This weekend, Jerry Seinfeld gave the commencement speech at Duke University and offered the graduates his three keys to life: 1. bust your ass, 2. pay attention, and 3. fall in love. Then, 10 minutes later, he added essentially a fourth key to life: “Do not lose your sense of humor. You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you’re going to need it to get through. Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive it without humor.” “It is worth the sacrifice of an occasional discomfort to have some laughs. Don’t lose that.” “Humor is the most powerful, most survival-essential quality you will ever have or need to navigate through the human experience.” Amen.
Related Content
John Waters’ RISD Graduation Speech: Real Wealth Is Life Without A*Holes
Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dartmouth Graduation
Jon Stewart’s William & Mary Commencement Address: The Entire World is an Elective
Read More...
Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative: for many viewers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crushing a heap of musical instruments, art supplies, and vintage entertainment into a single tablet inadvertently articulated a discomfort they’ve long felt with technology’s direction in the past couple of decades. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”
One wonders whether this would have surprised Aldous Huxley. He understood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC interview above, that “if you plant the seed of applied science or technology, it proceeds to grow, and it grows according to the laws of its own being. And the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.”
Even six decades ago, he and certain others had the sense, which has since become fairly common, that “man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now the victim of his own technology”; that “the development of recent social and scientific history has created a world in which man seems to be made for technology rather than the other way around.”
Having written his acclaimed dystopian novel Brave New World thirty years earlier, Huxley was established as a seer of possible technology-driven totalitarian futures. He understood that “we are a little reluctant to embark upon technology, to allow technology to take over,” but that, “in the long run, we generally succumb,” allowing ourselves to be mastered by our own creations. In this, he resembles the Julia of Byron’s Don Juan, who, “whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.” Huxley also knew that “it is possible to make people content with their servitude,” even more effectively in modernity than antiquity: “you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distraction and propaganda” — delivered, here in the twenty-first-century, straight to the device in our hand.
Related content:
Aldous Huxley Predicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000
An Animated Aldous Huxley Identifies the Dystopian Threats to Our Freedom (1958)
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)
Hear Aldous Huxley Narrate His Dystopian Masterpiece Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wikimedia Commons
Occasionally I slip into an ivory tower mentality in which the idea of a banned book seems quaint—associated with silly scandals over the tame sex scenes in James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence. After all, I think, we live in an age when bestseller lists are topped (no pun) by tawdry fan fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey. Nothing’s sacred. But this notion is a massive blind spot on my part; the whole awareness-raising mission of the annual Banned Books Week seeks to dispel such complacency. Books are challenged, suppressed, and banned all the time in public schools and libraries, even if we’ve moved past outright government censorship of the publishing industry.
It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he and Ginsberg’s “Howl” were put on trial for obscenity. Apparently, phrases like “cock and endless balls” did not sit well with the authorities. But the court vindicated them all.
The story of Howl’s publication begins in 1955, when 29-year-old Ginsberg read part of the poem at the Six Gallery, where Ferlinghetti—owner of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore—sat in attendance. Deciding that Ginsberg’s epic lament “knocked the sides out of things,” Ferlinghetti offered to publish “Howl” and brought out the first edition in 1956. Prior to this reading, “Howl” existed in the form of an earlier poem called “Dream Record, 1955,” which poet Kenneth Rexroth told Ginsberg sounded “too formal… like you’re wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties.” Ginsberg’s rewrite jettisoned the ivy league decorum.
Unfortunately, no audio exists of that first reading, but above you can hear the first recorded reading of “Howl,” from February, 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. The recording sat dormant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until scholar John Suiter rediscovered it in 2008. In it, Ginsberg reads his great prophetic work, not with the cadences of a street preacher or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robotic monotone with an undertone of manic urgency. Ginsberg’s reading, before an intimate group of students in a dormitory lounge, took place only just before the first printing of the poem in the City Lights edition.
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2013. Over the years, the audio originally featured in the post, along with many of the links, went dead. So we gave everything a refresh and brought it back.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.
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!
