More free music/entertainment to carry you through these bleak, strange times. Dead & Company (the surviving members of the Grateful Dead plus John Mayer and Oteil Burbridge) are making concerts free to stream at home. And the first one gets underway tonight.
Stay at home this weekend and tune in to “One More Saturday Night”, a new #CouchTour series featuring your favorite Dead & Company shows, for FREE. We’re kicking things off with the 12/2/17 Austin show this Saturday at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT on http://nugs.tv and on Facebook!
Click the links above to watch the show. Until then, you can watch a set above, recorded live in Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheatre, back in June 2017.
Also find a trove of 11,000+ recorded Grateful Dead shows in the Relateds below.
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An embarrassment of riches for those whose experience of COVID-19 is somewhere between extended snow day and staycation…
But what about caregivers who suddenly find themselves providing 24–7 care for elders with dementia, or neuro-atypical adult children whose upended routine is wreaking havoc on their emotions?
“I know people are happy that the schools have closed but I just lost critical workday hours and if/when day hab closes I will have to take low-paid medical leave AND we will not have any breaks from caregiving someone with 24–7 needs and aggressive, loud behaviors. I feel completely defeated,” one friend writes.
24 hours later:
We just lost day hab, effective tomorrow. My messages for in-home services haven’t been returned yet. Full on panic mode.
What can we do to help lighten those loads when we’re barred from physical interaction, or entering each other’s homes?
We combed through our archive, with an eye toward the most soothing, uplifting content, appropriate for all ages, starting with pianist Paul Barton’s classical concerts for elephants in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, above.
We’ve also got a trove of free coloring books and pages, though caregivers should vet the content before sharing it with someone who’s likely to be disturbed by medical illustration and images of medieval demons…
Readers, if you know a resource that might buy caregivers and their agitated, housebound charges a bit of peace, please add it in the comments below.
When people say things like “the science is settled” or “the science has changed,” researchers tend to grind their teeth. Science can come to a broad consensus, as in the case of the coronavirus or climate change, but it isn’t ever perfectly settled as a bloc on any question. We proceed in scientific knowledge not by attaining perfect knowledge but, as Isaac Asimov once wrote, by being less wrong than those who came before.
And scientists advance in scientific publishing, as Aeon writes, not with certainty, but with “excitement, baby steps and reams of rejections.” As we see in the short film above, The Researcher’s Article, by French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, getting one’s research published can be “a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting,” demonstrated here by the travails of physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff of the University of Paris-Saclay.
Even before submitting their findings, the scientists must carefully fit their work into the traditional form known as the “letter,” a document of four pages or fewer that condenses years of research into strictly succinct paragraphs, graphs, and references. The “letter” is “one of the most popular formats of articles in physics,” say the physicists, noting the major Nobel prize-winning discoveries to appear as letters in recent years, including the Higgs’ Boson publication that won in 2013, coming in at only two pages long.
Summing up “a massive amount of data,” short scientific articles then go on to prove themselves to their respective fields through a refereeing process in which three anonymous scientists read the work and recommend publication, revision, or rejection. This process can go several rounds and take several months. One must be persistent: Restagno and Bobroff were rejected from several journals before finally getting an acceptance.
After this significant investment of time and effort, the authors may have a readership of maybe twenty people. But crowd size is not the point, they say, “because research is made up of all these small discoveries,” contributing to a larger picture, informing and correcting each other, and going about the humble, painstaking business of trying to be less wrong than their predecessors, while still building on the best insights of hundreds of years of scientific publishing.
The past few weeks have reminded us just why viruses have been such a formidable enemy of humanity for so long. Though very few of the countless viruses in existence affect us in any way, let alone a lethal one, we can’t see them without microscopes. And so when a deadly virus breaks out, we live our daily lives with an invisible killer in our midst. Aggressive testing, as several coronavirus-afflicted countries have proven, does much to lower the rate of transmission. But how, exactly, does transmission happen? In the video above, Youtuber Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer and Apple product designer, demonstrates the process vividly by taking a blacklight into that most diseased of all environments: the elementary-school classroom.
