Several years back Tal Ben-Shahar taught a course on Positive Psychology at Harvard, which became, at least for a while, the most popular course at the university. About the course NPR wrote: “Twice a week, some 900 students attend Tal Ben-Shahar’s class on what he calls ‘how to get happy.’ … His class offers research from the relatively new field of positive psychology, which focuses on what makes people happy, rather than just their pathologies.”
Available in an admittedly grainy format, you can watch the 30 lectures from that course above, or over on YouTube. According to the original syllabus, topics discussed include “happiness, self-esteem, empathy, friendship, love, achievement, creativity, music, spirituality, and humor.”
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The pleasure of listening to classical music, as every classical music aficionado knows, goes well beyond listening to one’s favorite piece. You can’t have a favorite piece without having a favorite performance of that piece, played by certain musicians, presided over by a certain conductor, and recorded in a certain hall. And even so, many other recordings of that piece may well exist that you haven’t heard yet, one of which could one day usurp your personal top spot. About many compositions there also exists a near-infinite amount to learn and understand, especially for those of us with musical training or score-reading ability.
This aesthetically and intellectually rewarding process of seeking out and comparing — and indeed, the enterprise of classical music-listening itself — has become much easier with the advent of resources like the International Music Score Library Project. Founded in 2006, it has by this point expanded to contain “123,134 works, 404,963 scores, 46,610 recordings, 15,404 composers, and 445 performers,” all online and many free for the downloading. Just search for the name of a piece or composer with the window on the upper right — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for instance — and the IMSP will show you all the related items it currently has.
Mozart’s well-known and widely heard 1787 composition Eine kleine Nachtmusik (known numerically as K.525) has its own page in the IMSP’s database, where you’ll find not just 29 scores and parts and 28 arrangements and transcriptions in the sheet music section but two complete performances in the recording section: one by the Boston chamber orchestra A Far Cry and one by the Netherlands’ Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. You can listen to them right on the site, or download them by first clicking on the down arrow (↓) next to the words “complete performance,” then on the down arrow (↓) that appears to the right of the volume controller when the file starts playing.
Or if you’re not in the mood for a little night music, perhaps the IMSP can interest you in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 or Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But then, as the San Francisco Symphony’s Michael Tilson Thomas once said, “You can’t have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!” So if you’d prefer to go beyond the definition and hear more of the variations classical music has to offer — variations being one of the prime sources of its aforementioned pleasure — the IMSP’s vast archive has plenty of recordings to satisfy that desire as well, with more added all the time.
FYI: Last Friday, Colin Marshall highlighted for you the new feature film by kogonada, whose many video essays–on Ozu, Linklater, Malick, Anderson, etc.–we’ve shown you here before. Rather by coincidence, The Criterion Collection just posted kogonada’s latest video essay, this one examining how “doors open onto philosophical mysteries in the films of French master Robert Bresson.” Watch “Once There Was Everything” above, and pair it with his other Bresson essay (“Hands of Bresson”) from three years ago. It appears right below.
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Marshall McLuhan’s chestnut “the medium is the message” contains some of the most important theory about mass media to have emerged in the past century. In its honor, we might propose another slogan—less conceptually tidy and alliterative—that brings to mind the arguments of critical theorists like Theodor Adorno: “the economy is the culture”—the economic mechanisms that govern the “culture industry,” as Adorno would say, determine the kinds of productions that saturate our shared environment. In a purely corporate capitalist model, we consume culture—that which is marketed most aggressively and distributed most plentifully—and often discard it just as quickly. In an economy that doesn’t make profit the fulcrum of its every move, things go otherwise. The lines between consumers, creators, and communities become blurred in weird and wonderful ways.
This can happen in decentralized environments like the wilds of the early internet. And it can happen in institutions that code it into their design. The Smithsonian is one of those institutions. The public collections in its vast network of museums has remained, outside of special exhibits and films, free and “open access” for everyone. And one of their key cultural contributions, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, has devoted itself since its founding in the late sixties to “culture of, by, and for the people.”
