Listen to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Outright,’ the Poem He Recited from Memory at JFK’s Inauguration
The reading from Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration ceremony today follows a tradition that began 52 years ago, when John F. Kennedy invited his fellow New Englander Robert Frost to read at his inaugural.
Frost was an early supporter of Kennedy. On his 85th birthday (March 26, 1959) he was asked by a reporter about the decline of New England’s cultural influence in America. “The next President of the United States will be from Boston,” replied Frost, according to Poets.org. “Does that sound as if New England is decaying?” At that time Kennedy had yet to formally announce his candidacy, so Frost was asked to explain who he was talking about. “He’s a Puritan named Kennedy. The only Puritans left these days are the Roman Catholics. There. I guess I wear my politics on my sleeve.” When President-elect Kennedy invited the 86-year-old poet to read a poem at his inauguration, if it was not too arduous, Frost cabled his response:
IF YOU CAN BEAR AT YOUR AGE THE HONOR OF BEING MADE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, I OUGHT TO BE ABLE AT MY AGE TO BEAR THE HONOR OF TAKING SOME PART IN YOUR INAUGURATION. I MAY NOT BE EQUAL TO IT BUT I CAN ACCEPT IT FOR MY CAUSE–THE ARTS, POETRY, NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME TAKEN INTO THE AFFAIRS OF STATESMEN.
Frost wrote a new poem, “Dedication,” especially for the occasion. But conditions on inauguration day conspired against the old poet. A heavy blanket of snow fell on Washington the night before, and the sunlight that day was intense. In the harsh glare from the sun and snow, Frost found that he couldn’t read the typescript of his new poem. Kennedy had earlier asked Frost, if he wasn’t going to write a new poem, to consider reading his poem on American history, “A Gift Outright.” So when Frost found that he couldn’t read the new poem, he recited “A Gift Outright” from memory.
In the video above, we hear Frost reading the poem, which was written in the late 1930s and first published in 1942. Although some have said the audio is from the Kennedy inauguration, it apparently is not, because Frost reads the original text. For the inauguration, the poet reportedly agreed to Kennedy’s request to make a change in the final line. The phrase “Such as she would become” was changed to a more optimistic “Such as she will become.” (You can read the full text of the poem in a new window.) Sometime after the event, Kennedy put Frost’s inaugural appearance in perspective:
I asked Robert Frost to come and speak at the inauguration because I felt he had something important to say to those of us who are occupied with the business of government, that he would remind us that we were dealing with life, of hopes and fears of millions of people. He has said it well in a poem called “Choose Something Like a Star,” in which he speaks of the fairest star in sight and says, “It asks little of us here./It asks of us a certain height./So when at times the mob is swayed/to carry praise or blame too far,/we may choose something like a star/ to stay our mind on and be stayed.”
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Robert Frost Recites ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’
Read More...An Animated Interpretation of Billy Collins’ Poem, “Forgetfulness”
Some twenty-five years ago, my acting class spent an entire semester on the plays of Anton Chekhov. At the time, it felt very vital, but like so much else I studied in college, what I wound up retaining is sadly piecemeal. One thing I do remember is the youngest of the Three Sisters breakdown upon realizing that they’ll never make it to Moscow. At the heart of this freak-out is her despair that she, and everyone who matters to her, is aging, a condition she defines as diminishment. It seemed a bit over-the-top to me at the time. For god’s sake, she’s only 24. So what if she can’t remember a few words of schoolgirl Italian? Two and a half decades out, I was misremembering her name as Anya, a momentary confusion easily righted on my third Google search.
(IRINA. (Sobbing.) Where? Where has it all gone? Where is it? Oh my God, my God! I have forgotten everything, forgotten everything… Everything is confused in my head… I can’t remember what is the word for window in Italian, or for ceiling… I am forgetting everything, I forget more every day, and life flies past and never returns, never, and we will never go to Moscow… I see now that we will never go…)
I flashed on this long ago meltdown while watching “Forgetfulness,” the lovely animation of the Billy Collins poem, above. As Collins lists the seemingly inconsequential things lost, it occurred to me that the central “you” could stand for anybody: you, me, an elderly relative, Chekhov’s Irina. (Not Anya. If we’re to make it to Moscow, we better get cracking.)
