Frank Zappa was always frank. You gotta give him that.
Speaking with Village Voice journalist Howard Smith in 1971, Zappa talked candidly about the tastes, opinions, and beliefs of most Americans, whether they apply to music or politics or anything else. “You have a nation of people who are waiting for the next big thing to happen.” “I see a lot of changes. But I think they’re all temporary things and any change for the good is always subject to cancellation upon the arrival of the next fad. And the same thing with any change for the worst.”
Maybe it’s like this everywhere. But it’s particularly so in America says Zappa:
I think that’s a reasonable way to look at it because [the U.S.] doesn’t have any real sort of values, you know? And a fad provides you with a temporary occupation for your imagination. Really, [America] doesn’t have any real culture. It doesn’t have any real art. It doesn’t have any real anything. It’s just got fads and a gross national product and a lot of inflation.
It’s not a flattering portrait of the States. But know this. Zappa didn’t see himself being above it all: “I’m an American. I was born here. I automatically got entered in a membership in the club.” Yeah, Frank could be frank.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
By the time I got to high school, home economics classes had fallen out of favor: the boys, of course, considered them too “girly,” and the girls considered them enforcers of traditional gender roles wholly out of place in modern society. At that time, America’s widespread obsession with food still had a few years before its full bloom, and now I imagine that learning to cook has regained a certain cachet even among teenagers. But what of “home economics” itself, that curious banner that combines a definition of economics nobody now quite recognizes with the less-than-fashionable concepts of domesticity, practicality, and necessity?
At the Internet Archive blog, Jeff Kaplan highlights such works as the Pilgrim Cook Book, published by Chicago’s Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society in 1921 and including recipes for Sausage in Potato Boxes, Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy; 1912’s more subdued Food for the invalid and the convalescent, with its Beef Juice, Meat Jelly, Cracker Gruel, and advice that, “among other things, beer and pickles are bad for children”; and even older, 1906’s A bachelors cupboard; containing crumbs culled from the cupboards of the great unweddedwhich, warning that “the day of of the ‘dude’ has passed and the weakling is relegated to his rightful sphere in short order,” offers methods for the making of dishes with names like Bed-Spread For Two, Indian Devil Mixture, Hot Birds, and Finnan Haddie.
When Stanley Kubrick died, he left behind numerous film ideas that would never see the light of day. There was his epic Napoleon film; an adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel; his long-talked about Holocaust film Aryan Papers; and so much more.
But this was a new one to hear about: in 1996 Kubrick agreed to direct a music video for UNKLE’s upcoming Psyence Fiction album. You may recall, back when MTV played music videos, seeing Jonathan Glazer’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” video, or Jake Scott’s “Be There,” both from UNKLE’s album. Alas, Kubrick’s video never got made. He had started filming Eyes Wide Shut and then passed away upon its release.
Now “The Corridor,” a glimpse of which you can see above, is an attempt to bring Kubrick and UNKLE back together. It’s not what actually might have been filmed by the director, but something that captures the project in spirit. It’s also a loving tribute to Kubrick’s career and his love of single-point perspective, which has been video essayed elsewhere.
Director Toby Dye, who has directed videos like “Paradise Circus” for Massive Attack and “Another Night Out” for UNKLE, took on the job of bringing “The Corridor” to the screen, co-designed by Ridley Scott Associates, working with Dye’s Black Dog Films.
“The Corridor” uses the one song off Psyence Fiction that never got a video, the Richard Ashcroft-sung “Lonely Souls,” as its backdrop. Dye has created four narratives that play on Kubrick’s iconic films–The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon,and 2001–but then interweaves time and character along a long corridor tracking shot, starring Joanna Lumley and Aiden Gillen.
In addition, “The Corridor” is a video centerpiece to what sounds like a very cool exhibition. Curated by Mo’Wax and UNKLE founder James Lavelle, “Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick” opened yesterday at Somerset House in London and runs through August 24, 2016. Along with the video, the exhibition features artworks celebrating Kubrick’s influence on generations of artists. (The stack of heaters on top of the Overlook carpet is great.)
