At the start of 2014, Edge.org posed its annual question to 176 scientific minds: “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” The question (as we noted in January) came prefaced by this thought:
Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?
As is its custom, Edge initially gathered and published the responses (in text format) from thinkers like Steven Pinker, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, Robert Sapolsky, and Daniel Dennett. Now, as the sun sets on 2014, filmmaker Jesse Dylan has created a four-minute film based on the project, featuring some of the same figures mentioned above. Watch it up top.
In a few short weeks, we’ll bring you the Edge question of 2015.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Earlier this year, Colin Marshall told you how “Chess has obsessed many of humanity’s finest minds over centuries and centuries and Marcel Duchamp seems to have shown little resistance to its intellectual and aesthetic pull.” His passion for the game (which he describes above) led him to design a now iconic Art Deco chess set, to print an array of chess tournament posters, and to become a pretty adept chess player himself, eventually earning the title of “grand master” as a result. In a pretty neat project, Scott Kildall has looked back at records of Duchamp’s chess matches and created a computer program that lets you play against a “Duchampian ghost.” Just click here, and then click on the chess piece you want to move. It will turn green, and then you can move it with your trackpad/mouse. Enjoy.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
If you heard Sun Ra’s Christmas-day radio broadcast of poetry and music we featured on, well, Christmas day, perhaps it inspired you to create something — music, poetry, radio — yourself. More than twenty years after his death, the flamboyant jazz visionary continues to inspire all kinds of creative acts on the part of his listeners. Surely he played no small part in motivating the production of Big Music, Little Musicians, an album by the fourth‑, fifth‑, and sixth-graders of music teacher Randy Porter’s classes at Chabot, Montclair, and Thornhill elementary schools in Oakland, California. The album offers not just 43 (!) compositions by these elementary schoolers, but, 42 tracks in, their interpretation of Sun Ra’s “Planet Earth” (in its original form the opening cut from 1966’s Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra Visits Planet Earth):
You can hear the entirety of this out-of-print 1994 release (incidentally, the year after Sun Ra took his leave of planet Earth) at Ubuweb. “With as little as a couple months of experience under their belts,” say the notes there, the ten‑, eleven‑, and twelve-year-old students “are encouraged to improvise and compose and this disc documents it.” And admittedly, “while some may cringe at some of the technical problems young, inexperienced players are bound to have, the creativity exhibited is undeniable. It is also refreshing to hear such unabashed, egoless joy as we have here. Many a seasoned player could stand to give this a listen.” It puts me in the mind of not just the grade-schoolers who sang David Bowie’s Space Oddity but the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an amateur orchestra at the Portsmouth School of Art that compensated for each member’s shaky grasp of their instrument (including, at one point, none other than Brian Eno’s on the clarinet) with its sheer size and the famousness of its selections.
Ghost Train
Tom-Foolery
Help I’m Drowning In A Sea Of Harmony
Just above, you can hear a few original cuts of intriguingly named big music from these little musicians: “Ghost Train,” “Tom Foolery,” and “Help! I’m Drowning in a Sea of Harmony.” Seeing as these kids would be the same age as me today, it would certainly interest me to hear how they’ve turned out; such an early and strong dose of Sun Ra certainly couldn’t make one’s life less interesting.
“When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They’re the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created.” — Gerald Early talking to Ken Burns.
In this clip unearthed by the Smithsonian earlier this year, we find two great American traditions intertwined — baseball and jazz. As John Edward Hasse explains in his online essay, jazz and baseball grew up together. According to some, the first documented use of the word “jazz” came from a 1913 newspaper article where a reporter, writing about the San Francisco Seals minor league team, said “The poor old Seals have lost their ‘jazz’ and don’t know where to find it.” “It’s a fact … that the ‘jazz,’ the pepper, the old life, has been either lost or stolen, and that the San Francisco club of today is made up of jazzless Seals.” Or, if you listen to this public radio report, another use of the word can be traced back to 1912. That’s when a washed-up pitcher named Ben Henderson claimed that he had invented a new pitch — the “jazz ball.”
