Bill Nye the Science Guy has spent his career trying to “help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work.” A graduate of Cornell and a student of Carl Sagan, Nye has produced educational programs for the Science Channel, the Discovery Channel, and PBS. Most recently, he has gone on record saying that teaching creationism in America’s classrooms is bad for kids, and bad for America’s future. “If the United States produces a generation of science students who don’t believe in science, that’s troublesome” because the United States needs science to remain competitive,” he warns in this video.
For some weeks, the internet has been abuzz about a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis (AiG) and the Creation Museum. The debate — something Richard Dawkins called a pointless endeavor — took place last night in Petersburg, Kentucky. It’s now online, all two and a half hours of it. We’re you’re done watching the spectacle, you can view some other high-profile religion-science debates that we’ve featured in the past.
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If you picked up The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, you’ll have seen his distinctive index card-based writing method in action. Having died in 1977, Nabokov never completed the book, and so all Penguin had to publish decades later came to, as the subtitle indicates, A Novel in Fragments. These “fragments” he wrote on 138 cards, and the book as published includes full-color reproductions that you can actually tear out and organize — and re-organize — for yourself, “complete with smudges, cross-outs, words scrawled out in Russian and French (he was trilingual) and annotated notes to himself about titles of chapters and key points he wants to make about his characters.” That comes from a post by Dominic Basulto at Big Think, who highlights cards with “a full-on discussion of the precise word that Nabokov would like to describe a female character (fille, in French) and how best to render that word in English, while keeping the connotations and meaning of the word in French.” Reviewing The Original of Laura, Alexander Theroux describes the cards as a “portable strategy that allowed [Nabokov] to compose in the car while his wife drove the devoted lepidopterist on butterfly expeditions.”
Nabokov could thus, between thoughts of his winged objects of interest, use the cards for “inserting words, writing memos to himself, scribbling afterthoughts: ‘invent tradename [for a medicine], e.g., cephalopium.’ ” They also served him earlier in his career; at the Library of Congress’ site for its Manuscript Division’s Nabokov collection, you can see a couple of the cards on which he wrote his best-known novel, 1955’s Lolita. Asked about his working methods by Herbert Gold in the Paris Review, he described the method forthrightly: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” For every craft, the proper tool, and Nabokov remains, fragmentary last book and all, one of western literature’s most respected craftsmen of language — or, rather, languages, plural.
Though both have their roots in the previous century, jazz and cinema came of age as 20th century art forms, and they very often did so together (though not always in the most tasteful ways). Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer introduced the world to talkies. Cabaret, Lady Sings the Blues, The Cotton Club are all well-known fictional films that nearly anyone might name if asked about the subject. And though Ken Burns’ Jazz may seem like a definitive statement in jazz documentary, for decades, filmmakers have made jazz musicians their central subject—for example, in jazz fan-favorites like Mingus and Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser. Before these excellent, if sometimes painful, portraits, there were short films like Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili’s 1944 Jammin’ the Blues with Lester Young and other bop stalwarts, and 1950’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, a selection of clips featuring Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, and others performing at Norman Granz’s legendary series of concerts.
You’ll see excerpts from both Jammin’ the Blues and Jazz at the Philharmonic above in The Greatest Jazz Films Ever, a two-disc DVD set that appears to be out of print. (New copies currently retail on Amazon for anywhere from $259.00 to almost $4,000, but you can watch it free online.) This greatest hits collection also includes highlights from several television specials like Be Bop’s Nest—a rare Charlie Parker appearance with Dizzy Gillespie on the short-lived variety show Stage Entrance—and “The Sound of Miles Davis,” a 1959 episode of television show The Robert Herridge Theater that showcased one of Davis’ most celebrated ensembles.