We’re lucky to have artists like Chekhov, Collins, and by extension, animator Julian Grey, all possessed of the ability to imbue one of mankind’s most depressing and timely realities with tenderness and lyricism. Perhaps you’ll remember someone with whom to share “Forgetfulness”.
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Billy Collins Poetry to Animated Life
The Animation of Billy Collins’ Poetry
Ayun Halliday describes some of the places she has been (not Moscow) in No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late.
Read More...Watch Häxan, the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1922)
Some pictures from the silent era, like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, couldn’t look more clearly like ancestors of the modern horror film. Tracing the distant origins of other forms — of documentary, say — proves a trickier task. Hence the value of a movie like Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, which not only mounts a nonfictional investigation into humanity’s perception of “witches” throughout the ages, but does so with the aid of dramatic sequences as eerie as any of Count Orlok running amok. Given that Christensen’s meticulously researched historical creation demanded a larger budget than any other Scandinavian film to that point, you could also view it as an antecedent of today’s visually elaborate, spectacle-intensive blockbusters. Like many well-known silent films, Häxan has undergone multiple releases, each running different lengths, with different scores. You see above the 1968 version, which reduces Christensen’s original 104-minute cut to a brisk 77 minutes and accompanies it with a jaunty, richly incongruous five-piece jazz score by Daniel Humair.
Atop the music we hear the history of the persecution of “witches,” from the primitive era to medieval times to then-modern times, when the idea of the “hysterical woman” gained purchase in the zeitgeist. Narrating this story in the 1968 version is none other than writer and Beat icon William S. Burroughs, who, despite his flamboyantly artistic personality, delivers an ultimately sober analysis. The film takes the position that witchcraft, far from a reality in and of itself, arises and re-arises as an invention of the superstitious, the irrational, and those disinclined to understand the nature of mental illness. If that subject sounds more suitable for an academic paper, remember that this research comes delivered by the bold visual strokes of proto-horror silent film, close reading of the fifteenth-century inquisitor’s treatise Malleus Maleficarum, and the man who wrote Naked Lunch.
via Biblioklept
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Day of Light: A Crowdsourced Film by Multimedia Genius Brian Eno
Over the past several years, we’ve seen experimental artists adapt gracefully (or cash in, if you’re cynical) to the user-generated world we live in now. While the predictably unpredictable Flaming Lips have been at the interactive media game for a while in their own weird way, we’ve also seen Bjork branch out into multimedia with the Biophilia iPhone/iPad app to accompany the album of the same name, and last week we covered Philip Glass’s foray into the app market with his Glass Machine remixing app.
Not ever to be outdone, producer/composer/multimedia genius Brian Eno released his own app last year, Scape, which allows users to generate their own ambient compositions on their i‑devices. Scape’s release came just before that of Eno’s latest ambient album, Lux, a collection of soundscapes that were initially installed in art galleries and airport terminals. On the album’s release date this past November, Eno had more in store for fans. He streamed the entire album online at four different times during the same day: sunrise, daylight, sunset, and night.
Listeners were invited to upload photos of each time of day, under the general theme of “play of light” (a title Eno considered for the album). Eno and his team then curated their favorite images, from all over the globe, and edited them together into the short film above, entitled “Day of Light.” The idea, he says, was to “make a collaborative, generative work… to see what happened if you just made a space for it to happen in.” Judge the results for yourself. Does this product from the minds and eyes of the Eno collective add up to more than the sum of its parts?
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
Read More...Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff: Three Famous Pieces, 1919–1929
After hearing this week from two great French composers linked to the Impressionist movement–Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel–we continue our series of classic piano-roll recordings with a trio of performances by the last of the great Russian Romantic composers: Sergei Rachmaninoff.
When the Bolsheviks seized the aristocratic Rachmaninoff’s estate shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, he and his family fled to Scandinavia and then to America, where they arrived in November of 1918. To make money, the cash-strapped émigré put aside composing and embarked on a grueling performance schedule, and in March of 1919 agreed to make a series of piano-roll recordings for the American Piano Company, or “Ampico.”
