The Creativity of Female Graffiti & Street Artists Will Be Celebrated in Street Heroines, a New Documentary

in Art, Creativity, Film, Life | July 11th, 2016

Street art is a fre­quent­ly dan­ger­ous game. The threat of arrest pales in com­par­i­son to some of the haz­ards long time prac­ti­tion­ers describe. While oth­er artists sketch in pleas­ant cafes, cre­ators of large-scale street pieces often have no choice but to wrig­gle through ragged holes in chain link fences and climb to ver­tig­i­nous heights to get to their can­vas­es.

There’s a pop­u­lar con­cep­tion of graf­fi­ti artist as lone wolf, but when it comes to the per­ils of the street, there’s safe­ty in num­bers. You need a crew. Female street artists must draw on the pow­er of sis­ter­hood.

As pho­to­jour­nal­ist Martha Coop­er notes in the trail­er for direc­tor Alexan­dra Hen­ry’s Street Hero­ines, above:

I think bring­ing women togeth­er empow­ers them and there’s been some resis­tance on the part of men…it has to do with cama­raderie too. It’s not that they’re say­ing, “You can’t do it,” but they’re just not allow­ing them in to their inner group.

Appar­ent­ly, street art is some­thing of an old boy’s club.

“What!?” gasps Lady Pink, a well known vet­er­an with over 35 years’ expe­ri­ence. “You need a penis to climb a lad­der? Does it help you hold on?”

The female cama­raderie Coop­er cites extends to the suc­cess­ful fund­ing of a Kick­starter cam­paign to com­plete this doc­u­men­tary on “the courage and cre­ativ­i­ty of female graf­fi­ti & street artists from around the world.” As the dead­line loomed, Lexi Bel­la & Danielle Mas­tri­on, two of the women fea­tured in the doc­u­men­tary, issued an open invi­ta­tion to New York City-based female artists to join them in cre­at­ing a spur-of-the-moment mur­al in Brook­lyn, sur­ren­der­ing artis­tic con­trol to embrace com­mu­ni­ty spir­it.

Many of the 25 artists Hen­ry has pro­filed thus far speak of using their work to bring beau­ty to the street, and to advo­cate on behalf of the oppressed. Such earnest­ness may dimin­ish them even fur­ther in the eyes of the old school He Man Woman Haters Club. Lexi Bel­la coun­ter­bal­ances the laugh­ably soft image cer­tain macho prac­ti­tion­ers may assign to them by speak­ing unapolo­get­i­cal­ly of the thrill of mak­ing one’s work as big as pos­si­ble “so mil­lions of peo­ple can see it.”

Street Hero­ines is aim­ing for release in 2017.

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

The Bat­tle for LA’s Murals

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

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

David Lynch Despises Product Placement & Watching Movies on iPhones (NSFW)

in Business, Film, Technology | July 11th, 2016

When one first encoun­ters the sur­re­al sen­si­bil­i­ties of David Lynch on film, it’s hard to know what to expect of the man behind them. Is he a tor­tured recluse, work­ing out his demons onscreen? A dement­ed auteur with issues? But Lynch’s explo­rations of the vio­lence and sadism lurk­ing beneath America’s shiny veneer come to us too leav­ened by absur­dist humor to be the prod­uct of a man who takes him­self too seri­ous­ly.

And when you first encounter Lynch—in inter­views or his own cameo role, say, on Twin Peaks—you find exact­ly that: he’s an affa­ble, seem­ing­ly well-adjust­ed-if-eccen­tric gen­tle­man from Mis­soula, Mon­tana who doesn’t at all seem beset by dark forces in the way that many of his mem­o­rable char­ac­ters have been over many decades of film­mak­ing. Lynch seems instead remark­ably free from anx­i­ety, as his work is free from the per­ni­cious influ­ences of a venal Hol­ly­wood stu­dio cul­ture he evis­cer­ates in Mul­hol­land Dri­ve.

Lynch would cred­it his psy­cho­log­i­cal and cre­ative good health to med­i­ta­tion, but there are oth­er rea­sons that his body of work feels so con­sis­tent­ly ele­vat­ed to the lev­el of purist high art: the film­mak­er him­self is a purist when it comes to film—perhaps one of the last few high-pro­file direc­tors to remain almost ful­ly inde­pen­dent of the dic­tates of com­mer­cial­ism. Wit­ness his atti­tude toward such crude, inva­sive com­pro­mis­es as prod­uct place­ment in the inter­view clip at the top of the post (Lynch’s ver­dict in a word: “bull­shit”).