Even if you’ve never taken the time to delve into their curatorial efforts (and you should), you’ll know their work through Folkways Recordings, the record label created in by Moses Asch—founder of Folkways Records in 1949. After he passed away in 1986, Asch’s family donated over 2,000 records, his entire discography, to the Smithsonian, with the proviso that they always remain in print, whether or not they made a buck.
This has meant that scholars and fans of folk from all over the world have always been able to find the work of Pete Seeger, The Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly, to name but a few of the label’s “stars.” There are many more: Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Elizabeth Cotten, Reverend Gary Davis…. So many names in the pantheon of folk giants Robert Crumb immortalized in his colorful, and unusually tasteful, Heroes of Blues, Jazz, and Country. But Folkways has preserved much more besides. Kentucky’s Old Regular Baptist Church’s a capella hymns, Kilby Snow’s autoharp, Snooks English’s New Orleans street singing, Alice Gerrard and Hazel Dickens’ 60s interpretations of traditional bluegrass…. Music that appealed to small but culturally rich communities in its day, and that may have disappeared along with those communities in the scrum of cultural history, dominated as it is by mass entertainments.
The small, regional creations, some teetering on genius, some haunting in their artlessness, are critical documents of old America, the hollers, deserts, streets, swamps, low country, back country, mountains, valleys…. Hear it all in the Spotify playlist above (or access it here), 837 tracks of Folkways recordings. Smithsonian Folkways is perhaps best known for its North American artists, but it has released recordings from all over the world. Rather than creating commodities, the institution functions as a repository of global cultural memory, collecting and preserving “people’s music.” Since Asch’s endowment, Folkways has created an additional six labels under its umbrella and released over 300 new recordings. In 2003, they partnered with the American Folklife Center for the “Save Our Sounds” project, which aims to preserve recordings like those made by Thomas Edison on wax cylinders. Folkways opens a window on an alternate world where cultural production is not a perpetual struggle for ratings, reviews, and sales dominance.
It’s not entirely a utopian vision. There is the danger of a paternalizing approach. Curators like Asch, Harry Smith, John and Alan Lomax, and hundreds more serious enthusiasts and ethnographers have their own agendas, interests, biases, and blind spots. What we understand now as traditional Delta blues, for example, is a product of selection bias—it excludes many artists and varieties that didn’t catch on with collectors. Still Folkways remedies much of this shortcoming by including work from a broad spectrum of unknown composers, interpreters, and performers. There may be no form of modern folk music today that hasn’t been crafted and molded by the music industry, which might mean, by definition, that there is no modern folk music. For such a thing to exist—the “people’s music”—perhaps more democratic economies and institutions must prevail.
The author, an avid amateur lepidopterist, indulged his hobby along the way, depositing butterflies collected on this and other trips in glassine envelopes labeled with the name of the towns where the creatures encountered his net. Upon his return, he decided to donate most of his haul to the museum’s Lepidoptera collection, where he was as an eager volunteer.
Years later, Suzanne Rab Green, a Tiger Moth specialist and assistant curator at the museum, uncovered Nabokov’s specimens packed in a vintage White Owl cigar box.
Recognizing that this collection had literary value as well as scientific, Green decided to sort it by location rather than species, preserving the carefully hand-lettered envelopes along with the fragile wings and thoraxes.
Using Google Earth, she retraced Nabokov’s 3‑week journey for the museum’s Shelf Life series, digitally pinning his finds alongside vintage postcards of Gettysburg, Yosemite National Park, and the Grande Tourist Lodge in Dallas, Texas—all fertile collection sites, at least in 1941.
