Space Jazz, a Sonic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hubbard, Featuring Chick Corea (1983)

in Jazz, Music, Opera, Religion, Sci Fi | May 8th, 2014

The Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy has a num­ber of fas­ci­nat­ing­ly dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to its foun­da­tion by a sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el­ist. That nov­el­ist, a cer­tain L. Ron Hub­bard, launched his reli­gion in the Amer­i­ca of the 1950s, a pros­per­ous place in a Space Age decade when all things sci­ence-fic­tion­al enjoyed a per­haps unprece­dent­ed pop­u­lar­i­ty. Anoth­er big main­stream sci-fi wave would wash over the coun­try in the late 1970s and ear­ly 80s, when, as Nathan Rabin puts it at Slate, “than­ks to the pop­u­lar­i­ty of E.T., Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind, and the Star Wars and Star Trek fran­chis­es, space was the place and sci­ence fic­tion was the hottest genre around. Sci­en­tol­ogy want­ed in, so an ambi­tious plan was hatched: Hubbard’s epic 1982 Bat­tle­field Earth nov­el, to be fol­lowed by Space Jazz,” an album con­tain­ing a “son­ic space opera” based on the nov­el. At the top of post, you can hear the track “Earth, My Beau­ti­ful Home,” one of the pro­jec­t’s few un-bom­bas­tic num­bers, and one per­formed by a gen­uine­ly more-than-cred­i­ble jazz pianist, Chick Corea. 

The Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy counts Corea as a mem­ber, as it then did anoth­er of Space Jazz’s guest play­ers, bassist (and Core­a’s Return to For­ev­er band­mate) Stan­ley Clarke. This puts the album into the unusu­al class of works both writ­ten and per­formed by Sci­en­tol­o­gists, a group which also includes Bat­tle­field Earth’s much lat­er, John Tra­vol­ta-star­ring cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion, now known as one of the most notable flops in film his­to­ry. Rabin, in his arti­cle, also cov­ers sev­er­al oth­er albums cred­it­ed to Hub­bard, includ­ing 1986’s posthu­mous Mis­sion Earth, record­ed by mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist/­Scien­tol­o­gist Edgar Win­ter, which he calls the only one “that could con­ceiv­ably be played on the radio with­out prompt­ing con­fused cries of, ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’ and ‘Is this even music?’ ” Some say sci­ence fic­tion has under­gone anoth­er boom in recent years, but alas, we still await the great Sci­en­to­log­i­cal con­cept album of the 21st cen­tu­ry.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

Isaac Asi­mov Recalls the Gold­en Age of Sci­ence Fic­tion (1937–1950)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Shares Pho­tos of Her­self Grow­ing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

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.

Vi Hart Explains & Defends Net Neutrality in a New Doodle-Filled Video

in Business, Current Affairs | May 8th, 2014

Vi Hart is back at it again. Hart has a knack for demys­ti­fy­ing com­plex con­cepts with her visu­al­ly-rich math­e­mat­i­cal videos. She has pre­vi­ous­ly tack­led Stravin­sky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Com­po­si­tions and the Space-Time Con­tin­u­um. This week, she’s tak­ing on the con­cept of Net Neu­tral­i­ty. The FCC will soon con­sid­er whether it wants to end the era of net neu­tral­i­ty and the open web — some­thing that could have far-reach­ing con­se­quences for you. The web keeps get­ting more and more cor­po­ra­tized (even by com­pa­nies that claim to sup­port net neu­tral­i­ty). And by killing net neu­tral­i­ty, the FCC can offi­cial­ly ensure that big cor­po­ra­tions run the show.

In the video above, Hart explains the con­cept of net neu­tral­i­ty and why it’s impor­tant to defend. On her blog, she also includes a lot of addi­tion­al resources — includ­ing more videos that explain net neu­tral­i­ty, plus infor­ma­tion on how you can tell your polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives to keep the web open.

Hear the Voice of Arthur Conan Doyle After His Death

in History, Literature, Religion | May 7th, 2014

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly doc­u­ment­ed the strange case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fer­vent Spir­i­tu­al­ism, which Mark Strauss of io9 apt­ly describes as “hard to rec­on­cile [with] the man who cre­at­ed the lit­er­ary embod­i­ment of empir­i­cal think­ing,” Sher­lock Holmes. Conan Doyle was so eager to believe in the exis­tence of fairies and what he called “psy­chic mat­ters” that he was fre­quent­ly tak­en in by hoax­es. But the physi­cian and novelist’s seem­ing­ly odd views obtained wide­ly among his con­tem­po­raries who sought con­fir­ma­tion of the after­life and com­mu­nion with their dead rel­a­tives, mil­lions of whom were lost in the Civ­il War, then World War I.

