Hear “Weightless,” the Most Relaxing Song Ever Made, According to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)
As I write this, it’s election night, and I do not need to tell you about the thick haze of fear in the air. I have already had a couple friends ask me about resources for meditation and relaxation. I’m no expert, but I have looked into various ways to deal with stress and hypertension. Meditation tops my list (and those of many mental health professionals). At a very close second place: Music.
We’ve brought you many meditation resources in the past (see here, here, here, and here). And we’ve pointed you toward four hours of free original meditation music to help you “not panic,” courtesy of Moby. We’ve also brought you music to help you sleep, from composer Max Richter and many others. Now, we bring you what “a team of scientists and sound therapists” claim is “the most relaxing song ever,” as Electronic Beats informs us. You can hear the track, “Weightless”—by Manchester band Marconi Union and Lyz Cooper, founder of the British Academy of Sound Therapy—above.
The song’s relaxing properties supposedly work “by using specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener,” writes ShortList. I’ve had it on repeat for an hour and will testify to its efficacy. So can 40 women who “found it to be more effective at helping them relax than songs by Enya, Mozart and Coldplay.” In this experiment and others, says UK stress specialist Dr. David Lewis, “Brain imaging studies have shown that music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions.”
Emotions—fear, rage, and disgust—are running wild nationwide. Justifiable or not, they can wreak havoc on our mental and physical health if we can’t find ways to relax. “Weightless,” reports The Telegraph, “induced a 65 per cent reduction in overall anxiety and brought [study participants] to a level 35 per cent lower than their usual resting rates.” That’s no small change in attitude, but if you find this atmospheric track doesn’t do it for you, maybe try out some other tunes from the research team’s top 10 list of most relaxing (hear them all in the playlist above):
- Marconi Union and Lyz Cooper – Weightless
- Airstream – Electra
- DJ Shah – Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix)
- Enya – Watermark
- Coldplay – Strawberry Swing
- Barcelona – Please Don’t Go
- All Saints – Pure Shores
- AdelevSomeone Like You
- Mozart – Canzonetta Sull’aria
- Cafe Del Mar – We Can Fly
And then, again, there’s Moby’s four hours of ambient sounds, Max Richter’s eight-hour Sleep, the work of German ambient composer Gas, and hundreds of other supremely relaxing pieces of music to bring your stress levels down to manageable. Maybe keep some relaxing music on hand for extra-stressful moments, and as always, don’t forget to breathe.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Only Known Footage of Louis Armstrong in a Recording Studio: Watch the Recently-Discovered Film (1959)
1959 was a watershed for jazz, a form of music that often looks backward and forward at once. That year, virtuoso composers and soloists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, and Ornette Coleman pulled jazz in all sorts of temporal and spatial dimensions, giving new shape to bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, and whatever Ornette Coleman was up to. 1959 also brought us perhaps one of the most traditional records by a jazz great that year, Louis Armstrong’s Satchmo Plays King Oliver, a tribute album to his “earliest musical hero,” writes Allmusic, “and the man who enabled two of his breakout gigs” in 1918 and 1922.
Armstrong reached back to those years in his selection of material, with his All-Stars playing such classic Oliver compositions as “New Orleans stomp” and “Dr. Jazz,” along with a handful of tunes Armstrong “admitted with a sly smile, ‘Joe [Oliver] might have played.’” The recording sessions for that album ended up on a “33-minute, 16mm film,” writes The Guardian. “The record producer, Sid Frey, had the film professionally shot but wound up not doing anything with it or telling anyone about it.” Just recently, that film was discovered in a storage facility and acquired by the Louis Armstrong House Museum. It’s the only known footage of Armstrong in the studio.
See Armstrong and his All-Stars record “I Ain’t Got Nobody” at Audio Fidelity in Los Angeles above. Here, as in the other cuts, Armstrong revisits his New Orleans swing and ragtime roots, in stark contrast to the forward-looking wave of records from a new generation. But in doing so, he also created an instant classic tribute that “deserves to be placed on the shelf alongside Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats,” writes Jazzviews, “and in some aspects is superior to them both.… ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’ is a tune that could have been written by Louis and the group, it fits them well. The whole group are in top form and Louis’s vocal is a gem.” It certainly puts David Lee Roth’s hammy version to shame.