An avowed enemy of symbols and allegory, Nabokov prevented butterflies from occupying too significant a role in his fictional oeuvre, though he gushed unabashedly in his memoir, Speak, Memory:
Let me also evoke the hawkmoths, the jets of my boyhood! Colors would die a long death on June evenings. The lilac shrubs in full bloom before which I stood, net in hand, displayed clusters of a fluffy gray in the dark—the ghost of purple. A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow. In many a garden have I stood thus in later years—in Athens, Antibes, Atlanta—but never have I waited with such a keen desire as before those darkening lilacs. And suddenly it would come, the low buzz passing from flower to flower, the vibrational halo around the streamlined body of an olive and pink Hummingbird moth poised in the air above the corolla into which it had dipped its long tongue…. Through the gusty blackness, one’s lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets, their nervous wings half open butterfly fashion, the lower ones exhibiting their incredible crimson silk from beneath the lichen-gray primaries. “Catocala adultera!” I would triumphantly shriek in the direction of the lighted windows of the house as I stumbled home to show my captures to my father.
Despite the author’s stated distaste for overt symbolism, a few butterflies did manage to flutter onto the pages of his best known work, resulting in at least one thesis papers that makes a case for Lolita as butterfly—irresistible, beautiful, easily ensnared….
Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen? An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.
If you majored in art history, you no doubt have lasting memories, and possibly painful ones, of long nights spent in the library memorizing the names and signal characteristics of various art movements. What a shame, you might well think when looking back, that a subject as fascinating and important as the transformation of human creativity over time could become such a chore. Now that you’re free to learn about art history in whatever manner and order you like, why not start in Monoskop’s expansive online guide to art styles and movements?
As “a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities,” Monoskop has long offered a wide selection of downloadable books, videos, sound recordings, and other materials invaluable for anyone with an interest in the arts, especially the modern arts.
Each movement or style’s entry provides, among other information, the major artists, events, and texts (including, of course, “manifestos” and proclamations) associated with it, the media its works used, and links to all the relevant items both within and outside of Monoskop’s collections. It also includes related historical images, such as Futurist photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s 1911 Salutando, De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian’s 1920 Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue, and Gray, George Seurat’s Pointillism-defining 1884 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, or stills from computer art pioneers Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton’s 1970 animation Pixillation.
You may arrive in Monoskop’s guide to art styles and movements intending only to learn about one style or movement, but none of them developed in isolation. The organization makes it easy enough to see the connections that a dip in to research Arts and Crafts could well finish up, who knows how later, in Precisionism, Neo-Dada, or the aforementioned Expanded Cinema (an intriguing term; if you don’t know the art to which it refers, you can follow that link and find out). Or maybe you are currently a student majoring in art history, and you need something a bit more interesting than your textbook to solidify in your mind the nature of and connections between all these artistic ventures, influential or minor, long-lived or flash-in-the-pan — in which case, bookmark Monoskop’s guide right away.
Apple Computer Inc. will introduce an unusual database and management information program Tuesday that the company hopes will help it maintain its lead in technology for making computers easy to use.
The new software, known as Hypercard, will enable users of Apple’s Macintosh computers to organize information on computerized file cards that can be linked to other file cards in intricate ways. The program will be included for no charge with each Macintosh sold, starting this month.
Hypercard made its appearance precisely when Apple also released “a communications device, known as a modem, that will enable the Macintosh to send documents to and from facsimile machines.” Some of us still use modems today. Hypercard, not so much. At least not directly.
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Jack White, best known as the frontman of The White Stripes, launched Third Man Records in 2001, which has since positioned itself as “an innovator in the world of vinyl records and a boundary pusher in the world of recorded music, aiming to bring tangibility and spontaneity back into the record business.”
After establishing a physical location in Nashville in 2009, Third Man Records opened a second site in Detroit, and now a new vinyl pressing plant in the Motor City, providing a home to eight German-made record pressing machines. Jack White told CBS, “One day, I want this place to be like what I had heard about Henry Ford wanted for Ford Motor company. Which was you pour in raw materials on this side and out the other side of the factory pop out cars.”
Above you can get a half hour tour of the new record plant from Mythbuster’s Adam Savage. Enjoy.
