The 10 Most Depressing Radiohead Songs According to Data Science: Hear the Songs That Ranked Highest in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

in Music | June 20th, 2017

One of my favorite music-themed com­e­dy sketch­es of recent years fea­tures a sup­port group of Radio­head fans flum­moxed and dis­ap­point­ed by the band’s post-Ok Com­put­er out­put. The sce­nario trades on the per­plex­i­ty that met Radio­head­’s abrupt change of musi­cal direc­tion with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Kid A as well as on the fact that Radio­head fans tend toward, well… if not PTSD or severe mood dis­or­ders, at least a height­ened propen­si­ty for gen­er­al­ized depres­sion.

“Much of Radiohead’s music is unde­ni­ably sad,” writes Ana­lyt­ics Spe­cial­ist and Radio­head fan Char­lie Thomp­son. Rather than play some­thing “less depress­ing,” how­ev­er, as many an acquain­tance has asked him over the years, Thomp­son decid­ed “to quan­ti­fy that sad­ness, con­clud­ing in a data-dri­ven deter­mi­na­tion of their most depress­ing song.”

Now, pure­ly sub­jec­tive­ly, I’d place “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” in the top spot, fol­lowed close­ly by Amne­sia’s “Pyra­mid Song.” But my own asso­ci­a­tions with these songs are per­son­al and per­haps some­what arbi­trary. I might make a case for them based on lyri­cal inter­pre­ta­tions, musi­cal arrange­ment, and instru­men­ta­tion. But the argu­ment would still large­ly depend on mat­ters of taste and accul­tur­a­tion.

Thomp­son, on the oth­er hand, believes in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment.” To that end, he cre­at­ed a “gloom index,” which he used to mea­sure each song in the band’s cat­a­log. Rather than lis­ten­ing to them all, one after anoth­er, he relied on data from two online ser­vices, first pulling “detailed audio sta­tis­tics” from Spotify’s Web API. One met­ric in par­tic­u­lar, called “valence,” mea­sures a song’s “pos­i­tiv­i­ty.” These scores pro­vide an index “of how sad a song sounds from a musi­cal per­spec­tive.” (It’s not entire­ly clear what the cri­te­ria are for these scores).

Next, Thomp­son used the Genius Lyrics API to exam­ine “lyri­cal den­si­ty,” specif­i­cal­ly the con­cen­tra­tion of “sad words” in any giv­en song. To com­bine these two mea­sures, he leaned on an analy­sis by a fel­low data sci­en­tist and blog­ger, Myles Har­ri­son. You can see his result­ing for­mu­la for the “Gloom Index” above, and if you under­stand the pro­gram­ing lan­guage R, you can see exam­ples of his analy­sis at his blog, RChar­lie. (Read a less data-laden sum­ma­ry of Thompson’s study at the ana­lyt­ics blog Rev­o­lu­tions.) Thomp­son also plot­ted sad­ness by album, in the inter­ac­tive graph fur­ther up.

So, which song rat­ed high­est on the “Gloom Scale”? Well, it’s “True Love Waits” from their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool (hear a live acoustic ver­sion up above.). It’s a damned sad song, I’ll grant, as are the nine run­ners-up, all of which you can hear in the YouTube and Spo­ti­fy playlists above). “Pyra­mid Song” appears at num­ber 5, but “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” doesn’t even rank in the top ten. From a pure­ly sub­jec­tive stand­point, this makes me sus­pi­cious of the whole oper­a­tion. But you tell us, read­ers, what do you think of Thomp­son’s exper­i­ment in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment” in music?

Here’s the top 10:

1. True Love Waits
2. Give Up The Ghost
3. Motion Pic­ture Sound­track
4. Let Down
5. Pyra­mid Song
6. Exit Music (For a Film)
7. Dol­lars & Cents
8. High And Dry
9. Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier …
10. Video­tape

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s “Creep” Played on the Gayageum, a Kore­an Instru­ment Dat­ing Back to the 6th Cen­tu­ry