During the Swing Era, jazz musicians often took a keen interest in baseball. Writes Ryan Whirty in Offbeat, Louis Armstrong’s “passion for America’s pastime was so intense that, in the early ’30s, he owned his own team, the Secret Nine, in his hometown of New Orleans, even decking the players out in the finest, whitest uniforms ever seen on the sandlots of the Big Easy.” (See them in the photo above.) And then other band leaders like Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington formed baseball teams with members of their groups.
Above, you can watch Ellington playing ball in some home videos, both hitting and pitching. When the Duke was a kid, he imagined himself becoming a professional baseball player one day. But the youngster eventually got hit in the head with a bat during a game, and that’s where his baseball career ended. He later noted, “The mark is still there, but I soon got over it. With that, however, my mother decided I should take piano lessons.”
Note: The Duke Ellington Center writes on Youtube that “The appearance of Ben Webster at the end of the clip times the video to around 1940–41.”
Ten months before his death — a death he knew was coming — Christopher Hitchens debated the question, “Is there an afterlife?”. Sharing the stage with Sam Harris, and Rabbis David Wolpe and Bradley Shavit Artson at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, Hitchens lamented how “It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know, but who are unbelievers, and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind [about the existence of God]?’ That is considered almost a polite question.” “It’s a religious falsification that people like myself scream for a priest at the end. Most of us go to our end with dignity.”
After spending years as an unapologetic atheist, Hitchens also wasn’t going to start believing in an afterlife — or what he half jokingly called “The Never Ending Party.” The video above takes some of Hitchens comments from the debate and turns them into a whimsical animation. It’s classic Hitchens. Equal parts emphatic and funny. Below, you can watch the original debate in its entirety.
What do movies like Blade Runner, Her, Drive, and Repo Man, separated by the years and even more so by their sensibilities, have in common? All come from auteur directors, all have accumulated considerable fan followings, and all have styles all their own. But to my mind, one important quality unites them more than any other: all take place in Los Angeles. What’s more, all take place in a distinctive vision of Los Angeles, that most photographed but least understood city in the world. Every feature film that uses Los Angeles as something more than a backdrop, whether it tries to represent or reimagine it, also acts as an accidental documentary of the city: of its built environment, of its people, of the ever-shifting ideas we have of it.
?si=K9lV4aUGTMqE94YA
On that premise, I created Los Angeles, the City in Cinema, a series of video essays meant to examine the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the contradictory characteristics of the city itself. At the top of the post, you can watch my episode on Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 proto-cyberpunk future noir that remains, to this day, the popular idea of the Los Angeles of the future (as evidenced by the pejorative currency of the term “Blade Runner-ization” among NIMBYs): denser, darker, thoroughly Asianized, and taken back to a third-world industrial phase it never really passed through in the first place.
?si=esjTBpRSqjHa81eC
But more recently, a competing vision of Los Angeles’ future emerged in the form of Her, Spike Jonze’s tale of a mustachioed, ukulele-playing milquetoast who falls in love with a sentient computer operating system. He does so in the high-rises and high-speed trains of, by comparison to Blade Runner, a glossier, gentler, future Los Angeles not only free of killer android replicants but — even more surprisingly to many an Angeleno — free of cars. My video essay on Her compares and contrasts Scott and Jonze’s ideas of what lies ahead for the city: would you rather live in the former’s Los Angeles, hybridized with a grittier, less orderly Tokyo, or the latter’s, hybridized with a sanitized Shanghai?
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive gave us a new take on the old tradition of European filmmakers examining Los Angeles with a kind of perplexed fascination, as previously exemplified by John Boorman’s Point Blank, Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man, and Jacques Demy’s Model Shop. English cult director Alex Cox added his own rough-edged volume to that shelf with1984’s sci-fi punk favorite Repo Man. In 2000, Cox’s countryman Mike Figgis pulled off his real-time, four-screen experiment Timecode on the Sunset Strip, not far from the strip club where John Cassavetes set much of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie more than twenty years earlier. You can find video essays on these movies and others on the list of those I’ve produced so far:
New videos, including episodes on this year’s solid Los Angeles pictures, Nightcrawler and the Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, will appear regularly. If you live anywhere near Portland, Oregon, note that I’ll give a talk and screening there entitled “Los Angeles and Portland: The Cities in Cinema” at the Hollywood Theatre, featuring never-before-seen video essays on both Los Angeles and Portland films, on January 25, 2015. Keep an eye on their site for details.