It was a time of transition for musical entertainment. Most families who were not poor owned a piano, in keeping with the tradition that home entertainment was a do-it-yourself affair. But as technology advanced, people became more accustomed to the idea of hearing the music of a world-famous virtuoso in their own living room. Player pianos, or pianolas, sounded better than early phonographs and could still serve the function of a regular piano, so for awhile there was a booming business in the perforated paper rolls that kept them playing.
Rachmaninoff was interested in tapping into the piano roll market, but was skeptical at first about the quality of the recordings. When he made his first recording at the Ampico studio in New York, he was pleasantly surprised when he heard the playback. “Gentlemen,” he reportedly said, “I, Sergei Rachmaninoff, have just heard myself play.” He would eventually record 35 pieces for Ampico between 1919 and 1929, twelve of which were his own compositions. In the video above, we hear three of his best-known piano-roll recordings:
- Rachmaninoff plays his famous Prelude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2 , from the 1892 suite, Morceaux de fantaisie (“Fantasy Pieces”), recorded on March 17, 1919.
- Rachmaninoff plays his own piano transcription of his popular 1902 song “Lilacs,” from 12 Romances (also known as 12 Songs), Op. 21, recorded on April 6, 1922.
- Rachmaninoff plays a famous short piece written by another Russian composer: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1903 “Flight of the Bumblebee,” recorded on February 1, 1929.
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Read More...Watch Philip Glass Remix His Own Music—Then Try it Yourself With a New App
We told you in the fall about the album released by Beck and a troupe of other musicians to celebrate composer Philip Glass’s 75th birthday. Rework—Philip Glass Remixed is a collection of Glass works by artists including Beck, Tyondai Braxton, and Cornelius. Turns out that Glass himself was pretty turned on by the results. In the above video, Glass plays around with his own music using an interactive “Glass Machine” app, designed to complement the album.
You can almost see the wheels in Glass’s head turning as he swipes and taps away on the screen, creating new loops with phrases from his own music.
The app that Glass enjoys so much is available to anyone with an iPad, iPod touch or iPhone (3Gs or newer) and $10. The Rework app was designed by Scott Snibbe, who also created the interactive galaxy in Bjork’s Biophilia app.
The app includes eleven interactive visualizations of remixed songs from the Rework album (example on left) and a Glass Machine, allowing users to create their own Glass-inspired music.
As Glass himself said, while playing with the Machine, “the user has become the artist.”
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Philip Glass, Seen and Heard Through the Cinematic Mind of Peter Greenaway (1983)
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at .
Read More...Hear Lost Acetate Versions of Songs from The Velvet Underground & Nico (1966)
While the first Velvet Underground album may only have sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one started a band. You know, if you have even a faint acquaintance with rock history, that that well-worn observation comes from producer, artistic innovator, and “non-musician” musician Brian Eno. And whether you could get into it or not, you’ve no doubt heard at least parts of that first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, the 1967 release that brought together such soon-to-be rock luminaries as Lou Reed, John Cale, and the titular German vocalist/Warhol Superstar Nico. The whole album, in fact, appeared under Warhol’s aegis, and like most works associated with him, it tends to push opinions far in one direction or the other. The Velvet Undergound & Nico may still move you to found a rock band — or to scrap your interest in rock altogether — 45 years after its first release.
I refer to the record’s “first release” because it’s recently undergone a couple more, both of which originate in a version never even intended for market. “In 2002, a fellow paid 75 cents at a New York City flea market for a curious acetate recording of the Velvet Underground,” reports Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz. “Turns out, the acetate contained early recorded takes and mixes of songs in different form.” That man had stumbled upon the coveted Scepter Studios acetate version of the album that launched 30,000 bands, bootleg files of which soon began circulating on the net. The acetate received a legitimate release last year as part of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s “45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition,” and you can hear cuts from it, like “Heroin” at the top of this post and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” just above. For Velvet Underground purists, of course, only hearing the acetate disc itself will do. They’ll have a hard time doing so — it last changed hands for $25,200 — but luckily they can now get at least one step closer with its brand new vinyl release.