Said Dye:
‘For me, the unblinking red eye of 2001 A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 perfectly encapsulates the cinema of Stanley Kubrick. For all his films share that same coolly analytical gaze, studying from afar mankind and all its many foibles. Kubrick’s camera never appeared to follow the action, it was as if it moved of its own accord and the tableau of life simply unfurled before it. It was his seemingly never-ending camera zooms from Barry Lyndon that first sparked the seed of the idea behind “The Corridor,” before that idea grew, and grew into something that was, at times, infuriatingly ambitious, but I hope in the best tradition of the man who inspired it.’
Those who can’t attend will have to wait and see if and when the full video for “The Corridor” appears online. In the meantime, Somerset House awaits.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Do you know someone whose arguments consist of baldly specious reasoning, hopelessly confused categories, archipelagos of logical fallacies buttressed by seawalls of cognitive biases? Surely you do. Perhaps such a person would welcome some instruction on the properties of critical thinking and argumentation? Not likely? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wireless Philosophy (or “WiPhi”) videos by philosophy instructor Geoff Pynn of Northern Illinois University and doctoral students Kelley Schiffman of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and several other philosophy and psychology graduates.
What is critical thinking? “Critical thinking,” says Pynn, “is about making sure that you have good reasons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the various instructors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bottom of the post), but Pynn’s introductory video above lays out the foundation. Good reasons logically support the beliefs or conclusions one adopts—from degrees of probability to absolute certainty (a rare condition indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn specifies, does not relate to moral goodness, but to logical coherence and truth value. Though many ethicists and philosophers would disagree, he notes that it isn’t necessarily “morally wrong or evil or wicked” to believe something on the basis of bad reasons. But in order to think rationally, we need to distinguish “good” reasons from “bad” ones.
“A good reason for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it probable. That is, it’s one that makes the belief likely to be true. The very best reasons for a belief make it certain. They guarantee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he discusses these two classes of argument—one relating to certainty, the other probability. The first class, deductive arguments, occur in the classic, Aristotelian form of the syllogism, and they should guarantee their conclusions, meaning that “it’s impossible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false” (provided the form of the argument itself is correct). In such an instance, we say the argument is “valid,” a technical philosophical term that roughly corresponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or reasonable” argument. Some properties of deductive reasoning—validity, truth, and soundness—receive their own explanatory videos later in the series.
In abductive arguments (or what are also called “inductive arguments”), above, we reason informally to the best, most probable explanation. In these kinds of arguments, the premises do not guarantee the conclusion, and the arguments are not bound in rigid formal syllogisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most likely conclusion given the reasoning and evidence. Finding additional evidence, or finding that some of our evidence or reasoning is incorrect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the likelihood of our conclusion and make new inferences. Most scientific explanations rely on abductive reasoning, which is why they are subject to retraction or revision. New evidence—or new understandings of the evidence—often requires new conclusions.
As for understanding probability—the likelihood that reasons provide sufficient justification for inferring particular conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trouble, falling victim to all sorts of fallacies. And when it comes to interpreting evidence, we’re prey to a number of psychological biases that prevent us from making fair assessments. WiPhi brings previous video series to bear on these problems of argumentation, one on Formal and Informal Fallacies and another on Cognitive Biases.
When it comes to a general theory of probability itself, we would all benefit from some understanding of what’s called Bayes’ Theorem, named for the 18th century statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ Theorem can seem forbidding, but its wide application across a range of disciplines speaks to its importance. “Some philosophers,” says CUNY graduate student Ian Olasov in his video lesson above, “even think it’s the key to understanding what it means to think rationally.”