Related Content:
Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free
James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’
2,000+ Cassettes from the Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection Now Streaming Online
13 Lectures from Allen Ginsberg’s “History of Poetry” Course (1975)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
In 1885, Karl Benz built what’s now considered the first modern automobile. According to the Mercedes Benz website, the car featured a “compact high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke engine installed horizontally at the rear, a tubular steel frame … and three wire-spoked wheels. The engine output was 0.75 hp (0.55 kW).” Two years after its invention, Karl Benz’s wife Bertha proved that the car was ready for prime time, driving her early Benz from Mannheim to Pforzheim. After that groundbreaking drive, the Benz went into production, becoming the first commercially available automobile in history.
Above, you can watch a car enthusiast known as “Mr. Benz” take the nineteenth-century car for a spin. Below, watch a re-enactment of Bertha’s historic drive.
Related Content
178,000 Images Documenting the History of the Car Now Available on a New Stanford Web Site
A Flying Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Taylor Aerocar in Action
Read More...
Today, Steve Albini, the musician and producer of important albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey, the Pixies and many others, passed away in Chicago, at the all-too-early age of 61. In tribute, we’re bringing you this classic 2013 post from our archive.
Journeyman record producer Steve Albini (he prefers to be called a “recording engineer”) is perhaps the crankiest man in rock. This is not an effect of age. He’s always been that way, since the emergence of his scary, no-frills post-punk band Big Black and later projects Rapeman and Shellac. In his current role as elder statesman of indie rock and more, Chicago’s Albini has developed a reputation as kind of a hardass. He’s also a consummate professional who musicians want to know and work with. From the sound of the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa to Joanna Newsom’s Ys, Albini has had a hand in some of the defining albums of the last thirty plus years, and there is good reason for that: nothing sounds like an Albini record. His method is all his own, and his results—minimalist, dynamic, and raw—are impossible to argue with.
So when Nirvana embarked on recording their final, painful (in hindsight) album In Utero, they asked Albini to steer them away from the more major-label sound of the breakout Nevermind, produced by Butch Vig. True to form, the typically verbose Albini sent a four-page typed letter in response. The letter (first page above—see the rest here) is a testament to perhaps the most thoughtful producer since Quincy Jones and lays out Albini’s philosophy in very fine detail. Two sample paragraphs serve as a thesis:
I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…
I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more “work” does not imply a better end result. Clearly you have learned this yourselves and appreciate the logic.
Albini decries any interference from the “front office bulletheads,” or record company execs (his feuds with such people are legendary), and makes it quite clear that he’s there to serve the interests of the band and their sound, not the product of a marketing campaign. While Albini has issued many a surly manifesto over the years, this statement of his craft is maybe the most comprehensive. He is driven by what he calls a “kinship” with the bands he works with. And his passionate commitment to musicians and to quality sound makes him one of the most artistically virtuous people working in popular music today. For more on In Utero, read Dave Grohl’s Rolling Stone interview here. Below, see Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Steve Albini discuss the now-famous letter to Nirvana.
Related Content:
Visit “Mariobatalivoice,” the Cooking Blog by Steve Albini, Musician & Record Producer
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. Attributed to various luminaries of antiquity, that saying (the probable inspiration for Isak Dinesen’s poem “Ex Africa,” itself the probable inspiration for her memoir Out of Africa, which in turn was loosely adapted into Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-lavished film) translates to “Out of Africa, always something new.” But it’s perhaps more notable that out of Africa came something quite old indeed: humankind itself, which over the past 60,000 years has been spreading ever farther across the world. You can see how it happened in the Insider Science video above, which animates those 60 millennia of global migration in less than two and a half minutes.
For more detail, consider supplementing that video with this one from GeoNomad, which tracks the outward expansion of humanity through DNA research. “Scientific research has shown that the 7.5 billion people who occupy the earth today are the descendants of a woman who lived 200,000 years ago,” explains its narration.
“Scientists call her Mitochondrial Eve,” in reference to the DNA located in mitochondria, a type of energy-producing organelle known as “the powerhouse of the cell.” Both male and female humans possess mitochondrial DNA, of course, but only female mitochondrial DNA passes down to offspring; hence our not talking about a Mitochondrial Adam.
DNA mapping has allowed us to trace the genetic and geographical history of the Mitochondrial Eve’s descendants. Some left for other parts of Africa, and others for what we now know as the Middle East and India. Whether by wanderlust or necessity — and given the harrowing conditions implied by their low survival rate, the latter probably had more to do with it — certain groups continued on to modern-day southeast Asia and Australia. It was through western Asia that the first humans entered neanderthal-populated Europe as early as 56,800 years ago. There, some 546 centuries later, Terence would write, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”: a declaration perhaps made in the suspicion that, when you go back far enough, we’re all one big family.