You’ll also see excerpts from The Sound of Jazz, which Fresh Sound Records calls “one of the great glorious moments on television,” and which contains performances from Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, the Count Basie Orchestra, and more. Finally, we get excerpts from a 1959 television special called Jazz From Studio 61, featuring the original Ahmad Jamal Trio with the Ben Webster Quintet. The Greatest Jazz Films Ever is an impressive and enduring collection of documents from the golden age of jazz. While the emphasis here is generally on musicianship, not filmmaking, it’s a collection that also demonstrates jazz’s close relationship to film and television in the mid-20th century. Allmusic has a complete tracklist of the collection. And for a detailed breakdown of each clip, you won’t want to pass up a scroll through this helpful French site.
Mm, just listen to Sweet Baby James’ “magic fingers boogie up and down those golden frets.” Is it any wonder he became the subject of so many songs, two of them Joni’s?
(For the record, here are critic David B. Wilson’s Top 5 Songs About James Taylor:
According to Joni’s own website, James’ “You Can Close Your Eyes,” above, is about her. (That would explain the little giggle at the top.)
He performed it solo on his 1971 release, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. Joni contributed backing vocals elsewhere on the album. In return, he played guitar on her Blue.
The general public had to wait another year to hear “See You Sometime,” David Wilson’s pick for the number one song about James Taylor, but Joni must’ve made sure that James got a preview.
As she later told Bill Flanagan of Musician Magazine, “I wrote a song for James Taylor that mentioned his suspenders. And then on his next album he went and wore his bloody suspenders on the cover! Well, then the cat was completely out of the bag!”
Oh, Joni, I’m not so sure the suspenders were the giveaway.
As for the young man she talks about after “For Free”—the guy who felt he was over the hill at the ripe old age of 21—it’s not James. It’s Neil Young, and the song his gloomy mood inspired was “Circle Game.” (Good luck finding that cut. Once a ubiquitous bootleg, with the exception of the songs posted here, the concert has all but disappeared, though those who still listen to cds can put it in their baskets on Amazon’s UK site.)
Ayun Hallidaywas introduced to this concert as a WBEZ Unconcert in the early 80’s and worries that her homemade cassette may one day cease to exist. Follow her @AyunHalliday
UK-born, Chicago-based artist Philip Hartigan has posted a brief video piece about Franz Kafka’s drawings. Kafka, of course, wrote a body of work, mostly never published during his lifetime, that captured the absurdity and the loneliness of the newly emerging modern world: In The Metamorphosis, Gregor transforms overnight into a giant cockroach; in The Trial, Josef K. is charged with an undefined crime by a maddeningly inaccessible court. In story after story, Kafka showed his protagonists getting crushed between the pincers of a faceless bureaucratic authority on the one hand and a deep sense of shame and guilt on the other.
On his deathbed, the famously tortured writer implored his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished work. Brod ignored his friend’s plea and instead published them – novels, short stories and even his diaries. In those diaries, Kafka doodled incessantly – stark, graphic drawings infused with the same angst as his writing. In fact, many of these drawings have ended up gracing the covers of Kafka’s books.
“Quick, minimal movements that convey the typical despairing mood of his fiction” says Hartigan of Kafka’s art. “I am struck by how these simple gestures, these zigzags of the wrist, contain an economy of mark making that even the most experienced artist can learn something from.”
In his book Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch describes what happened when he came upon Kafka in mid-doodle: the writer immediately ripped the drawing into little pieces rather than have it be seen by anyone. After this happened a couple times, Kafka relented and let him see his work. Janouch was astonished. “You really didn’t need to hide them from me,” he complained. “They’re perfectly harmless sketches.”
“Kafka slowly wagged his head to and fro – ‘Oh no! They are not as harmless as they look. These drawing are the remains of an old, deep-rooted passion. That’s why I tried to hide them from you…. It’s not on the paper. The passion is in me. I always wanted to be able to draw. I wanted to see, and to hold fast to what was seen. That was my passion.”
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.