Or, just above, see him opine on the phe­nom­e­non of the iPhone, or smart­phone equiv­a­lent, as media plat­form. “If you’re play­ing the movie on a tele­phone,” says Lynch, “you will nev­er in a mil­lion years expe­ri­ence the film. You may think you have expe­ri­enced it. But you’ll be cheat­ed…. Get real.” Like the inter­view clip at the top, the iPhone mini-rant—an extra from the Inland Empire DVD, Lynch’s last fea­ture film—shows us the direc­tor at his cranki­est, a side that of him that seems to emerge only when the sub­ject of artis­tic com­pro­mise for commerce’s sake aris­es.

But should we con­sid­er Lynch a Lud­dite, an oppo­nent of the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion in film­mak­ing? Far from it. Lynch shot Inland Empire on a small dig­i­tal cam­era, as you can hear him dis­cuss above in anoth­er clip from the film’s DVD. And if we were to assume that he hates Hol­ly­wood and the stu­dio sys­tem, we’d be wrong there as well. He goes on to explain what he loves about L.A.: the dream, the light, the smell, the feel of the “gold­en age of Hol­ly­wood,” the sound stages (“fac­to­ries for mak­ing cin­e­ma”), and even the star sys­tem. Keep watch­ing for more of Lynch’s idio­syn­crat­ic opinions—on his favorite actress Lau­ra Dern, on “mak­ing films for a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence,” and on a sub­ject very dear to him: “dreams influ­enc­ing thoughts.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

David Lynch Cre­ates a Very Sur­re­al Plug for Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion

9 New Episodes of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks to Air in 2016

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

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common

in Music, Physics, Science, TED Talks | July 9th, 2016

Sci­en­tists need hob­bies. The gru­el­ing work of nav­i­gat­ing com­plex the­o­ry and the pol­i­tics of acad­e­mia can get to a per­son, even one as laid back as Dart­mouth pro­fes­sor and astro­physi­cist Stephon Alexan­der. So Alexan­der plays the sax­o­phone, though at this point it may not be accu­rate to call his avo­ca­tion a spare time pur­suit, since John Coltrane has become as impor­tant to him as Ein­stein, Kepler, and New­ton.

Coltrane, he says in a 7‑minute TED talk above, “changed my whole research direc­tion… led to basi­cal­ly a dis­cov­ery in physics.” Alexan­der then pro­ceeds to play the famil­iar open­ing bars of “Giant Steps.” He’s no Coltrane, but he is a very cre­ative thinker whose love of jazz has giv­en him a unique per­spec­tive on the­o­ret­i­cal physics, one he shares, it turns out, with both Ein­stein and Coltrane, both of whom saw music and physics as intu­itive, impro­visato­ry pur­suits.

Alexan­der describes his jazz epiphany as occa­sioned by a com­plex dia­gram Coltrane gave leg­endary jazz musi­cian and Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts pro­fes­sor Yusef Lateef in 1967. “I thought the dia­gram was relat­ed to anoth­er and seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed field of study—quantum grav­i­ty,” he writes in a Busi­ness Insid­er essay on his dis­cov­ery, “What I had real­ized… was that the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ple that moti­vat­ed Einstein’s the­o­ry was reflect­ed in Coltrane’s dia­gram.”

The the­o­ry might “imme­di­ate­ly sound like untestable pop-phi­los­o­phy,” writes the Cre­ators Project, who show­case Alexander’s physics-inspired musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tion with exper­i­men­tal pro­duc­er Rioux (sam­ple below). But his ideas are much more sub­stan­tive, “a com­pelling cross-dis­ci­pli­nary inves­ti­ga­tion,” recent­ly pub­lished in a book titled The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Struc­ture of the Uni­verse.

Alexan­der describes the links between jazz and physics in his TED talk, as well as in the brief Wired video fur­ther up. “One con­nec­tion,” he says, is “the mys­te­ri­ous way that quan­tum par­ti­cles move.… Accord­ing to the rules of quan­tum mechan­ics,” they “will actu­al­ly tra­verse all pos­si­ble paths.” This, Alexan­der says, par­al­lels the way jazz musi­cians impro­vise, play­ing with all pos­si­ble notes in a scale. His own impro­vi­sa­tion­al play­ing, he says, is great­ly enhanced by think­ing about physics. And in this, he’s only fol­low­ing in the giant steps of both of his idols.