The United States has two important cultural means of self-examination—the work of foreign observers and of domestic satirists. In the former category, we have the longstanding example of political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville and the much bleaker, contemporary vision of Werner Herzog. As for the latter, we have venerable literary heroes like Mark Twain and more populist, contemporary voices like Chris Rock, Stephen Colbert, and cartoonist Aaron McGruder, creator of the comic strip-turned-animated series The Boondocks. In 2010, the Season 3 debut episode of the biting Adult Swim show brought these two traditions together, as McGruder took on the election of America’s first black president by imagining a German documentarian—Herzog—who examines the nation’s response through interviews with the show’s characters.
The clip above will give you an idea of the general tone. Herzog plays an exaggerated version of himself, complete with stereotypically German expressions of existential despair. The Freeman family, the show’s center, represents an also-exaggerated range of responses from black Americans to Obama’s election. Huey, the young black radical (“retired”), expresses a deep, cynical skepticism. His brother Riley has a total disregard for the social and political import of the election, confident instead that a black president will give him a license to do what he wants. And the brothers’ grandfather Robert, a Civil Rights veteran, displays an unqualified optimism and nostalgic pride for his activist days. The full episode also satirizes a certain ill-informed rapper with a character called Thugnificent and certain superficial white progressives (“Obama Guy” and “Obama Girl”). And, of course, belligerent reactionary Uncle Ruckus gets his say.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
By the time of its airing, the episode was already nearly two years late in its comment on the events, making it feel, wrote the A.V. Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, “like an instant period piece.” Perhaps now it seems downright paleolithic in the timescale of political commentary. Making this kind of cultural critique seem relevant outside of the immediate moment is a challenge writers on The Daily Show confront, well, daily. But here, the content holds up, not only because Herzog has a way of making everything timeless, but also because “the episode takes us back to… the way [Barack Obama] managed to make almost every single one of his supporters believe that he was going to do what THEY most wanted him to do and not what he had actually promised to do.” In many ways, the country is still recovering from a brutal hangover after this post-2008 election high.
Whether the president is fully to blame for encouraging false hopes—and fears—is highly debatable. In any case, the characters’ outsized expectations or expressions of apathy or virulent outrage mirror many of the responses of both liberals and conservatives. But it seems that both the left and right shared at least one hope: that the election of the country’s first black president would put an end to its oldest, deepest, most persistent ill. “At the end of the episode,” writes VanDerWerff, “most of the characters seem disappointed that Obama didn’t completely rewrite the space-time continuum, that America still struggles with race.” An understatement perhaps even in 2010, the phrase “still struggles with race” is even more so today, for reasons both obvious and less so.
That the United States—despite the continued efforts of a great many activists and some few legislators—is still riven with deep racial divides, and that these represent the persistence of a historical legacy, should not be matters in much dispute. A multitude of academic analyses on “staggering disparities” in policing practices, imbalances in the justice system, and profound wealth inequality and discrimination in housing and employment bear out the claim. How we talk about these issues, who is authorized to do so, and what can be done about it, on the other hand, are matters of considerable, seemingly unending debate. It has always seemed particularly ironic that many comedians—from Richard Pryor to Chris Rock and Louis CK—have achieved much of their mainstream success by telling hard truths about the state of race in America, truths few people seem to want to hear. When those messages come from non-entertainers, for example, the backlash can be swift and vicious.
But this is nothing new. From the candor of Shakespeare’s jesters to Swift’s poison pen to, yes, The Boondocks, humor and satire have served as vehicles for what we would otherwise suppress or repress. (No need to be a Freudian to acknowledge the point). In this episode, the satirical target isn’t only Obama’s supporters and detractors at home—though they get their due. Herzog’s editorial intrusions also satirize some woefully naïve, ahistorical expectations of a global, or at least European, community. As the Herzog character puts it in his second question to Huey, “now that it looks like Obama is going to win, as a black African American Negro, are you merely excited, or are you extremely excited that everything is going to change forever.” VanDerWerff reads Huey’s apathetic response to such grandiosity as an expression of McGruder’s view that idealism is “both an unsustainable tragedy and the only rational response to a world that’s hopelessly screwed.” But in the face of unbridled idealism, Huey’s hard-bitten realism is tonic: “Hope,” he says, “is irrational.” So also, perhaps, is despair.
