New BBC Dramatization of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Now Streaming Free for a Limited Time

FYI: The BBC is now stream­ing a drama­ti­za­tion of Salman Rushdie’s Book­er Prize-win­ning nov­el Mid­night’s Chil­dren. This free stream will only last for a lim­it­ed time (the next 29 days). So dive in.

Here’s how the BBC briefly describes the pro­duc­tion:

To mark the 70th anniver­sary of the Par­ti­tion of India, an ambi­tious new drama­ti­za­tion of Salman Rushdie’s daz­zling nov­el of love, his­to­ry and mag­ic. Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of mid­night on 15th August 1947, at the exact moment that India and Pak­istan become sep­a­rate, inde­pen­dent nations. From that moment on, his fate is mys­te­ri­ous­ly hand­cuffed to the his­to­ry of his coun­try. The sto­ry starts with Saleem’s grand­fa­ther, Aadam, in Kash­mir in 1915. Drama­tised by Ayee­sha Menon. Star­ring Nikesh Patel, Abhin Galeya and Meera Syal.

You can find the sev­en indi­vid­ual episodes here. Each is about an hour long. Find more free lit­er­ary delights in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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!

The Case for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valuable “Deep Work” Instead, According to Computer Scientist Cal Newport

A famil­iar ding comes from your pock­et, you look up from what you’re doing and reach for the smart­phone. Before you can think, “it can wait,” you’ve dis­ap­peared into the screen like lit­tle Car­ol Anne Freel­ing in Pol­ter­geist. Tak­en by a ghost­ly pres­ence with designs upon your soul—your time, emo­tion­al well-being, cre­ativ­i­ty—Face­book. Some­one has request­ed my friend­ship! You like my video? I like you! Why, I’ve got an opin­ion about that, and that, and that, and that…. All the lit­tle per­for­ma­tive ges­tures, imprint­ed in the fin­gers and the thumbs.

Twit­ter, Snapchat, Insta­gram, Tum­blr, What­sApp, VKon­tact, Sina Wei­bo…. Just maybe, social media addic­tion is a glob­al epi­dem­ic, a col­lec­tion of emo­tion­al­ly, social­ly, and polit­i­cal­ly, tox­ic behav­iors. As Suren Rama­sub­bu reports, “social media engage­ment has been found to trig­ger three key net­works in the brain” that make us think intense­ly about our self-image and pub­lic per­cep­tion, cre­ate new neur­al path­ways, and release dopamine and oxy­tocin, which keep us com­ing back for more lit­tle red hearts, tiny thumbs-ups, and diminu­tive gold stars (good job!).

While the nature of addic­tion is a con­tro­ver­sial top­ic, it will arouse lit­tle dis­agree­ment to say that we live—as George­town Uni­ver­si­ty Com­put­er Sci­ence Pro­fes­sor Calvin New­port writes in the sub­ti­tle of his book Deep Work—in a “dis­tract­ed world.” (The full title is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World.) Newport’s pre­scrip­tion will go down less eas­i­ly. Quit, drop out, tune out, opt out, get out of the Matrix, New­port argues, more or less, in his book and his TEDx talk above. He acknowl­edges the odd­i­ty of being a “mil­len­ni­al com­put­er sci­en­tist book author, stand­ing on a TED stage” who nev­er had a social media account and urges oth­ers to give up theirs.

Any one of his over­lap­ping demo­graph­ics is like­ly to have a sig­nif­i­cant web pres­ence. Put all of them togeth­er and we expect New­port to be pitch­ing a start­up net­work to an audi­ence of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists. Even the sto­ry about why he first abstained could have made him a minor char­ac­ter in The Social Net­work. But feel­ings of pro­fes­sion­al jeal­ousy soon turned to wari­ness and alarm. “This seems dan­ger­ous,” he says, then lets us know—because we sure­ly wondered—that he’s okay. “I still have friends. I still know what’s going on in the world.” Whether you’re con­vinced he’s hap­pi­er than the rest of us poor saps is up to you.

