Watch a New Nina Simone Animation Based on an Interview Never Aired in the U.S. Before

in Music | December 2nd, 2015

Blank on Blank has worked their mag­ic again, this time ani­mat­ing a 1968 inter­view with the singer-song­writer and civ­il rights activist, Nina Simone. As always, Blank on Blank’s visu­al work is a treat. But what stands out for me here is the audio record­ing. Tak­en from a 1960s radio show host­ed by Lil­ian Ter­ry, the audio orig­i­nal­ly aired in Italy in the 1960s. And, until now, it has nev­er been heard in the Unit­ed States. Ter­ry is nowa­days work­ing on an audio­book project called Voic­es from the Jazz Dimen­sion that “chron­i­cles her remark­able col­lec­tion of inter­views with jazz leg­ends from Nina to Duke Elling­ton.” We can hard­ly wait for that project to take final shape. You can find more Blank on Blank ani­ma­tions, all of which revive vin­tage audio clips, in our archive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nina Simone Sings Her Break­through Song, ‘I Loves You Por­gy,’ in 1962

Free Archive of Audio Inter­views with Rock, Jazz & Folk Leg­ends Now on iTunes

Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Clas­sic Jazz Videos (and Much More)

15-Year-Old French Guitar Prodigy Flawlessly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yngwie Malmsteen & Steve Vai

in Music | December 2nd, 2015

I’ve been play­ing gui­tar off and on for most of my life, and I’d be the first to admit that I’m not the most spec­tac­u­lar musi­cian. I do it for joy and don’t sweat my musi­cal lim­i­ta­tions too much. This is a good thing; oth­er­wise I might find myself seething with mad envy—like F. Mur­ray Abraham’s Salieri—upon real­iz­ing that in 15 life­times I’d nev­er be as good as young French prodi­gy Tina S is at 15 years of age. Tina has sent gui­tar nerds every­where flee­ing to their bed­rooms, work­ing their fin­gers bloody in furi­ous efforts to match her speed and accu­ra­cy. Watch her flaw­less­ly rip through Yng­wie Malmsteen’s “Arpeg­gios from Hell” above, ye mighty shred­ders, and despair. See her destroy Steve Vai’s “Pagani­ni 5th Caprice (Cross­roads)” below, ye mon­sters of rock, and rend your den­im vests asun­der with grief.

The baroque speed met­al of Malm­steen and Vai aren’t real­ly my bag, but I have to say, there’s maybe a lit­tle Salieri voice cack­ling into the void in the back of my mind when I watch Tina’s videos. Maybe she’s a one-trick-pony, it tells me, play­ing arpeg­gios all day like a few hun­dred oth­er gui­tarists in the audi­tion line for a hun­dred met­al bands in a hun­dred cities a day—players who couldn’t slow down and play the blues if they were heav­i­ly med­icat­ed.

So says my inner Salieri. But no, there she is below, flaw­less­ly pulling off the “Com­fort­ably Numb” solo, her bends and slides so impec­ca­bly timed I could close my eyes and almost swear it’s David Gilmour. Sigh and alas.

But can she do Van Halen, you right­ly ask? Because, you know, any­one can play Malm­steen, Vai, and Gilmour, but Eddie Van Halen, c’mon…. Yet there she is below, with a sear­ing ren­di­tion of “Erup­tion,” a song gui­tarists who learn Van Halen often avoid for rea­sons that will like­ly become evi­dent when you see Tina play it. Is she too much tech­nique, too lit­tle soul, you say? Yeah, well, she’s 15, and bet­ter than most of us are at twice that age. Com­ments on her videos include the fol­low­ing: “I want to throw my gui­tar out the win­dow” and “This makes me want to kill myself.” In all seri­ous­ness, I hope any­one who gen­uine­ly feels this way seeks help. Also in all seri­ous­ness, don’t despair. Do what you do and enjoy it. And maybe after many long life­times you’ll be reborn as a Parisian gui­tar prodi­gy.

That Tina S has obvi­ous nat­ur­al abil­i­ty in no way means she hasn’t had to work hard for this lev­el of skill. On the con­trary, any­one this good gets there through end­less reg­u­lar prac­tice and the guid­ance of a tal­ent­ed teacher (in this case, French gui­tarist Renaud Louis-Ser­vais). Tina post­ed her first video in 2008 at the ten­der age of 8, play­ing a com­po­si­tion by gui­tarist Maria Lin­ne­mann. You can see her below hon­ing the clas­si­cal chops that she lat­er put to ludi­crous­ly fast use on a met­al trib­ute to Vival­di.

