artists (1996)

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Jimi Hen­drix Wreaks Hav­oc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From BBC (1969)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The New York Times’ First Profile of Hitler: His Anti-Semitism Is Not as “Genuine or Violent” as It Sounds (1922)

in History | November 16th, 2016

I’ve heard it again and again. The now Pres­i­dent-elect made vicious and belit­tling attacks on African-Amer­i­cans, Mus­lims, immi­grants, women, the dis­abled, etc. dur­ing the cam­paign sea­son (and for sev­er­al decades before), but he didn’t mean it. And I have many ques­tions. For exam­ple, why should any­one assume—given the his­to­ry of coun­try after coun­try after country—that a bul­ly­ing nativist auto­crat doesn’t mean what he says?

We know celebri­ty breeds triv­i­al­iza­tion. But we also know well that in some of the most famous—but by no means only—cases of dem­a­gogues who rose to pow­er with hate speech, the rhetoric quick­ly turned to many years of incom­pre­hen­si­ble, yet cal­cu­lat­ed, bru­tal­i­ty. At least in the U.S., hard­ly any­one believed that the melo­dra­mat­ic vit­ri­ol Hitler and Mus­soli­ni spat at scape­goats of all kinds, espe­cial­ly Jews, should be tak­en very seri­ous­ly.

In 1922—at the dawn of Hitler’s bud­ding nation­al­ist move­ment—The New York Times pub­lished its first pro­file, and explained his dem­a­goguery away. The arti­cle, titled “New Pop­u­lar Idol Ris­es in Bavaria,” begins with sev­er­al alarm­ing sub­head­ings: “Hitler cred­it­ed with extra­or­di­nary pow­ers of sway­ing crowds to his will,” “forms gray-shirt­ed army… They obey orders implic­it­ly,” “Leader a reac­tionary,” “Anti-Red and Anti-Semit­ic.” It then goes on to under­mine these charges.

Accord­ing to “sev­er­al reli­able, well-informed [unnamed] sources,” we’re told, “Hitler’s anti-Semi­tism was not so gen­uine or vio­lent as it sound­ed,” though “the Hitler move­ment is not of a mere local or pic­turesque inter­est.”

He was mere­ly using anti-Semit­ic pro­pa­gan­da as a bait to catch mass­es of fol­low­ers and keep them aroused, enthu­si­as­tic and in line for the time when his orga­ni­za­tion is per­fect­ed and suf­fi­cient­ly pow­er­ful to be employed effec­tive­ly for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es.

What pur­pos­es? The paper quotes one admir­ing “sophis­ti­cat­ed politi­cian” as say­ing, “You can’t expect the mass­es to under­stand or appre­ci­ate your fin­er real aims. You must feed the mass­es with crud­er morsels and ideas like anti-Semi­tism. It would be polit­i­cal­ly all wrong to tell them the truth about where you real­ly are lead­ing them.” Where might this be? The shad­owy source did not say. We cyn­i­cal­ly expect all politi­cians to lie, to feed us “crud­er morsels.” But assum­ing that racism, big­otry, and scapegoating—whether sin­cere or not—will go down so eas­i­ly with so many peo­ple con­sti­tutes a very dark view of “the mass­es.”

Ten years lat­er, after Hitler was released from prison for trea­son and had begun his can­di­da­cy for pres­i­dent, many, even more com­pli­men­ta­ry, arti­cles would follow—as Rafael Med­off doc­u­ments in The Dai­ly Beast—all the way up to Time magazine’s nam­ing him “Man of the Year” for 1938.  “Why did many main­stream Amer­i­can news­pa­pers por­tray the Hitler regime pos­i­tive­ly,” asks Med­off, “espe­cial­ly in its ear­ly months? How could they pub­lish warm human-inter­est sto­ries about a bru­tal dic­ta­tor? Why did they excuse or ratio­nal­ize Nazi anti-Semi­tism? These are ques­tions that should haunt the con­science of U.S. jour­nal­ism to this day.”

One reporter in a 1933 Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor dis­patch from Ger­many informed his read­ers that “the train arrived punctually”—indulging a trope about fas­cists mak­ing the “trains run on time” that has aston­ish­ing­ly come back in cir­cu­la­tion via for­mer Cincin­nati may­or Ken Black­well. “Traf­fic was well reg­u­lat­ed.” The cor­re­spon­dent found “not the slight­est sign of any­thing unusu­al afoot.” The word we often hear for what hap­pened dur­ing the 30s is “nor­mal­iza­tion,” a process by which the most har­row­ing por­tents were blend­ed into the land­scape, ren­dered signs of noth­ing “unusu­al afoot.”