It turns out that Coltrane him­self used Einstein’s the­o­ret­i­cal physics to inform his under­stand­ing of jazz com­po­si­tion. As Ben Ratliff reports in Coltrane: The Sto­ry of a Sound, the bril­liant sax­o­phon­ist once deliv­ered to French horn play­er David Amram an “incred­i­ble dis­course about the sym­me­try of the solar sys­tem, talk­ing about black holes in space, and con­stel­la­tions, and the whole struc­ture of the solar sys­tem, and how Ein­stein was able to reduce all of that com­plex­i­ty into some­thing very sim­ple.” Says Amram:

Then he explained to me that he was try­ing to do some­thing like that in music, some­thing that came from nat­ur­al sources, the tra­di­tions of the blues and jazz. But there was a whole dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at what was nat­ur­al in music.

This may all sound rather vague and mys­te­ri­ous, but Alexan­der assures us Coltrane’s method is very much like Einstein’s in a way: “Ein­stein is famous for what is per­haps his great­est gift: the abil­i­ty to tran­scend math­e­mat­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions with phys­i­cal intu­ition. He would impro­vise using what he called gedanken­ex­per­i­ments (Ger­man for thought exper­i­ments), which pro­vid­ed him with a men­tal pic­ture of the out­come of exper­i­ments no one could per­form.”

Ein­stein was also a musi­cian—as we’ve not­ed before—who played the vio­lin and piano and whose admi­ra­tion for Mozart inspired his the­o­ret­i­cal work. “Ein­stein used math­e­mat­i­cal rig­or,” writes Alexan­der, as much as he used “cre­ativ­i­ty and intu­ition. He was an impro­vis­er at heart, just like his hero, Mozart.” Alexan­der has fol­lowed suit, see­ing in the 1967 “Coltrane Man­dala” the idea that “impro­vi­sa­tion is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of both music and physics.” Coltrane “was a musi­cal inno­va­tor, with physics at his fin­ger­tips,” and “Ein­stein was an inno­va­tor in physics, with music at his fin­ger­tips.”

Alexan­der gets into a few more specifics in his longer TEDx talk above, begin­ning with some per­son­al back­ground on how he first came to under­stand physics as an intu­itive dis­ci­pline close­ly linked with music. For the real meat of his argu­ment, you’ll like­ly want to read his book, high­ly praised by Nobel-win­ning physi­cist Leon Coop­er, futur­is­tic com­pos­er Bri­an Eno, and many more bril­liant minds in both music and sci­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

CERN’s Cos­mic Piano and Jazz Pianist Jam Togeth­er at The Mon­treux Jazz Fes­ti­val

Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty: String The­o­ry Explored With an A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion of Bohemi­an Rhap­sody

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

An 1585 Recipe for Making Pancakes: Make It Your Saturday Morning Breakfast

in Food & Drink | July 9th, 2016

Ear­li­er this week, Col­in Mar­shall high­light­ed a trove of 3,000 vin­tage cook­books on Archive.org, many of which date back to the 19th cen­tu­ry.

Cook­books, how­ev­er, first arrived on the scene well before that. Accord­ing to the ven­er­a­ble British Library, the “late 16th cen­tu­ry was the first time that cook­ery books began to be pub­lished and acquired with any sort of reg­u­lar­i­ty.” “It is also the first time that cook­ery books were direct­ed at a female audi­ence.” That is, priv­i­leged women who could read and had access to sug­ar, spices and oth­er then rare ingre­di­ents.

Above you can find a recipe for mak­ing pan­cakes, straight from 1585.  To make Pan­cakes, the text reads:

Take new thicke Creame a pine, foure or five yolks of egs, a good hand­ful of flower and two or three spoone­fuls of ale, strain them togeth­er into a faire plat­ter, and sea­son it with a good hand­full of sug­ar, a spoone­ful of syna­mon, and a lit­tle Gin­ger: then take a fri­ing pan, and put in a litle peece of But­ter, as big as your thumbe, and when it is molten brown, cast it out of your pan, and with a ladle put to the fur­ther side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold your pan …, so that your stuffe may run abroad over all the pan as thin as may be: then set it to the fire, and let the fyre be ver­ie soft, and when the one side is baked, then turn the oth­er, and bake them as dry as ye can with­out burn­ing.