Bayesian reasoning, informal logic, sound, valid, and true arguments… all of these modes of critical thinking help us make sense of the tangles of information we find ourselves caught up in daily. Though some of our less rationally-inclined acquaintances may not be receptive to good introductory lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharpen our own reasoning skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as critical thinkers in Wireless Philosophy’s thorough, high quality series of video lessons.
Find more helpful resources in the Relateds below.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
If you’ve ever listened to Radiolab, one of the most popular and enduring podcasts out there, you know how much music (and sound more generally) plays a special role in the show’s production. And that’s all largely the creation of Radiolab’s co-host, Jad Abumrad. You know those “jaggedy sounds, little plurps and things, strange staccato, percussive things” that make the show so distinctive? That’s all Abumrad, who majored in experimental music composition and production at Oberlin College.
To get inside Abumrad’s thinking about music (what is sound? what is music? why do we organize sound into music?) watch the video above. Mac Premo interviewed Jad, then turned the conversation into a short creative film. Note: If you don’t react well to seeing fast-moving images, you might want to skip this one.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
In March of 2015, The Guardian published a piece on Prince’s vault, begun by his former sound engineer Susan Rogers before his Purple Rain superstardom: “It’s an actual bank vault, with a thick door,” she said, “in the basement of Paisley Park. When I left in 87, it was nearly full.” That was 30 years ago. Composer and Prince orchestrator Brent Fischer speculated that “over 70% of the music we’ve worked on for Prince is yet to come out.” Already able to release “in a decade what most musicians couldn’t put out in a lifetime,” Prince stored in his vaults enough to reveal him as thrice the prolific genius we knew in life.
Now that Prince has departed, the vault has been finally been opened. What’s in it? Speculation, rumor, and hoaxes abound; we could see a posthumous album a year for the next century. As they trickle out we’ll likely see more conventional, less Prince-like releasing strategies, now that he is no longer personally in control of his output. This will surely make it easier on his fans, but will also strip the music of much of its curious mystique. “A streaming skeptic before it was fashionable,” writes August Brown at the L.A. Times, and “a born futurist,” Prince excelled at “creating new distribution systems under his purview.” As an early adopter of web technology, he began giving away and selling his music and merchandise online as early as 1996, when he created his first official website, “The Dawn” (above).
Prince’s web debut happened in the midst of his pitched battle with Warner Brothers, and three years after he changed his name to the “Love Symbol.” Browsing through the history of his internet strategies allows us to see how his personalized distribution approaches and online identities evolved over the next two decades as he regained full creative independence. We can easily survey that history all in one place now, thanks to the Prince Online Museum, an archive of 16 of Prince’s various websites, each one with its own profile written in Prince’s distinctive idiom, with “testimonials from the people who were involved in creating and running them for Prince,” writes The New York Times, and “links as well as screen shots and videos” of each site, none of them currently active.
There’s even a precursor to Prince’s online world, Prince Interactive, a 1994 CD-Rom “coupled with Prince’s underground film, The Beautiful Experience.” This early attempt makes clear that “Prince was fascinated and excited by the possibilities of connecting directly 2 his audience through their computers. It would be several years until that became a reality 4 him, but the idea started here.” (See a slow video walk-through of the CD-Rom above). After 1996’s “The Dawn” came the first official online retail store, “1–800-NewFunk,” and an online lyric book, “Crystal Ball Online.” Successive sites each had a distinctive focus: on Prince’s charitable foundation with “Love 4 One Another”; on various iterations of his “NPG Music Club,” an “online distribution hub”—including the “virtual estate” of the 2003 iteration (see picture further up); and on rebranding efforts like “3121.com.”
One of the most striking of all of the various sites, “Lotusflow3r” (top) contained “vibrant 3D imagery and animation connected 2 the music” and design of the 3‑CD album set of the same name from 2009. The last entry in the archive, the “3rdEyeGirl” site from 2013, was created for Prince’s new band and “was another example of choosing 2 bypass traditional channels and go his own way.” Each of these site profiles act as “snapshots in time to experience the Web sites just like when they were active,” writes Prince Online Museum director Sam Jennings. They also showcase “his fierce independence” and desire “to connect directly with his audience without any middleman.”