The arrival of the compact disc was thought to be the death sentence for LPs. Vinyl was big, imprecise, and stuck in the past: CDs were the wave of the future. Recent years, however, have seen a surprising trend. Vinyl collectors have managed to weather the digital music storm of the ‘80s and ‘90s, while compact discs, having seen better days, have dropped in popularity. In fact, according to The Telegraph, LP sales are better than they’ve been at any point over the past 12 years. Although it is the hobbyist collector and the DJ who have buoyed vinyl sales for many years, the recent surge in LP popularity is, in part, due to younger fans who prefer the experience of listening to vinyl records over digital downloads. Daft Punk, Arctic Monkeys, The National, and Vampire Weekend are just some of the A‑list bands taking advantage of the trend.
But how are LPs manufactured today? Pretty much the exact way they’ve been produced throughout the past 50 years, actually. Many of the LP pressing plants use restored presses, bought second-hand for about $25,000. The video above, made in 1956 by RCA Victor, gives a detailed description of the process. After the sound recording, the audio is transferred to a lacquer master disc.
The playing time of the music dictates the number of grooves on the disc, and the sound dynamics determine the distance between them. As the video explains, the loud passages need more room, while quiet ones need less. A finely ground and electrically heated piece of sapphire cuts the vinyl with precision. Once it is complete, the master disc is coated in various metals, which, when separated, create a new, silver-faced master copy. This metallic master can’t be played, and is used to create a mold, which must be checked for sound quality. Finally, the mold is used to make a stamper, which stamps the appropriate grooves on the records. The record press heats the plastic, turning it into a warm, moldable goo, presses it, and cools its once the grooves have been stamped. If you got lost somewhere along the way, don’t worry. Visuals help, and the video above should give you an idea of how things happen.
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”All of us who do creative work,” says Ira Glass, creator This American Life, quite possibly the most respected program on public radio, “we get into it because we have good taste.” Yet despite this discernment, or indeed because of it, “there’s a gap: for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. [ … ] Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.” For this reason, Glass argues, the tasteful often fail at their creative endeavors entirely. “Most everybody I know who does interesting creative work,” he continues, “they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.” This astute diagnosis of a “totally normal” syndrome comes extracted from Glass’ talk on the craft of storytelling, previously featured here on Open Culture.
Fortunately for those of us struggling with the very taste-ability mismatch Glass describes, a solution exists. If you want a quick fix, though, prepare for disappointment. “Do a lot of work,” he flatly advises. “Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap.” These words have proven inspiring enough that they’ve surely spurred listeners on to plow paths of sheer production through their chosen rocky yet fertile creative fields. Two listeners in particular, David Shiyang Liu and Frohlocke, apparently found themselves immediately galvanized to work with the words themselves, resulting in the typographically focused video interpretations above. Only one question remains: how large a volume of typographically focused video interpretations of Ira Glass’ words did they have to create before they could make ones this impressive?
Teddy Roosevelt seems to us a paradox today, and did in his time as well: A man’s man hunter, cowboy, and war hero, who supposedly saved the game of football from extinction (Roosevelt worried that banning the game would produce “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men”); also, a Harvard-educated New York progressive and treehugging conservationist hero, who re-defined presidential style with Brooks Brothers three-piece suits and uniforms. And for all of his public heroics, Roosevelt was also a doting father who gave his nickname to the most universally cuddly species of bear. Perhaps some of the best representations of Roosevelt’s personal ethos are photographs of his combination library and gun room, hung with hunting trophies and skins in the home he built for his family in Oyster Bay, New York (below—see more at the appropriately named “Art of Manliness”).
One significant reason Roosevelt could embody seemingly widely divergent traits was that he was a devourer of books, reading tens of thousands in his lifetime, absorbing thousands of points of view from every possible source. But Roosevelt did not read the way we do today—rapidly taking in information for its own sake, with automated services compiling recommendations from the metadata (a phenomenon Susan Jacoby has indicted as part of our hyper-partisan, groupthink culture). He read according to his whim, putting pleasure ahead of profit and disdaining fads and rigid cultural norms. He was, literary site Book Riot supposes, “probably the most well-read president, and perhaps one of the most well-read men in all of history.”
