Dick Van Dyke, Paul Lynde & the Original Cast of Bye Bye Birdie Appear on The Ed Sullivan Show (1961)
?si=cd3WFcukQgkDVXT4
Think back, if you will to the dawn of the 60’s, or failing that, the third season of Mad Men, when Broadway musicals could still be considered legitimate adult entertainment and Bye Bye Birdie was the hottest ticket in town.
Six months after the show’s 1960 opening, Broadway’s—soon to be television’s—latest star Dick Van Dyke, appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to introduce the rest of the country to the musical their high schools and community theaters would be performing in perpetuity.
The showcase also afforded the American viewing public their first glimpse of the man who would outlast Sullivan as a fixture in their living rooms, Hollywood’s most outrageous Square, Paul Lynde.
Lynde had his camp and ate it too in the role of a solidly Midwestern father of two who, by virtue of his association with his teenage daughter, finds himself appearing on none other than… The Ed Sullivan Show! It’s a truly meta moment. The studio audience seems to enjoy the joke, and Sullivan appears pleased too, when he wanders on after “Hymn for a Sunday Evening” as the song is properly called. According to his biography, Always on Sunday, his response upon first hearing was less enthusiastic. When the merry Broadway crowd turned to check Sullivan’s response to Lynde’s gulping final admission, (“I love you, Ed!”), Sullivan reported that he wanted the floor to open up and swallow both him and his wife.
Way to get with the joke, Ed!
Later in the episode, there’s some graceful Van Dyke footwork on “Put on a Happy Face,” a song that even the most seasoned theatergoers tend to forget originated with this show, probably because it does nothing to advance the plot.
Lynde and Van Dyke reprised their roles in the 1962 film, but in a typical tale of stage-to-screen heartbreak, Susan Watson, Lynde’s original Birdie daughter, was replaced by 22-year-old bombshell, Ann-Margret. (The deliciously bitchy remark Maureen Stapleton made about her at the wrap party turns out to be apocryphal, or at least intended more kindly than it would seem.) See what she brings to “Hymn for a Sunday Evening” below.
Related Content:
A Young Frank Zappa Turns the Bicycle into a Musical Instrument on The Steve Allen Show (1963)
Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials
Ayun Halliday is an author and homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Saul Bass’ Rejected Poster Concepts for The Shining (and His Pretty Excellent Signature)
Stanley Kubrick’s perfectionism extended well beyond his films themselves. He even took pains to ensure the promotion of his projects with posters as memorable as the actual experience of watching them. The poster for Barry Lyndon remains perhaps the most elegant of all time, and who could forget the first time A Clockwork Orange’s promised audiences (or threatened audiences with the promise of) “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven”? Though less often seen today, the bright yellow original poster for The Shining, with that unidentified pointillist face and its expression of shock, may well unsettle you more than even the film itself.
It came from the office of famous graphic designer Saul Bass, known not just for storyboarding Kubrick’s Spartacus but for creating the title sequences for movies like Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (whose poster Bass also designed), North by Northwest, and Psycho (whose immortal “shower scene” Bass may also have come up with). Kubrick rightly figured Bass had what it took to deliver the considerable impact of his psychological horror picture in graphic form.
“This poster design wasn’t a ‘design and done’ deal however,” writes Derek Kimball in a DesignBuddy post on the evolution of the image. “Many of Bass’ concepts were rejected by Kubrick before settling on the final design.” You can see three of them here in this post, and the rest there. Each one includes Kubrick’s handwritten notes of objection: “hand and bike are too irrelevant,” “title looks bad small,” “too much emphasis on maze,” “looks like science fiction film,” “hotel looks peculiar.” You’ve got to admit that the man has a point in every case, although I suspect Bass knew in advance which design the auteur would, once through the wringer of revisions, have the least trouble with. “I am excited about all of them,” Bass writes, “and I could give you many reasons why I think they would be strong and effective identifiers for the film,” but one in particular, “provocative, scary, and emotional,” “promises a picture I haven’t seen before.”