But does she do Mozart? Not so far on her Youtube chan­nel, where you’ll find more ear­ly acoustic per­for­mances, like “Let it Be” and “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia,” and more recent shred­fests like Jason Becker’s “Alti­tudes.” To learn just how Tina views her own musi­cian­ship and sees her future as a gui­tarist, read this inter­view with her on the Gui­tar Chan­nel. “I have not yet start­ed my career as a gui­tarist,” she dead­pans. Many would-be Salieris have already sworn to end theirs after watch­ing her videos.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four­teen-Year-Old Girl’s Blis­ter­ing Heavy Met­al Per­for­mance of Vival­di

Great Vio­lin­ists Play­ing as Kids: Itzhak Perl­man, Anne-Sophie Mut­ter, & More

The Gui­tar Prodi­gy from Karachi

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

Learn to Code with Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science Course: The 2015 Edition

in Computer Science, Online Courses | December 2nd, 2015

Briefly not­ed: This fall, Har­vard has been rolling out videos from the 2015 edi­tion of Com­put­er Sci­ence 50 (CS50), the uni­ver­si­ty’s intro­duc­to­ry cod­ing course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a peren­ni­al­ly pop­u­lar pro­fes­sor (you’ll imme­di­ate­ly see why), the one-semes­ter course (taught most­ly in C) com­bines cours­es typ­i­cal­ly known else­where as “CS1” and “CS2.”

Even if you’re not a Har­vard stu­dent, you’re wel­come to fol­low CS50 online by head­ing over to the This is CS50 web­site, or this alter­na­tive site here. There you will find video lec­tures (stream them all above or access them indi­vid­u­al­ly here), prob­lem sets, quizzes, and oth­er use­ful course mate­ri­als. Once you’ve mas­tered the mate­r­i­al cov­ered in CS50, you can start branch­ing out into new areas of cod­ing by perus­ing our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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

Immanuel Kant’s Life & Philosophy Introduced in a Short Monty Python-Style Animation

in Philosophy | December 2nd, 2015

Philoso­pher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is per­haps best known for his sys­tem­at­ic philo­soph­i­cal ethics, con­ceived of as a post-reli­gious frame­work for sec­u­lar moral­i­ty. His pri­ma­ry eth­i­cal man­date, which he called the “cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive,” enables us—Alain de Bot­ton tells us in his short School of Life video above—to “shift our per­spec­tive, to get us to see our own behav­ior in less imme­di­ate­ly per­son­al terms.” It’s a philo­soph­i­cal ver­sion, de Bot­ton says, of the Gold­en Rule. “Act only accord­ing to that max­im,” Kant famous­ly wrote of the imper­a­tive in his Ground­work of the Meta­physics of Morals, “by which you can at the same time will that it should become a uni­ver­sal law.”

This guide to moral behav­ior seems on its face a sim­ple one. It asks us to imag­ine the con­se­quences of behav­ior should every­one act in the same way. How­ev­er, “almost every con­ceiv­able analy­sis of the Ground­work has been tried out over the past two cen­turies,” writes Har­vard pro­fes­sor Michael Rosen, “yet all have been found want­i­ng in some way or oth­er.” Friedrich Niet­zsche allud­ed to a seri­ous prob­lem with what Rosen calls Kant’s “rule-util­i­tar­i­an­ism.” How, Niet­zsche asks in On the Geneal­o­gy of Morals, are we to deter­mine whether an action will have good or bad con­se­quences unless we have “learned to sep­a­rate nec­es­sary events from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see dis­tant events as if they were present, to antic­i­pate them….”