The nor­mal­iza­tion of Nazism in Ger­many involved a tremen­dous pro­pa­gan­da effort, much of it aimed at chil­dren. In the U.S., the press seemed more than will­ing to turn an eth­no-nation­al­ist move­ment with frightening—and plain­ly stated—objectives into an ordi­nary, ratio­nal state actor. Anti-Semi­tism was described as legit­i­mate polit­i­cal resent­ment or rea­son­able anger at Ger­man Jews’ “com­mer­cial clan­nish­ness.” Some­how the vic­tims of Nazism had to be respon­si­ble for their own mur­der and per­se­cu­tion. “There must be some rea­son,” wrote The Chris­t­ian Cen­tu­ry in an April, 1933 edi­to­r­i­al, “oth­er than race or creed—just what is that rea­son?” Few peo­ple, it seems, could or would allow them­selves to imag­ine that the new Ger­man Führer actu­al­ly meant what he said.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

Gand­hi Writes Let­ters to Hitler: “We Have Found in Non-Vio­lence a Force Which Can Match the Most Vio­lent Forces in the World” (1939/40)

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

Stewart Brand’s List of 76 Books for Rebuilding Civilization

in Books, Education | November 16th, 2016

When the future looks dim, we can attend to the present with furi­ous agency, spin­ning from task to task, for­get­ting for days on end to prac­tice fore­thought. How much of this comes from tech-addled infor­ma­tion over­load and how much from phys­i­o­log­i­cal respons­es to real impend­ing dan­ger is anyone’s guess. But both sources of anx­i­ety dri­ve away thoughts of what Stew­art Brand— futur­ist, founder of the Whole Earth Cat­a­log, and one of Ken Kesey’s band of Mer­ry Pranksters—calls the “Long Now,” also the name of his foun­da­tion advo­cat­ing “the long view and the tak­ing of long-term respon­si­bil­i­ty.”

But, you may object, we think of our chil­dren, and maybe of our grand­chil­dren, too. Yet when Brand says long, he doesn’t mean 25, 50, or 100 years in the future. Inspired by an imag­ined clock that ticks away years, cen­turies, and mil­len­nia (and which Long Now is actu­al­ly build­ing) the foun­da­tion aims to cre­ate a ver­sion of Isaac Asi­mov’s “library of the deep future.” Long Now—whose board includes Bri­an Eno, Wired founder Kevin Kel­ly, and dig­i­tal map maven David Rumsey—refers to their library as the “Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion,” a some­what grandiose title for a very ambi­tious project: an archive to help rebuild civ­i­liza­tion in case of dec­i­ma­tion or cat­a­stroph­ic col­lapse.

Many of the board mem­bers—like Kel­ly and Eno—have sub­mit­ted their own lists of rec­om­men­da­tions for titles to add to the col­lec­tion of 3,500 books. (We’ve fea­tured Eno’s list in a pre­vi­ous post.) The sam­pling of con­trib­u­tors so far is hard­ly a diverse group, and read­ers have point­ed out that the sam­pling of authors (it’s over­whelm­ing­ly male) isn’t either. That per­fect­ly legit­i­mate crit­i­cism aside, these lists do pro­vide us with ways of think­ing about the kinds of books some pos­si­ble future might need to rebuild. Would ancient Greek epics like The Ili­ad and The Odyssey have much rel­e­vance if the world lost its cul­tur­al wealth, along with the mil­lions of ref­er­ences to Homer?

These epics, and those of Gil­gamesh and Beowulf, have much more to con­tribute than just his­tor­i­cal val­ue. What about the sci­ence fic­tion of Ian Banks? Sto­ic phi­los­o­phy of Mar­cus Aure­lius and Lucretius? Edward Gibbon’s The His­to­ry of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (all six vol­umes)? All of these appear on Stew­art Brand’s list, but so do prac­ti­cal and enter­tain­ing sur­veys like Peter Barber’s The Map Book, and sci­en­tif­ic texts like Paul G. Hewitt’s Con­cep­tu­al Physics and Theodore Gray’s The Ele­ments: A Visu­al Explo­ration of Every Known Atom in the Uni­verse.