You have to appreciate that kind of confidence in his team’s work when dealing with such a famously exacting client — and, looking at the letter itself, you really have to have to appreciate the kind of confidence it takes to sign your name with a caricature of your own face on the body of your namesake fish.
Related Content:
The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (As Told by Those Who Helped Him Make It)
Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining
Saul Bass’ Vivid Storyboards for Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960)
A Brief Visual Introduction to Saul Bass’ Celebrated Title Designs
Saul Bass’ Oscar-Winning Animated Short Ponders Why Man Creates
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Director Robert Rodriguez Teaches The Basics of Filmmaking in Under 10 Minutes
Orson Welles once claimed that Gregg Toland, cinematographer for Citizen Kane, taught him everything he needed to know about shooting movies in a half hour. Director Robert Rodriguez — who started off as the poster boy for ‘90s indie cinema and is currently making a healthy living turning out movies like Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – claims that he can reduce that time by a third. In 10 Minute Film School, which you can watch above, Rodriguez quickly hits on some of the key points of movie making while espousing the same rebel DIY spirit that made him a success. Remember, this is a guy who made a feature film, El Mariachi, for $7000.
Rodriguez’s basic philosophy doesn’t dwell on learning the fine points of Aristotelian act structure or the technical nuances of the Red camera. He just wants you to start shooting stuff. “Don’t dream about being a filmmaker,” he proclaims in the video, which looks like it was shot some time during the Clinton administration. “You are a filmmaker. Now let’s get down to business.”
He tells aspiring filmmakers to become technical — learn the tools of the trade. If you don’t, you might become overly reliant on the techies who may or may not be interested in realizing your vision. He also doesn’t put too much stock in screenwriting books like Save the Cat. “Anyone know how to write?” he asks the audience. “No? Good. Everyone else writes the same way. Start writing your way. That makes you unique.”
He also advises against storyboards. “Make a blank screen for yourself and sit there and watch your movie. Imagine your movie, shot for shot, cut for cut…Write down the shots you see and then go get those shots.”
The video shows its age when Rodriguez starts to talk about equipment. No aspiring filmmaker aside from a celluloid fetishist is going to shoot a first feature on 16mm when cheaper, easier digital cameras are available. Yet the core of his message is still valid. “You don’t want anything too fancy,” he states over and over. Fancy equipment makes for lifeless, dull films, lacking in that reckless, adventurous spirit of the newbie moviemaker.
Essentially, Rodriguez wants to keep the “independent” in independent filmmaking. Just as he tells his charges to get technical, Rodriguez also tells them to keep their budgets low. The more money a studio sinks into a production, the more they can dictate how that money is spent. Rodriguez had a guitar case, a turtle and a small Texan town at his disposal when he was starting out, and, with that, he strung together the story of El Mariachi. In the 20 plus years since, Rodriguez has maintained creative control over just about all of his movies.
One final note. “Don’t bother going to film school,” he says. As someone with an overpriced MFA in film, I have to say that he’s probably right.
via Filmmaker IQ
Related Content:
Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema
Filmmaking Advice from Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi (NSFW)
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new picture of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
Read More...5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History
Working with his colleagues, Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, took Freebase (Google’s “community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things”) and gathered data on 150,000 important artists and cultural figures who lived during the long arc of Western history (6oo BCE to 2012). The scholars then mapped these figures’ births and deaths (blue=birth, red=death) and traced their movements through time and place. The result is a 5‑minute animation (above), showing how the West’s great cultural centers shifted from Rome, eventually to Paris (circa 1789), and more recently to New York and Los Angeles. Maps documenting the flow of ideas and people in other geographies will come next.
According to NPR, “The models [used to create the videos] are the latest application of a rapidly growing field, called network science — which uses visualizations to find the underlying patterns and trends in complex data sets.” And they could yield some unexpected insights into the history of migration — for example, even with the advent of planes, trains and automobiles, modern artists don’t move too much farther from their birthplaces (an average of 237 miles) relative to the artsy types who lived in the 14th century (133 miles on average).