You can’t see viruses under a blacklight, but you can see the special powder that Rober applies to the hands of the class’s teacher. At the beginning of the school day, the teacher shakes the hand of just three kids, touching none of the others, and by lunchtime — a couple of hours after Rober powders the hands of one more student during morning break — the blacklight reveals the “germs” everywhere.
This despite fairly diligent hand-washing, albeit hand-washing unaccompanied by the disinfection of surfaces, cellphones, and other objects in and parts of the classroom. “Even if a virus is spread through airborne transmission,” Rober says, “those tiny droplets don’t stay in the air for long. Then they land on surfaces, waiting to be touched by our hands.” This leads him to the declaration that “the ultimate defense against catching a virus is: just don’t touch your face.”
Rober calls your eyes, nose, and mouth “the single weak spot on the Death Star when it comes to viruses. That’s the only way they can get in to infect you.” Hence, here in the time of COVID-19, the frequent urgings not just to wash our hands but to refrain from touching our faces as well. Increasingly many of us have become hyper-aware of our own “germ hygiene,” as Rober calls it, but the other half of the battle against the pandemic must be institutional: school closures, for example, one of which was announced over the PA system during this very video’s shoot. “Because of this virus, we are going to be closing school for three weeks,” says the principal, not without a note of excitement in his voice — but an excitement hardly comparable to the subsequent explosion of joy among the third-graders listening. Challenging though this time may be, children like these remind us to take our fun wherever we find it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In these times, we need to keep at some kind of routine. And so I’d like to doff my cloth worker’s cap to Denis Shiryaev, who once again has returned from the early days of cinema with another AI-restored clip of film from the early 20th century.
Ah, but there’s something amiss this time, a glitch in the matrix of expectations. Not all sources can be saved by technology. Fans of Shiryaev’s crystal clear journeys back in time (find them in the Relateds below) might find the footage rough. It doesn’t make this film any less fascinating.
Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon started their film business to try to copy the success of similar, earlier filmmakers like the Lumiere Brothers in Paris. Audiences would pay to see short films of how people lived, worked, walked about, and just existed. It was a window into another reality, and by pure chance a hundred of Mitchell & Kenyon’s films were found preserved in a Blackburn, UK basement nearly a century later. This is a compilation of three of them, scored by Guy Jones with mild atmospherics.
More than any of the other films that Shiryaev has “restored,” Mitchell & Kenyon don’t try to hide their camera or pretend it’s not there. Instead, these three films make a point of inviting their subjects to look directly at us, and because of Shiryaev’s work these dozens and dozens of eyes really seem to be watching us from across time. The young boys are cheeky, the young girls shy, the older adults bemused or slightly irritated. There is no particular focus here–we can choose who we want to follow, which indeed was one of the reasons for these films popularity. They were designed for repeat visits.
There are two particular points of interest that happen very quickly. One is at 1:09–the appearance of an Afro-Caribbean man as part of the workforce. People of African descent had lived in Britain since the 12th century, but this might be one of the earliest films of such a person. The other is later at 4:24, which might be the first film of a bloke giving the camera the rude two-fingered salute. This moment is why the British Film Institute dubbed Mitchell & Kenyon “the accidental anthropologists.”
(You might also watch for the fight that breaks out near the end of the film. Real or not? You be the judge.)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
A heads up to all parents, Audible has announced that they’re providing free stories for kids during this period of social distancing, which inevitably means widespread school closures. They write:
For as long as schools are closed, we’re open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids.
All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.
Explore the collection, select a title and start listening.
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Back in 2014, this image won a contest on a subreddit devoted to Blender, “the amazing open-source software program for 3D modeling, animation, rendering and more.” (You can download the free software here.) The image riffs, of course, on Edward Hopper’s classic 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” taking its theme of loneliness to new extremes–extremes that we’re just starting to get accustomed to now.
Find lots of background information on the original “Nighthawks” painting in the Relateds below.
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With so many of us across the world stuck at home, humanity’s thoughts have turned to what we’ll do when we can resume our normal lives. This time of quarantine, lockdown, and other forms of isolation urges us to reflect, but also to read — and in many cases to read the important books we’d neglected in our pre-coronavirus lives. Quite a few such volumes appear in the Long Now Foundation’s “Manual for Civilization,” which longtime Open Culture readers will remember us featuring not long after it launched in 2014. Its name refers to a library, one that according to the Foundation’s executive director Alexander Rose “will include the roughly 3500 books most essential to sustain or rebuild civilization.”