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In places where atrocities or widespread human rights violations occur, we sometimes hear ordinary citizens later claim they didn’t know what was going on. In the case of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, this would be almost impossible to believe. “120,000 people,” notes Newsweek, “lost their property and their freedom,” rounded up in full view of their neighbors. Every major publication of the time reported on Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 Executive Order. Newsweek wrote “that people in coastal areas ‘were more anxious than ever to get rid of their aliens after rumors that signal lights were seen before submarine attacks’ ” off the coast of Southern California. There were many such rumors, the kind that spread xenophobic fear and paranoia, and which people used to vocally support, or tacitly approve of, sending their neighbors to internment camps because of their ancestry.
Image by Francis Stewart
Other reactions were less than subtle. The West Seattle Herald confronted readers with the blunt headline “GET ‘EM OUT!” Nonetheless, Newsweek’s Rob Verger writes, “the policy was by no means greeted with unanimous support,” and a vigorous public debate played out, with opponents pointing to the blatant racism and violations of civil rights. Two-thirds of the internees were American citizens. Yet all Japanese Americans were repeatedly called “aliens,” language consistent with the virulently anti-Japanese propaganda campaigns emerging at the same time.
Once the camps were built and the internees imprisoned, however, a massive propaganda effort began, not only the sell the camps as a necessary national security measure, but to portray them as idyllic villages where the patriotic internees patiently waited out the war by farming, playing baseball, making arts and crafts, running general stores, attending school, waving flags, and running newspapers.
Image by Clem Albers
Much of that information was conveyed to the public visually by photographers hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the camps. Among them were Clem Albers, Francis Stewart, and Dorothea Lange—well known for her photographs of the Great Depression. All three visited the camp called Manzanar in the foothills of the Sierra mountains. Another famous photographer, Ansel Adams, gained access to Manzanar by virtue of his friendship with its director, Ralph Merritt.
Image by Dorothea Lange
Their photographs, for the most part, show busily working men and women, smiling schoolchildren, and lots of patriotic leisure activities, like Stewart’s photo of sixth grade boys playing softball, further up. The photographers were strictly prohibited from photographing guards, watchtowers, searchlights, or barbed wire, and the heavy military presence at the camp is nearly always out of frame, with some very rare exceptions, like Albers’ photograph above of military police.
Image by Ansel Adams
Adams worked under these prohibitions as well, but his photos captured camp life as honestly as he could. The stunning landscapes sometimes compete, even in the background, with the real subject of some of his images (as in the photo at the top). But he also conveyed the harsh barrenness of the region. He tried to intimate the oppressive police apparatus by capturing its shadow. “The purpose of my work,” he wrote to the Library of Congress in 1965 upon donating his collection, “was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, business and professions, had overcome a sense of defeat and despair [sic].” His images often show internees “in heroic poses,” writes Dinitia Smith, as above, in order to ennoble their conditions. Lange’s photographs, on the other hand, like that of a young girl below, “seemingly unstaged and unlighted… bear the hallmarks” of her “distinctively documentary style.” Her pictures “compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames.” Some of her photos show smiling, relaxed subjects. Many others, like the photograph of a barracks interior further down, show the faces of weary, uncertain, and despondent civilian prisoners of war.
Image by Dorothea Lange
Perhaps because of her refusal to sentimentalize the camps, or because of her left-wing politics and opposition to internment (both known before she was hired), Lange’s work was censored, not only through restricted access, but through the impoundment of over 800 photographs she took at 21 locations. Those photos were recently published in a book called Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment and hundreds of them are free to view online at the Densho Digital Repository’s Dorothea Lange Collection. The National Park Service’s collection features 16 pictures from Lange’s visit to Manzanar. At the NPS site, you’ll also find collections of photographs from that camp by Adams, Albers, and Stewart. Each, to one degree or another, faced a form of censorship in what they could photograph or whether their work would be shown at all. What most ordinary people saw at the time did not tell the whole story. For all practical purposes, writes Oberlin Library, “life at a Japanese internment camp was comparable to the life of a prisoner behind bars.”