A complete report on the project was published in the journal Science by Schich and his colleagues. Unfortunately you’ll need a subscription to read it.
Related Content:
Social Media in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution
Free Online History Courses
European Cultural History in 91 Free Lectures by George Mosse
Read More...
The 10 Greatest Documentaries of All Time According to 340 Filmmakers and Critics
Earlier this year we featured the aesthetically radical 1929 documentary A Man with a Movie Camera. In it, director Dziga Vertov and his editor-wife Elizaveta Svilova, as Jonathan Crow put it, gleefully use “jump cuts, superimpositions, split screens and every other trick in a filmmaker’s arsenal” to craft a “dizzying, impressionistic, propulsive portrait of the newly industrializing Soviet Union.”
He mentioned then that no less authoritative a cinephilic institution than Sight and Sound named A Man with a Movie Camera, in their 2012 poll, “the 8th best movie ever made,” But now, in their new poll in search of the greatest documentary of all time, they gave Vertov’s film an even higher honor, naming it, well, the greatest documentary of all time. A Man with a Movie Camera, writes Brian Winston, “signposts nothing less than how documentary can survive the digital destruction of photographic image integrity and yet still, as Vertov wanted, ‘show us life.’ Vertov is, in fact, the key to documentary’s future.”
High praise indeed, though Sight and Sound’s critics make strong claims (with supporting clips) for the other 55 documentaries on the list as well. In the top ten alone, we have the following:
- A Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
- Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France 1985). Lanzmann’s “550-minute examination of the Jewish Holocaust falls within the documentary tradition of investigative journalism, but what he does with that form is so confrontational and relentless that it demands to be described in philosophical/spiritual terms rather than simply cinematically.”
- Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1982). “It’s a cliché to say about a movie [ … ] that its true shape or texture is in the eye of the beholder – but it’s true of Sans soleil, which not only withstands multiple viewings, but never seems to be the same film twice. It addresses memory even as its different threads seem to forget themselves; it parses geopolitics without betraying any affiliation; it might be Marker’s most elaborately self-effacing film, or his most plangently personal.”
- Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955). “In 1945 moviegoers worldwide became familiar through weekly newsreels in their local cinemas with the unspeakable conditions in the recently liberated Nazi extermination camps. [ … ] Not, however, until Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of the Allied liberation of the most notorious camp, at Auschwitz, did film producers truly confront and define the moral and aesthetic parameters involved in treating such an intractable subject.”
- The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989). “A good prosecutor can put a guilty suspect behind bars, we hear in The Thin Blue Line, but it takes a great one to convict an innocent man. Something similar might be said of Errol Morris’s brilliantly unstable, highly influential investigation into the 1976 roadside shooting of a Texas cop and the wrongful conviction of one Randall Adams.” Demonstrating a miscarriage of justice is impressive, but it’s quite another thing to undermine the very notion of a stable truth.”
- Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, 1961). Rouch and Morin “are the architects of a social collaboration and are rigorously open-handed with the materials they’re using. Their loose vox-pop style, beginning each encounter by asking whether the interviewee is happy, disarmingly mixes with scenes that show how cinema, in any regard, must be artificial – employing classic shot-reverse-shot techniques in otherwise uneventful conversational moments.”
- Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922). “Nanook of the North is notorious for its fakery, its open-faced igloo and cutesy depiction of the Inuit as untouched by Western culture. [But] Flaherty’s photography is beautiful, and his make-believe methods captured the traditional skills of Allakariallak’s ancestors on film before they died out altogether; to the cinema audiences of the time, Nanook was a journey to a foreign and fascinating place.”
- The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000). Varda’s “handheld DV autoportrait of the artist as an older woman,” though it “seems small and simple, albeit rigorous in its intimacy, brilliantly encompasses agriculture, art history, class politics, ecology, economics, recycling raps and (via an interview with a descendant of Louis Daguerre) the origins of cinema.”