It’s Sat­ur­day morn­ing. What are you wait­ing for? Give it a try. The page above also offers recipes for var­i­ous pud­dings. Find those recipes tran­scribed here. 

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

Cook Real Recipes from Ancient Rome: Ostrich Ragoût, Roast Wild Boar, Nut Tarts & More

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

Jane Austen’s Music Collection, Now Digitized and Available Online

in History, Literature, Music | July 8th, 2016

“What real­ly mat­ters is what you like, not what you are like,” says the nar­ra­tor of Nick Horn­by’s High Fideli­ty. “It’s no good pre­tend­ing that any rela­tion­ship has a future if your record col­lec­tions dis­agree vio­lent­ly.” That mas­ter Eng­lish social nov­el­ist of the late 20th cen­tu­ry made a point with which Jane Austen, the mas­ter Eng­lish social nov­el­ist in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, may well have agreed. Horn­by, like his char­ac­ter, loves and col­lects music, even into this 21st cen­tu­ry when the very def­i­n­i­tion of a music col­lec­tion has expand­ed into unrec­og­niz­abil­i­ty. Jane Austen did as well, though col­lect­ing music in her day meant some­thing else again: col­lect­ing sheet music.

“The Pride and Prej­u­dice author, who also played piano and sang, copied music by hand into per­son­al albums and col­lect­ed sheet music,” says the BBC about Austen’s per­son­al music col­lec­tion, part of the Austen fam­i­ly music library now dig­i­tized by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Southamp­ton’s Hart­ley Library and made avail­able at the Inter­net Archive. The arti­cle quotes project leader and pro­fes­sor of music Jean­ice Brooks as say­ing these 18 albums of music (the bound kind, not the kind over which High Fideli­ty’s Lon­don thir­tysome­things obsess) could not just help explain the “musi­cal envi­ron­ment that fed the nov­el­ist’s imag­i­na­tion” and led to nov­els “full of musi­cal scenes,” but pro­vide a “unique glimpse of the musi­cal life of an extend­ed gen­try fam­i­ly in the years around 1800.”

If, as a uni­ver­si­ty spokesman says, a 19th-cen­tu­ry sheet music col­lec­tion reflects the per­son­al­i­ty of its own­er “just as a dig­i­tal music col­lec­tion on a mobile phone or MP3 device would today,” what does Jane Austen’s say about her? The items in the col­lec­tion iden­ti­fied as belong­ing to Austen her­self include one vol­ume con­tain­ing “two songs from Dalayrac’s Les deux Savo­yards, one song, and the ‘Sav­age Dance,’ ” anoth­er con­tain­ing “Juve­nile Songs & Lessons” for “for young begin­ners who don’t know enough to prac­tise,” and anoth­er, accord­ing to the BBC, con­tain­ing “the tra­di­tion­al Welsh song Nos Galan, bet­ter known today as Christ­mas song ‘Deck the Halls.’ ”

Not quite a does-she-like-the-Bea­t­les-or-does-she-like-the-Stones sit­u­a­tion, cer­tain­ly. But Inter­net Archive allows you to flip at your leisure through these albums, all of them once kept in the Austen fam­i­ly home and some or all once han­dled by Austen her­self, which ought to pro­vide a sat­is­fac­tion for many of the count­less fans always seek­ing to get a lit­tle clos­er to the writer whose books they’ve read and reread so enjoy­ably. Some of them have no doubt drawn the inspi­ra­tion from her work to start writ­ing them­selves, com­pos­ing sto­ries in her style. Those who go so far as to copy out pieces of her beloved prose in their own hand, can now try not just writ­ing the words she wrote, but play­ing the notes she played as well.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Aban­doned Man­u­script, The Wat­sons

Jane Austen Writes a Let­ter to Her Sis­ter While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

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.

Can You Solve These Animated Brain Teasers from TED-Ed?

in Animation, Education, Games, K-12, Math | July 8th, 2016

Zom­bies, alien over­lords, sharks, a mad dictator…math is a dan­ger­ous propo­si­tion in the hands of TED Ed script writer Alex Gendler.