As for the claim that we should join him in the wilder­ness of the real—his argu­ment is per­sua­sive. Social media, says New­port, is not a “fun­da­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy.” It is akin to the slot machine, an “enter­tain­ment machine,” with an insid­i­ous added dimension—the soul steal­ing. Para­phras­ing tech guru and icon­o­clast Jaron Lanier, New­port says, “these com­pa­nies offer you shiny treats in exchange for min­utes of your atten­tion and bytes of your per­son­al data, which can then be pack­aged up and sold.” But like the slot machine, the social media net­work is a “some­what unsa­vory source of enter­tain­ment” giv­en the express intent of its engi­neers to make their prod­uct “as addic­tive as pos­si­ble,” com­pa­ra­ble to what dieti­tians now call “ultra-processed foods”—all sug­ar and fat, no nutri­ents.

New­port names anoth­er objec­tion to quitting—the neces­si­ty of social media as an essen­tial busi­ness tool—then piv­ots to his book and his com­mit­ment to what he calls “deep work.” What is this? You can read the book to find out, or get a Cliff’s Notes ver­sion in Bri­an Johnson’s video above. John­son begins by con­trast­ing deep work with “shal­low work,” where we spend most of our time, “con­stant­ly respond­ing to the lat­est and loud­est email and push noti­fi­ca­tion for social media, or text mes­sages or phone ring­ing, what­ev­er.”

While we may get lit­tle endor­phin boosts from all of this heav­i­ly medi­at­ed social activ­i­ty, we pay a high price in stress, anx­i­ety, and lost time in our per­son­al, pro­fes­sion­al, and cre­ative lives. The research on over­work and dis­trac­tion sup­ports New­port’s con­clu­sions. The real rewards come from deep work, he argues, that which we do when we have total focus and emo­tion­al invest­ment in a project. With­out get­ting too spe­cif­ic, such work, New­port says, is not only per­son­al­ly ful­fill­ing, but valu­able “in a 21st cen­tu­ry econ­o­my” for its rar­i­ty.

Social media, on the oth­er hand, he claims, con­tributes lit­tle to our work lives. And as you (or maybe it’s me) scan the open social media tabs in your over­loaded brows­er, and tune in to the clut­tered state of your mind, you might find your­self agree­ing with his hereti­cal propo­si­tion. You might even share his talk on social media. Or decide to fol­low us on Face­book and/or Twit­ter.

To delve fur­ther into New­port’s think­ing, see his books: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World and Dig­i­tal Min­i­mal­ism: Choos­ing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Both books are also avail­able in audio for­mat on Audible.com. Sign up for a free tri­al here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Artist Draws 9 Portraits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Experiments to Turn LSD into a “Creativity Pill”

LSD was first syn­the­sized in 1938 by chemist Albert Hoff­man in a Swiss lab­o­ra­to­ry but only attained infamy almost two decades lat­er, when it became part of a series of gov­ern­ment exper­i­ments. At the same time, a UC Irvine psy­chi­a­trist, Oscar Janiger (“Oz” to his friends), con­duct­ed his own stud­ies under very dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. “Unlike most researchers, Janiger want­ed to cre­ate a ‘nat­ur­al’ set­ting,” writes Brandy Doyle for MAPS (the Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­che­del­ic Stud­ies). He rea­soned that “there was noth­ing espe­cial­ly neu­tral about a lab­o­ra­to­ry or hos­pi­tal room,” so he “rent­ed a house out­side of LA, in which his sub­jects could have a rel­a­tive­ly non-direct­ed expe­ri­ence in a sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment.”

Janiger want­ed his sub­jects to make cre­ative dis­cov­er­ies in a state of height­ened con­scious­ness. The study sought, he wrote, to “illu­mi­nate the phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal nature of the LSD expe­ri­ence,” to see whether the drug could effec­tive­ly be turned into a cre­ativ­i­ty pill. He found, over a peri­od last­ing from 1954 to 1962 (when the exper­i­ments were ter­mi­nat­ed), that among his approx­i­mate­ly 900 sub­jects, those who were in ther­a­py “had a high rate of pos­i­tive response,” but those not in ther­a­py “found the expe­ri­ence much less pleas­ant.” Janiger’s find­ings have con­tributed to the research that orga­ni­za­tions like MAPS have done on psy­choac­tive drugs in ther­a­peu­tic set­tings. The exper­i­ments also pro­duced a body of art­work made by study par­tic­i­pants on acid.

