The Colbert Report opened last night with a segment called “Stephen Colbert’s Tribute to Having Paul McCartney on His Show, Featuring Paul McCartney, With Special Guest Stephen Colbert.” And, for the next 12 minutes, Paul and Stephen covered a lot of ground. Because McCartney has just released material from Wings — a 1976 concert film called Rockshowand a reissue of Wings Over America — the conversation begins with the Wings era: how Macca started all over again; drove to gigs in a van, with no hotel reservations booked; eventually recorded a fine album (Band on the Run) in Nigeria, amidst a cholera outbreak; and began performing live for the first time in years … which led to inevitable questions about the Beatles: why they stopped performing live in 1966, and how their songwriting evolved. It all ends with interviewer and interviewee singing a charming duet of Irving Berlin’s 1936 classic “Cheek to Cheek.” Later, McCartney treated the Colbert crowd to six songs. We’ve embedded a couple of clips below. You can watch the full 60-minute show here.
Read Open Culture long enough, and sooner or later you’ll encounter “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman, the Canadian MC whose rhyming subjects of choice include evolution, The Canterbury Tales, and British versus Canadian English. Though the hard-reading Brinkman has, it seems, staked out the musical genre of “lit hop” for himself, he’s gained just as much of his distinctive brand of rigorously factual hip-hop notoriety by rapping for the other of what C.P. Snow defined as the “two cultures.” His parallel science rapping career began on a commission from University of Warwick microbiologist and Rough Guide to Evolution author Mark Pallen. Out of all this came “the first peer-reviewed rap” show, The Rap Guide to Evolution, whose development we’ve previously featured.
Above, you’ll find the music video for “Artifical Selection,” one song from The Rap Guide to Evolution. “Artificial selection, it starts with a question,” Brinkman raps. “How did people ever get cows, chickens and pigs / And other animals and plants to act so domestic? / We took them from the wild and we bred them, brethren.” He explores the topic further, touching on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the inadvertent usage of evolution by early farmers and livestock breeders, domestic aphids kept by ant colonies, and even the natural selection inherent in the MC’s development of his performance techniques. On Brinkman’s official site, the video comes with tags like “Heredity,” “Lamarkism,” and “Unity of Common Descent.” How many rap videos could credibly do the same?
The History section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 60 courses. Some courses (like those featured below) focus on broad time periods and themes. Others take a look at more specialized topics that will keep you engaged for hours. All lectures were taped right in the classrooms of great universities:
China: Traditions and Transformations – Multiple Formats – Peter K. Bol & William Kirby, Harvard
European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present - YouTube - iTunes Video — Web — Thomas Lacquer, UC Berkeley
History of the World to 1500 CE – YouTube - iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
History of the World Since 1500 CE – YouTube — iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
The Western Tradition (Video) – YouTube – Eugen Weber, UCLA
US History: From Civil War to Present — iTunes Audio — Web — Jennifer Burns, UC Berkeley
As you can see, the courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web. And they’re all listed in our meta collection of 700 Free Online Courses. Other key disciplines found in the collection include Philosophy, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond.
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On the eve of yet another Superman movie reboot—coming tomorrow with all the usual summer hit fanfare and noise—take a moment before gorging yourself on popcorn and extravagant CGI spectacles to reflect on the character’s enduringly simple origins. After all, this month marks the 75th anniversary of this most iconic of American superheroes, who first appeared in the June 1938 Action Comics #1. The brainchild of Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (so memorably fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Superman is what Neil Gaiman calls an archetypal “primal thing,” a character who can be reinvented every decade while still remaining unmistakably himself.
Witness, for example, the first appearance of Superman on the big screen in the 1941 Fleischer cartoon (top), Superman (or The Mad Scientist)—the first in a series of seventeen shorts. On the heels of the first non-print adaptation of the character—the Adventures of Superman radio drama (listen below)—the cartoon series shows us the original Siegel and Shuster hero, a rough-and-tumble space alien raised in an orphanage, not by the kindly Kents in rural America.
You’ll notice however, that Superman’s resume—more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings… etc.—hasn’t changed a bit. But some of the character’s attributes and origins were considerably softened after DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth instituted a code of superhero ethics (many years before the Comics Code Authority stepped in to censor the whole industry).
