Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, premiered in Paris in 1953, at the Théâtre de Babylone, under the direction of French actor, Roger Blin. Many other directors staged the play in the years to come, each time interpreting it in their own way. All the while, Beckett complained that the play was being subjected to “endless misunderstanding.” However, when an actor, Peter Woodthrope, once asked him to explain what Godot is all about, Beckett answered quixotically: “It’s all symbiosis, Peter; it’s symbiosis.” Thanks for the clarification, Sam.
Beckett never gave a clear explanation. But perhaps he offered up something better. In 1985, Beckett directed three of his plays — Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame — as part of a production called “Beckett Directs Beckett.” The plays performed by the San Quentin Players toured Europe and Asia with much fanfare, and with Beckett exerting directorial control. And do keep this in mind. Beckett paces things slowly. So you won’t hear your first sound until the 2:00 mark.
If you consider yourself a Harry Potter fan, you’ve almost certainly read read all seven of J.K. Rowling’s novels and watched all eight of their film adaptations. The question of where to go from there has many possible answers. Some true believers plunge straight into, and often contribute to, the vast body of unofficial reading material that is Harry Potter fan fiction. Others turn to the scholarship surrounding Potter and his world, a field that includes such studies of varying seriousness as The Science of Harry Potter, Harry Potter and Philosophy, The Values of Harry Potter, Looking for God in Harry Potter, and If Harry Potter Ran General Electric. In the University of Toronto lecture above, quantum physicist Krister Shalm explains, appropriately enough, the quantum physics of Harry Potter.
Shalm thus faces two tasks: to explain the relevant facts of quantum physics in a manner understandable to the layman, and the even more formidable challenge of relating the relevant facts of Harry potter in a way that won’t completely alienate the uninitiated. But pulling this off in an entertaining fashion would seem to land right in the wheelhouse of a man who bills himself as “The Dancing Physicist” and states his mission to “make some of the mind-boggling concepts in quantum mechanics more approachable” by collaborating with “a magician, musicians, and dancers.” That magician, a certain Dan Trommater, turns up in this lecture to complement Shalm’s physical angle with a magical one. Together, they illustrate for us how Draco Malfoy’s teleportation techniques resemble what quantum physicists do in the lab on a regular basis, and what relevance Schrödinger’s famous cat has to that fateful prophecy that either Harry Potter or Lord Voldemort would ultimately die. (Luckily for me, Shalm doesn’t reveal which one; I haven’t read the books myself yet!)
This wondrous little video is, as they say, guaranteed to raise a smile. According to Beatles legend, John Lennon was shooting a promotional film for “Strawberry Fields Forever” in early 1967 when he passed by an antique shop and discovered a poster from 1843 trumpeting the arrival of Pablo Fanque’s Circus. The circus, the poster proclaimed, was to be “for the benefit of Mr. Kite.” Intrigued, Lennon bought the quirky Victorian poster, hung it on his wall at home, and then proceeded to write “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” the seventh track on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Almost 45 years later, Beatles fans still can’t shake the poster from their minds. And, just recently, Peter Dean and a team of artists decided to recreate the poster using traditional methods of wood engraving and letterpress printing. They share their experience in the elegant video above. Your can buy your own copy of the limited edition print here.
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In this fascinating clip from a 1974 interview by Michael Parkinson of the BBC, Orson Welles describes his “very strange relationship” with Ernest Hemingway, casting himself in a story of their first meeting as a torero opposed to Hemingway’s bull.
The two men met in New York in the early summer of 1937, when Welles was asked to narrate The Spanish Earth, a documentary organized by Hemingway and other artists to promote the Rebublican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Welles was a great admirer of Hemingway, who was 16 years his senior. When he was 18 years old he went to Spain to study bullfighting after reading Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. But despite some similarities, the two men were poles apart, as Welles’ anecdote of their first meeting suggests.
The bravado in Welles’s story may have something to do with a need to compensate for his own injured pride over the reception of his narration for The Spanish Earth. Under pressure from Lillian Hellman and others in the project, who complained that Welles’ performance was too theatrical for the documentary, director Joris Ivens decided to scrap it and asked Hemingway to come back in to read his own words. Welles later drew on the incident in the projection room as inspiration for his script “The Sacred Beasts,” about the relationship between a young bullfighter and an older film director. The script was eventually developed into The Other Side of the Wind, an unfinished film starring John Huston as the Hemingway-inspired filmmaker Jake Hannaford. Welles was working on the project when the interview with Parkinson took place. You can see the complete interview on YouTube, and read a transcript at Wellesnet.