This represents one of “two complete takes,” The Guardian notes, presumably the first. Afterward, at 4:22, watch Louis and the band take five and talk things over. There’s no audio, but it’s cool nonetheless to see them casually lounge around smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes. “For now, the museum will post one complete song on its website and social media”—it’s current song being that above. “It plans to show the complete film at a future date.” For now, it’s housed at the museum’s Corona, Queens location, “in the modest brick building where Armstrong lived for 28 years and died in 1971.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Bruce Springsteen Plays 3 Classic Songs & Makes the Case for Hillary at Rally Last Night
Last night, Bruce Springsteen played a three-song acoustic set at a Hillary Clinton rally in Philadelphia, First came “Thunder Road,” then “Long Walk Home” and “Dancing in the Dark. At the 6:00 mark, the Boss makes his pitch for Hillary, whose candidacy is “based on intelligence, experience, preparation and an actual vision of America where everyone counts.” And the case against Donald, a “man whose vision is limited to little beyond himself, who has a profound lack of decency,” and puts his ego before American democracy itself. Amen, now let’s hear Bruce play.
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Read More...David Bowie Sings “Fame” & “Golden Years” on Soul Train (1975)
Just before his death this year, David Bowie revealed that what turned out to be his final album, Blackstar, was largely inspired by the experimental sounds of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. And just this past August, Bowie’s name appeared in the credits of the much-anticipated Blonde from Frank Ocean (as an “influence”). This melding of style and influence between rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B giants is a hallmark of 2016, but in 1975 such crossovers were rare. When David Bowie began working with Luther Vandross and Carlos Alomar on his Philly soul-inspired Young Americans album, “no other established rock musician had yet tried to do anything similar,” writes Douglas Wolk at Pitchfork, “and Bowie pulled it off in a way that not only didn’t seem crass but gave Luther Vandross his big break.”
The album’s first big single, “Fame,” (above) “landed Bowie on Soul Train,” Wolk notes, and though “he wasn’t the first white solo performer to play the show [that would be Dennis Coffey] he was damn close.” Bowie and Alomar’s hip confection later inspired George Clinton’s “Give Up the Funk,” and James Brown released an instrumental track in 1976 that was a “note-for-note duplicate of ‘Fame.’”
That kind of genuine admiration for Bowie’s deft take on funk and soul extended to ordinary fans as well. In a Q&A before his Soul Train performances, one audience member asked him “when did you actually start getting into soul music? You know, when did you start wanting to do soul music? I mean you’re doin’ it now!” Bowie gives a somewhat garbled answer, then launches into miming “Golden Years” (below).
Fansite Bowie Golden Years claims he “had been drinking to calm his nerves before his performance” and “spoke thickly with disconnected sentences.” We can see him flub a few lines as he lip-synchs. This was also the year Bowie presented the best female R&B vocal Grammy to Aretha Franklin apparently so high on coke that he didn’t remember being there afterward. A lot of Young Americans, especially “Fame,” addresses exactly the state he was in, “at a moment,” writes Wolk, “when [pop stardom] seemed likely to destroy him.” Bowie’s appearance on Soul Train coincided with the release of the “Golden Years” single from 1976’s Station to Station, the album on which he bridged his obsessions with soul music and krautrock, and adopted the persona of the Thin White Duke, “a nasty character indeed,” as he once said.
Vast numbers of Bowie fans consider his subsequent three albums, known as The Berlin Trilogy, to be the best work of the artist’s career, but for a brief moment in the mid-seventies, he was fully immersed in black American music, and those influences continued to inform his work through the decade and throughout the rest of his life. Bowie also gave back as much as he borrowed: “black radio stations that never thought twice about ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ or ‘Changes’ ate up ‘Fame’ and ‘Golden Years,’” writes Renée Graham at the Boston Globe, and artists like Clinton, Brown, and a few dozen future hip-hop DJs took note.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Stephen King’s The Shining Is Now an Opera: Hear a Recording of the Entire Production (for a Limited Time)
A quick update: Back in May, Colin Marshall told you about how The Shining–first a Stephen King novel, then a Stanley Kubrick film–was getting adapted into an opera. Fast forward six months, and you can now hear a complete recording of that production, thanks to Minnesota Public Radio. The MPR web site, where you can stream the recording through November 30, includes a scene-by-scene guide to the complete opera. You can also find the digital program for the opera here. Enjoy.
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Read More...Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Documentary on the Painter Narrated by Gene Hackman
On a road trip across America last year, I made a stop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and thus had the chance to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Though I’d already known something of the influential American painter’s life and work, I hadn’t understood the depth of her connection to, and the extent of the inspiration she drew from, the American Southwest. “This is O’Keeffe country,” says Gene Hackman, narrator of the thirteen-minute documentary Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art that screens perpetually at the museum but which you can also watch just above, “a land the painter made indelibly her own. Northern New Mexico transformed the artist’s work and changed her life.”
“As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” says the artist herself. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. There’s something in the air; it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.”