You can learn even more about Superman’s origins from his creators themselves, interviewed in the clip above for the 1981 BBC documentary Superman: The Comic Strip Hero. Siegel reveals how the idea for Superman came to him during one restless night in which he composed all of the basic script for the character, “an entirely new concept.” The very next day, Shuster sat down at his drawing board and Superman’s look emerged fully-formed. Both creators and their heirs have won and lost high-profile lawsuits over rights to their characters. But legal wrangling over compensation aside, there’s no denying that their mad eureka moment left an indelible cultural legacy no updated film, logo, or controversy can diminish.
Yesterday we featured the National Gallery of Art’s site NGA Images, where you can download 25,000 high-quality digital images of that museum’s works of art. Today, why not have a look at Google Art Project? Though we’ve posted about it before, you’ll want to check out its slick new redesign — not to mention its expanded collection, which now includes more than 250,000 works of art from over 250 museums. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardenois writes that the latest iteration of Google Art Project’s “improved search tools now make it significantly easier to filter any list of artworks by artist, place, data and related events. [ … ] Some of the most important artworks are also available as gigapixel images. Many museums also allow you to browse their galleries using Google Street View.”
The collections newly added to Google Art Project come from institutions as far- and wide-ranging as Kuwait’s al Sabah Collection, Japan’s Kawabara Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst, and Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. At the top, we have an image of Sunkwan Kwon’s “A Man in Stripe Shirt Who is Dropping His Head for a Long Time After Phone Call,” made available in the Korean Art Museum Association collection. But don’t look at the image in this post; look at the piece’s entry in Google Art Project, which lets you scroll and zoom as you please. And you will want to zoom, since Kwon’s very large-format photography demands close attention to detail. At such a high resolution, you can pay that attention, looking right into the windows and observing the people behind them. Viewers, as the work’s description says, “should keep having tenacious questions that ask who the characters are, why they show tense expressions on their face and what their situations are.”
Chances are in the past week you’ve read some argument about how the internet has destroyed the middle class, democracy, culture, etc, or a rebuttal of one of the above. I can’t add much to these debates. They sometimes sound like arguments over whether telephony is a boon or a curse. These technologies—as long as the grid’s up and running—we shall always have with us.
Sociological speculation notwithstanding, the exponentially increasing computing power that pushes our online interactions to ever-dizzying speeds is surely something to pause and marvel at, if not to fear. The short video above from Buzzfeed takes us on a wild ride through the millions of transactions that occur online in a single minute. Here we learn that in sixty-seconds, there will be 2,000,000 Google searches, 27,800 uploads to Instagram, 278,000 Tweets, 1,875,000 Facebook likes, a “low estimate” of 200,000 people streaming porn….
Actually, it does start to seem like all this online activity is pretty narrowly focused, or maybe that’s a limitation of the survey. Another video from 2011 (below) and infographics here and here offer some comparative analytics.
In February of 1962, less than a month before the release of his debut album, an obscure young folk singer named Bob Dylan recorded some songs and an interview for a local New York City radio show called Folksinger’s Choice.
The show was broadcast on WBAI and hosted by Cynthia Gooding, an established folk singer 17 years older than Dylan. As it happened, both Gooding and Dylan were native Minnesotans. Gooding had first met Dylan in Minneapolis in late 1959, not long after he graduated from high school.
As the interview gets rolling, the 20-year-old Dylan wastes little time before launching into some tall tales about his past. He says he moved to Minneapolis from South Dakota, because Minneapolis was “about the only place you didn’t have to go too far to find the Mississippi River.” Before that, he says, he traveled with a carnival, “off and on for about six years.” When Gooding asks whether that might have interfered with his schooling, Dylan doesn’t miss a beat. “Well,” he says, “I skipped a bunch of things, and I didn’t go to school a bunch of years and I skipped this and that.” He says he wrote a song for the “elephant lady” in the carnival and called it “Won’t You Buy A Postcard?” But he quickly adds that he forgot how it went.
To follow along with the interview, click here to open the full transcript in a new window. And while you won’t hear Dylan’s ode to the elephant lady, if you listen to the complete one-hour program you will be treated to 11 songs from his early repertoire. They include several that Dylan wrote, along with some old folk and blues songs:
According to the 2011 documentary Queen: The Days of Our Lives (watch it here), Mercury took ideas for three songs and knitted them into one complex operatic ballad. It was long enough (almost six minutes) that it seemed unlikely to get any radio play. The music execs begged Mercury to simplify things, to pare things down, but he didn’t relent. It was all or nothing. And the recording process equaled the complexity of the song. Six different studios were used along the way, with Mercury trying to help the band record the sprawling song he had mapped out in his mind.