The recre­ation­al math­e­mat­ics puz­zles he retro­fits for TED’s edu­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive have been around for hun­dreds, even thou­sands of years. In the past, sto­ry­lines tend­ed to rely on bias­es 21st-cen­tu­ry puz­zle solvers would find objec­tion­able. As math­e­mati­cian David Singmas­ter told Sci­ence News:

One must be a lit­tle care­ful with some of these prob­lems, as past cul­tures were often bla­tant­ly sex­ist or racist. But such prob­lems also show what the cul­ture was like.… The riv­er cross­ing prob­lem of the jeal­ous hus­bands is quite sex­ist and trans­forms into mas­ters and ser­vants, which is clas­sist, then into mis­sion­ar­ies and can­ni­bals, which is racist. With such prob­lems, you can offend every­body!

Gendler’s updates, ani­mat­ed by Artrake stu­dio, derive their nar­ra­tive urgency from the sort of crowd pleas­ing sci fi predica­ments that fuel sum­mer block­busters.

And for­tu­nate­ly for those of us whose brains are per­ma­nent­ly stuck in beach mode, he nev­er fails to explain how the char­ac­ters pre­vail, out­wit­ting or out­run­ning the afore­men­tioned zom­bies, aliens, sharks, and mad dic­ta­tor.

(No wor­ries if you’re deter­mined to find the solu­tion on your own. Gendler gives plen­ty of fair warn­ing before each reveal.)

Put your brain in gear, pull the skull-embossed lever, and remem­ber, team­work — and induc­tive log­ic — car­ry the day!

The pris­on­er hat rid­dle, above, hinges on a hier­ar­chy of beliefs and the alien overlord’s will­ing­ness to give its nine cap­tives a few min­utes to come up with a game plan.

Go deep­er into this age old puz­zle by view­ing the full les­son.

Gendler’s spin on the green-eyed log­ic puz­zle, above, con­tains two brain teasers, one for the hive mind, and one for an indi­vid­ual act­ing alone, with a strat­e­gy culled from philoso­pher David Lewis’ Com­mon Knowl­edge play­book. Here’s the full les­son.

Rar­ing for more? You’ll find a playlist of TED-Ed puz­zles by Gendler and oth­ers here. The full les­son for the bridge prob­lem at the top of the post is here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es 

200 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion 

Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge: 4 Bril­liant Math­e­mati­cians & Their Drift to Insan­i­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day, author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, will be lead­ing a free col­lab­o­ra­tive zine work­shop  at the Glue­stick Fest in Indi­anapo­lis Sat­ur­day, July 9. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Animated: Frank Zappa on Why the Culturally-Bereft United States Is So Susceptible to Fads (1971)

in Music | July 7th, 2016

Frank Zap­pa was always frank. You got­ta give him that.

Speak­ing with Vil­lage Voice jour­nal­ist Howard Smith in 1971, Zap­pa talked can­did­ly about the tastes, opin­ions, and beliefs of most Amer­i­cans, whether they apply to music or pol­i­tics or any­thing else. “You have a nation of peo­ple who are wait­ing for the next big thing to hap­pen.” “I see a lot of changes. But I think they’re all tem­po­rary things and any change for the good is always sub­ject to can­cel­la­tion upon the arrival of the next fad. And the same thing with any change for the worst.”

Maybe it’s like this every­where. But it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly so in Amer­i­ca says Zap­pa:

I think that’s a rea­son­able way to look at it because [the U.S.] doesn’t have any real sort of val­ues, you know? And a fad pro­vides you with a tem­po­rary occu­pa­tion for your imag­i­na­tion. Real­ly, [Amer­i­ca] doesn’t have any real cul­ture. It doesn’t have any real art. It doesn’t have any real any­thing. It’s just got fads and a gross nation­al prod­uct and a lot of infla­tion.

It’s not a flat­ter­ing por­trait of the States. But know this. Zap­pa did­n’t see him­self being above it all: “I’m an Amer­i­can. I was born here. I auto­mat­i­cal­ly got entered in a mem­ber­ship in the club.” Yeah, Frank could be frank.