- Dont Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967). “The man born Robert Zimmerman knows well the value of obscuring myths and shifting personas, and part of the fascination of Pennebaker’s pioneering Direct Cinema account of Dylan’s 1965 tour of Britain is the way it captures the singer transforming on camera into ‘Dylan’, the unreachably cool, detached yet wired, lightning-in-a-bottle young genius who, as Greil Marcus memorably wrote, ‘seemed less to occupy a turning point in cultural space and time than to be that turning point.’ ”
- Grey Gardens, (Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, 1975). “Imagine if John Waters shot a script by Tennessee Williams and it was broadcast in a TV slot usually reserved for The Hoarder Next Door or How Clean Is Your House? [ … ] a fly-in-a-Harvey-Wallbanger look at the world of Jackie O.’s eccentric cousins, Big Edie and Little Edie (and their interloper, ‘the Marble Faun’). It’s fingernails-down-blackboard wonderful, as the Edies reminisce, sing, dance, yell at each other and watch approvingly as cats and raccoons befoul their rotting Long Island retreat.”
You can read up on the rest of the 50 greatest documentaries of all time, which range across the world, across history, and across the spectrum of truth and fiction, at Sight and Sound.
Related Content:
4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More200 Free Documentaries Online
Free: Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, the 8th Best Film Ever Made
The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Ray Bradbury: “I Am Not Afraid of Robots. I Am Afraid of People” (1974)
Anyone remember Michael Crichton’s Westworld (or the Simpsons parody)? In this dystopian 1973 sci-fi, tourists visit a triumvirate of fantasy theme parks staffed by robotic historical re-enactors: Roman World, Medieval World, and the titular West World, with its “lawless violence on the American Frontier.” When a virus infects the parks’ androids, James Brolin must fight a ruthless robot gunslinger—played by a stone-faced Yul Brenner—to the death. The film may look laughably dated, but the fears it taps into are anything but: 2001, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, I, Robot, and even a Westworld remake in the works—the perennial theme of man vs. machine, as old in film at least as Fritz Lang’s silent Metropolis, becomes ever more relevant in our drone-haunted world.
But are evil—or at least dangerously malfunctioning—robots something we should legitimately fear? Not according to visionary sci-fi author and Disney enthusiast Ray Bradbury in a letter to English writer Brian Sibley, penned in 1974, one year after the release of theme-park horror Westworld. The main body of Bradbury’s letter consists of a vigorous defense of Walt Disney and Disneyland, against whom “most of the other architects of the modern world were asses and fools.” Sibley recalls that his initial letter “expressed doubts about Disney’s use of Audio-Animatronic creations in Disneyland.” “At the time,” he explains, “I… had probably read too many sci-fi stories about the danger of robots taking over our human world—including, of course, some by Ray—and so saw it as a sinister rather than benign experiment.”
After his praise of Disney, Bradbury writes two agitated postscripts exploding what Sibley calls “ill-informed and prejudiced views” on robots. He classes automated entities with benign “extensions of people” like books, film projectors, cars, and presumably all other forms of technology. Notwithstanding the fact that books cannot actually wield weapons and kill people, Bradbury makes an interesting argument about fears of robots as akin to those that lead to censorship and enforced ignorance. But Bradbury’s counterclaim sounds a misanthropic note that nonetheless rings true given the salient examples he offers: “I am not afraid of robots,” he states, emphatically, “I am afraid of people, people, people.” He goes on to list just a few of the conflicts in which humans kill humans, religious, racial, nationalist, etc.: “Catholics killing Protestants… whites killing blacks… English killing Irish.…” It’s a short sampling that could go on indefinitely. Bradbury strongly implies that the fears we project onto robotic bogeymen are in reality well-grounded fears of each other. People, he suggests, can be monstrous when they don’t “remain human,” and technology—including robots—only assists with the necessary task of “humanizing” us. “Robots?” Bradbury writes, “God, I love them. And I will use them humanely to teach all of the above.”