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

A Free Course on Machine Learn­ing & Data Sci­ence from Cal­tech

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

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When Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman Joined the Grateful Dead Onstage for Some Epic Improvisational Jams: Hear a 1993 Recording

in Music | June 20th, 2017

The influ­ence of mod­ern jazz on clas­sic rock extends far beyond too-cool pos­es and too many drugs. In the 1960s, writes Jeff Fitzger­ald at All About Jazz, “a few play­ers were ven­tur­ing beyond the sacred three-chord trin­i­ty and devel­op­ing some seri­ous chops.” John Coltrane’s “extend­ed impro­vi­sa­tions on his unlike­ly top-forty hit ver­sion of ‘My Favorite Things’” gets cred­it for inspir­ing “not only long-form rock hits like The Doors’ sev­en-minute ‘Light My Fire’ and CCR’s eleven-minute “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ but lat­er jam bands from the Grate­ful Dead to Phish.” But of course, the “break­through moment for Rock-Jazz rela­tions” arrived when Miles Davis “devel­oped a Jazz/Rock hybrid called Fusion.”

Davis’ Bitch­es Brew had much crossover appeal, espe­cial­ly to one of those afore­men­tioned jam bands, the Dead, who—a month after the album’s release—invited Davis and his elec­tric band to open for them at the Fill­more West. (Read about, and lis­ten to, that unique event here.)

The pair­ing made sense not only because Davis’ long-form grooves hit many of the same psy­che­del­ic musi­cal recep­tors as the Dead’s extend­ed free-form ses­sions, but also because Jer­ry Gar­cia was some­thing of a jazz-head. Espe­cial­ly when it came to free jazz pio­neer and inven­tor of “Har­molod­ics,” Ornette Cole­man.

“The gui­tarist had been a long time devo­tee” of Cole­man, writes Ben Djarum at Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, and con­tributed his dis­tinc­tive play­ing to three tracks on Coleman’s 1988 album Vir­gin Beau­ty (hear them togeth­er on “Desert Play­ers” above). Garcia’s devo­tion marks him as a true rock con­nois­seur of avant-garde jazz. (Per­haps the only oth­er Cole­man fans in the rock world as indebt­ed to his influ­ence are the also-leg­en­dar­i­ly-drug-fueled indie exper­i­men­tal­ists Roy­al Trux.) It turns out the appre­ci­a­tion was mutu­al. “Cole­man him­self was aware of musi­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Dead and his own group, Prime Time,” which also had two drum­mers.

“Each empha­sizes both melody and look-Ma-no-lim­its impro­vi­sa­tion,” wrote David Fricke in a 1989 Rolling Stone arti­cle about “jazz’s eter­nal icon­o­clast find­ing a new audi­ence” through his asso­ci­a­tion with Gar­cia and com­pa­ny.  Upon wit­ness­ing the Dead play Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1987, and awed by the fans’ ulti­mate ded­i­ca­tion, Cole­man found him­self think­ing, “’Well, we could be friends here.’ Because if these peo­ple here could be into this, they could dig what we’re doing.” It would take six more years, but Cole­man final­ly played with the Dead in 1993 at their annu­al Mar­di Gras cel­e­bra­tion at the Oak­land Col­i­se­um. Where the Davis/Dead match-up 26 years ear­li­er had been a dip­tych, show­cas­ing the strengths of each artist by con­trast with the oth­er, the Coleman/Dead pair­ing was a true col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Not only did Coleman’s Prime Time open the show, but the sax­o­phon­ist joined the Dead onstage dur­ing their sec­ond set—in the midst of an open jam called “Space” (see in playlist below). His horn became a promi­nent­ly inte­grat­ed fea­ture of what one fan remem­bered as “sin­gu­lar­ly the most intense thing I ever wit­nessed.” Such exag­ger­a­tion from Dead­heads seems rou­tine, and sad­ly we have no video, nor could it ever repli­cate the expe­ri­ence. But some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar live record­ings of the entire Dead set may bear out the extreme­ly high praise. “The Oth­er One,” at the top of the post, first stretch­es out into very Cole­man-like ter­ri­to­ry, and the band keeps up beau­ti­ful­ly. After the verse kicks in halfway through, the song soon erupts into “walls of sound, screams, melt­downs, explo­sions….”

