Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of Comedy (NSFW)

in Comedy | September 21st, 2012

Record­ed and aired last year, HBO’s Talk­ing Fun­ny is an hour long, unscript­ed sit-down with four of the biggest names in comedy—Ricky Ger­vais, Jer­ry Sein­feld, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K.. If you’re famil­iar with the work of any or all of these guys, you know you’re in for a lit­tle pro­fun­di­ty and a lot of pro­fan­i­ty. This is def­i­nite­ly, I repeat, not safe for work, and not safe for any­one who takes offense eas­i­ly. They go to some pret­ty nervy places, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from these four. Well, three actu­al­ly. Sein­feld comes in for some good-natured rib­bing for an entire career of work­ing “clean,” drop­ping an f‑bomb maybe once or twice in his act, ever.

So, if you can take the strong lan­guage that pops up occasionally–albeit in very reflec­tive and hilar­i­ous ways that I argue dif­fuse ten­sion and aren’t in the least bit mean-spirited–then you will be reward­ed by a con­ver­sa­tion between four high­ly accom­plished actors and come­di­ans who love to talk about their craft, com­pare war sto­ries, decon­struct their com­ic per­son­ae, and express gen­uine appre­ci­a­tion for each other’s work. But as soon as the con­ver­sa­tion seems to get too heady or sen­ti­men­tal, it’s back to sick humor and insults. There’s some­thing of the inse­cure ten-year old boy in each of these guys, who tend to use com­e­dy as a defen­sive weapon to fend off pain and sad­ness with­out run­ning away from either one; it works dif­fer­ent­ly in each com­ic, and it’s fas­ci­nat­ing to watch.

Ger­vais is espe­cial­ly thought­ful about his respon­si­bil­i­ty to the audi­ence (after some ini­tial brava­do), which comes as some sur­prise con­sid­er­ing his usu­al role as an obliv­i­ous ass. Sein­feld, the elder states­man, gets some def­er­ence from the oth­ers, but even at 57 is still boy­ish and slight­ly corny. Rock and C.K. are two of the smartest comics of their gen­er­a­tion and also two of the most pro­fane, but again, I think they pull it off because they are also two of the most hon­est and least threat­en­ing men to ever grace a stage—C.K. the self-dep­re­cat­ing sad sack and Rock the diminu­tive class clown with a per­pet­u­al imp­ish grin. Make up your own mind about the touchy sub­jects, or avoid them alto­geth­er, but over­all, I think each of these come­di­ans comes across as lov­able pre­cise­ly because they’re will­ing to be them­selves, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, child­ish insults, sweaty male ids, and all. They might make it look easy, but this is work for pro­fes­sion­als.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Great George Car­lin Showed Louis CK the Way to Suc­cess (NSFW)

“Learn Eng­lish With Ricky Ger­vais,” A New Pod­cast Debuts (NSFW)

Come­di­ans in Cars Get­ting Cof­fee: Jer­ry Seinfeld’s News Series Debuts on the Web

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Moby Dick Big Read: Tilda Swinton & Others Read a Chapter a Day from the Great American Novel

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | September 21st, 2012

“Moby-Dick is the great Amer­i­can nov­el. But it is also the great unread Amer­i­can nov­el. Sprawl­ing, mag­nif­i­cent, deliri­ous­ly digres­sive, it stands over and above all oth­er works of fic­tion, since it is bare­ly a work of fic­tion itself. Rather, it is an explo­sive expo­si­tion of one man’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the world of the whale, and the way humans have relat­ed to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”

That’s how Ply­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty intro­duces Her­man Melville’s clas­sic tale from 1851. And it’s what sets the stage for their web project launched ear­li­er this week. It’s called The Moby Dick Big Read, and it fea­tures celebri­ties and less­er known fig­ures read­ing all 135 chap­ters from Moby Dick — chap­ters that you can start down­load­ing (as free audio files) on a rolling, dai­ly basis. Find them on iTunes, Sound­cloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.

The project start­ed with the first chap­ters being read by Til­da Swin­ton (Chap­ter 1), Cap­tain R.N. Hone (Chap­ter 2), Nigel Williams (Chap­ter 3), Caleb Crain (Chap­ter 4), Musa Okwon­ga (Chap­ter 5), and Mary Nor­ris (Chap­ter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Cal­low and even Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron will read future chap­ters, which often find them­selves accom­pa­nied by con­tem­po­rary art­work inspired by the nov­el.

If you want to read the nov­el as you go along, find the text in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. We also have ver­sions read by one nar­ra­tor in our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion. Til­da Swin­ton’s nar­ra­tion of Chap­ter 1 appears right below:

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Two Legends Together: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Program, 1963

in Music, Radio | September 20th, 2012

In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel intro­duced Chica­go radio lis­ten­ers to an up-and-com­ing musi­cian, not yet 22 years old, “a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huck­le­ber­ry Finn, if he lived in the 20th cen­tu­ry. His name is Bob Dylan.” (Lis­ten to the inter­view below.)