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Andy Warhol Quits Painting, Manages The Velvet Underground (1965)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...MAKERS Tells the Story of 50 Years of Progress for Women in the U.S.
Among the many thousands of items in my newsfeed yesterday, three popped out and stuck with me: First, a conservative panel called Independent Women’s Forum convened to discuss their sense that “conservative leaders and funders… don’t take women’s issues seriously.” Panel moderator Christina Hoff Sommers joked, “I’m not sure what’s worse: conservatives ignoring women’s issues or conservatives addressing them.” The tone was light, but the sense of frustration these women feel with their male colleagues was very clear.
Secondly, a UK comedian, Michael J. Dolan published a soul-searching piece much discussed stateside in which he admits he was “a misogynist comedian.” Dolan claims that, like racist comedians of old, “Those peddling misogyny, homophobia or other varieties of hate to drunks who don’t know better are going to find themselves out of favour.” And finally, former president Jimmy Carter wrote an editorial to announce that he is severing his six-decade-long ties with the Southern Baptist Convention because of their view that women should be “subservient” to men. “It is simply self-defeating,” wrote Carter, “for any community to discriminate against half its population.”
I mention these examples because they seem to be part of a general trend of cultural reassessment, after several dismally low points in the discussion of gender equality this past year, about the continued institutionalization—in politics, religion, the workplace, and entertainment—of damaging attitudes toward half of the human species. While it sometimes seems that social change takes place at a glacial pace, with several steps back for every step forward, there are always strong undercurrents of progress that aren’t readily apparent until someone takes the time to organize them into narratives.
This is precisely what the filmmakers of MAKERS aim to do. A “multi-platform video experience” from AOL and PBS, the project showcases “hundreds of compelling stories from women of today and tomorrow… both known and unknown.” Unlike worldwide, policy-based efforts like the just-ended 2013 Global Maternal Health Conference, MAKERS restricts its focus to women in the U.S. and, it seems, relies primarily on individual women with prominent public roles—journalists, activists, writers, and celebrities, or at least that’s the sense one gets from their introductory video (above), which might open them up to charges of elitism. But there is more to the project than celebrity profiles. In their own words, the producers of MAKERS describe the project thus:
MAKERS originated from a very clear premise: over the last half century, the work of millions of women has altered virtually every aspect of American culture. MAKERS features groundbreaking women who have sparked change, been first in their fields and paved the way for those that followed. This initiative also extends to profile hundreds of stories of women who are driving social change today.
Delve into the wealth of short documentary videos on the MAKERS YouTube channel and you’ll see that there are dozens of women profiled who aren’t celebrities in the conventional sense. Sure, we’ve got stars of the screen and the power centers of government and the corporate world, e.g. Ellen DeGeneres, Hilary Clinton, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, but there are also lesser known “makers,” like 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson, founder and editor-in-chief of webzine Rookie. Gevinson is a prodigy who has built her own online media empire, beginning at the age of 11, when her fashion blog Style Rookie became one of the most popular of its kind. Watch her (below) discuss her own approach to typical teenage insecurities in an excerpt from her longer profile.
Another maker with a deeply inspiring story that you won’t hear in the daily news cycle is Katherine Switzer, the first woman to enter the Boston Marathon in 1967. She did so by signing the form with her initials, making marathon officials think she was a man. Below, Switzer recounts the curiosity, bile, and disturbingly violent harassment she faced during the race. It wasn’t until five years later that the race was officially opened to women. By that time, Switzer was an activist for female runners.
The MAKERS project profiles dozens of other women—like civil rights lawyer and founder of Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman—who normally fly under the mass-media radar, but whose presence in the culture has an enormous impact. Keep your eye on PBS listings—on February 26th, they will air a three-hour documentary called MAKERS: Women Who Make America, which promises to tell the “remarkable story for the first time” of the sweeping progress American women have made over the last half-century.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness.