Spir­i­tu­al­ism pro­vid­ed a com­fort to the bereaved, as well as ample oppor­tu­ni­ty for grifters and char­la­tans. And yet, Strauss points out, the rise of Spir­i­tu­al­ism in the 19th cen­tu­ry may also have been due to the ris­ing influ­ence of sci­ence in pop­u­lar cul­ture, as more and more peo­ple sought exper­i­men­tal evi­dence for their super­nat­ur­al beliefs. Conan Doyle wrote twen­ty books on the sub­ject, includ­ing the two-vol­ume 1924 His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al­ism. In a speech he gave in May of 1930, just before his death, he explained the appeal. Hear the audio above and read a tran­scrip­tion below:

Peo­ple ask, what do you get from spir­i­tu­al­ism? The first thing you get is that it absolute­ly removes all fear of death. Sec­ond­ly, it bridges death for those dear ones whom we may lose. We need have no fear that we are call­ing them back, for all that we do is to make such con­di­tions as expe­ri­ence has taught us, will enable them to come if they wish. And the ini­tia­tive lies always with them.

Two months lat­er at a séance attend­ed by thou­sands at the Roy­al Albert Hall, a medi­um claimed to have com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the Sher­lock Holmes author. And four years after that, anoth­er medi­um, Noah Zerdin, held a séance attend­ed by hun­dreds, and Conan Doyle is said to have been one of 44 who spoke from the beyond. This time, the event was record­ed, on 26 acetate disks, which were only dis­cov­ered 67 years lat­er in 2001 by Zerdin’s son, who donat­ed them to the British Library. The 1934 record­ings fea­tured in a 2002 BBC radio doc­u­men­tary called What Grandad Did in the Dark.

Just above, you can hear the sup­posed voice of Arthur Conan Doyle speak­ing from the spir­it world. The audio is seri­ous­ly spooky, but I’m not inclined to believe that it’s any­thing more than a hoax, although the tech­nol­o­gy of the time would make manip­u­la­tion of the direct record­ings dif­fi­cult. So-called “spir­it voic­es” in record­ings such as this are known as EVP (“elec­tron­ic voice phe­nom­e­non”), and there are many such exam­ples of the genre at the British Library, includ­ing a batch of 60 tapes made by a Dr. Kon­stan­tin Rau­dive, “who believed that the dead could com­mu­ni­cate with the liv­ing through the medi­um of radio waves.”

A post on the British Library site com­ments that “the record­ed evi­dence is not espe­cial­ly con­vinc­ing, being short com­ments or frag­ments that with­out the accom­pa­ny­ing spo­ken ‘trans­la­tion’ would prob­a­bly not strike the lis­ten­er as hav­ing any mean­ing­ful con­tent.” The Conan Doyle audio seems a lit­tle more coher­ent, though it’s dif­fi­cult to make out exact­ly what the voice says. Com­pare the two sam­ples and draw your own con­clu­sions. Or bet­ter yet, con­sid­er what Sher­lock Holmes would make of this alleged “evi­dence.”

You can find Sher­lock Holmes texts in our col­lec­tions: 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices and 550 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur Conan Doyle & The Cot­tin­g­ley Fairies: How Two Young Girls Fooled Sher­lock Holmes’ Cre­ator

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Ques­tion­naire Made Famous By Mar­cel Proust (1899)

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

Watch Gumbasia the Jazzy Stop Motion Film That Gave Birth to Gumby (1955)

in Animation, K-12, Television | May 7th, 2014

Like many in the Hon­ey­comb Kids gen­er­a­tion, I did­n’t prop­er­ly appre­ci­ate chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion icon Gum­by until Eddie Mur­phy par­o­died him on Sat­ur­day Night Live. This sparked a revival. Watch­ing Gum­by episodes in the com­pa­ny of oth­er mer­ry young adults reframed my pre­vi­ous­ly held view of him as a rel­ic from a time when TV was bor­ing. Turns out that Gum­by and his equine side­kick Pokey were actu­al­ly pret­ty fun­ny, weird-in-a-good-way, and far more soul­ful than the wit­less flat ani­ma­tion jam­ming the air­waves of my 70s child­hood.