Book Riot points us toward a few pages of Roosevelt’s autobiography, in which—amidst picaresque chapters like “In Cowboy Land” and heavy ones like “The Presidency; Making an Old Party Progressive”—Roosevelt pauses to detail his thoughts on reading in a particularly pragmatic chapter titled “Outdoors and Indoors.” Although Roosevelt does not present his contemplation as an easily digestible list of rules, as is the fashion now, Book Riot has seen fit to condense his thought. Below see the first five of their list, “Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 Rules for Reading.” I’d be willing to bet that if everyone followed Teddy’s advice, we could up the woeful national literacy quotient within a few short years.
1. “The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library [a reference to the Harvard Classics]. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books… But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times.”
2. “A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.”
3. “Personally, the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.”
4. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”
5. “He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.”
Head over to Book Riot for the remaining five of Roosevelt’s “rules,” along with some witty commentary.
This morning, we’re serving up some green eggs and ham. Or rather Neil Gaiman is. Whenever I think about someone reading Dr. Seuss’ classic children’s book, I can’t help but think back to Jesse Jackson’s classic reading on SNL in 1991. But who knows, maybe 20 years from now, another generation might call to mind this version by the unshaven Gaiman. If the reading whets your appetite a bit, don’t miss our collection of Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories, which includes, among other things, audio & video recordings of @neilhimself reading his own stories. We’ve got some more good Dr. Seuss material below.
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Historians, biographers, and die-hard Sagan devotees will inevitably want to visit the Library of Congress in person to view the full archive, which contains over 1700 boxes of material. The lay reader curious about Sagan’s life, however, won’t need to make the trek to the U.S. capital to sample the archive’s contents. That’s because the Library of Congress has uploaded a portion of the collection online, including sundry fascinating biographical pieces. Above, you can view a digitized set of the Sagan family’s silent home movies, where young Carl shows off his boyhood boxing prowess, rides horseback, and plays piano (preciously, we presume).
It was during high school that Sagan began to fill out intellectually. His senior yearbook is testimony to both his interest in science and the humanities: not only was Sagan president of both the science and chemistry clubs, he also led the French club, served as an editor on his school’s newspaper, debated, took part in theatre productions, and was a member of the photography club.
Indeed, Sagan displayed his uncanny ability to merge science with the humanities in Wawawhack, his high school newspaper, writing a piece entitled “Space, Time, and The Poet.” He begins by saying, “it is an exhilarating experience to read poetry and observe its correlation with modern science. Profound scientific thought is hardly a rarity among the poets.” Throughout the piece, Sagan goes on to draw from verses by Alfred Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, John Milton, and Robert Frost.
Could Sonny and Cher, Simon and Garfunkel, and Herman’s Hermits — to name a few of the “top scenemakers” Singers and Swingers author Roberta Ashley designates as the “grooviest gourmets happening” — really shared a common palate with Betty and her child-chefs?
It’s hard to imagine 1967’s rock stars” eating this stuff, let alone making it. The Rolling Stones’ “Hot Dogs on the Rocks” sounds more suited to Mick Jagger’s hot pot at the London School of Economics than the back of a “Ruby Tuesday” era tour bus. I don’t recall Keith Richards mentioning them in Life.
Moving on to Singers and Swingers’ salad course, Monkee Peter Tork’s “Mad Mandarin Salad” (click here for ingredients) sounds like it would taste quite similar to the New Boys and Girls Cook Book’s “Rocket Salad”, above. Canned fruit features prominently in both, but “Rocket Salad” is way more phallic, and thus more rock n’ roll.
“Barbra Streisand’s Instant Coffee Ice Cream” sounds sophisticated, mayhaps because coffee, like alcohol, has no place in the Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls’ realm. It seems like it would uphold the Singers and Swingers’ mandate by being “easy-to-prepare”. Dare I say “easy enough for a child to prepare”? So my own mother told the Indianapolis Star sometime in the late 60’s. The evidence is below. Just like Barbra’s, my mother’s recipe required marshmallows and a blender.
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