“Using this as an curatorial principle,” Rose adds, “is helping us assemble a very interesting collection of books.” So too are their choices of people asked for recommendations of books to put on the Manual for Civilization’s shelves.
Take, for instance, the history-focused list of books provided by Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle author Neal Stephenson, a prolific writer in his own right:
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volumes 1–6 by Edward Gibbon
The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volumes 1–3 by Fernand Braudel
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar
Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes
The American Practical Navigator: An Epitome of Navigation by Nathaniel Bowditch
Pax Britannica: A Three Volume Set (Heaven’s Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets) by James Morris
Son Of The Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell
The Siege at Peking by Peter Fleming
Marlborough, His Life & Times, Volumes 1–6 by Winston Churchill
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
The Long Now Foundation didn’t just approach Stephenson because they enjoy his novels: he was previously involved with the Foundation’s “Clock of the Long Now” project, a mechanical clock engineered to keep time for 10,000 years and thus serve as a physical reminder of the necessity of long-term thinking. The process of coming up with ideas for the Clock provided Stephenson with inspiration for his novel Anathem, which deals with monastic communities of intellectuals dedicated to safeguarding knowledge against the collapse of society.
Music producer and visual artist Brian Eno’s album January 07003 / Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now also came out of his own work on the Clock, and as a founding member of the Long Now Foundation he naturally also had a list of books (previously featured here on Open Culture) rich with historical, political, philosophical, sociological, architectural, literary, and aesthetic texts to contribute:
More recently, programmer and publisher Tim O’Reilly drew up an even more expansive list of books for addition to the Manual for Civilization. Owing to the wide and ever-growing array of technical books put out by the publisher that bears his name, you might guess that O’Reilly would mostly recommend volumes pertinent to rebuilding our digital world. In fact he offers a range of highly analog choices, thematically speaking, which he breaks down into four categories. First come the “religious/ philosophical works”:
The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu translated by Witter Bynner
The Bhagavad Gita translated by Christopher Isherwood
The Analects of Confucius translated by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont
The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato (translated by GMA Grube, revised by John Cooper)
Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigel
The New Testament
An Introduction to Realistic Philosophy by John Wild
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God (4 volumes) by Joseph Campbell
Then the literature:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey translated by George Chapman
Samuel Johnson: Poems and Selected Prose
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
The Four Quartets by T.S.Eliot
Then books about “science, technology, and society”:
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman
And finally, “stuff that would be useful if civilization declines”:
The Foxfire Books edited by Eliot Wigginton (more info)
The Tracker: The True Story of Tom Brown Jr. by Tom Brown
Putting Food By by Ruth Hertzberg
Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application by Luther Burbank
Plant and mushroom identification manuals for every major geography: Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide and Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America
Guide to Identifying Trees and Shrubs by Mark Zampardo
O’Reilly adds that “you also need engineering, including (bicycles, flight, bridges, and factories), spinning and weaving and the manufacturing technology thereof, metallurgy, materials science, math (including slide rule design and logarithmic tables), chemistry, biology, fundamentals of computer chips (and alternate ways of doing computing without the ability to do a full fab).”
At the Long Now Foundation’s site you’ll find more recommendations by such luminaries as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, and Brain Pickings curator Maria Popova. Whether your interests incline toward the technical, the historical, the philosophical, or toward practically anything else besides, the Manual for Civilization has more than a few books for you to digest. (Nearly 900 of them are available for free at the Internet Archive.) What’s more, the coronavirus has granted an entirely plausible excuse to spend more of our days reading — and a fairly good reason to consider how we might run society differently in the future.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
This video of Tilda Swinton’s Springer Spaniels cavorting in pastoral Scotland to a Handel aria performed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo won’t cure what ails you, but it is definitely good medicine.
Swinton and her partner, artist Sandro Kopp, filmed the beautiful beasts in such a way as to highlight their doggy exuberance, whether moving as a pack or taking a solo turn.