Can we ever have that kind of fore­sight? Can we for­mu­late rules such that every­one who acts on them will pre­dict the same pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive out­comes in every sit­u­a­tion? The ques­tions did not seem to per­son­al­ly dis­turb Kant, who lived his life in a high­ly pre­dictable, rule-bound way—even, de Bot­ton tells us, when it came to struc­tur­ing his din­ner par­ties. But while the cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive has seemed unwork­ably abstract and too divorced from par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances and con­tin­gen­cies, an elab­o­ra­tion of the max­im has had much more appeal to con­tem­po­rary ethi­cists. We should also, Kant wrote, “act so as to treat peo­ple always as ends in them­selves, nev­er as mere means.” De Bot­ton pro­vides some help­ful con­text for why Kant felt the need to cre­ate these eth­i­cal prin­ci­ples.

Kant lived in a time when “the iden­ti­fy­ing fea­ture of his age was its grow­ing sec­u­lar­ism.” De Bot­ton con­tends that while Kant wel­comed the decline of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion, he also feared the con­se­quences; as “a pes­simist about human char­ac­ter,” Kant “believed that we are by nature intense­ly prone to cor­rup­tion.” His solu­tion was to “replace reli­gious author­i­ty with the author­i­ty of rea­son.” The project occu­pied all of Kant’s career, from his work on polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy to that on aes­thet­ics in the Cri­tique of Pure Judg­ment. And though philoso­phers have for cen­turies had dif­fi­cul­ty mak­ing Kant’s ethics work, his dense, dif­fi­cult writ­ing has nev­er­the­less occu­pied a cen­tral place in West­ern thought. In his defense of the author­i­ty of rea­son, Kant pro­vid­ed us with one of the most com­pre­hen­sive means for under­stand­ing how exact­ly human rea­son works—and for rec­og­niz­ing its many lim­i­ta­tions.

To read Kan­t’s work for your­self, down­load free ver­sions of his major texts in a vari­ety of dig­i­tal for­mats from our archive of Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks. Kant is no easy read, and it helps to have a guide. To learn how his work has been inter­pret­ed over the past two hun­dred years, and how he arrived at many of his con­clu­sions, con­sid­er tak­ing one of many online class­es on Kant we have list­ed in our archive of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Phi­los­o­phy in Rus­sia

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

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

45,000 Works of Art from Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center Now Freely Viewable Online

in Art | December 2nd, 2015

Just last month, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty’s Iris and B. Ger­ald Can­tor Cen­ter for Visu­al Arts made its col­lec­tion acces­si­ble online, dig­i­tiz­ing and upload­ing over 45,000 of its works of art in forms freely view­able by all. These include, if you nav­i­gate through the col­lec­tions high­light­ed on the browse page, works of Amer­i­can and Euro­pean art; African, Native Amer­i­can, and Ocean­ic art; Asian art; mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary art; prints, draw­ings, and pho­tographs; and Stan­ford fam­i­ly col­lec­tions as well as works cur­rent­ly on dis­play.

But this hard­ly hap­pened at a stroke. The short video above gives a look behind the scenes — or rather, muse­um walls, or per­haps dig­i­tal muse­um walls — to reveal some of the effort that went into the six-year project that has cul­mi­nat­ed in the open­ing of the Can­tor Arts Cen­ter’s online col­lec­tions.

The endeav­or required no small amount of phys­i­cal work, not just to re-pho­to­graph every­thing in their col­lec­tions (only five per­cent of which goes on dis­play at any one time), but to per­form a whole new inven­to­ry, the first com­plete one the muse­um had done since 1916. (As a recent move remind­ed me, there’s noth­ing like hav­ing to move all your stuff from one place to anoth­er to give you the clear­est pos­si­ble sense of exact­ly what you have.)

Here we’ve post­ed a few paint­ings from the Can­tor: James McNeill Whistler’s Hurling­ham (well, an etch­ing, if you want to get tech­ni­cal), Théodore Caru­elle d’Aligny’s View of the Bay of Naples, Nakabayashi Chikkei’s Autumn Land­scape and Edward Hop­per’s New York Cor­ner. (You can also find a whole dif­fer­ent set of scenes ren­dered in pen and ink at the Can­tor’s ded­i­cat­ed dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of the sketch­books of San Fran­cis­co Bay Area abstract expres­sion­ist painter Richard Diebenko­rn.)