Janiger invit­ed over 100 pro­fes­sion­al artists into the study and had them pro­duce over 250 paint­ings and draw­ings. The series of eight draw­ings you see here most like­ly came from one of those artists (though “the records of the iden­ti­ty of the prin­ci­ple researcher have been lost,” writes Live­Science). In the psych-rock-scored video at the top see the pro­gres­sion of increas­ing­ly abstract draw­ings the artist made over the course of his 8‑hour trip. He report­ed on his per­cep­tions and sen­sa­tions through­out the expe­ri­ence, not­ing, at what seems to be the drug’s peak moment at 2.5 and 3 hours in, “I feel that my con­scious­ness is sit­u­at­ed in the part of my body that’s active—my hand, my elbow, my tongue…. I am… every­thing is… changed… they’re call­ing… your face… inter­wo­ven… who is….”

Trip­py, but there’s much more to the exper­i­ment than its imme­di­ate effects on artists’ brains and sketch­es. As Janiger’s col­league Mar­lene Dobkin de Rios writes in her defin­i­tive book on his work, “all of the artists who par­tic­i­pat­ed in Janiger’s project said that LSD not only rad­i­cal­ly changed their style but also gave them new depths to under­stand the use of col­or, form, light, or the way these things are viewed in a frame of ref­er­ence. Their art, they claimed, changed its essen­tial char­ac­ter as a con­se­quence of their expe­ri­ences.” Psy­chol­o­gist Stan­ley Kripp­n­er made sim­i­lar dis­cov­er­ies, and “defined the term psy­che­del­ic artist” to describe those who, as in Janiger’s stud­ies “gained a far greater insight into the nature of art and the aes­thet­ic idea,” Dobkin de Rios writes.

Artis­tic productions—paintings, poems, sketch­es, and writ­ings that stemmed from the experience—often show a rad­i­cal depar­ture from the artist’s cus­tom­ary mode of expres­sion… the artists’ gen­er­al opin­ion was that their work became more expres­sion­is­tic and demon­strat­ed a vast­ly greater degree of free­dom and orig­i­nal­i­ty.

The work of the unknown artist here takes on an almost mys­ti­cal qual­i­ty after a while. The project began “serendip­i­tous­ly” when one of Janiger’s vol­un­teers in 1954 insist­ed on being able to draw dur­ing the dos­ing. “After his LSD expe­ri­ence,” writes Dobkin de Rios, “the artist was very emphat­ic that it would be most reveal­ing to allow oth­er artists to go through this process of per­cep­tu­al change.” Janiger was con­vinced, as were many of his more famous test sub­jects.

Janiger report­ed­ly intro­duced LSD to Cary Grant, Anais Nin, Jack Nichol­son, and Aldous Hux­ley dur­ing guid­ed ther­a­py ses­sions. Still, he is not near­ly as well-known as oth­er LSD pio­neers like Ken Kesey and Tim­o­thy Leary, in part because, writes the psy­choac­tive research site Erowid, “his data remained large­ly unpub­lished dur­ing his life­time,” and he was not him­self an artist or media per­son­al­i­ty (though he was a cousin of Allen Gins­berg).

Janiger not only changed the con­scious­ness of unnamed and famous artists with LSD, but also exper­i­ment­ed with DMT with Alan Watts and fel­low psy­chi­a­trist Humphry Osmond (who coined the word “psy­che­del­ic”), and con­duct­ed research on pey­ote with Dobkin de Rios. To a great degree, we have him to thank (or blame) for the explo­sion of psy­che­del­ic art and phi­los­o­phy that flowed out of the ear­ly six­ties and indeli­bly changed the cul­ture. At Live­Science, you can see a slideshow of these draw­ings with com­men­tary from Yale physi­cian Andrew Sewell on what might be hap­pen­ing in the trip­ping artist’s brain.