The “Politehnica” University of Timisoara, Romania, an engineering school established in 1920, takes its motto from Ferdinand I: “It’s not the walls that make a school, but the spirit living inside.” While the walls of “Politehnica” are as stately as anyone could ask for, what’s inside, according to the short documentary above, is also pretty spiffy—the spirit of computing history, Romanian style. With a score that sounds a little like an outtake from Logan’s Run, this video gives us a tour of the university’s Museum of Information Technology and Communications, opened November 16, 2001.
We meet a number of ancient machines, many of which were responsible for designing buildings and hydroelectric dams and some of which still function. There’s the Mecipt 1, a massive 1961 mainframe system covered in dials, switches, and routing systems and looking somewhat more industrial than the machines built by Fairchild and IBM at the same time. Next comes Mecipt 2 in 1963, which was in operation for sixteen years and did much of the building design. The microcomputers TIMS and MS-100 resemble the original business machines made in the sixties by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Data General Corp. Overall, the short doc takes us through the experimental course of Romanian computing from 1961 to 1989. The reader who brought this to our attention points out that there’s little material out there on Romanian computer engineering. This short doc offers a rare look at a very little-known and fascinating history.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Yesterday saw the launch of what you’ll surely find the most intriguing use of Syria’s domain name extension yet, especially if you follow the visual arts. It serves the punning site Art.sy, to which you’ll soon point your browser whenever you want to discover new imagery that appeals to your aesthetic sensibility. Thus holds the theory, in any case, behind this service created by the Art Genome Project. It aims to become to visual art what Pandora has become to music: a virtual mind that can take your tastes, turn right back around to recommend works that please those tastes, and — in the best of all possible outcomes, little by little — broaden those tastes as well. Tell Art.sy what has recently captivated you in the museums, and it will dig through pieces from Washington’s National Gallery, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the British Museum, and elsewhere, trying its best to find something else that will do the same. In total, Art.sy hosts “17,000+ artworks by 3,000+ artists” from “300+ of the world’s leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to São Paulo.”
Melena Ryzik in TheNew York Times describes Art.sy’s elaborate system of code-based aesthetic classification as developed by “a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied,” in which “some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” …) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography,” while others “are highly subjective, even quirky.” Ryzik lists the possible codes for a Picasso as including “Cubism,” “abstract painting,” “Spain,” “France” and “love,” and those for a Jackson Pollock as “abstract art,” “New York School,” “splattered/dripped,” “repetition” and “process-oriented.” Here we have yet another reason to maintain a high artistic awareness in our high-tech time. Still, I can’t help but recall the wise counsel Stephen Fry offered in an interview we featured back in August: a truly life-enriching recommendation engine wouldn’t give you the same art you’ve always enjoyed; it would give you the exact opposite.
You can learn more about the ins-and-outs of Art.sy here.
Alan Watts came to San Francisco during the early 1950s, wrote his bestseller Way of Zen, and became one of the foremost popularizers of Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and various forms of Eastern philosophy. His TV show, Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life (1960), introduced Americans to the seemingly exotic concept of meditation (watch here). And his radio show and lectures forced listeners to pause and look at their lives from a fresh perspective. Again and again, Watts challenged the Western emphasis on money-making to the exclusion of all else. We’ve heard Watts rail against this soul-crushing value in a lecture animated by the creators of South Park. (I’m not kidding you.) And, in the newly-produced video above, he continues along the same trajectory. So, as you drink your morning coffee and ponder your day, ask yourself: Are you putting money-making before happiness itself? Or are you pursuing the passions that bring happiness, achieving excellence, and then letting the money follow? With that, I’ll let you continue with your day.
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It’s certainly not uncommon for celebrities to take up political causes, though this does not usually lead to them getting arrested for holing up in a high tower oil-drilling ship for four days. What’s less common is for this interest to burgeon into a full-on obsession with all things philosophical, but that’s exactly what happened to Lucy Lawless (best known as Xena, the Warrior Princess).
“I went to the UN summit on sustainable development after getting involved in the whole… big oil protest… and I saw all of these people working very hard but seemingly at cross-purposes about how do we create a just society.” On a full two-hour episode of The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast (which she claims was largely responsible for turning her on to philosophy), she describes how this political interest drove her to look at the foundations and histories of theories of justice, and eventually decide to go back to school to study philosophy, which she’s now doing in New Zealand between flights to the states to film TV spots such as her recent appearance on NBC’s Parks and Recreation.
The thesis of the book is that celebrities serve as an outlet for society’s aggressive instincts. Drawing on canonical texts about religious anthropology like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the author compares the treatment of modern celebrities to ancient rites where young maidens were lavishly bestowed with fineries and then sacrified. Lucy thinks this well matches her own experiences, and talks about the existential weirdness involved with being and dealing with the famous.