I have to agree with her; my own great American road trip showed me not only that the states really do look different from each other, but that New Mexico — which at first struck me as a Krazy Kat landscape come to life — looks most different of all. O’Keeffe first went to New Mexico for a year and a half in 1929, in her early forties, and returned each year over the next two decades, moving there permanently in 1949 and dying in Santa Fe in 1986, at the age of 98.
Though she remains best known in art history for her paintings of flowers that make their viewers see them in a way they’ve never seen flowers before, New Mexico introduced a whole new sensibility into O’Keeffe’s body of work. This holds especially true of her time at Ghost Ranch, whose location in an area called Piedra Lumbre, or “Shining Rock,” provided the painter with the strikingly colored cliffs and other almost unreal-looking natural forms that made their way into her equally sublime landscapes. “The best place in the world,” she called it, and if we can measure places by what they move human beings to create, her words hardly sound like an exaggeration.
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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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.
Read More...Patti Smith Reads from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the Love Letter He Wrote From Prison (1897)
Just last month, the U.K. announced the so-called “Turing Law,” a policy U.K.’s justice minister Sam Gyimah describes as pardoning “people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of any crime today.” The law is named for Alan Turing, the brilliant gay computer scientist whose work on A.I. gave the artificial intelligence test its name.
Turing was also instrumental in breaking the Nazi Enigma code, and the Ministry of Justice’s press release identifies Turing only as an “Enigma codebreaker,” suggesting that his patriotic duty may have made him something of an official martyr; Turing was one thousands of men unjustly convicted over many decades. But “does pardoning those men unlucky enough to get caught,” asks Jonathan Cooper, “actually address the trauma to which the British state subjected LGBT people?”
I couldn’t possibly say. But the “unlucky ones” who were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for crimes of “gross indecency” have left often poignant records of their mistreatment, and of the psychological toll it took on them. Turing wrote a very pained letter to a friend, Norman Rutledge, after his conviction (hear Benedict Cumberbatch read it here).
Around sixty years earlier, an even more well-known convict, one of the first to be convicted of “gross indecency” laws, Oscar Wilde, left an even more profound expression of his emotional turmoil. Called De Profundis (from the depths) and addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, the hundred-page document, with its lengthy digressions and ruminations, cannot solely be read as a letter, although it contains a wealth of tender and angry expressions for Douglas.
De Profundis, writes Colm Tóibín, “cannot be read for its accurate account of their relationship, nor taken at its word.” This is in part because Wilde had no other choice but to write a letter, or write nothing at all. The succession of prisons in which he was held between 1895 and 1897 allowed no writing of plays, novels, or essays.
Over the last four months of Wilde’s incarceration, he and the governor of Reading prison came up with a scheme. Since “regulations did not specify how long a letter should be,” Wilde would be given pen and ink each day and be allowed compose correspondence as long as he liked. The letter would then be his personal property when he left. Despite its literary density, the letter remains, writes Tóibín, “one of the greatest love letters ever written.”
Reading prison has just been opened to the public for the first time this year. Since July, artists, writers, and performers have gathered with audiences inside the prison to celebrate and commune with the spirit of Wilde. Among the events have been readings of De Profundis by Tóibín, who read the letter in its entirely last month, as did Patti Smith.
At the top of the post, you can see an excerpt of Smith’s reading. “The edited version of De Profundis” from which she reads “was the first one to be published in 1905, in a limited edition of 200, five years after Wilde’s death.” In-between clips of her reading, there are interviews with a Reading prison caretaker and others, and voice-over narration telling us Wilde’s tragic story of imprisonment, as well as the general outlines of those who left no record of their persecution.
Once released, Wilde went right back to writing literature, beginning with the long, violent poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” The video up top comes from The Guardian.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five
If you’ve kept up with Open Culture for a while, you know that Kurt Vonnegut could write a good letter, whether home from World War II, to high school students, to other writers, to John F. Kennedy, or to the future. You also know that Benedict Cumberbatch can give a good reading, whether of literature like The Metamorphosis and Moby Dick or more directly personal words from Alan Turing or a Guantánamo prisoner. It must have seemed like only a matter of time, then, before this master reader of letters (in the broad sense) took on the work of a master letter-writer, and here we have a clip of Cumberbatch at the Hay Festival 2014 reading a Vonnegut letter — and a particularly impassioned Vonnegut letter at that.
“I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school,” Vonnegut writes to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board at North Dakota’s Drake High School, who in 1973 ordered its copies of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and other novels burned for their “obscene language.” “Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.”
After assuring McCarthy that “my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news,” Vonnegut goes on to describe himself not as one of the “ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people” that McCarthy may imagine, but as a “large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work.”
And as for the products of that labor, “if you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.” Vonnegut acknowledges the school’s right to decide what books its students should read, “but it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.”