Read a transcript of the letter below, courtesy of Letters of Note, and be sure to check out that site’s new book-length collection of fascinating historical correspondence.
June 10, 1974
Dear Brian Sibley:
This will have to be short. Sorry. But I am deep into my screenplay on SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and have no secretary, never have had one..so must write all my own letters..200 a weekl!!!
Disney was a dreamer and a doer..while the rest of us were talking ab out the future, he built it. The things he taught us at Disneyland about street planning, crowd movement, comfort, humanity, etc, will influence builders architects, urban planners for the next century. Because of him we will humanize our cities, plan small towns again where we can get in touch with one another again and make democracy work creatively because we will KNOW the people we vote for. He was so far ahead of his time it will take is the next 50 years to catch up. You MUST come to Disneyland and eat your words, swallow your doubts. Most of the other architects of the modern world were asses and fools who talked against Big Brother and then built prisons to put us all up in..our modern environments which stifle and destroy us. Disney the so-called conservative turns out to be Disney the great man of foresight and construction.
Enough. Come here soon. I’ll toss you in the Jungle Ride River and ride you on the train into tomorrow, yesterday, and beyond.
Good luck, and stop judging at such a great distance. You are simply not qualified. Disney was full of errors, paradoxes, mistakes. He was also full of life, beauty, insight. Which speaks for all of us, eh? We are all mysteries of light and dark. There are no true conservatives, liberals, etc, in the world. Only people.
Best,
(Signed, ‘Ray B.’)
P.S. I can’t find that issue of THE NATION, of the NEW REPUBLIC, which ever it was, with my letter in it on Disney. Mainly I said that if Disneyland was good enough for Captain Bligh it was good enough for me. Charles Laughton and his wife took me to Disneyland for my very first visit and our first ride was the Jungle Boat Ride, which Laughton immediately commandeered, jeering at customers going by in other boats! A fantastic romp for me and a hilarious day. What a way to start my association with Disneyland! R.B.
P.S. Can’t resist commenting on you fears of the Disney robots. Why aren’t you afraid of books, then? The fact is, of course, that people have been afraid of books, down through history. They are extensions of people, not people themselves. Any machine, any robot, is the sum total of the ways we use it. Why not knock down all robot camera devices and the means for reproducing the stuff that goes into such devices, things called projectors in theatres? A motion picture projector is a non-humanoid robot which repeats truths which we inject into it. Is it inhuman? Yes. Does it project human truths to humanize us more often than not? Yes.
The excuse could be made that we should burn all books because some books are dreadful.
We should mash all cars because some cars get in accidents because of the people driving them.
We should burn down all the theatres in the world because some films are trash, drivel.
So it is finally with the robots you say you fear. Why fear something? Why not create with it? Why not build robot teachers to help out in schools where teaching certain subjects is a bore for EVERYONE? Why not have Plato sitting in your Greek Class answering jolly questions about his Republic? I would love to experiment with that. I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people, people, people. I want them to remain human. I can help keep them human with the wise and lovely use of books, films, robots, and my own mind, hands, and heart.
I am afraid of Catholics killing Protestants and vice versa.
I am afraid of whites killing blacks and vice versa.
I am afraid of English killing Irish and vice versa.
I am afraid of young killing old and vice versa.
I am afraid of Communists killing Capitalists and vice versa.
But…robots? God, I love them. I will use them humanely to teach all of the above. My voice will speak out of them, and it will be a damned nice voice.
Best, R.B.
via Letters of Note
Related Content:
Ray Bradbury: Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization
The Secret of Life and Love, According to Ray Bradbury (1968)
Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...James Brown Blows Away the Rolling Stones in 18 Electric Minutes (1964)
On a recent road trip through the Deep South, I made a pilgrimage to several sacred shrines of American music, including obligatory stops in Memphis at the garish Graceland and unassuming Sun Studios. But the highlight of the tour had to be that city’s Stax Museum of American Soul Music (“nothing against the Louvre, but you can’t dance to Da Vinci”). Housed in a re-creation of the original Stax Records, the museum mainly consists of aisles of glass cases, in which sit instruments, costumes, and other memorabilia from artists like Booker T. and the MGs, Sam & Dave, The Staples Singers, and Isaac Hayes. One particular relic caught my attention for its radiating aura of authenticity—a battered first pressing of James Brown’s 1956 “Please, Please, Please,” the song that built the house of Brown and his backing singer/dancers the Famous Flames—a song, wrote Philip Gourevitch, that “doesn’t tell a story so much as express a condition.”