A great year for open education got even better with the launch of Marginal Revolution University. Founded by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two econ professors at George Mason University, MRUniversity promises to deliver free, interactive courses in the economics space. And they’re getting started with a course on Development Economics, a subdiscipline that explores why some countries grow rich and others remain poor. In short, issues that have real meaning for everyday people worldwide.
1. The product is free, and we offer more material in less time.
2. Most of our videos are short, so you can view and listen between tasks, rather than needing to schedule time for them. The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long. When needed, more videos are used to explain complex topics.
3. No talking heads and no long, boring lectures. We have tried to reconceptualize every aspect of the educational experience to be friendly to the on-line world.
4. It is low bandwidth and mobile-friendly. No ads.
5. We offer tests and quizzes.
6. We have plans to subtitle the videos in major languages. Our reach will be global, and in doing so we are building upon the global emphasis of our home institution, George Mason University.
7. We invite users to submit content.
8. It is a flexible learning module. It is not a “MOOC” per se, although it can be used to create a MOOC, namely a massive, open on-line course.
9. It is designed to grow rapidly and flexibly, absorbing new content in modular fashion — note the beehive structure to our logo. But we are starting with plenty of material.
10. We are pleased to announce that our first course will begin on October 1.
You’ve no doubt heard of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. What’s more, you’ve no doubt heard it, even if you could swear you haven’t. (Need a refresher? Listen to Glenn Gould’s performance of it here.) If you’d like to gain much more familiarity with this deeply respected piece of music, but in small pieces of it at a time, keep an ear on The Well-Tweeted Clavier, going on now from the 92nd Street Y in NYC. Known to pull a cultural stunt every now and again, 92Y has a plan to tweet about a prelude and fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier each and every day. They launched this project on September 14, and it should run for a total of 48 days. You can see these tweets by following 92Y on Twitter, or simply by checking the hashtag #WTClavier. “The Well-Tempered Clavier can be played on any keyboard,” 92Y Tweeted on October 3. “Truth in advertising?’ That day, they posted three videos associated with Prelude and Fugue No. 20 in A minor, BWV 865: a two-part performance and a short talk from pianist and conductor András Schiff.
At the end of this month, Schiff, famously a booster of Bach’s work, opens the New York component of his program The Bach Project, an effort that will, all told, include the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, 92nd Street Y, Carnegie Hall and Great Performers at Lincoln Center. “To me, Bach’s music is not black and white; it’s full of colours,” Schiff writes in his essay “Without the Pedal But With Plenty of Colors.” “In my imagination, each tonality corresponds to a colour. The Well-Tempered Clavier, with its 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, provides an ideal opportunity for this fanciful fantasy.” You can explore these colors on 92Y’s main Well-Tweeted Clavier page, which actually color-codes all the preludes and fugues thus far tweeted so you can experience them as chromatically as Schiff does. “Of course, this is a very personal interpretation, and each of you may have a different opinion,” he adds. “Nevertheless, if some of us happen to believe that music is more than just a series of notes and sounds, then a little bit of fantasy is welcome.”
I’ll admit it: I’m not a big Pinterest user. Until very recently I thought the social networking site was a bit twee—too much about cute clothes and crafts, not enough about ideas.
Turns out the web’s 15th largest site has a lot more to offer.
Open Culture has its own embryonic Pinterest page. But, more importantly, university presses are making widespread use of Pinterest to promote new book titles. Likewise, academic libraries are using their Pinterest pages to promote events and help fund major capital improvements. For libraries and archives, a major ongoing mission is to keep the collections visible. It’s not easy to let the world know about your one-of-a-kind holdings, and Pinterest potentially offers a great way to bring these materials to new and younger audiences.
Big retailers haven’t figured out how to make real money off of Pinterest yet, though one theory holds that the site’s highly visual nature puts people in the mood to click and buy. True or not, university presses and libraries need all the help they can get to gin up sales, so they’re wading into the Pinterest waters and seeing what happens.
There are the usual, and completely worth checking out, suspects: Of course, Harvard University Press has a page that features, among other things, interviews with Harvard Press authors. Watch mathematician Paul Lockhart, author of Measurement, trip out on parallelograms.
Syracuse University’s page links to its audio archive, which includes a fun, episodic program called “Wait? They Banned What?”. You might be surprised to find out that Bing Crosby song was banned during World War II for being too catchy.
These sites offer very few decorating tips for your Air Stream trailer, and I found no links to locavore jam-making businesses, but Alice, whomever she may be, has created a great curatorial tool for exploring a new trend in book promotion.
But wait. Cambridge University Press has a pin on its page called “Librianista” that links to short-hemline clothes modeled by bespectacled cuties. I guess even the world’s oldest publisher gets to have a little fun.
Thanks to Kirstin Butler for sending Alice’s Tumblr our way.
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. See more of her work at .
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