Then, in 2006, the Muse­um of the Mov­ing Image had an exhib­it devot­ed to the work of Art Clokey, father of Gum­by.

I decid­ed to take the kids, gam­bling that they might respond to Gum­by as I did now, not the way I did when I was their age. Their screen time was pret­ty lim­it­ed back then, and as a result, they’d avid­ly watch just about any­thing.

The first video we encoun­tered was Gum­ba­sia, the exper­i­men­tal, char­ac­ter-free, stop motion riff above that Clokey made as a stu­dent at USC. It was pro­duced in 1953 and released in 1955.

Not exact­ly what I’d been prim­ing the chil­dren to expect on the sub­way ride over.

“That’s Gum­by?” they cried in dis­may. “That cube?”

No. But those mor­ph­ing cubes and squig­gles did give birth to an empire, after pro­duc­er and pres­i­dent of the Motion Pic­ture Pro­duc­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, Sam Engel, offered to bankroll a pilot, declar­ing Gum­ba­sia the most excit­ing film he’d ever seen in his life. Clokey was teach­ing Eng­lish at the Har­vard Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my. Engel’s sole wish was to improve the qual­i­ty of chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming. He asked Clokey if he could “make lit­tle clay fig­ures out of that clay and ani­mate them.”

Clokey did just that, with Engel bankrolling the pilot, “Gum­by on the Moon.” The pro­duc­er was so pleased with the result, he refused to take a cut when Gum­by was giv­en a sev­en year con­tract at NBC.

Imag­ine a Cin­derel­la sto­ry like that hap­pen­ing today!

If this small morsel of Gum­by his­to­ry leaves you crav­ing more, book your flight for the inau­gur­al Gum­by Fest in Glen­do­ra, Cal­i­for­nia, where Gum­by grew to matu­ri­ty in “an unas­sum­ing indus­tri­al build­ing.”

You can find Gum­ba­sia in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 675 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

Watch “Bot­tle,” an Award-Win­ning Stop Motion Ani­mat­ed Tale of Transocean­ic Cor­re­spon­dence

Hard­er Than It Looks: How to Make a Great Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of sev­en books, and cre­ator of the award win­ning East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

An Introduction to 100 Important Paintings with Videos Created by Smarthistory

in Art, History | May 7th, 2014

If you have an inter­est in how the inter­net has widened the very con­cept of edu­ca­tion, you may well know about Google’s Art Project, a dig­i­tal wealth of free visu­al art infor­ma­tion and view­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties we’ve fea­tured before. And you more than like­ly know about Khan Acad­e­my, the high­est-pro­file pro­duc­er of edu­ca­tion­al videos on the inter­net. Now, from the com­bined pow­er of their learn­ing resources comes this col­lec­tion of video intro­duc­tions to over 100 impor­tant paint­ings. Rang­ing from between two to nine min­utes and cov­er­ing works of art cre­at­ed in eras from 575 B.C.E to the Sec­ond World War, these brief but intel­lec­tu­al­ly dense and visu­al­ly rich lessons bear the label of Smarthis­to­ry, “a mul­ti­me­dia web-book about art and art his­to­ry” that merged with Khan Acad­e­my in 2011.

In the video at the top of the post, Smarthis­to­ry intro­duces us to Bot­ti­cel­li’s 1486 Tbe Birth of Venus, “one of the most icon­ic images in the his­to­ry of West­ern art” — its con­tent, its con­text, and its inspi­ra­tion. The Birth of Venus might seem like one of those images that needs no intro­duc­tion, but as all the infor­ma­tion revealed in the video reminds us, most of us, if not art his­to­ri­ans our­selves, could at least use a refresh­er.

Just above, we have Vin­cent van Gogh’s 1889 The Bed­room, a paint­ing that, in the words of the artist him­self, “ought to rest the brain — or rather, the imag­i­na­tion.” Though we all know the name of this par­tic­u­lar post-Impres­sion­ist, we may not have seen this par­tic­u­lar can­vas of his before, a fact Smarthis­to­ry’s experts Beth Har­ris and Steven Zuck­er take into account when they explain to us how they them­selves think about it. “What you’re talk­ing about is the root of abstrac­tion itself,” says Zuck­er. “It’s not that this is rep­re­sen­ta­tive; it’s that the for­mal qual­i­ties of paint­ing itself can have their own expe­ri­en­tial aspect.” And they speak just as insight­ful­ly on the paint­ings we encounter, in one form or anoth­er, every so often in our dai­ly lives. Edward Hop­per’s 1942 Nighthawks, for instance, a repli­ca of which I saw on the side of one cof­fee mug I used every day for years, gets dis­cussed below as “an expres­sion of wartime alien­ation” that deliv­ers “an imme­di­ate impli­ca­tion that we are alone”  that “makes us look for some sign of life, but we don’t see any­thing.” Smarthis­to­ry’s videos man­age to reveal a great deal of emo­tion­al, tech­ni­cal, and his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge on these and many oth­er paint­ings in a frac­tion of the time it takes a stu­dent to cross cam­pus for their art his­to­ry lec­ture — let alone to sit through its entire slideshow. You can see all 100 videos in the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