“Please, Please, Please” was not a Stax release, but the museum rightly claims it as a seminal “precursor to soul.” Brown bequeathed to sixties soul much more than his over-the-top impassioned delivery—he brought to increasingly kinetic R&B music a theatricality and showmanship that dozens of artists would strive to emulate. But no group could work a stage like Brown and his band, with their machine-like precision breakdowns and elaborate dance routines. And while it seems like Chadwick Boseman does an admirable impression of the Godfather of Soul in the upcoming Brown biopic Get on Up, there’s no substitute for the real thing, nor will there ever be another. By 1964, Brown and the Flames had worked for almost a decade to hone their act, especially the centerpiece rendition of “Please, Please, Please.” And in the ’64 performance above at the T.A.M.I.—or Teenage Awards Music International—at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, you can see Brown and crew for the first time do the so-called “cape act” (around 7:50) during that signature number. David Remnick describes it in his New Yorker piece on this performance:
…in the midst of his own self-induced hysteria, his fit of longing and desire, he drops to his knees, seemingly unable to go on any longer, at the point of collapse, or worse. His backup singers, the Flames, move near, tenderly, as if to revive him, and an offstage aide, Danny Ray, comes on, draping a cape over the great man’s shoulders. Over and over again, Brown recovers, throws off the cape, defies his near-death collapse, goes back into the song, back into the dance, this absolute abandonment to passion.
It’s an act Brown distilled from both charismatic Baptist church services and professional wrestling, and it’s a hell of a performance, one he pulled out, with all his other shimmying, strutting, moonwalking stops, in order to best the night’s lineup of big names like the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Rolling Stones, who had the misfortune of having to follow Brown’s act. Keith Richards later called it the biggest mistake of their career. You can see why. Though the Stones put on a decent show (below), next to Brown and the Flames, writes Remnick, they looked bland and compromising—“Unitarians making nice.”
via The New Yorker
Related Content:
Every Appearance James Brown Ever Made On Soul Train. So Nice, So Nice!
James Brown Saves Boston After MLK’s Assassination, Calls for Peace Across America (1968)
James Brown Gives You Dancing Lessons: From The Funky Chicken to The Boogaloo
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Art of Structured Procrastination
If you’re one of our philosophically-minded readers, you’re perhaps already familiar with Stanford professor John Perry. He’s one of the two hosts of the Philosophy Talk radio show that airs on dozens of public radio stations across the US. (Listen to a recent show here.) Perry has the rare ability to bring philosophy down to earth. He also, it turns out, can help you work through some worldly problems, like managing your tendency to procrastinate. In a short essay called “Structured Procrastination” — which Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz) read and called “one of the single most profound moments of my entire life” – Perry gives some tips for motivating procrastinators to take care of difficult, timely and important tasks. Perry’s approach is unorthodox. It involves creating a to-do list with theoretically important tasks at the top, and less important tasks at the bottom. The trick is to procrastinate by avoiding the theoretically important tasks (that’s what procrastinators do) but at least knock off many secondary and tertiary tasks in the process. The approach involves “constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself” and essentially “using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another.” It’s unconventional, to be sure. But Andreesen seems to think it’s a great way to get things done. You can read “Structured Procrastination” here.
Have your procrastination tips? Add them to the comments section below. Would love to get your insights.
via LinkedIn
Related Content:
The Art of Living: A Free Stanford Course Explores Timeless Questions
Take First-Class Philosophy Courses Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts
Read More...Playing an Instrument Is a Great Workout For Your Brain: New Animation Explains Why
Get me a piano teacher, stat!