Related content:
New Study Finds That Humans Are 33,000 Years Older Than We Thought
How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look
Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Million Years of Human Evolution Visualized in Six Minutes
The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today
Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...
On August 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was synthesizing a new compound called lysergic acid diethylamide-25 when he got a couple of drops on his finger. The chemical, later known worldwide as LSD, absorbed into his system, and, soon after, he experienced an intense state of altered consciousness. In other words, he tripped.
Intrigued by the experience, Hofmann dosed himself with 250 micrograms of LSD and then biked his way home through the streets of Basel, making him the first person ever to intentionally drop acid. The event was later commemorated by psychonauts and LSD enthusiasts as “Bicycle Day.”
Italian animators Lorenzo Veracini, Nandini Nambiar and Marco Avoletta imagine what Hofmann might have seen during his historic journey in their 2008 short A Bicycle Trip.
The film shows Hofmann riding through the Swiss medieval town as he sees visions like a trail of flowers coming off a woman in red, cobblestones coming alive and scurrying away, and a whole forest becoming transparent before the marveling scientist’s eyes. The film also shows Hofmann slamming into a fence, illustrating why it’s never a good idea to drive under the influence of hallucinogens.
After his early experiments, Albert Hofmann became convinced that LSD is not only a powerful potential treatment for the mentally ill but also a valuable bridge between the spiritual and the scientific. He called the substance “medicine for the soul.”
If you’re interested in learning more about the turbulent history of the drug, check out below the 2002 documentary Hofmann’s Potion, by Canadian filmmaker Connie Littlefield, which traces Hofmann’s invention from being a promising psychological treatment, to counterculture symbol, to banned substance. The 56-minute doc features footage and interviews with such psychedelic luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Stanislav Grof, Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass) along with Hofmann himself.
Hofmann was always uncomfortable with the casual way the ‘60s counterculture used his invention. “[LSD] is not just fun,” he says in Littlefield’s movie. “It is a very serious experiment.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow her at @jonccrow.
Related Content:
Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Animated
Artist Draws Nine Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment
Aldous Huxley’s LSD Death Trip
Take a Trip to the LSD Museum, the Largest Collection of “Blotter Art” in the World
Read More...The world has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, albeit not quite as dramatically as how we see the world. That’s just what’s on display at the David Rumsey Map Collection, whose more than 131,000 historical maps and related images are available to browse (or download) free online. Since we last featured it here on Open Culture, the collection has added at least 40,000 items to its digital holdings, making it an even more valuable resource for not just understanding how humanity has viewed the world throughout the ages, but how we’ve imagined it — and, for that matter, how we’ve imagined other worlds from Mars to Narnia to Krypton.
“Imaginary maps” is just one of the categories through which you can explore the David Rumsey Map Collection. There are also tags for newspaper maps, timelines, city maps, celestial maps, data visualizations, children’s maps, and more varieties besides.
If you’d prefer a more traditional form of organization, you can search for maps of specific geographical regions: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, the Pacific, the Arctic, and of course, the world. If it’s the last item you’re interested in, apart from the considerable two-dimensional holdings, the interactive globes constitute a gallery of their own, and there you can view ones made between the mid-sixteenth century and just last year from every possible angle.
Among the site’s new features is a “search by text-on-maps” feature, which you can activate by clicking the “by Text on Maps” button next to the search window at the top of the page. This lets you compare and contrast the ways particular places have been labeled on the variety of maps in the collection: not just proper names like Cairo, Madrid, and Yosemite, but also more general terms like “gold mine,” “lighthouse” or “dragons.” Arguably, we look at maps more often here in the twenty-first century than we ever did before, though seldom if ever do we depart from whichever mapping app we happen to keep on our phones. It’s worth stepping back in cartographical time to remember that there were once as many ways of understanding the world as there were depictions of it.