With each film he made, the internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami left critics grasping for superlatives, and his death this past Monday has challenged them to find ways to fully describe the distinctive nature of his cinematic mastery. In his New Yorker obituary for Kiarostami, Richard Brody calls him “simply one of the most original and influential directors in the history of cinema,” as well as “the first Iranian filmmaker who expanded the history of cinema not merely in a sociological sense but in an artistic one,” whose “tenacious, bold, restless originality” brought the world to Iranian cinema and Iranian cinema to the world.
Brody narrated video essays on two films of Kiarostami’s. He calls 1999’s The Wind Will Carry Us (above) “the greatest of Kiarostami’s Iranian films,” a showcase for his combination of “patient and loving attention to characters drawn from daily life and to their landscapes with a precise, canny, and fierce distillation of concrete phenomena into brilliant, vertiginous, and liberating abstractions.” In 2012’s Tokyo-set Like Someone in Love, Kiarostami’s final film, he “found himself freer than usual to depict such ordinary events as a woman, her hair uncovered, in a bedroom with a man. But, facing the seemingly limitless freedom of depiction, Kiarostami ingeniously reverses the equation; starting with the title and continuing with the very first shot, he questions the difference between simulation and reality, between imitation and being.”
Audiences everywhere thrilled to Kiarostami’s treatment of those concepts, potentially abstruse in the hands of other filmmakers but never in his, when he put them at the center of 2010’s Juliette Binoche-staring Certified Copy, the first film he made outside Iran. In his video essay “The Double Life of James and Juliette: Mysteries and Perceptions in Kiarostami’s Certified Copy,” cinema scholar Peter Labuza breaks down this many-layered, multifaceted, multilingual work, in one sense a no-frills relationship drama about a man and a woman who may or may not be or have been married, and in another a “complete and total enigma” deeply concerned with “the nature and role of perception.”
Graham Bollard’s “The Minimalist Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami” focuses on the director’s aesthetic choices, such as often shooting inside cars, whose space “helps define the main character’s point of view” and repeating a shot in such a way that “we, the audience, are forced to view it in different ways that take on different meanings,” drawing visual evidence from Kiarostami’s Iranian films like Taste of Cherry, Ten, and Close-Up, from which Hamid Dabashi’s book Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future takes its name. The essay ends with a quote from it, describing Kiarostami’s work as “there to filter the world and thus strip it of all its cultures, narrativities, authorities, and ideologies” — no small accomplishment for one lifetime in cinema.
Nearly every Western youth subculture in existence eventually gets its own Hollywood film. Like most such films, 1993’s Swing Kids—which tells the story of jazz-loving German youth during the rise of the Third Reich—managed to be both inaccurate and critically reviled. Roger Ebert hated the film’s celebration of “a very small footnote to a very large historical event,” and compared the Swing Kids to “Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.” Ebert’s reaction is uncharacteristic of him; he writes critically of the film, but he also seemed to find its subject—the kids themselves—repellant.
The review prompts us to ask: Were these kids—dubbed Swingjugend by the Nazis—participating in a revolutionary act of cultural resistance, or were they no more than typical, naive teenagers who preferred to “listen to big bands than enlist in the military”? (After all, writes Ebert, “who wouldn’t?”) But the question about the Swing Kids’ political motivations may be less relevant than one about whether their pursuit of a carefree, jazz-scored lifestyle under Nazism constitutes a “small footnote” in history. Should we know and care about the Swing Kids, and if so, why?
A German site called Swingstyle compiles information about the subculture and admits that “the real Swing Kids were politically unsophisticated.” Despite being seen as a “youth problem” by Nazi authorities, they “actually cared little for contesting official policies toward Jews or other matters. They just wanted to have fun at a dark time in their country’s history, and avoid the war if possible.” Or, rather, most of them wanted to avoid joining the Hitler Youth, mandated for all young people in 1939: “We must remember the age of most swing kids was between 12 and 16 or 17.”