But to get a sense of the full scope of the geo­graph­ic, his­tor­i­cal, aes­thet­ic, and for­mal vari­ety of the art the Can­tor has made view­able any­where and any time, you’ll want to fol­low the instruc­tions pro­vid­ed by one of our read­ers, Robin L: “Go to this search gate­way. If you enter in an artist (I tried Whistler), you will get a list of all of the col­lec­tions’ images with small images and some basic infor­ma­tion. Then click on the spe­cif­ic piece that you want. And that one will open up with a small-medi­um image and some descrip­tion of the piece. If you click on the image again, it will enlarge.” 

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Whit­ney Muse­um Puts Online 21,000 Works of Amer­i­can Art, By 3,000 Artists

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

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

40,000 Art­works from 250 Muse­ums, Now View­able for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

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, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Dresser: The Contraption That Makes Getting Dressed an Adventure

in Art | December 1st, 2015

Joseph Her­sch­er — kinet­ic artist extra­or­di­naire and cre­ator of the great “Page Turn­er” Rube Gold­berg machine — returns with a new con­trap­tion: “The Dress­er”.

Orig­i­nal­ly, “The Dress­er” was a live per­for­mance piece that Her­sch­er per­formed in Char­lotte, NC. He spent a year build­ing the con­trap­tion, then 2 months test­ing it, before stag­ing it for audi­ences. (Watch a short doc­u­men­tary on the live per­for­mance here.) Now, thank­ful­ly, he brings the quirky device to the web, for the rest of us to see. Some­where Rube Gold­berg is smil­ing.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Page Turn­er: A Fab­u­lous Rube Gold­berg Machine for Read­ers

The Falling Water: A Rube Gold­berg Machine That Makes a Fine Cock­tail

Stu­dents Tells the Passover Sto­ry with a Rube Gold­berg Machine

Prince (RIP) Performs Early Hits in a 1982 Concert: “Controversy,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover” & More

in Music | December 1st, 2015

Update: Neil deGrasse Tyson just put it right. Now we know what it sounds like when doves cry.

We’re just get­ting the sad news that the artist Prince Rogers Nelson–otherwise sim­ply known as Prince–has appar­ent­ly died at the age of 57. Here you can watch him per­form some of his ear­li­est hits, back in 1982. In the hours to come, we’ll have more on Prince and his influ­en­tial career.

The empire of Prince is a tight­ly con­trolled king­dom, ruled by an enig­mat­ic and eccen­tric musi­cal genius with a leg­en­dar­i­ly con­tentious rela­tion­ship with the music indus­try. For most of the nineties, he was referred to as “the artist for­mer­ly known as Prince,” hav­ing changed his name to an unpro­nounce­able sym­bol to spite his label Warn­er Bros. “Dur­ing that time,” writes Rolling Stone, “sales of his new music slowed down sig­nif­i­cant­ly, but he still man­aged to get his point across.”

You have to admire an artist—even one as wealthy and suc­cess­ful as Prince—willing to take a finan­cial hit for the sake of prin­ci­ple. In his most recent stand (though it prob­a­bly won’t cost him any­thing worth men­tion­ing in stream­ing rev­enue), Prince removed all of his music this past sum­mer from every stream­ing ser­vice except Jay‑Z’s Tidal. So we’re very lucky to have the black-and-white taped live per­for­mance here from 1982 at New Jersey’s Capi­tol The­atre (released by The Music Vault), two years before he hit his 80s peak with the release of Pur­ple Rain the film and album.

What­ev­er you think of Pur­ple Rain the movie (actress Apol­lo­nia Kotero was nom­i­nat­ed for a Razz­ie for worst new star, and her Prince-penned song “Sex Shoot­er” for worst orig­i­nal song), no one can deny the absolute pop bril­liance of the album. It’s hard to pick a favorite; most of us can sing the cho­rus­es to “Let’s Go Crazy,” “When Doves Cry,” or “I Would Die 4 U” in our sleep. That said, Prince had already released some of the finest music of his career by the time he appeared at this New Jer­sey con­cert, includ­ing one of my per­son­al favorites, “Con­tro­ver­sy” (top) from the 1981 album of the same name and “I Wan­na Be Your Lover” (above) from 1979’s Prince.