The video above was ani­mat­ed by Blank on Blank. You can read a tran­script of the con­ver­sa­tion here.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 82 Hours of Frank Zap­pa Music: Free Playlists of Songs He Com­posed & Per­formed

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)

An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary Time

in Food & Drink, Internet Archive | July 7th, 2016

By the time I got to high school, home eco­nom­ics class­es had fall­en out of favor: the boys, of course, con­sid­ered them too “girly,” and the girls con­sid­ered them enforcers of tra­di­tion­al gen­der roles whol­ly out of place in mod­ern soci­ety. At that time, Amer­i­ca’s wide­spread obses­sion with food still had a few years before its full bloom, and now I imag­ine that learn­ing to cook has regained a cer­tain cachet even among teenagers. But what of “home eco­nom­ics” itself, that curi­ous ban­ner that com­bines a def­i­n­i­tion of eco­nom­ics nobody now quite rec­og­nizes with the less-than-fash­ion­able con­cepts of domes­tic­i­ty, prac­ti­cal­i­ty, and neces­si­ty?

You can get a sense of the field­’s his­to­ry with a vis­it to the Cook­book and Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion at the Inter­net Archive. Its items, drawn from the Young Research Library Depart­ment of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at UCLA, the Ban­croft Library at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and the Prelinger Library, “take us back to an Amer­i­ca in the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry cov­er­ing top­ics on cook­ery, tex­tiles, fam­i­ly and home, bud­get­ing, domes­tic sci­ences, and many oth­er delight­ful top­ics.” Some will find them more inher­ent­ly delight­ful than will oth­ers, but the his­tor­i­cal val­ue remains unde­ni­able: each and every book in the col­lec­tion takes us back to a dif­fer­ent time and place with its own inter­ests and pri­or­i­ties, in the kitchen as well as else­where in the home.

At the Inter­net Archive blog, Jeff Kaplan high­lights such works as the Pil­grim Cook Book, pub­lished by Chicago’s Pil­grim Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church Ladies’ Aid Soci­ety in 1921 and includ­ing recipes for Sausage in Pota­to Box­es, Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauer­kraut Can­dy; 1912’s more sub­dued Food for the invalid and the con­va­les­cent, with its Beef Juice, Meat Jel­ly, Crack­er Gru­el, and advice that, “among oth­er things, beer and pick­les are bad for chil­dren”; and even old­er, 1906’s A bach­e­lors cup­board; con­tain­ing crumbs culled from the cup­boards of the great unwed­ded which, warn­ing that “the day of of the ‘dude’ has passed and the weak­ling is rel­e­gat­ed to his right­ful sphere in short order,” offers meth­ods for the mak­ing of dish­es with names like Bed-Spread For Two, Indi­an Dev­il Mix­ture, Hot Birds, and Finnan Had­die.

If we dis­missed what­ev­er they taught in high school Home Ec as old-fash­ioned, then boy, the wis­dom pre­served in this cor­ner of the Inter­net Archive exists on a whole oth­er plane. But it also con­tains more than laughs: the seri­ous stu­dent of cui­sine and its his­to­ry will also find the likes of 1907’s A Guide to Mod­ern Cook­ery, the work of French “king of chefs and chef of kings” Auguste Escoffi­er, as well as — stick­ing, sen­si­bly, to that most Epi­cure­an of all nations — Le grand dic­tio­n­naire de cui­sine, a 1200-page ency­clo­pe­dia-cook­book pub­lished just after the death of its author, The Three Mus­ke­teers author Alexan­dre Dumas. As rel­e­vance goes, both of them of them sure­ly hold up far bet­ter than, say, The whole duty of a woman, or, An infal­li­ble guide to the fair sex: con­tain­ing rules, direc­tions, and obser­va­tions, for their con­duct and behav­ior through all ages and cir­cum­stances of life, as vir­gins, wives, or wid­ows.

Enter the archive of 3,000+ cook­books and home ec texts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essen­tial Cook­ing Tech­niques: From Poach­ing Eggs to Shuck­ing Oys­ters

1967 Cook­book Fea­tures Recipes by the Rolling Stones, Simon & Gar­funkel, Bar­bra Streisand & More

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

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 “The Corridor,” a Tribute to the Music Video Stanley Kubrick Planned to Make Near the End of His Life

in Film, Music | July 7th, 2016

When Stan­ley Kubrick died, he left behind numer­ous film ideas that would nev­er see the light of day. There was his epic Napoleon film; an adap­ta­tion of a Jim Thomp­son nov­el; his long-talked about Holo­caust film Aryan Papers; and so much more.