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

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

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

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.

Do Rappers Have a Bigger Vocabulary Than Shakespeare?: A Data Scientist Maps Out the Answer

in English Language, Music | May 7th, 2014

Each year brings us a new list of words that, once hip or sub­cul­tur­al, sig­nal their admis­sion into the main­stream by enter­ing the pages—print or online—of the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary or Mer­ri­am Web­ster’s. Many of those come from the world of hip hop. The form is a ver­i­ta­ble lab­o­ra­to­ry of lin­guis­tic inno­va­tion, spawn­ing dozens of region-spe­cif­ic argots that mutate and evolve beyond the capac­i­ty of hip lex­i­cog­ra­phers to doc­u­ment. One data sci­en­tist, Matt Daniels, has made an inter­est­ing attempt, how­ev­er, in a project he calls “The Largest Vocab­u­lary in Hip Hop.” Pro­ceed­ing from the premise that cer­tain rap­pers might match or best Shake­speare for the title of “largest vocab­u­lary ever,” Daniels used a method­ol­o­gy called “token analy­sis” to ana­lyze the lyri­cal con­tent of “the most famous artists in hip hop.” He relied on Rap Genius tran­scrip­tions, which are only cur­rent to 2012, to pro­duce a sam­ple size of 35,000 words (the equiv­a­lent of 3–5 stu­dio albums).

Top­ping the list by far with a total of 7,392 unique words used is rap­per Aesop Rock, whom, Daniels admits, is some­what obscure by com­par­i­son with Jay Z or Snoop Dog. More well-known artists like Wu Tang Clan, The Roots, and Out­kast also rank high­ly, but what Daniels dis­cov­ered is that many of the rap­pers near the top of the scale are under­ground or obscure artists who don’t sell mil­lions of records. And occu­py­ing the low­er end are some top-sell­ing artists and house­hold names like Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Snoop Dog (DMX is dead last at #85). King of the hill Jay‑Z, whose 2013 album Magna Carta…Holy Grail sold half a mil­lion copies in its first week, ranks some­where in the mid­dle, and Daniels quotes from the mega-sell­ing rapper’s “Moment of Clar­i­ty” from his Black Album in which he plain­ly admits that he’ll write mid­dle­brow lyrics for mil­lion dol­lar sales fig­ures, say­ing “I dumb­ed down for my audi­ence to dou­ble my dol­lars” (one won­ders how many lis­ten­ers per­ceived the slight).

Daniels admits in an NPR inter­view that this is “not a seri­ous aca­d­e­m­ic study” but a project he under­took for the fun of it. And a great many of the “unique words” count­ed in each rapper’s totals are slang coinages or vari­ants like “pimps, pimp, pimp­ing, and pimpin,” each of which counts sep­a­rate­ly. Even so, writes Daniels on the project’s site, “it’s still direc­tion­al­ly inter­est­ing,” as well as soci­o­log­i­cal­ly. And of course, lit­er­ary writ­ers have been con­tribut­ing made-up words to the gen­er­al lex­i­con for cen­turies. See Daniels’ site for an inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion (screen shot above) of the rank­ings of all 85 rap­pers sur­veyed.