Whether we can rea­son­ably expect these books to sur­vive hun­dreds or thou­sands of years from now is maybe beside the point. It’s an exer­cise in futur­ol­o­gy. Long Now rep­re­sents both “a mech­a­nism and a myth,” Brand has writ­ten. His heavy empha­sis on illus­trat­ed non­fic­tion sug­gests some crit­i­cal acknowl­edge­ment that future read­ers may not be flu­ent and may have few mem­o­ries of what things once looked like (espe­cial­ly through micro­scopes and tele­scopes). His heavy empha­sis on clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture and almost exclu­sive­ly Euro­pean his­to­ry shows a par­tic­u­lar cul­tur­al bias that may have lit­tle jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.

See a select­ed list of 20 titles from Brand’s list below, and see the full list of 76 books at the Long Now Foun­da­tion site here. Find his list myopic or miss­ing some key areas of knowl­edge? Sug­gest your own addi­tions in the com­ments.

The Sto­ry of Writ­ing: Alpha­bets, Hiero­glyphs & Pic­tograms by Andrew Robin­son

Brave New World (The Folio Soci­ety) by Aldous Hux­ley and illus­trat­ed by Leonard Roso­man

Dune by Frank Her­bert

The Sin­gu­lar­i­ty is Near: When Humans Tran­scend Biol­o­gy by Ray Kurzweil

One True God: His­tor­i­cal Con­se­quences of Monothe­ism by Rod­ney Stark

The Clash of Civ­i­liza­tions and the Remak­ing of World Order by Samuel P. Hunt­ing­ton

The Idea of Decline in West­ern His­to­ry by Arthur Her­man

What Tech­nol­o­gy Wants by Kevin Kel­ly

The Long Sum­mer: How Cli­mate Changed Civ­i­liza­tion by Bri­an Fagan

A His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tions by Fer­nand Braudel

The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy by Isaac Asi­mov

The Prince by Machi­avel­li, trans­lat­ed by George Bull, pub­lished by Folio Soci­ety

The Nature of Things by Lucretius

The Ili­ad by Homer trans­lat­ed by Robert Fagles

The Mem­o­ry of the World: The Trea­sures That Record Our His­to­ry from 1700 BC to the Present Day by UNESCO

The Land­mark Herodotus: The His­to­ries edit­ed by Robert B. Strassler

Brand is not so mod­est as to exclude his own work, list­ing his How Build­ings Learn: What Hap­pens After They’re Built as a can­di­date for a declin­ing or post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world. That book is also a six-part BBC series, with music by Bri­an Eno. You can watch the first episode at the top of the post and find all six parts at our pre­vi­ous post on Brand here.

Again, Brand’s com­plete list of 76 books can be found here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Watch Stew­art Brand’s 6‑Part Series How Build­ings Learn, With Music by Bri­an Eno

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

Thomas Edison’s Hugely Ambitious “To-Do” List from 1888

in History, Technology | November 16th, 2016

Even beyond devel­op­ing the phono­graph, the motion pic­ture cam­era, light bulb, and the creepy talk­ing doll, Thomas Edi­son got a lot done in life. With his even greater knack for enter­prise than for inven­tion, he might, had he lived in the 21st cen­tu­ry, trad­ed on his rep­u­ta­tion for pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and indus­try by sell­ing us his per­son­al “life hacks.” Alas, those in search of Edis­on­ian tips and tricks for liv­ing must infer them from all the mate­ri­als he left behind after a life that stretched from the mid-19th cen­tu­ry to near­ly the mid-20th, such as this exten­sive to-do list from Jan­u­ary 3, 1888.

“Through­out his life, Thomas Edi­son kept ‘idea books’ filled with to-do lists, sketch­es and oth­er notes on cur­rent and future projects,” says the site of PBS’ Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence. Just over a month after open­ing his new lab in West Orange, New Jer­sey, “Edi­son cre­at­ed a five-page list of ‘Things doing and to be done.’

That year alone, Edi­son would exe­cute 45 patents, pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with the phono­graph and cylin­der records. Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell and his asso­ciates had begun to make improve­ments on Edison’s decade-old phono­graph, which pushed Edi­son into action. Despite this com­pe­ti­tion, Edis­on’s ‘To Do’ list shows that the phono­graph wasn’t the only thing on the inventor’s mind.”