Graphic and motion designer Henning M. Lederer surfs that wave on the most unexpected of boards—a collection of abstract mid-century covers drawn from the Instagram feed of artist Julian Montague, who shares his enthusiasm for vintage minimalism.
His latest effort, above, continues his explorations in the subjects which most frequently traded in these sorts of geometric covers—science, psychotherapy, philosophy and sociology.
No word on what inspired him to toss in the first cover, which features a cheerful, Playmobil-esque mushroom gatherer. It’s endearing, but—to quote Sesame Street—is not like the others. Those of us who can’t decipher Cyrillic script get the fun of imagining what sort of text this is—a mycology manual? A children’s tale? A psychological examination—and ultimately rejection—of midcentury publishers’ fascination for spirals, diagonal bars, and other non-narrative graphics?
Whether or not you’d be inclined to pick up any of these titles, you may find yourself wanting to dance to them, compliments of musician Jörg Stierle’s trippy electronics.
We’ve featured the work of many cinema-loving video essayists (myselfincluded) here on Open Culture, none of it more artistic than that of a man who goes by the name of Kogonada. Whether dealing with the films of auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alfred Hitchcock, or Wes Anderson, he finds new and striking ways — often free of traditional narration, and sometimes even free of spoken words altogether — to show us how their cinematic visions work, and in so doing to create new cinematic visions of his own. But when, we Kogonada fans have long wondered, would this mysterious fellow make a movie of his own?
The answer arrived at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in the form of Columbus, Kogonada’s feature directorial debut. “Columbus gets its title from the city where it’s set — Columbus, Indiana, home to a remarkable collection of renowned works of modern architecture,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, one of the many critics to have already lavished praise on the newly released picture.
“Those buildings provide an extraordinary premise for the drama, which is a visionary transformation of a familiar genre: a young adult’s coming-of-age story. For once, that trope doesn’t involve a sexual awakening or a family revelation; it’s the tale of an intellectual blossoming, thanks to a new friendship that arises amid troubled circumstances.”
Those troubled circumstances have to do with the parents of the two main characters: Casey, a recent high-school graduate who’s stayed in town to care for a mother trying to kick a methamphetamine habit, and Jin, a fortysomething translator who’s flown in from his home in Korea (birthplace of both the Midwest-raised Kogonada and the film’s Los Angeles-raised star John Cho) to watch over his father, an architectural theorist plunged into a coma by a stroke. “These parallel lines meet when Casey offers to show the stranger her town,” writes Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers in his review. “ ‘Meth and modernism are really big here,’ she tells Jin, as he becomes increasingly intrigued by this girl who sees the art and the humanity in buildings.”
Soon Jin and Casey take “baby steps toward a relationship, in a manner that recalls Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.” That film, and its successors Before Sunset and Before Midnight, figure heavily into Kogonada’s video essay on Linklater, “On Cinema & Time.” Other influences, cited by critics as well as Kogonada himself, include Terence Malick, whose way with the elemental he examined in “Fire & Water,” and Yasujiro Ozu, whose films got him thinking about cinema in the first place. As he put it to Indiewire, he started by thinking he would “try to figure out what it is about his films that initially felt very unimpressive, but kept haunting me,” to understand why Ozu “isn’t easy to just reduce to something — he certainly is not this sort of traditionalist, he’s certainly not a western modernist, he is something else and whatever he was exploring and offering felt so relevant, even today.”
Kogonada’s video essays “Way of Ozu” and “Passageways” reveal not just the Japanese master’s use of architectural spaces, but Kogonada’s interest in such spaces. Columbus brings the depth of that interest to the fore: “The director provokes awareness of the Modernist Columbus by treating it as one of the film’s characters,” writes Architectural Record’s Dante A. Ciampaglia. “It’s both protagonist and nemesis for Casey and Jin as they wander the city, explore its architectural bounty, and find it both reflecting inner struggles and inspiring epiphanies.” As Kogonada himself puts it, “I think that’s the thing that interests me, the relationship between empty spaces and life itself.” May he find many more opportunities to explore it onscreen.
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