Related content:
Oculi Mundi: A Beautiful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes
40,000 Early Modern Maps Are Now Freely Available Online (Courtesy of the British Library)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari thought of Kafka as an international writer, in solidarity with minority groups worldwide. Other scholars have characterized his work—and Kafka himself wrote as much—as literature concerned with national identity. Academic debates, however, have no bearing on how ordinary readers, and writers, around the world take in Kafka’s novels and short stories. Writers with both national and international pedigrees such as Borges, Murakami, Marquez, and Nabokov have drawn much inspiration from the Czech-Jewish writer, as have filmmakers and animators. Today we revisit several international animations inspired by Kafka, the first, above by Polish animator Piotr Dumala.
Trained a sculptor, Dumala’s textural brand of “destructive animation” creates chilling, high contrast images that appropriately capture the eerie and unresolved play of light and dark in Kafka’s work. The Polish artist’s Franz Kafka (1992) draws on scenes from the author’s life, as told in his diaries.
Next, watch a very disorienting 2007 Japanese adaptation of Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” by animator Koji Yamamura. The soundtrack and monotone Japanese dialogue (with subtitles) effectively conveys the tone of the story, which John Updike described as “a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty with things, impeding every step.” Read the original story here.
Russian-American team Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker created the 1963 animation above using a “pinscreen” technique, which photographs the three-dimensional movement of hundreds of pins, making images from real light and shadow. We’ve previously written on just “how demanding and painstaking an effort” the animators made to create their work. Their previous efforts got the attention of Orson Welles, who commissioned the above short as a prologue for his Anthony Perkins-starring film version of The Trial. And yes, that voice you hear narrating the parable “Before the Law,” an excerpt from Kafka’s novel, is Welles himself.
Kafka’s most famous story, The Metamorphosis, inspired Canadian animator Caroline Leaf’s 1977 film above. Leaf’s Kafka animation also takes a sculptural approach to the author’s work, this time sculpting in sand, a medium Leaf herself says created “black and white sand images” with “the potential to have a Kafka-esque feel—dark and mysterious.” However we interpret the content of Kafka’s work, the feel of his stories is unmistakable to readers and interpreters across continents. It’s one that consistently inspires artists to use a spare, high contrast style in adapting him.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.
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!
Related Content:
Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell
Hunter S. Thompson and Franz Kafka Inspire Animation for a Bookstore Benefiting Oxfam
Kafka’s Famous Character Gregor Samsa Meets Dr. Seuss in a Great Radio Play
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
In the nineteen-sixties, the music media encouraged the notion that a young rock-and-roll fan had to side with either the Beatles or their rivals, the Rolling Stones. On some level, it must have made sense, given the growing aesthetic divide between the music the two world-famous groups were putting out. But, at bottom, not only was there no rivalry between the bands (it was an invention of the music papers), there was no real need, of course, to choose one or the other. In the fifties, something of the same dynamic must have obtained between Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, two popular genre writers, each with his own worldview.
Bradbury and Asimov had much in common: both were (probably) born in 1920, both attended the very first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, both began publishing in pulp magazines in the forties, and both had an aversion to airplanes. That Bradbury spent most of his life in California and Asimov in New York made for a potentially interesting cultural contrast, though it never seems to have been played up. Still, it may explain something of the basic difference between the two writers as it comes through in the video above, a compilation of talk-show clips in which Bradbury and Asimov respond to questions about their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.
Asimov may have written a guide to the Bible, but he was hardly a literalist, calling the first chapters of Genesis “the sixth-century BC version of how the world might have started. We’ve improved on that since. I don’t believe that those are God’s words. Those are the words of men, trying to make the most sense that they could out of the information they had at the time.” In a later clip, Bradbury, for his part, confesses to a belief in not just Genesis, but also Darwin and even Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who theorized that characteristics acquired in an organism’s lifetime could be passed down to the next generation. “Nothing is proven,” he declares, “so there’s room for a religious delicatessen.”
One senses that Asimov wouldn’t have agreed, and indeed, would have been perfectly satisfied with a regular delicatessen. Though both he and Bradbury became famous as science-fiction writers around the same time — to say nothing of their copious writing in other genres — they possessed highly distinct imaginations. That works like Fahrenheit 451 and the Foundation trilogy attracted such different readerships is explicable in part through Bradbury’s insistence that “there’s room to believe it all” and Asimov’s dismissal of what he saw as every “get-rich quick scheme of the mind” peddled by “con men of the spirit”: each point of view as thoroughly American, in its way, as the Beatles and the Stones were thoroughly English.
Related content:
Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots
Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)
50 Famous Academics & Scientists Talk About God
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.
Read More...