Note: IAI Acad­e­my has just released a short course called The Sci­ence of Psy­che­delics. You can enroll in it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage Shows US and British Sol­diers Get­ting Dosed with LSD in Gov­ern­ment-Spon­sored Tests (1958 + 1964)

Hofmann’s Potion: 2002 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Harvard Course on Positive Psychology: Watch 30 Lectures from the University’s Extremely Popular Course

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.”

If you’re inter­est­ed in delv­ing deep­er into Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy, we’d rec­om­mend Tal Ben-Sha­har’s books: Hap­pi­er: Learn the Secrets to Dai­ly Joy and Last­ing Ful­fill­ment and Short Cuts to Hap­pi­ness: Life-Chang­ing Lessons from My Bar­ber. The same goes for read­ing the works of Mar­tin Selig­man, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia pro­fes­sor who effec­tive­ly invent­ed the field. You can also take free cours­es on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy. Just head over to our col­lec­tion of Free Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A Crash Course on Psy­chol­o­gy: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Hap­pi­ness Revealed by a 75-Year Har­vard Study

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Download 400,000 Free Classical Musical Scores & 46,000 Free Classical Recordings from the International Music Score Library Project

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Free Music from 150+ Clas­si­cal Com­posers, Cour­tesy of Musopen.org

Free: Down­load 500+ Rare Music Man­u­scripts by Mozart, Bach, Chopin & Oth­er Com­posers from the Mor­gan Library

A Big Bach Down­load: All of Bach’s Organ Works for Free

The Library of Con­gress Makes 25 Mil­lion Records From Its Cat­a­log Free to Down­load

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How Doors Open onto Philosophical Mysteries in Robert Bresson’s Films: A Short Video Essay by Kogonada

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.

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:

Video Essay­ist Kog­o­na­da Makes His Own Acclaimed Fea­ture Film: Watch His Trib­utes to Its Inspi­ra­tions Like Ozu, Lin­klater & Mal­ick

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

How Richard Lin­klater (Slack­erDazed and Con­fusedBoy­hood) Tells Sto­ries with Time: Six Video Essays

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Stream 35 Hours of Classic Blues, Folk, & Bluegrass Recordings from Smithsonian Folkways: 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie & More

Image of Woody Guthrie by Al Aumuller, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 17,000+ Tra­di­tion­al Folk & Blues Songs Curat­ed by the Great Musi­col­o­gist Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Hous­es Over 17,400 Folk Record­ings From 1946 to the 1990s

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Woody Guthrie at 100: Cel­e­brate His Amaz­ing Life with a BBC Film

Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing the Bawdy Prison Blues Song “Uncle Bud” (1940)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

An Animated Look at Vladimir Nabokov’s Passion for Butterfly Collecting: “Literature & Butterflies Are the Two Sweetest Passions Known to Man”

Lit­er­a­ture and but­ter­flies are the two sweet­est pas­sions known to man. — Vladimir Nabokov

A 1941 fam­i­ly road trip along Route 66 plant­ed the seeds for Vladimir Nabokov’s nov­el Loli­ta.

It also enriched the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry’s but­ter­fly col­lec­tion by some 300 North Amer­i­can spec­i­mens.

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.

But­ter­flies remained a life­long obses­sion for the author. He served for six years as cura­tor of Harvard’s Muse­um of Com­par­a­tive Zoology’s Lep­i­doptera wing and devel­oped an evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry relat­ed to his study of the Poly­omma­tus blues Green men­tions in the 360° video above. (Be aware, the 360° fea­ture will not work in Safari).

He also wooed his wife, Vera, by mak­ing charm­ing and keen­ly observed draw­ings of but­ter­flies for her.

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.

- Loli­ta, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

Track Nabokov’s cross-coun­try but­ter­fly col­lect­ing trip, cour­tesy of the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delight­ful But­ter­fly Draw­ings

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Great­est (and Most Over­rat­ed) Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Take Vladimir Nabokov’s Quiz to See If You’re a Good Reader–The Same One He Gave to His Stu­dents

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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