If you’re won­der­ing who has a big­ger vocab­u­lary — Shake­speare or rap­pers — here’s the quick answer in pure­ly numer­i­cal terms. In his sam­ple size of 35,000 words per artist, Daniels deter­mined that Aesop Rock used 7,392 unique words (and Wu-Tang Clan, 5,895) against Shake­speare’s 5,000 unique words. And there you have it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jay‑Z: The Evo­lu­tion of My Style

The Great­ness of Charles Dar­win Explained with Rap Music

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

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

Support “Green Reads,” a Program That Finances Libraries by Distributing Used Books in Eco-Friendly Vending Machines

in Books | May 7th, 2014

Green Reads has launched a crowd fund­ing cam­paign on IndieGogo to build 15 eco-friend­ly, used book vend­ing machines. Invent­ed by Dana Clarke, the machines require no elec­tric­i­ty and they’ll allow libraries, char­i­ties, and book retail­ers a way to sell used books and cre­ate a sus­tain­able source of rev­enue. Green Reads is look­ing to raise $75,000 ($5000 per machine) by May 19. Once oper­a­tional, the machines will be donat­ed (not sold) to libraries and char­i­ties. You can get a lot more infor­ma­tion and con­tribute to this wor­thy cam­paign right here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

550 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

170 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion

15 Free eBooks on New Media Studies & the Digital Humanities

in e-books | May 6th, 2014

Worth not­ing: dig­i­tal­cul­ture­books is an imprint of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Press ded­i­cat­ed to pub­lish­ing books on new media stud­ies and dig­i­tal human­i­ties. Com­mit­ted to open­ness, the imprint typ­i­cal­ly releas­es its titles under a Cre­ative Com­mons (CC) license that lets you read the works online for free. You can also make non-com­mer­cial use of the texts with­out get­ting per­mis­sion (or pay­ing fees) so long as you give prop­er attri­bu­tion. Below, we have list­ed the texts (and the series in which they appear). Click the links below, then look for the “Read for free online” link beneath each author’s name. And you’ll be good to go. We have more free ebooks in two col­lec­tions: 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices and 170 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion.

Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties

• Past­play: Teach­ing and Learn­ing His­to­ry with Tech­nol­o­gy by Kevin Kee
• Writ­ing His­to­ry in the Dig­i­tal Age by Kris­ten Nawrotz­ki and Jack Dougher­ty
• Hack­ing the Acad­e­my: New Approach­es to Schol­ar­ship and Teach­ing from Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties Edit­ed by Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Sche­in­feldt
• Teach­ing His­to­ry in the Dig­i­tal Age by T. Mills Kel­ly

Land­mark Video Games

• DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST by Dan Pinch­beck
• Myst and Riv­en: The World of the D’ni by Mark J. P. Wolf
• Silent Hill: The Ter­ror Engine by Bernard Per­ron

The New Media World

• When Media Are New: Under­stand­ing the Dynam­ics of New Media Adop­tion and Use by John Carey and Mar­tin C. J. Elton
• Broad­cast­ing, Voice, and Account­abil­i­ty: A Pub­lic Inter­est Approach to Pol­i­cy, Law, and Reg­u­la­tion by
  Steve Buck­ley, Kreszen­tia Duer, Toby Mendel, and Sean O’Siochru with Mon­roe E. Price and Marc Raboy
• Own­ing the Olympics: Nar­ra­tives of the New Chi­na by Mon­roe E. Price and Daniel Dayan, Edi­tors
• The Hyper­linked Soci­ety: Ques­tion­ing Con­nec­tions in the Dig­i­tal Age Edit­ed by Joseph Tur­ow and Lok­man Tsui

Tech­nolo­gies of the Imag­i­na­tion

• Dig­i­tal Tools in Urban Schools: Medi­at­ing a Remix of Learn­ing by Jabari Mahiri
• Home Truths? Video Pro­duc­tion and Domes­tic Life by David Buck­ing­ham, Maria Pini and Rebekah Wil­lett
• My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthro­po­log­i­cal Account of World of War­craft by Bon­nie A. Nar­di
• Skate Life: Re-Imag­in­ing White Mas­culin­i­ty by Emi­ly Chivers Yochim

via Metafil­ter

Sigmund Freud Appears in Rare, Surviving Video & Audio Recorded During the 1930s

in History, Psychology | May 6th, 2014

What, I won­der, would Sig­mund Freud have made of Han­ni­bal Lec­tor? The fic­tion­al psy­cho­an­a­lyst, so sophis­ti­cat­ed and in con­trol, moon­light­ing as a blood­thirsty can­ni­bal… a per­fect­ly grim rejoin­der to Freud’s ideas about humankind’s per­pet­u­al dis­con­tent with the painful repres­sion of our dark­est, most anti­so­cial dri­ves. While Freud’s pri­ma­ry taboo was incest, not can­ni­bal­ism, I’m sure he would have appre­ci­at­ed the irony of an ultra-civ­i­lized psy­chi­a­trist who gives full steam to his most pri­mal urges.