We don’t get any­thing from the year’s ground­break­ing 1999, the first album to fea­ture the Rev­o­lu­tion, but we do get clas­sics of the sleazy sex-god first phase of the Pur­ple One’s career, includ­ing “Jack U Off,” above, in which Prince pulls out some clas­sic male-strip­per-does-jazzer­size dance moves while the band rips through the rau­cous stom­per of a tune at almost punk tem­po and vol­ume. These three songs rep­re­sent three of facets Prince as an artist: There’s the agi­tat­ed social com­men­ta­tor, the sen­si­tive, pin­ing lover, and the unre­pen­tant horn­dog. He’s empha­sized one or anoth­er of these per­sona over the course of his career, mod­u­lat­ing them with the funked-up futur­ist char­ac­ter he evolved into as the decade pro­gressed.

Prince’s attempts at film star­dom most­ly fall into the so-bad-they’re-good cat­e­go­ry, begin­ning with rock opera Pur­ple Rain. But few know that he intend­ed to release his first cel­lu­loid effort around the time of this con­cert. It was to be called The Sec­ond Com­ing, to accom­pa­ny a scrapped album of the same name. Hear him sing the unre­leased, gospel-inspired title song above, whose lyrics recall one of Michael Jackson’s social­ly con­scious anthems and include the line “How many more good men must die before there’s gun con­trol.” To learn more about that ill-fat­ed film project, read this inter­view with the pro­posed direc­tor Chuck Statler, the “god­fa­ther of the music video,” here. And to see the full Capi­tol The­atre show, check it out on Youtube here, or right down below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

35 Years of Prince’s Hair­styles in 15 Glo­ri­ous Sec­onds!

Watch a Young Bob Mar­ley and The Wail­ers Per­form Live in Eng­land (1973): For His 70th Birth­day Today

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

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

Slavoj Zizek​ Explains What’s Wrong with Online Dating & What Unconventional Technology Can Actually Improve Your Love Life

in Life, Philosophy, Technology | December 1st, 2015

I once read a book by Lar­ry King called How to Talk to Any­one, Any­time, Any­where. Slavoj Zizek might well con­sid­er writ­ing a book of his own called How to Make Intel­lec­tu­al Pro­nounce­ments About Any­thing, Any­time, Any­where. From Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness to the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion to Star­bucks (and those just among the top­ics we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) the Sloven­ian philoso­pher-provo­ca­teur has for decades demon­strat­ed a will­ing­ness to expound on the widest pos­si­ble vari­ety of sub­jects, to the point where his career has begun to look like one con­tin­u­ous, free-asso­cia­tive ana­lyt­i­cal mono­logue, which in the Big Think video above reach­es the inevitable sub­ject: your love life.

Per­haps you’ve tried online dat­ing — a prac­tice that, giv­en the increas­ing­ly thor­ough inte­gra­tion of the inter­net and dai­ly life, we’ll prob­a­bly soon just call “dat­ing.” Per­haps you’ve had pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences with it, per­haps you’ve had neg­a­tive ones, and most prob­a­bly you’ve had a mix­ture of both, but how often can you take your mind off the awk­ward fact that you have to first “meet” the oth­er per­son through an elec­tron­ic medi­um, cre­at­ing a ver­sion of your­self to suit that medi­um? Zizek calls this online dat­ing’s prob­lem­at­ic “aspect of self-com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion or self-manip­u­la­tion.”

“When you date online,” he says, “you have to present your­self there in a cer­tain way, putting for­ward cer­tain qual­i­ties. You focus on your idea of how oth­er peo­ple should per­ceive you. But I think that’s not how love func­tions, even at the very sim­ple lev­el. I think the Eng­lish term is ‘endear­ing foibles’ — an ele­men­tary ingre­di­ent in love. You can­not ever fall in love with the per­fect per­son. There must be some tiny small dis­turb­ing ele­ment, and it is only through notic­ing this ele­ment that you say, ‘But in spite of that imper­fec­tion, I love him or her.’ ”

Fair enough. But what to do about it? Zizek thinks that the way for­ward for roman­tic tech­nolo­gies lies not in a less tech­no­log­i­cal approach, but a more tech­no­log­i­cal approach — or at least a stranger tech­no­log­i­cal approach. He imag­ines a world of “ide­al sex­u­al attrac­tion” where “I meet a lady; we are attract­ed to each oth­er; we say all the usu­al stuff — your place, my place, what­ev­er, we meet there. What hap­pens then? She comes with her plas­tic penis, elec­tric dil­do. I come with some hor­ri­ble thing — I saw it, it’s called some­thing like stim­u­lat­ing train­ing unit — it’s basi­cal­ly a plas­tic vagi­na, a hole.”