But this was a new one to hear about: in 1996 Kubrick agreed to direct a music video for UNKLE’s upcom­ing Psyence Fic­tion album. You may recall, back when MTV played music videos, see­ing Jonathan Glazer’s “Rab­bit in Your Head­lights” video, or Jake Scott’s “Be There,” both from UNKLE’s album. Alas, Kubrick­’s video nev­er got made. He had start­ed film­ing Eyes Wide Shut and then passed away upon its release.

Now “The Cor­ri­dor,” a glimpse of which you can see above, is an attempt to bring Kubrick and UNKLE back togeth­er. It’s not what actu­al­ly might have been filmed by the direc­tor, but some­thing that cap­tures the project in spir­it. It’s also a lov­ing trib­ute to Kubrick’s career and his love of sin­gle-point per­spec­tive, which has been video essayed else­where.

Direc­tor Toby Dye, who has direct­ed videos like “Par­adise Cir­cus” for Mas­sive Attack and “Anoth­er Night Out” for UNKLE, took on the job of bring­ing “The Cor­ri­dor” to the screen, co-designed by Rid­ley Scott Asso­ciates, work­ing with Dye’s Black Dog Films.

“The Cor­ri­dor” uses the one song off Psyence Fic­tion that nev­er got a video, the Richard Ashcroft-sung “Lone­ly Souls,” as its back­drop. Dye has cre­at­ed four nar­ra­tives that play on Kubrick’s icon­ic films–The Shin­ing, A Clock­work Orange, Bar­ry Lyn­don,and 2001–but then inter­weaves time and char­ac­ter along a long cor­ri­dor track­ing shot, star­ring Joan­na Lum­ley and Aiden Gillen.

In addi­tion, “The Cor­ri­dor” is a video cen­ter­piece to what sounds like a very cool exhi­bi­tion. Curat­ed by Mo’Wax and UNKLE founder James Lavelle, “Day­dream­ing with Stan­ley Kubrick” opened yes­ter­day at Som­er­set House in Lon­don and runs through August 24, 2016. Along with the video, the exhi­bi­tion fea­tures art­works cel­e­brat­ing Kubrick’s influ­ence on gen­er­a­tions of artists. (The stack of heaters on top of the Over­look car­pet is great.)

Said Dye:

‘For me, the unblink­ing red eye of 2001 A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 per­fect­ly encap­su­lates the cin­e­ma of Stan­ley Kubrick. For all his films share that same cool­ly ana­lyt­i­cal gaze, study­ing from afar mankind and all its many foibles. Kubrick’s cam­era nev­er appeared to fol­low the action, it was as if it moved of its own accord and the tableau of life sim­ply unfurled before it. It was his seem­ing­ly nev­er-end­ing cam­era zooms from Bar­ry Lyn­don that first sparked the seed of the idea behind “The Cor­ri­dor,” before that idea grew, and grew into some­thing that was, at times, infu­ri­at­ing­ly ambi­tious, but I hope in the best tra­di­tion of the man who inspired it.’

Those who can’t attend will have to wait and see if and when the full video for “The Cor­ri­dor” appears online. In the mean­time, Som­er­set House awaits.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

A Tour of Stan­ley Kubrick’s Prized Lens Col­lec­tion

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based 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.

32 Animated Videos by Wireless Philosophy Teach You the Essentials of Critical Thinking

in Online Courses, Philosophy | July 6th, 2016

Do you know some­one whose argu­ments con­sist of bald­ly spe­cious rea­son­ing, hope­less­ly con­fused cat­e­gories, arch­i­pel­a­gos of log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es but­tressed by sea­walls of cog­ni­tive bias­es? Sure­ly you do. Per­haps such a per­son would wel­come some instruc­tion on the prop­er­ties of crit­i­cal think­ing and argu­men­ta­tion? Not like­ly? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy (or “WiPhi”) videos by phi­los­o­phy instruc­tor Geoff Pynn of North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and doc­tor­al stu­dents Kel­ley Schiff­man of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and sev­er­al oth­er phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­o­gy grad­u­ates.