These five pages of things to acquire or cre­ate (see the full list below) include not just the “New Stan­dard Phono­graph” but an “Improved Mag­net­ic Bridge for prac­ti­cal work,” “Unin­flam­ma­ble Insu­lat­ing Mate­r­i­al,” a “Box bal­anc­ing Sys­tem,” “Arti­fi­cial Moth­er Pearl,” “But­ter direct from Milk,” “Arti­fi­cial Ivory,” “Marine Teleg­ra­phy,” and a “Long dis­tance stan­dard Tele­phone Trans­mit­ter which employs devices of record­ing phono­graph.” While not all the ideas that inspired, or were inspired by, the items on this long list came to fruition, Edi­son clear­ly saw val­ue in get­ting them all out of his head and on paper. One won­ders what the man who declared that “genius is one per­cent inspi­ra­tion, nine­ty-nine per­cent per­spi­ra­tion” would make of the count­less orga­ni­za­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty tools now on the mar­ket. Nobody ever per­spired because of using an app, after all — but plen­ty have per­spired devel­op­ing them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

A Brief, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Thomas Edi­son (and Niko­la Tes­la)

Thomas Edi­son & His Trusty Kine­to­scope Cre­ate the First Movie Filmed In The US (c. 1889)

Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talk­ing Dolls: An Inven­tion That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Mar­ket

Take the 146-Ques­tion Knowl­edge Test Thomas Edi­son Gave to Prospec­tive Employ­ees (1921)

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.

Frank Zappa’s Amazing Final Concerts: Prague and Budapest, 1991

in Music | November 15th, 2016

We say good­bye to musi­cal icons in many dif­fer­ent ways, from flash­mobs, SNL intros, and long ret­ro­spec­tives to live con­cert trib­utes fea­tur­ing the biggest cov­er band on earth. No mat­ter how out­sized the ges­ture, it nev­er quite seems out of place when it comes to artists of a cer­tain stature. In the case of Frank Zap­pa, we’ve recent­ly seen jazz orches­tra trib­utes, a “mon­u­men­tal live per­for­mance” of one of his own orches­tral works, and sev­er­al Zap­pa trib­ute con­certs by his son Dweezil.

For all their heart and sta­mi­na, how­ev­er, no trib­ute can com­pete with the pow­er of those artists’ farewells to us. Both David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, too frag­ile to per­form in their last years, left phe­nom­e­nal albums we’ll pore over for decades to come. South­ern rock great Leon Rus­sell, who just passed away this week at 74, put on rol­lick­ing live shows into his final years, and had con­certs booked into 2017 when he died. Prince’s final per­for­mance was, like all of his per­for­mances, stun­ning.

And Zap­pa? Well see for your­self. Zap­pa played his way out of the world as he’d played his way into it, with sar­don­ic humor and blis­ter­ing vir­tu­os­i­ty.

As you can see at the top and above, Zap­pa and band deliv­ered on every promise in their last con­certs in Prague and Budapest in 1991. In the 10-minute clip at the top, Zappa’s impro­visato­ry prog gui­tar runs soar and dive over the band’s slink­ing jazz-reg­gae, then get more tech­ni­cal as he trades licks with anoth­er vir­tu­oso gui­tarist. In the low­er-qual­i­ty video above, with clips from both con­certs, Zap­pa and band dis­play their mas­tery of an East­ern Euro­pean-sound­ing march with their guest musi­cian “gyp­sy friends” in Hun­gary (at 9:00).

In the fol­low­ing two years, until his death in 1993, Zap­pa would become too weak to play as he suc­cumbed to prostate can­cer. In his final inter­views, he pro­nounced him­self “total­ly unre­pen­tant” for his life and career and insist­ed he had only ever been an “enter­tain­er.” And it’s true, what­ev­er else Zap­pa was—incredibly skilled gui­tarist, com­pos­er, and indus­try innovator—he was always, to the last cou­ple years of his life, an incred­i­ble show­man.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In One of his Final Inter­views, Frank Zap­pa Pro­nounces Him­self “Total­ly Unre­pen­tant”

Frank Zap­pa Debates Cen­sor­ship on CNN’s Cross­fire (1986)

A Young Frank Zap­pa Turns the Bicy­cle into a Musi­cal Instru­ment on The Steve Allen Show (1963)

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