The first video above features Mercury’s piano track that forms the backbone of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” On it, Mercury plays a Bechstein concert grand piano, which otherwise appears in the famous video that promoted the song. The second video above features the isolated vocal parts. During the grueling recording sessions, Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor spent 10–12 hours each day working on the vocals. And finally, for good measure, we’ve added below a fresh reminder of what a beautiful thing Queen created almost 40 years ago. Filmed just last week, the clip features a crowd of 60,000 singing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” before the start of a Green Day concert in London. I’ll just leave it with that.
No surprise that in “Masterworks for One and All,” an article about how museums have begun to offer free, high-quality downloadable images of works from their collections, the New York Times’ Nina Siegal brings up Walter Benjamin. The preoccupations of the philosopher behind “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” may seem more relevant than ever in these days of not just mechanical reproduction, but universal, developed-world ownership of the means of mechanical reproduction — and nearly instantaneous, effortless mechanical reproduction at that. Many rights-holders, including certain museums, have effectively decided that if you can’t beat the mechanical reproducers, join ’em. “With the Internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images,” Siegal quotes the Rijksmuseum’s director of collections as saying. “We decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image of [Vermeer’s] ‘Milkmaid’ from the Rijksmuseum rather than using a very bad reproduction.” (See our previous post: The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art.)
Siegal goes on to mention the efforts of Washington’s National Gallery of Art, which has so far made super high-resolution images of 25,000 works freely available on NGA Images, a site that describes itself as “designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.” You can browse the images by collection — French galleries, self-portraits, music — view the most recent additions, or pull up the works of art most frequently requested by others. Leonardo’s portrait of the Florentine aristocrat Ginevra de’ Benci, seen up top, has proven particularly popular, as has Claude Monet’s The Japanese Footbridge just above. But does all this bear out Benjamin’s concerns about mechanical reproduction cheapening the original aura of a work? “I don’t think anyone thinks we’ve cheapened the image of the ‘Mona Lisa,’” an NGA spokeswoman said to Siegal. “People have gotten past that, and they still want to go to the Louvre to see the real thing. It’s a new, 21st-century way of respecting images.”
Just yesterday, The New York Times ran a piece declaring that vinyl is back. Once a casualty of the CD, vinyl records are now selling at a steady clip, and not just to nostalgic sexagenarians. Younger music fans are embracing old-school records, frankly because they deliver a better sound than compressed MP3s. When Daft Punk released its latest album Random Access Memories last month, 19,000 vinyl copies were sold, representing about 6% of overall sales. And that may be a lowball number.
There is, of course, a nostalgic component to the vinyl revival. We fondly reminisce about the days when music had other tangible and aesthetic dimensions. Remember when you could feel the weight of the records, study the cover designs, revel in the liner notes, then slip the discs onto the turntable and watch them spin? Those memories get captured by a new photo exhibit — “World Records” — being held at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles from June 8 to July 13. It features the work of Kai Schaefer, who has photographed over 100 classic albums on an array of turntables. Above, you’ll find a copy of Miles Davis’ jazz classic, Kind of Blue, sitting on a Rekokut B‑12GH. Other favorites of ours include London Calling by The Clash on a B&O Beogram 4004, The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Streeton a Dual1010, and VU’s The Velvet Underground & Nico on a Thorens TD 124II. You can visit a larger online gallery of photos here.
Americans use words differently in different regions of the country—a “moot” or “mute” point? There’s a grammatical argument to be made here for sure, but for a simple yes or no answer check out a series of new maps released by statistician Joshua Katz.
The maps are of the continental United States (Alaska and Hawaii are not included for geographical proximity purposes) and they reveal delightfully quirky trends. Some relate to things you might think of yourself: How do you pronounce aunt? (most respondents would say “ant” while those in New England would say “ahnt.”) Other questions get at more obscure (and questionable) regional differences, like drive-through liquor stores.
When most of the people on television sound like they’re from some generic American city with no accent or idioms, it’s easy to lose track of local dialect. How would you pronounce “caramel”? Differently, according to Katz’s maps, if you’re from the Eastern Seaboard than if you’re from the West or Midwest. And “pecan” has at least four different regional pronunciations.
Katz is a graduate student at North Carolina State University. He designed the maps to reflect responses to 122 questions about pronunciation and word usage based on research originally conducted by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University.
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