Dylan had just fin­ished record­ing the songs for his sec­ond album, The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, when he trav­eled from New York to Chica­go to play a gig at a lit­tle place part­ly owned by his man­ag­er, Albert Gross­man, called The Bear Club. The next day he went to the WFMT stu­dios for the hour-long appear­ance on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram. Most sources give the date of the inter­view as April 26, 1963, though Dylan schol­ar Michael Krogs­gaard has giv­en it as May 3.

Things were mov­ing fast in Dylan’s life at that time. He was just emerg­ing as a major song­writer. His debut album from the year before, Bob Dylan, was made up most­ly of oth­er peo­ple’s songs. The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, which was fin­ished but had­n’t yet been released, con­tained almost all orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al, includ­ing sev­er­al songs that would become clas­sics, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” With­in a few months Dylan would make his debut at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val and per­form at the his­toric March on Wash­ing­ton. But when Dylan vis­it­ed WFMT, it’s like­ly that many of Terkel’s lis­ten­ers had nev­er heard of him. In the record­ed broad­cast he plays the fol­low­ing songs:

  1. Farewell
  2. A Hard Rain’s a‑Gonna Fall
  3. Bob Dylan’s Dream
  4. Boots of Span­ish Leather
  5. John Brown
  6. Who Killed Dav­ey Moore?
  7. Blowin’ In The Wind

Dylan tells Terkel that “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” is not about atom­ic fall­out, even though he wrote the song in a state of anx­i­ety dur­ing the Cuban mis­sile cri­sis. “No, it’s not atom­ic rain,” Dylan says, “it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fall­out rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just got­ta hap­pen.… In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pel­lets of poi­son are flood­ing their waters,’ that means all the lies that peo­ple get told on their radios and in their news­pa­pers.”

But as the con­ver­sa­tion pro­gress­es it becomes clear that the moti­va­tion behind Dylan’s com­ments isn’t to dis­pel myths or to clear up any of the “lies that peo­ple get told on their radios.” Rather, he’s dri­ven by his life-long dread of being pigeon­holed by oth­ers. Dylan is hap­py to spread his own myths. At one point he tells Terkel a “stretch­er” that would have made Huck­le­ber­ry Finn proud: He claims that when he was about ten years old he saw Woody Guthrie per­form in Bur­bank, Cal­i­for­nia. Regard­less of its fac­tu­al­i­ty, the Dylan-Terkel inter­view is an enter­tain­ing hour, a fas­ci­nat­ing win­dow on the young artist as he was enter­ing his prime. You can stream it here.

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David Byrne Gives Us the Lowdown on How Music Works (with Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin)

in Music | September 20th, 2012

“I had an extreme­ly slow-dawn­ing insight about cre­ation,” writes eclec­ti­cal­ly mind­ed musi­cian David Byrne in the open­ing chap­ter of his new book How Music Works. “That insight is that con­text large­ly deter­mines what is writ­ten, paint­ed, sculpt­ed, sung, or per­formed.” This comes as only the first in a series of illu­mi­nat­ing ideas Byrne lays out in the text, a far-reach­ing med­i­ta­tion on artis­tic cre­ation through the field that hap­pens to be his spe­cial­ty. Approach­ing music — you know, the stuff he made at the front of the Talk­ing Heads and con­tin­ues to make in solo albums and col­lab­o­ra­tions with the likes of Bri­an Eno and St. Vin­cent —  from as many angles as he can, he writes about its tech­nol­o­gy, the busi­ness of it, its social ele­ments, its role in his life, and what sci­ence and nature have to teach us about its mechan­ics. For more on that last bit, watch the above con­ver­sa­tion from Seed mag­a­zine, which sits Byrne down with Dan Lev­itin, neu­ro­sci­en­tist, musi­cian, and author of This is Your Brain on Music. Though it pre­cedes the pub­li­ca­tion of How Music Works by about five years, the chat cov­ers great stretch­es of high­ly rel­e­vant ground.