Dare we exam­ine where this sce­nario goes? The out­come may sur­prise you. They sim­ply insert her elec­tric dil­do into his stim­u­lat­ing train­ing unit, and voilà, “the machines are doing it for us, buzzing in the back­ground, and I’m free to do what­ev­er I want, and she.” With full trib­ute paid to the super­ego by their vul­gar devices, “we have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. I talk with a lady because we real­ly like each oth­er. And, you know, when I’m pour­ing her tea, or she to me, quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touch­ing. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usu­al oppres­sive sex where you wor­ry about per­for­mance. No, all that is tak­en care of by the stu­pid machines. That would be ide­al sex for me today.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

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

Slavoj Žižek on the Feel-Good Ide­ol­o­gy of Star­bucks

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, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Lynda Barry’s Illustrated Syllabus & Homework Assignments from Her New UW-Madison Course, “Making Comics”

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Education, K-12, Online Courses | November 30th, 2015

Car­toon­ist turned edu­ca­tor Lyn­da Bar­ry is again per­mit­ting the world at large to freely audit one of her fas­ci­nat­ing Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madi­son class­es via her Tum­blr. (To get to the start of the class, click here and then scroll down the page until you reach the syl­labus, then start work­ing your way back­wards.)

The top­ic this fall is “Graph­ic Vices, Graph­ic Virtues: Mak­ing Comics,” a sub­ject with which Bar­ry is inti­mate­ly acquaint­ed. In the professor’s own words, this class is “a(n aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly rig­or­ous) blast!”

As in pre­vi­ous class­es, the syl­labus, above, spells out a high­ly spe­cial­ized set of required sup­plies, includ­ing a num­ber of items rarely called for at the col­lege lev­el.

It’s become a time hon­ored tra­di­tion for Barry’s stu­dents to adopt new names by which to refer to each oth­er in-class, some­thing they’ll enjoy hear­ing spo­ken aloud. For “Mak­ing Comics,” Bar­ry is fly­ing under the han­dle Pro­fes­sor SETI (as in “search for extrater­res­tri­al intel­li­gence”), telling the class that “images are the ETI in SETI.”

The stu­dents have respond­ed with the fol­low­ing han­dles: Chef Boyardee, Gin­ger, Lois Lane, Rosie the Riv­et­er, Regi­na Pha­lange, Ara­bel­la, Snoopy, Skeeter, Tig­ger, Arya Stark, Nala, Nos­tal­gia, Aki­ra, Lapus Lazuli, The Buffalo,Mr. Novem­ber, The Short Giraffe, Nic­ki Minaj, Neko, Vin­cent Brooks, Reg­u­lar Sized Rudy, and Zef.

(Sounds like a rough and ready crew. What name would you choose, and why?)

As usu­al, Bar­ry draws inspi­ra­tion from the dizzy­ing boun­ty of images avail­able on the net, bom­bard­ing her pupils with find­ings such as the lobed teeth of the crab-eater seal, above.

Sci­ence and music remain pet sub­jects–Afro­fu­tur­ist band­leader Sun Ra serves as class ora­cle this go round.

Pro­fes­sor SETI keeps the “graph­ic vice” of the class’ offi­cial title front and cen­ter with assign­ments per­tain­ing to the 7 dead­ly sins, ask­ing stu­dents to exam­ine mod­ern equiv­a­lents of the hor­rors depict­ed by Heron­imus Bosch above and 16th-cen­tu­ry engraver Pieter van der Hey­den, below.

What to do with all of these images? Draw them, of course! As Bar­ry tells her stu­dents:

Draw­ing is a lan­guage. It’s hard to under­stand what that real­ly means until you’ve ‘spo­ken’ and ‘lis­tened’ to it enough in a reli­able reg­u­lar way like the reli­able reg­u­lar way we will have togeth­er this semes­ter.