Before she died earlier this year, Maya Angelou was working on Caged Bird Songs, a musical collaboration that features Angelou reciting her poems and producers Shawn Rivera and RoccStarr blending them with modern day hip-hop. After her passing, Angelou’s estate continued nudging the project along. Eventually the 13-song album was released in November, and now comes a music video. The video (above) centers around “Harlem Hopscotch,” a poem Angelou wrote in 1969. The text of the poem is available over at the Poetry Foundation. You can hear more tracks from the album below, or purchase the complete album here:
Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.
There’s a widely disseminated Kurt Vonnegut quote that puts things even more succinctly:
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment after I’m dead.
It’s a definition Vonnegut, Asimov’s honorary successor as AHA president, a scientist’s son, and, famously, a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, embodied, though surely not the only one he coined.
…a humanist, perhaps, was somebody who was crazy about human beings, who, like Will Rogers, had never met one he didn’t like. That certainly did not describe me. It did describe my dog, though.
As the title of Vonnegut’s speech implies (“Why My Dog is Not a Humanist”), Sandy, his undiscriminating Hungarian sheepdog, ultimately fell short of satisfying the criteria that would have labelled him a humanist. He lacked the capacity for rational thought of the highest order, and moreover, he regarded all humans — not just Vonnegut — as gods.
Ergo, your dog is probably not a humanist either.
Characteristically, Vonnegut ranged far and wide in his consideration of the matter, touching on a number of topics that remain germane, some 20 years after his remarks were made: race, excessive force, the treatment of prisoners…and Bill Cosby.
They’ve even become friends, ones close enough that Lynch just calls Moby “Mo,” and Moby once gave Lynch a slide guitar as a present. They’ve got such a rapport, in fact, that Moby can ask Lynch, leadingly and admittedly so, if Lynch considers that slide guitar the best present he ever received. He asks it, in fact, right up there onstage at the IMS, along with such other questions, pre-written on a sheet, as “Have you ever grown maggots?,” “Is Inland Empire my favorite movie of the last ten years?,” “What would your favorite birthday meal be, keeping in mind this is a conference about electronic music?,” “Do we fear death?,” and “Would you like to grow quinoa in your backyard?”
Though both Moby and Lynch love their quinoa, they make even more of a connection over their city of residence, Los Angeles. The former points out that three of the latter’s pictures — Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire — star not any particular human actor, but Los Angeles itself. “Anything goes,” Lynch explains about the city that inspires him (sometimes, no doubt, during the meditation sessions he also discusses here) with its light and its jasmine-scented air. “You’re free to think and do things” — two pursuits that both of these guys have engaged in, unceasingly and fruitfully, over their entire careers.
Next time you see the still-youthful and musically prolific Paul McCartney, take a good hard look and ask yourself, “is it reallyhim?” Can you be sure? Because maybe, just maybe, the conspiracy theorists are right—maybe Paul did die in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced by a double who looks, sounds, acts, and writes almost exactly like him. Almost. It’s possible. Entirely implausible, wholly improbable, but within the realm of physical possibility.
In fact, the rumor of Paul’s death and replacement by some kind of pod person imposter cropped up not once, but twice during the sixties. First, in January, 1967, immediately after an accident involving McCartney’s Mini Cooper that month. The car, driven by Moroccan student Mohammad Hadjij, crashed on the M1 after leaving McCartney’s house en route to Keith Richard’s Sussex Mansion. Hadjij was hospitalized, but not killed, and Paul, riding in Mick Jagger’s car, arrived at the destination safely.
The following month, the Beatles Book Monthly magazine quashed rumors that Paul had been driving the Mini and had died, writing, “there was absolutely no truth in it at all, as the Beatles’ Press Officer found out when he telephoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself who had been at home all day with his black Mini Cooper Safely locked up in the garage.” “The magazine,” writes the Beatles Bible, “downplayed the incident, and claimed the car was in McCartney’s possession.”