The title of the aria, “Rompo i Lacci,” from the second act of Flavio, translates to “I break the laces,” and there’s no mistaking the joy Rosy, Dora, Louis, Dot, and Snowbear take in being off the leash.
Flashbacks to their rolypoly puppy selves are cute, but it’s the feathery ears and tails of the adult dogs that steal the show as they bound around beach and field.
The filmmakers get a lot of mileage from their stars’ lolling pink tongues and willingness to vigorously launch themselves toward any out of frame treat.
We’ve never seen a tennis ball achieve such beauty.
There’s also some fun to be had in special effects wherein the dogs are doubled by a mirror effect and later, when one of them turns into a canine Rorschach blot.
The video was originally screened as part of Costanzo’s multi-media Glass Handel installation for Opera Philadelphia, an exploration into how opera can make the hairs on the back of our neck stand up.
Having watched the development of interactive data visualizations as a writer for Open Culture, I’ve seen my share of impressive examples, especially when it comes to mapping music. Perhaps the oldest such resource, the still-updating Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music, also happens to be one of the best for its comprehensiveness and witty tone. Another high achiever, The Universe of Miles Davis, released on what would have been Davis’ 90th birthday, is more focused but no less dense a collection of names, record labels, styles, etc.
While visualizing the history of any form of music can result in a significant degree of complexity, depending on how deeply one drills down on the specifics, jazz might seem especially challenging. Choosing one major figure pulls up thousands of connections. As these multiply, they might run into the millions. But somehow, one of the best music data visualizations I’ve seen yet—Pratt Institute’s Linked Jazz project—accounts seamlessly for what appears to be the whole of jazz, including obscure and forgotten figures and interactive, dynamic filters that make the history of women in jazz more visible, and let users build maps of their own.
Jazz musicians “are like family,” Zena Latto, one of the musicians the project recovered, told an interviewer in 2015. A multi-racial, transnational, actively multi-generational family that meets all over the world to play together constantly, that is. As a form of music built on ensemble players and journeymen soloists who sometimes form bands for no more than a single album or tour, jazz musicians probably form more relationships across age, gender, race, and nationality than those in any other genre.
That organic, built-in diversity, a feature of the music throughout its history, shows up in every permutation of the Linked Jazz map, and comes through in the recorded interviews, performances, and other accompanying info linked to each musician. Like the Universe of Miles Davis, Linked Jazz leans heavily on Wikipedia for its information. And in using such “linked open data (LOD),” as Pratt notes in a blog post, the project “also reveals archival gaps. While icons such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis have large digital footprints, lesser-known performers may barely have a mention”—despite the fact that most of those players, at one time or another, played with, studied under, or recorded with the greats.
Such was the case with Latto, who was mentored by Benny Goodman and toured throughout the 1940s and 50s with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, “considered the first integrated all-women band in the United States.” Latto was “part of a network that stretched from New York to New Orleans,” but her name had disappeared entirely until Pratt School of Information professor Cristina Pattuelli found it on a tattered flyer for a Carnegie Hall concert. “Soon, through Linked Jazz, Lotta had a Wikipedia page and her interview was published on the Internet Archive.”
Linked Jazz’s focus on women musicians does not mean gender segregation, but a rediscovery of women’s place in all of jazz. Like all of the other filters, the Linked Jazz data map’s gender view shows both men and women prominently in the little photo bubbles connected by webs of red and blue lines. But as you begin clicking around, you will see the perspective has shifted. “Linked Jazz has concentrated on processing more interviews with women jazz musicians,” writes Pratt, “and these resources have been enhanced by a series of Women of Jazz Wikipedia Edit-a-thons in 2015 and 2017.”
Likewise, the inclusion of these interviews, biographies, and recordings have enhanced the breadth and scope of Linked Jazz, which as a whole represents the best intentions in open data mapping, realized by a design that makes exploring the daunting history of jazz a matter of strolling through a digital library with the entire catalog appearing instantly at your fingertips. The project also shows how thoughtful data mapping can not only replicate the existing state of information, but also contribute significantly by finding and restoring missing links.
A message from Bruce: “Practice social distancing & stream ‘London Calling: Live In Hyde Park’ from the comfort of your own home, now on YouTube & Apple Music in its entirety for the 1st time!” Watch it all above.
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