But as you can see in the short documentary clip at the top, the Swing Kids’ resistance to the by-now familiarly disturbing, paramilitary regimentation of German young people (see above), was in its way a radical act. “Their casual, fun-loving attitude made a mockery of Nazi control,” the documentary narrator says. They embraced what was “considered ‘degenerate music’ by Nazi ideology,” writes MessyNChic, “because it was often performed by black and Jewish musicians and promoted free love.”
We cannot assume the Swing Kids’ love of the music extended to a love for the people who made it. It’s more so the case that the Swing Kids “admired the British and American way of life,” and the free-spiritedness universally represented at the time by jazz in American and British films and records, to which German youth had some limited access. But in their battle for “self-determination and freedom,” informal groups like the Edelweiss Pirates, the Traveling Dudes, and the Navajos resisted subordination into a homogenized Aryan mass—the mechanism by which Hitler turned ordinary Germans into loyal abettors of mass murder.
Through fashion and music, the Swing Kid clubs—like the rockers or punks of the U.S. and U.K. in later decades—formed in conscious resistance to social and political conformity. The Navajos wrote the following song, for example:
Hitler’s dictates make us small, we’re yet bound in chains. But one day we’ll again walk tall, no chain can us restrain. For hard are our fists, Yes! And knives at our wrists, for youth to be free, Navajos lay siege.
The references to violence weren’t purely symbolic. Swing Kid gangs fought Hitler Youth in the streets. Some Swing Kids, writes MessyNChic, became known for “tagging public walls with anti-Nazi slogans like ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Medals for Murder!’. Throwing bricks through windows and sabotaging cars of Nazi officials… raiding military bases… derailing trains… even planning to blow up the Gestapo HQ in Cologne.” And as the educational site Music and the Holocaust documents, the Gestapo fought back “with special cruelty” against Swing Boys and Swing Girls.
In Hamburg, Swing Kids “had to endure discriminating interrogations, torture and detention.” They landed in youth concentration camps, and adult and Jewish “swing members… were deported” to death camps in Bergen-Belson, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and elsewhere. MessyNChic claims that “a file compiled by the Gestapo is said to have contained more than 3,000 names [of Swing Kids] already by the end of the 1930’s in Cologne alone. In terms of numbers, that would mean these youths represented a much larger resistance potential than any other opposition group in Germany made up by adults.”
Again, none of this organized resistance constituted an explicit political program. “The Swing Kids themselves never intended to have any political effects,” writes Swingstyle, “they did not understand politics” and “they turned their backs on the reality around them: the Jewish roundups, the death camps and the steady stream of manpower reserves disappearing into the cauldrons of Russia and France.” Swing was a means of escapism and identification with the more relaxed, permissive “paradises” of America and Britain.
Like teenagers living under any regime, Swing Kids were mainly motivated by sex and the search for a good time. But perhaps the anarchic strength of their most primal instincts made these young people some of the most effective resistance fighters against the Nazi obsession with purity and order. Their lives—choreographed to the tunes of Count Basie and Benny Goodman—were “in complete opposition to the perceived National Socialist concept of youth,” concludes Swingstyle: “To the extent that the Swing Kids assumed American ideals of personal freedom, relaxed living, and appreciation of the ‘lower races’… they were a grave threat to the upside-down philosophy of Nazism that sought to insulate Germany from the rest of the world.”
Their embrace of an international, racially-mixed culture—jazz—was itself a radical political act in Nazi Germany, even if they had no theoretical concepts of what that embrace meant for the future of their country. And their violent rejection of the Hitler Youth makes them even more compelling. It seems to me that the Swing Kids do indeed deserve a celebratory place in history—and maybe they deserve a better film as well.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