Freud—who was born on this day in 1856, in the small town of Freiberg—also had a care­ful­ly con­trolled image, though his pas­sion­ate avo­ca­tion was not for the macabre, sala­cious, or pruri­ent, but for the archae­o­log­i­cal. He once remarked that he read more on that sub­ject than on his own, an exag­ger­a­tion, most like­ly, but an indi­ca­tion of just how much his inter­est in cul­tur­al arti­facts and rit­u­al con­tributed to his the­o­ret­i­cal expli­ca­tion of indi­vid­ual and social psy­chol­o­gy.

In the film above, we see Freud in con­ver­sa­tion with a friend, a pro­fes­sor of archae­ol­o­gy, whom the psy­chi­a­trist con­sult­ed on his exten­sive col­lec­tion of antiq­ui­ties. Lat­er, we see Freud with his dog, then reclin­ing out­doors with a book. Over this footage we hear the nar­ra­tion of Freud’s daugh­ter Anna, who only allowed this film to be viewed by a small cir­cle until her death in 1982.

Though Freud lived many decades into the era of record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, pre­cious lit­tle film and audio of the founder of psy­cho­analy­sis exists. While the home movies at the top may be the only mov­ing image of him, per­haps the only audio record­ing of his voice, above, was made in 1938, the year before his death. At 81 years old, Freud’s advanced jaw can­cer left him in con­sid­er­able tor­ment. Nonethe­less, he agreed to record this brief mes­sage for the BBC from his Lon­don home in Mares­field Gar­dens. Read a tran­script of the speech, and see Freud’s hand­writ­ten copy, below.

I start­ed my pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ty as a neu­rol­o­gist try­ing to bring relief to my neu­rot­ic patients. Under the influ­ence of an old­er friend and by my own efforts, I dis­cov­ered some impor­tant new facts about the uncon­scious in psy­chic life, the role of instinc­tu­al urges, and so on. Out of these find­ings grew a new sci­ence, psy­cho­analy­sis, a part of psy­chol­o­gy, and a new method of treat­ment of the neu­roses. I had to pay heav­i­ly for this bit of good luck. Peo­ple did not believe in my facts and thought my the­o­ries unsa­vory. Resis­tance was strong and unre­lent­ing. In the end I suc­ceed­ed in acquir­ing pupils and build­ing up an Inter­na­tion­al Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Asso­ci­a­tion. But the strug­gle is not yet over.  –Sig­mund Freud.

The Library of Con­gress online exhib­it Sig­mund Freud: Con­flict & Cul­ture has many more pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments includ­ing a holo­graph page from Freud’s man­u­script of Civ­i­liza­tion and its Dis­con­tents, in which he the­o­rized the bedrock impulse of ser­i­al killers, fic­tion­al and real: the so-called “Death Dri­ve,” our “human instinct of aggres­sion and self-destruc­tion.”

Many impor­tant texts by Freud can be found in our col­lec­tion, 600 Free eBooks for the iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices. And you’ll inevitably find a few cours­es cov­er­ing Freud’s thought in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, part of our list of 950 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Down­load Sig­mund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion on His 160th Birth­day

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

Global Breakfast Radio Lets You Listen to Radio Broadcasts From Wherever the Sun is Rising

in Radio | May 5th, 2014

“The sun is always ris­ing some­where; break­fast is always just about to hap­pen. Din­ner time in Dakar is break­fast time in Bris­bane.” Enter Glob­al Break­fast Radio, a web site that aggre­gates and streams radio sta­tions from around the world (over 250 sta­tions from more than 120 coun­tries), air­ing broad­casts from wher­ev­er it’s break­fast time right now. “As the sun ris­es on the Green­wich Mean Line, you’ll hear break­fast pro­grammes from around the UK, Ice­land and West Africa; the broad­cast then moves west­wards, fol­low­ing the sun­rise across the Atlantic islands, sweep­ing over Amer­i­ca and then into the Pacific.” That’s how Daniel Jones, one of the co-founders of Glob­al Break­fast Radio, explains the project to Wired.

Right now, in Cal­i­for­nia, it’s near­ly 11:30 pm. But, with a click of the mouse, I can lis­ten to pro­grams kick­ing off the day in Assisi, Italy.  You can start lis­ten­ing right here on your com­put­er. The streamed broad­cast should work in any mod­ern web brows­er. It should also run just fine on your iPhone, iPad and oth­er mobile devices. Enjoy.

via Mefi