In 1969, rumors of Paul’s death and a conspiracy to cover it up began circulating again, this time with an impressive apparatus that included publications in college and local newspapers, discussions on several radio shows, a university research team, and enough esoteric clues to keep highly suspicious, stoned, and/or paranoid, minds guessing for decades afterward. The formless gossip first officially took shape in print in the article “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?” in Iowa’s Drake University student newspaper, the Times-Delphic. Cataloguing “an amazing series of photos and lyrics on the group’s albums” that pointed to “a distinct possibility that McCartney may indeed be insane, freaked out, even dead,” the piece dives headfirst into the kind of bizarre analysis of disparate symbols and tenuous coincidences worthy of the most dogged of today’s conspiracy-mongers.
Invoked are ephemera like “a mysterious hand” raised over Paul’s head on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—“an ancient death symbol of either the Greeks or the American Indians”—and Paul’s bass, lying “on the grave at the group’s feet.” The lyric “blew his mind out in a car” from “A Day in the Life” comes up, and more photographic evidence from the album’s back cover and centerfold photo. Evidence is produced from Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album. Of the latter, you’ve surely heard, or heard of, the voice seeming to intone, “Turn me on, dead man,” and “Cherish the dead,” when “Revolution No. 9” is played backwards. Only a college dorm room could have nurtured such a discovery.
The article reads like a parody—similar to the subversive, half-serious satirical weirdness common to the mid-sixties hippie scene. But whether or not its author, Tim Harper, meant to pull off a hoax, the Paul is dead meme went viral when it hit the airwaves the following month. First, a caller to Detroit radio station WKNR transmitted the theory to DJ Russ Gibb. Their hour-long conversation lead to a review of Abbey Road in The Michigan Daily titled “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light.” With tongue in cheek, writer Fred LaBour called the death and replacement of Paul “the greatest hoax of our time and the subsequent founding of a new religion based upon Paul as Messiah.” In the mode of paranoid conspiracy theory so common to the time—a genre mastered by Thomas Pynchon as a literary art—LaBour invented even more clues, inadvertently feeding a public hungry for this kind of thing. “Although clearly intended as a joke,” writes the Beatles Bible, “it had an impact far wider than the writer and his editor expected.”
Part of the aftermath came in two more radio shows that October of 1969. First, in two parts at the top, New York City DJ Roby Yonge makes the case for McCartney’s death on radio station WABC-AM. Recycling many of the “clues” from the previous sources, he also contends that a research team of 30 students at Indiana University has been put on the case. Yonge plainly states that some of the clues only emerge “if you really get really, really high… on some, you know, like, mind-bending drug,” but this proviso doesn’t seem to undermine his confidence in the shaky web of connections.
Was Yonge’s broadcast just an attention grabbing act? Maybe. The next Paul is Dead radio show, just above, is most certainly an Orson Welles-like publicity stunt. Broadcast on Halloween night, 1969, on Buffalo, NY’s WKBW, the show employs several of the station’s DJs, who construct a detailed and dramatic narrative of Paul’s death. The broadcast indulges the same album-cover and lyric divination of the earlier Paul is Dead media, but by this time, it’s grown pretty hoary. But for a small contingent of die-hards, the rumor was mostly put to rest just a few days later when Life magazine published a cover photograph of Paul—who had been out of the public eye after the Beatles’ breakup—with his wife Linda and their kids. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, McCartney famously remarked in the interview inside, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and added, “If I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.”
In later interviews, the Beatles denied having anything to do with the hoax. Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 that the idea of them intentionally planting obscure clues in their albums “was bullshit, the whole thing was made up.” The hoax did make for some interesting publicity—even featuring in the storyline of a Batman comics issue—but the band mostly found it baffling and annoying. Certain fans, however, refused to let it die, and there are those who still swear that Paul’s imposter, allegedly named Billy Shears and sometimes called “Faul,” still walks the earth. Paul is Dead websites proliferate on the internet—some more, some less convincing; all of them outlandish, and all offering a fascinating descent into the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. If that’s your kind of trip, you can easily get lost—as did pop culture briefly in 1969—in endless “Paul is Dead” speculation.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