That’s an impor­tant def­i­n­i­tion for those lack­ing con­fi­dence in their draw­ing abil­i­ties to keep in mind. Bar­ry may revere the inky blacks of comics leg­end Jaime Her­nan­dez, but she’s also a devo­tee of the wild, unbri­dled line that may be a beginner’s truest expres­sion. (Stick fig­ures, how­ev­er, “don’t cut it.”) To her way of think­ing, every­one is capa­ble of com­mu­ni­cat­ing flu­ent­ly in visu­al lan­guage. The cur­rent crop of stu­dent work reveals a range of train­ing and nat­ur­al tal­ent, but all are wor­thy when viewed through Barry’s lens.

The teacher’s phi­los­o­phy is the bind­ing ele­ment here, but don’t fret if you are unable to take the class in per­son:

We rarely speak direct­ly about the work we do in our class though we look at it togeth­er. We stare at it and some­times it makes us laugh or we silent­ly point out some part of it to the class­mate beside us.  To be able to speak this unspo­ken lan­guage we need to prac­tice see­ing (hear­ing) the way it talks.

That ear­li­er-allud­ed-to rig­or is no joke. Dai­ly diary comics, 3 minute self por­traits on index cards, pages fold­ed to yield 16 frames in need of fill­ing, and found images copied while lis­ten­ing to pre­scribed music, lec­tures, and read­ings are a con­stant, non-nego­tiable expec­ta­tion of all par­tic­i­pants. Her method­ol­o­gy may sound goose‑y but it’s far from loose‑y.

In oth­er words, if you want to play along, pre­pare to set aside a large chunk of time to com­plete her week­ly assign­ments with the vig­or demand­ed of non-vir­tu­al stu­dents.

Those who aren’t able to com­mit to going the dis­tance at this time can recon­struct the class lat­er.  Bar­ry leaves both the assign­ments and exam­ples of stu­dent work on her Tum­blr for per­pe­tu­ity. (You can see an exam­ple here.) For now, try com­plet­ing the 20 minute exer­cise using the assigned image above, or by choos­ing from one of her “extra cred­it” images, below:

Set timer for three min­utes and begin this draw­ing using a yel­low col­or pen­cil. Try to draw as much of the draw­ing as you can in three min­utes. You can draw fast, and in a messy way, The impor­tant thing is to get as much cov­ered as you can in three min­utes. You can col­or things in if you like. Look for the dark­est areas of the pho­to and col­or those in.

Set a timer for anoth­er three min­utes and using your non-dom­i­nant hand, draw with orange or col­or pen­cil to draw the entire draw­ing again, draw­ing right on top of the first draw­ing lay­er. The lines don’t have to match or be right on top of each oth­er, you can change your mind as you add this lay­er. You can move a bit to the right rather than try to draw direct­ly onto the first set of lines.

Set a timer for anoth­er 3 min­utes and use a red pen­cil and draw it again, using you dom­i­nant hand, adding anoth­er lay­er to the draw­ing. Again, you don’t have to fol­low your orig­i­nal lines. Just draw on top of them.

Set a timer for anoth­er 3 min­utes and use a dark green pen­cil to draw the entire draw­ing one more time on top of all the oth­ers. 

Set a timer for 8 min­utes and use a dark blue pen­cil to draw it one more time.

Spend the last 8 min­utes ink­ing the image in with your uni­ball pen. Remem­ber that sol­id black is the very last thing you’d do giv­en your time lim­it. You want to make sure to draw all the parts of the pic­ture first.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry Shows You How to Draw Bat­man in Her UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Lyn­da Barry’s Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her UW-Madi­son Class, “The Unthink­able Mind”

Watch Lyn­da Barry’s Grad­u­a­tion Speech; Give a Shout Out to the Teach­ers Who Changed Your Life

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

Classic Blues Songs By John Lee Hooker, B.B. King & Muddy Waters Played on the Gayageum, a Traditional Korean Instrument

in Music | November 30th, 2015

To say that most polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions on social media lack nuance seems tan­ta­mount to point­ing out that most pornog­ra­phy lacks romance. The thrusts, par­ries, and asides of the Face­book com­ment skir­mish and the Twit­ter­fight gen­er­al­ly con­sti­tute per­for­ma­tive acts rather than thought­ful inter­per­son­al engage­ment. It’s more the nature of the medi­um than the fault of the par­tic­i­pants; ever-churn­ing con­tro­ver­sy keeps the machines run­ning. One con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject now trend­ing on a net­work near you is the issue of Cul­tur­al Appropriation—broadly defined as the use of the sym­bols, lan­guage, dress, hair­styles, music, art, and oth­er sig­ni­fiers of one cul­ture by anoth­er.