More that forty years have passed, and hardly anywhere does Slaughterhouse-Five now count as controversial reading material. But Vonnegut’s words to McCarthy, which you can read in full at Letters of Note web site (or in the Letters of Note book), still bear not just repeating but breathing new life into by a performer like Cumberbatch, one of the most respected of his generation. At the Letters Live Youtube channel, you can see his interpretation of more letters originally written by Sol LeWitt, William Safire, and other people known primarily for their work, but the reading of whose letters make them, in Vonnegut’s words, “very real.”
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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.
Read More...What Character Traits Do Geniuses Share in Common?: From Isaac Newton to Richard Feynman
Back in 1993, James Gleick wrote Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. A decade later came his biography on Isaac Newton. As Gleick mentions above, the two scientists–who lived, of course, centuries apart–shared very little in common. Newton (1643–1727) was “solitary, antisocial, unpleasant, bitter.” Richard Feynman (1918–1988) could be best described as “gregarious, funny, a great dancer.” Watch him joyously play the bongos to see what Gleick means.
So the question remains: What did they have in common? And particularly what character traits contributed to their “scientific genius”? Gleick goes on to explain:
They were both, as I tried to get in their heads, understand their minds, the nature of their genius, I sort of felt I was seeing things that they had in common, and they were things that had to do with aloneness. Newton was much more obviously alone than Feynman, but Feynman didn’t particularly work well with others. He was known as a great teacher, but he wasn’t a great teacher, I don’t think, one on one. I think he was a great lecturer. I think he was a great communicator. But when it came time to make the great discoveries of science, he was alone in his head. Now, when I say he, I mean both Feynman and Newton, and this applies, also, I think, to the geniuses that I write about in The Information, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Ada Byron. They all had the ability to concentrate with a sort of intensity that is hard for mortals like me to grasp, a kind of passion for abstraction that doesn’t lend itself to easy communication, I don’t think.
Solitude. Concentration. Abstraction. In a nutshell, that’s what goes into the making of a genius.
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Read More...When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bader Ginsburg, His Most Famous Student, To Care Deeply About Writing
There are a few ways to get a glimpse of Vladimir Nabokov as a teacher, a role he occupied for almost twenty years at Wellesley and Cornell. We can take the “good reader” quiz he gave to his students. We can listen to his interviews on life and literature, though they won’t give us any sense of spontaneity. The Russian-émigré writer insisted on carefully scripted questions and answers “to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin’s fan.”
We can see also see Nabokov, as played by Christopher Plummer, teach his second favorite novel, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, at a Cornell lecture above. Plummer, who introduces himself in the role, tells us, “this urbane, worldly Russian aristocrat spent a large part of his productive life in Ithaca, New York.” And the characterization, if not a likeness, is a convincing dramatic interpretation of a very urbane, and witty, Professor, not a man who “speak[s] like a child,” as the real Nabokov once wrote of himself in 1973.
What of his students? What can they tell us about Nabokov as a teacher? One of his most famous, Thomas Pynchon, won’t say much. But perhaps his best known pupil, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has paid him tribute many times, telling The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing in 2011, “I attribute my caring about writing” to Nabokov, who “was a man in love with the sound of words. He taught me the importance of choosing the right word and presenting it in the right word order.”
Ginsburg, who studied under Nabokov as an undergraduate in the early fifties, still sings his praises over sixty years later. “He was magnetically engaging,” she told The Culture Trip this week. “He stood alone, not comparable to any other lecturer.” And last month, the Supreme Court Justice wrote a New York Times Op-Ed titled “Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Living.” Second on the list, “teachers who influenced or encouraged me in my growing-up years.” Her first example, Nabokov, who “changed the way I read and the way I write.”
If Nabokov so profoundly influenced Ginsburg’s reading and writing, and made such a dramatic impression on her as a professor, would we find any traces of that influence in her jurisprudence? Perhaps. As Jennifer Wilson notes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Nabokov pronounced himself “resolutely ‘anti-segregationist.’” This was among the “few issues he spoke out against strongly and unambiguously—Marxism, fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism.”
You may or may not see some influence of Nabokov—of his repugnance for legalized discrimination or of his meticulous wording—in Ginsburg’s passionate dissent to the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act, for example. There, Ginsburg called voter suppression “the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination” and wrote “given a record replete with examples of denial or abridgement of a paramount federal right, the Court should have left the matter where it belongs: in Congress’ bailiwick.” Within their constraints of legal writing, I’d argue Ginsburg’s best sentences contain the cutting precision and wit of Nabokov’s scathing, deeply considered observations.
via The Culture Trip/Vintage Anchor
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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