What is crit­i­cal think­ing? “Crit­i­cal think­ing,” says Pynn, “is about mak­ing sure that you have good rea­sons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the var­i­ous instruc­tors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bot­tom of the post), but Pynn’s intro­duc­to­ry video above lays out the foun­da­tion. Good rea­sons log­i­cal­ly sup­port the beliefs or con­clu­sions one adopts—from degrees of prob­a­bil­i­ty to absolute cer­tain­ty (a rare con­di­tion indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn spec­i­fies, does not relate to moral good­ness, but to log­i­cal coher­ence and truth val­ue. Though many ethi­cists and philoso­phers would dis­agree, he notes that it isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly “moral­ly wrong or evil or wicked” to believe some­thing on the basis of bad rea­sons. But in order to think ratio­nal­ly, we need to dis­tin­guish “good” rea­sons from “bad” ones.

“A good rea­son for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it prob­a­ble. That is, it’s one that makes the belief like­ly to be true. The very best rea­sons for a belief make it cer­tain. They guar­an­tee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he dis­cuss­es these two class­es of argument—one relat­ing to cer­tain­ty, the oth­er prob­a­bil­i­ty. The first class, deduc­tive argu­ments, occur in the clas­sic, Aris­totelian form of the syl­lo­gism, and they should guar­an­tee their con­clu­sions, mean­ing that “it’s impos­si­ble for the premis­es to be true while the con­clu­sion is false” (pro­vid­ed the form of the argu­ment itself is cor­rect). In such an instance, we say the argu­ment is “valid,” a tech­ni­cal philo­soph­i­cal term that rough­ly cor­re­sponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or rea­son­able” argu­ment. Some prop­er­ties of deduc­tive rea­son­ing—valid­i­ty, truth, and sound­ness—receive their own explana­to­ry videos lat­er in the series.

In abduc­tive argu­ments (or what are also called “induc­tive argu­ments”), above, we rea­son infor­mal­ly to the best, most prob­a­ble expla­na­tion. In these kinds of argu­ments, the premis­es do not guar­an­tee the con­clu­sion, and the argu­ments are not bound in rigid for­mal syl­lo­gisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most like­ly con­clu­sion giv­en the rea­son­ing and evi­dence. Find­ing addi­tion­al evi­dence, or find­ing that some of our evi­dence or rea­son­ing is incor­rect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the like­li­hood of our con­clu­sion and make new infer­ences. Most sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions rely on abduc­tive rea­son­ing, which is why they are sub­ject to retrac­tion or revi­sion. New evidence—or new under­stand­ings of the evidence—often requires new con­clu­sions.

As for under­stand­ing probability—the like­li­hood that rea­sons pro­vide suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for infer­ring par­tic­u­lar conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trou­ble, falling vic­tim to all sorts of fal­lac­i­es. And when it comes to inter­pret­ing evi­dence, we’re prey to a num­ber of psy­cho­log­i­cal bias­es that pre­vent us from mak­ing fair assess­ments. WiPhi brings pre­vi­ous video series to bear on these prob­lems of argu­men­ta­tion, one on For­mal and Infor­mal Fal­lac­i­es and anoth­er on Cog­ni­tive Bias­es.

When it comes to a gen­er­al the­o­ry of prob­a­bil­i­ty itself, we would all ben­e­fit from some under­stand­ing of what’s called Bayes’ The­o­rem, named for the 18^th cen­tu­ry sta­tis­ti­cian and philoso­pher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ The­o­rem can seem for­bid­ding, but its wide appli­ca­tion across a range of dis­ci­plines speaks to its impor­tance. “Some philoso­phers,” says CUNY grad­u­ate stu­dent Ian Olasov in his video les­son above, “even think it’s the key to under­stand­ing what it means to think ratio­nal­ly.”

Bayesian rea­son­ing, infor­mal log­ic, sound, valid, and true argu­ments… all of these modes of crit­i­cal think­ing help us make sense of the tan­gles of infor­ma­tion we find our­selves caught up in dai­ly. Though some of our less ratio­nal­ly-inclined acquain­tances may not be recep­tive to good intro­duc­to­ry lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharp­en our own rea­son­ing skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as crit­i­cal thinkers in Wire­less Philosophy’s thor­ough, high qual­i­ty series of video lessons.

Find more help­ful resources in the Relat­eds below.

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:

Down­load 130 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es: Tools for Think­ing About Life, Death & Every­thing Between

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detec­tion Kit: What to Ask Before Believ­ing

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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