Read More...The Ultimate Full Moon Shot
The quick backstory: “Dean Potter walks a highline at Cathedral Peak as the sun sets and the moon rises. Shot from over 1 mile away with a Canon 800mm and 2X by Mikey Schaefer. This shot was part of a bigger project for National Geographic called The Man Who Can Fly. ”
Read More...The Enigma Machine: How Alan Turing Helped Break the Unbreakable Nazi Code
In 2001, none other than Sir Mick Jagger bought the rights to a novel by Robert Harris called Enigma. The novel, a fictionalized account of WWII British codebreakers, then became a feature film, written by Tom Stoppard, produced by Sir Mick, and starring Mr. Dougray Scott and Ms. Kate Winslett as derring-do Bletchley Park mathematicians and cryptanalysts employed in a race against time and the Nazis to break the fabled Enigma code before all hell breaks loose. It all sounds very dramatic (and I’ve heard the film is entertaining), but things didn’t happen quite like that. Reality is never so formulaic or so good-looking. But the Enigma code was broken, and the story of the code machine and its eventual decryption is fascinating on its own terms. As University of Cambridge “Enigma Project Officer” Dr. James Grime says–in the series of videos above and below–it’s a story of “how mathematicians can save lives.” Still with me?
Okay, so in the first video above, Dr. Grime gives us a thorough tour of the Enigma machine (Sir Mick owns one, by the way… but back to the history…). Developed by the Germans, it’s a marvelous encryption method set into a small box that when opened resembles little more than a fancy WWII-era typewriter. Oh, but it’s clever, you see, because the Enigma machine (the one above belongs to science writer Simon Singh) translates ordinary messages into code through an ingenious method by which no letter in the code ever repeats, making it almost impossible to decode in the ordinary ways. The machine was quite complicated for its time; it works by sending the characters typed by the keys through a series of circuits—first through three rotors like those on a combination bike lock, but each with 26 places instead of ten.
Now at this point, the machine was nothing more than what was available to any bank or business wishing to transmit trade secrets. But the German military machines had an extra layer of encoding: at the front of their machines was a “plugboard,” something like a small switchboard. This allowed the coding coming through the rotors to be resequenced for an extra level of scrambling. In the German military machines, the total number of possible combinations for message encryptions comes to a staggering figure in the quadrillions. (The exact number? 158,962,555,217,826,360,000). There’s a little more to the machine than that, but Dr. Grime can explain it much better than I.
Of course, the Enigma Machine had to have a fatal flaw. Otherwise, no novel, no movie, no drama (and maybe no victory?). What was it, you ask? Amazingly, as you will learn above, the very thing that made the Enigma nearly impossible to break, its ability to encode messages without ever repeating a letter, also made the code decipherable. But first, Alan Turing had to step in. Sadly, Turing is missing from Enigma the film. (More sadly, he was disgraced by the country he served, which put him on trial for his sexuality and humiliated him to the point of suicide). But as Grime shows above, Turing is one of the real heroes of the Enigma code story. Cryptanalysts initially discovered that they could decipher ordinary words and phrases (like “Heil Hitler”) in the Enigma messages by matching them up with strings of random letters that never repeated.
But this was not enough. In order for the Enigma code to work for the Germans, each operator—sender and receiver—had to have exactly the same settings on their rotors and plugboards. (The messages were transmitted over radio via Morse code). Each month had its own settings, printed on code sheets in soluble ink that easily dissolved in water. If the Allied codebreakers deciphered the settings, their decryption would be useless weeks later. Furthermore, the German navy had a more complicated method of encoding than either the army or air force. The Polish had developed a machine called the Bombe, which could decipher army and air force codes, but not navy. What Turing did, along with Gordon Welchman, was develop his own version of the Bombe machine, which allowed him to break any version of the Enigma code in under 20 minutes since it bypassed most of the tedious guesswork and trial and error involved in earlier by-hand methods.
This is all very dramatic stuff, and we haven’t had one celebrity step in to dress it up. While I’m certain that Enigma the film is a treat, I’m grateful to Dr. Grime for his engagement with the actual codebreaking methods and real personalities involved.
A third video of extra footage and outtakes is available here if you’re still hungry for more WWII codebreaking secrets.
via Science Dump
Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.
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