When I was a child, my father, enchanted by the notion that I might someday provide live piano accompaniment to his evening cocktails, signed me up for lessons with a mild-mannered widow who—if memory serves—charged 50¢ an hour.
Had I only been forced to practice more regularly, I’d have no trouble remembering the exact price of these lessons. My memory would be a supremely robust thing of beauty. Ditto my math skills, my cognitive function, my ability to multitask.
Instead, my dad eventually conceded that I was not cut out to be a musician (or a ballerina, or a tennis whiz…) and Mrs. Arnold was out a pupil.
Would that I stuck with it beyond my halting versions of “The Entertainer” and “Für Elise.” According to the TED-Ed video above, playing an instrument is one of the very best things you can do for your brain. Talent doesn’t matter in this context, just ongoing practice.
Neuroscientists using fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) technology to monitor the brain activity of subjects listening to music saw engagement in many areas, but when the subjects traded in headphones for actual instruments, this activity morphed into a grand fireworks display.
(The animated explanation of the interplay between various musically engaged areas of the brain suggests the New York City subway map, a metaphor I find more apt.)
This massive full brain workout is available to anyone willing to put in the time with an instrument. Reading the score, figuring out timing and fingering, and pouring one’s soul into creative interpretation results in an interoffice cerebral communication that strengthens the corpus calossum and executive function.
Vindication for drummers at last!
Though to bring up the specter of another stereotype, stay away from the hard stuff, guys…don’t fry those beautiful minds.
If you’d like to know more about the scientific implications of music lessons, WBUR’s series “Brain Matters” has a good overview here. And good luck breaking the good news to your children.
Related Content:
Watch a New Music Video Shot Entirely Within an MRI Machine
TED-Ed Brings the Edginess of TED to Learning
“Hummingbird,” A New Form of Music Notation That’s Easier to Learn and Faster to Read
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar
Any serious reader of Haruki Murakami — and even most of the casual ones — will have picked up on the fact that, apart from the work that has made him quite possibly the world’s most beloved living novelist, the man has two passions: running and jazz. In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he tells the story of how he became a runner, which he sees as inextricably bound up with how he became a writer. Both personal transformations occurred in his early thirties, after he sold Peter Cat, the Tokyo jazz bar he spent most of the 1970s operating. Yet he hardly put the music behind him, continuing to maintain a sizable personal record library, weave jazz references into his fiction, and even to write the essay collections Portrait in Jazz and Portrait in Jazz 2.
Image comes from Ilana Simons’ animated introduction to Murakami
“I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15,” Murakami writes in the New York Times. “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck.” Though unskilled in music himself, he often felt that, in his head, “something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.”
He found writing and jazz similar endeavors, in that both need “a good, natural, steady rhythm,” a melody, “which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm,” harmony, “the internal mental sounds that support the words,” and free improvisation, wherein, “through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.”
With Peter Cat long gone, fans have nowhere to go to get into the flow of Murakami’s personal jazz selections. Still, at the top of the post, you can listen to a playlist of songs mentioned in Portrait in Jazz, featuring Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. (You can find another extended playlist of 56 songs here.) Should you make the trip out to Tokyo, you can also pay a visit to Cafe Rokujigen, profiled in the short video just above, where Murakami readers congregate to read their favorite author’s books while listening to the music that, in his words, taught him everything he needed to know to write them. And elsewhere on the very same subway line, you can also visit the old site of Peter Cat: just follow in the footsteps taken by A Geek in Japan author Héctor García, who set out to find it after reading Murakami’s reminiscences in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And what plays in the great eminence-outsider of Japanese letters’ earbuds while he runs? “I love listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful,” he writes. Hey, you can’t spin to Thelonious Monk all the time.
Related Content:
Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist
In Search of Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Great Postmodernist Novelist
Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most
1959: The Year that Changed Jazz
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