Watch­ing this back-and-forth, I could swear to see­ing some of the con­cepts devel­oped in How Music Works tak­ing ear­ly shape in Byrne’s head. He and Lev­itin dis­cuss the wide­spread sus­pi­cion of delib­er­ate craft in an osten­si­bly emo­tion­al form like rock and roll; the way music gen­er­ates plea­sure by tak­ing detours and dis­rupt­ing pat­terns; the rela­tion­ship between under­stand­ing songs and acquir­ing lan­guages; the sen­so­ry sim­i­lar­i­ties between lis­ten­ing to music and drink­ing wine; the nature of trance states; and the long-stand­ing yet seem­ing­ly now chang­ing social func­tion of music. Byrne admits that music actu­al­ly helped him change his own behav­ior: “I used music as a real tool to find my way into engag­ing social­ly,” he says, and this ties in with every­thing the two have spent the past hour talk­ing about. Intel­lec­tu­al though their musi­cophil­ia may seem, they nev­er for­get about the pre-ratio­nal ele­ments of the musi­cal expe­ri­ence. The guid­ing notion of their con­ver­sa­tion might have been summed up by Carl Sagan: “It is some­times said that sci­en­tists are unro­man­tic,” he wrote in anoth­er con­text, “but is it not stir­ring to under­stand how the world actu­al­ly works? It does no harm to the romance of the sun­set to know a lit­tle bit about it.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stew­art

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing Traditional American Folk Song “Mule on the Mount” (1939)

in Literature, Music | September 20th, 2012

zora neal hurston

Two years before the 1937 pub­li­ca­tion of her nov­el Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God, Zora Neale Hurston pub­lished a col­lec­tion of African-Amer­i­can folk­lore called Of Mules and Men. She did so as an author­i­ty on the sub­ject and a trained anthro­pol­o­gist who had stud­ied under the most well-regard­ed fig­ure in the dis­ci­pline at the time, Franz Boas. Her study was both a per­son­al and a pro­fes­sion­al under­tak­ing for her; although Hurston had grown up in the Deep South—in Eatonville, Florida—she cred­it­ed her aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing with giv­ing her the crit­i­cal dis­tance to real­ly see the cul­ture on its own terms. As she puts it in the Intro­duc­tion to Of Mules and Men, she had known black South­ern cul­ture “from the ear­li­est rock­ing of my cra­dle… but it was fit­ting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wear­ing it…. I had to have the spy-glass of Anthro­pol­o­gy to look through at that.”

After receiv­ing her B.A. from Barnard, Hurston trav­eled exten­sive­ly in the South and the Caribbean in the 1930s to doc­u­ment local cul­tures and con­duct field research. Her work was part­ly spon­sored by a Guggen­heim fel­low­ship and part­ly by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion, whose Fed­er­al Writ­ers Project spon­sored sev­er­al oth­er black writ­ers like Ralph Elli­son, Claude McK­ay, and Richard Wright. Work­ing at times with cel­e­brat­ed folk­lorists Stet­son Kennedy and Alan Lomax, Hurston col­lect­ed record­ings of South­ern and Caribbean sto­ries and folk songs, often telling or singing them her­self. In the clip above, from June 18, 1939, Hurston sings a song she calls “Mule on the Mount.” In the first minute and a half of the record­ing, you can hear Hurston describe the song’s ori­gins and many vari­a­tions to some­one (pos­si­bly Lomax) in the back­ground. She explains how she came to know the song, first hear­ing it in her home­town of Eatonville. Then she begins to sing, in a high, sweet voice, with all the into­na­tion of a true blues singer, punc­tu­at­ing the vers­es with snorts and grunts, as many folk songs—often work songs—would be, though in this case, the snorts may be mule snorts. The record­ing reveals Hurston as a tal­ent­ed inter­preter of her mate­r­i­al, to say the least.

The songs and sto­ries Hurston col­lect­ed, in addi­tion to her child­hood expe­ri­ences, pro­vid­ed her with much of the mate­r­i­al for her nov­els, sto­ries, and plays. Sev­er­al more of her WPA record­ings, also sung by her, are online as mp3s at the Flori­da Depart­ment of State’s “Flori­da Mem­o­ry” project. The orig­i­nals are housed at the Library of Congress’s “Flori­da Folk­life” col­lec­tion. Hurston’s crit­i­cal and cre­ative work brought her renown in her life­time not only as a writer, but as a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al and folk­lorist as well—hear her talk, some­what reluc­tant­ly, about Hait­ian zom­bies in a 1943 radio inter­view on the pop­u­lar Mary Mar­garet McBride show. Sad­ly, Hurston passed her final years in obscu­ri­ty and her work was neglect­ed for a cou­ple decades until a revival in the 70s lead by Alice Walk­er. She’s nev­er been known as a singer, but after lis­ten­ing to the above record­ing, you might agree she should be.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Big List of 530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New Additions)

in Online Courses | September 20th, 2012

While you were sun­ning your­self on the beach this sum­mer — or just tak­ing a nice stay­ca­tion at home — we were busy track­ing down new cours­es to add to our list of 530 Free Online Cours­es. Avail­able via YouTube, iTunes or the web, these cours­es were taped on the cam­pus­es of top uni­ver­si­ties like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and UC Berke­ley. They range across diverse dis­ci­plines — Phi­los­o­phy, His­to­ry, Com­put­er Sci­ence, and Physics, to name a few — and you can access them all for free. Below we’re high­light­ing some of the most recent addi­tions to the big mas­ter list, and also throw­ing in a few inter­est­ing bonus picks. Hope you enjoy:

  • Aes­thet­ics & Phi­los­o­phy of Art – iTunes – Web — James Grant, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture – YouTube – Aysha Iqbal Viswamo­han, IIT Madras
  • Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners - iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video & Audio — Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
  • Dar­win and Design – Web Site – James Par­adis, MIT
  • Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture and Film — RSS Feed — Sean Dor­rance Kel­ly, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
  • Expos­ing Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy – iTunes Video — Web Site — RSS Feed — Dan Armen­dariz, Har­vard
  • Life in the Uni­verse – iTune­sU – Web – Richard Pogge, Ohio State
  • Kant’s Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son – iTunes Video – iTunes Audio — Video/Audio on Web – Dan Robin­son, Oxford
  • Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion — iTunes — Web — T. J. Maw­son, Oxford
  • Sci­ence Fic­tion and Pol­i­tics — iTunes Audio — Web –  Court­ney Brown, Emory Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Shake­speare After All: The Lat­er Plays – Mul­ti­ple For­mats – Mar­jorie Gar­ber, Har­vard
  • The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse – PBS Video – Cal Tech
  • The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry – YouTube - Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Bonus — A Few Uncon­ven­tion­al Cours­es:

  • Hegel: The Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry — Web Site — Leo Strauss, U Chica­go
  • Jack Ker­ouac – Web 1 and Web 2 – Allen Gins­berg, Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Plato’s Apol­o­gy of Socrates – YouTube – Allan Bloom, UChica­go
  • The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law – Web — YouTube – Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
  • This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Nor­ton Lec­tures – Web Audio – Jorge Luis Borges, Har­vard
  • The Unan­swered Ques­tion: 6 Lec­tures on Music - YouTube – Leonard Bern­stein, Har­vard

Look­ing for free text­books? Don’t miss our meta col­lec­tion of 160 Free Text­books avail­able on the web.

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The Oldest Color Movies Bring Sunflowers, Exotic Birds and Goldfish Back to Life (1902)

in Film, History, Photography | September 20th, 2012

Long before Tech­ni­col­or came along, the British pho­tog­ra­ph­er and inven­tor Edward Turn­er devel­oped a three-col­or motion pic­ture sys­tem in 1899. It was based on the mid-19th cen­tu­ry dis­cov­ery that all col­ors could be pro­duced through com­bi­na­tions of the three pri­ma­ry col­ors — red, green and blue. And Turn­er’s genius was find­ing a way to bring this notion to mov­ing pic­tures. Work­ing with the financier Fred­er­ick Mar­shall Lee, Turn­er man­aged to shoot col­or films of chil­dren play­ing with sun­flow­ers (above), a macaw perched in a cage, and gold­fish swim­ming in a bowl. But then his films and pro­jec­tors were lost … for a good cen­tu­ry … and only recent­ly did the Nation­al Media Muse­um in the UK recov­er the footage and then build a spe­cial pro­jec­tor capa­ble of bring­ing the films back to the screen. To learn how they pulled it off, watch the video below. It’s pret­ty inter­est­ing:

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What’s Next for the Large Hadron Collider? PhD Comics Introduces the Search for Extra Dimensions

in Physics | September 19th, 2012

With the announce­ment this sum­mer that sci­en­tists at CERN believe they’ve found the long-sought-after sub­atom­ic par­ti­cle called the Hig­gs boson, the ques­tion aris­es: What’s next for the Large Hadron Col­lid­er? In this new ani­mat­ed dis­cus­sion from Jorge Cham at PhD Comics, physi­cists Daniel White­son and Jonathan Feng of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine, explain how the work at the LHC isn’t even remote­ly fin­ished yet. Some of the most inter­est­ing exper­i­ments will involve the search for evi­dence of extra dimen­sions, a con­cept that may hold the key to a num­ber of mys­ter­ies. As White­son and Feng explain, a par­ti­cle mov­ing in anoth­er dimen­sion would have a greater mass than oth­er­wise expect­ed, as a con­se­quence of Ein­stein’s spe­cial the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. The LHC might be used to find evi­dence of these heav­ier ver­sions of par­ti­cles. “So what we’re look­ing for,” says White­son, “is nor­mal mat­ter, but heav­ier ver­sions of it.” For more ani­mat­ed physics from PhD Comics you can see our ear­li­er posts on the Hig­gs boson and dark mat­ter. And to learn more about physics, see our long list of Free Physics Cours­es in our col­lec­tion of over 500 Free Cours­es Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lawrence Krauss on the Mys­te­ri­ous Allure of Extra Dimen­sions

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