A prob­lem aris­es when we leave the sub­ject broad­ly defined. Pow­er dynam­ics are key, but to con­demn all acts of cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion as theft leaves us in a bind. How do we gen­er­ate cul­ture with­out it? Not all acts of bor­row­ing are equal­ly respect­ful, but with­out them, we could not have had the musi­cal rev­o­lu­tions of rock and roll—with its appro­pri­a­tion of the blues—or of hip-hop, with its appro­pri­a­tion of dis­co, pop, Kung Fu movies, and every­thing else in a DJ’s record and video col­lec­tion. Neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive exam­ples can eas­i­ly get jum­bled togeth­er under these rubrics. To avoid get­ting tan­gled in ana­lyt­i­cal bram­bles, why don’t we turn instead to what I would con­sid­er a pos­i­tive exam­ple of cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion: the pieces you hear in the videos here, inter­pre­ta­tions of blues songs per­formed by musi­cian Luna Lee on a Gayageum, a tra­di­tion­al Kore­an zither-like instru­ment.

We’ve fea­tured Luna’s Gayageum cov­ers before—of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” and Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s take on Hendrix’s “Lit­tle Wing.” Both Hen­drix songs demon­strate the degree to which the rock gui­tarist bor­rowed heav­i­ly from blues idioms. Tra­di­tion­al blues artists them­selves, of course, cre­at­ed and inno­vat­ed through bor­row­ing from each oth­er and from myr­i­ad tra­di­tion­al sources. Are Luna’s blues per­for­mances any dif­fer­ent? She clear­ly demon­strates a love and respect for the source mate­r­i­al, and she plays it with deft­ness and skill, tak­ing plea­sure in musi­cian­ship, not sales­man­ship. Her blues cov­ers don’t seem to have much com­mer­cial appeal, but they great­ly appeal to lis­ten­ers judg­ing by the num­ber of peo­ple her videos reach.

At the top of the post, you can hear her play John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom.” Below it, we have Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and above, B.B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone.”  Low­er down, hear Mud­dy Waters “Rollin’ and Tum­blin’” (first record­ed by Ham­bone Willie New­born) and Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom.” Each inter­pre­ta­tion relies on mul­ti­track recording—Luna is either accom­pa­nied by a gener­ic back­ing track or accom­pa­nies her­self with a rhythm track that she plays over. Her cov­ers of Amer­i­can blues clas­sics on a tra­di­tion­al Kore­an instru­ment bring to the fore the inter­cul­tur­al acces­si­bil­i­ty of the songs and their adapt­abil­i­ty to an instru­men­tal con­text we might also con­sid­er “roots.” But as you can see from Luna’s Youtube chan­nel, she doesn’t only adapt “roots” music. She also cov­ers Radio­head, Frank Sina­tra, Led Zep­pelin, and AC/DC.

It’s like­ly my own bias for the blues—and for more tra­di­tion­al blues in particular—that makes me say so, but I think the cov­ers rep­re­sent­ed here are her most suc­cess­ful. (Whether Messrs Hook­er, King, King, Waters, and James would approve, I can­not say.) There’s some­thing about hear­ing the Gayageum in dia­logue with these songs that feels… well, if not exact­ly authen­tic at least less gim­micky than than a cov­er of One Repub­lic. But ulti­mate­ly, what­ev­er your pref­er­ence, if you can appre­ci­ate Luna’s instru­men­tal skill and devo­tion to her source mate­r­i­al, you’ll find some­thing to love on her page.

She’s not in it for the mon­ey, but like every strug­gling artist, Luna has dreams and bills to pay. To sup­port her work, vis­it her Patre­on page and help con­tribute to her goal of play­ing music full time and hir­ing addi­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tors. In the pitch video below, Luna gives us some of her musi­cal back­ground and explains how she adapt­ed the tra­di­tion­al­ly acoustic Gayageum for more rock­ing con­tem­po­rary tunes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Per­formed on a Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

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

Led Zep­pelin, Rolling Stones & The Bea­t­les Played on a 3‑String Elec­tric Moun­tain Dul­cimer

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