“The Oth­er One,” was “a wise choice,” writes Oliv­er Trager in his The Amer­i­can Book of the Dead, “as its rhythm-based pow­er allowed Cole­man to con­tin­ue his broad brush strokes.” After a “lan­guorous” ren­di­tion of “Stel­la Blue,” the penul­ti­mate tune, “Turn on Your Love Light,” above, “pro­vid­ed Cole­man with the per­fect show-end­ing rave­up to let loose in the fash­ion of an old­time, down-home Texas horn honker.” In an inter­view lat­er that same year, Gar­cia called Cole­man “a won­der­ful mod­el for a guy who’s done what we did, in the sense of cre­at­ing his own real­i­ty of what music is and how you sur­vive with­in it. He’s a high-integri­ty kind of per­son and just a won­der­ful man.” As for the night itself, Gar­cia remarked:

It was such a hoot to hear him play total­ly Ornette and total­ly Grate­ful Dead with­out com­pro­mis­ing either one of them. Pret­ty incred­i­ble. Good musi­cians don’t do that kind of char­ac­ter­iz­ing music. like this is this kind of music and that is that kind of thing.

Cole­man should be remem­bered as one of the most refined exam­ples of such a musi­cian for his cham­pi­oning what he called “Har­molod­ic Democ­ra­cy.” You can hear the full Grate­ful Dead set from that Feb­ru­ary, 1993 Mar­di Gras con­cert at Archive.org. The night went so well, notes Trager, that “the musi­cians repeat­ed the for­mu­la with sim­i­lar results in Decem­ber 1993 run­ning through a near­ly iden­ti­cal song list at the Sports Are­na in Los Ange­les.” One can only imag­ine the  audi­ence was equal­ly mes­mer­ized.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

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

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Behold The Paintings of David Bowie: Neo-Expressionist Self Portraits, Illustrations of Iggy Pop, and Much More

in Art | June 19th, 2017

Would you believe that David Bowie, era-tran­scend­ing pop star, actor, and avid read­er, found not just the time to build a for­mi­da­ble art col­lec­tion (auc­tioned off for $41 mil­lion last year at Sothe­by’s), but to do quite a few paint­ings of his own? Even Bowie fans who know only his music will have seen one of those paint­ings, a self-por­trait which made the cov­er of his 1995 album Out­side. That same year he had his first show as a painter, “New Afro/Pagan and Work: 1975–1995,” at The Gallery, Cork Street.

“David Bowie paint­ings show a knowl­edge­able approach to art, influ­enced by Frank Auer­bach, David Bomberg, Fran­cis Bacon, Fran­cis Picabia…” says Very Pri­vate Gallery in a post on 25 of those works of art, adding that his style “also shows a touch of post-mod­ernism, more pre­cise­ly neo-expres­sion­ism move­ment.”

Com­pris­ing can­vas­es paint­ed between 1976 and 1996, the selec­tions include not just Bowie’s self-por­traits but depic­tions of such friends and asso­ciates as Iggy Pop, paint­ed in Berlin in 1978 just above, and pianist Mike Gar­son.

Bowieol­o­gists rec­og­nize his “Berlin era” in the late 1970s, which pro­duced the albums Low, Lodger, and “Heroes” (all to vary­ing degrees involv­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Bri­an Eno) as an espe­cial­ly fruit­ful peri­od of his musi­cal career. But the gal­leries and muse­ums of the Ger­man cap­i­tal also wit­nessed Bowie’s first immer­sion into the world of visu­al art, both as an enthu­si­ast and as a cre­ator. The city even found its way into some of his paint­ings, such as 1977’s Child in Berlin above. “Heroes”, the final album of Bowie’s “Berlin tril­o­gy,” even inspired a bit of Bowie art­work, the self-por­trait sketch below mod­eled on the record’s famous cov­er pho­to by Masayoshi Suki­ta, itself inspired by Erich Heck­el’s 1917 paint­ing Roquairol.

But just as Bowie the musi­cian and per­former could­n’t stop seek­ing out and incor­po­rat­ing new influ­ences, so did Bowie the painter’s atten­tion con­tin­u­al­ly turn to new sub­ject mat­ter, includ­ing the mythol­o­gy of the tribes inhab­it­ing present-day South Africa. At Very Pri­vate Gallery you can see not just more of his fin­ished work but more of his sketch­es, includ­ing stud­ies of Hunger City, the the­mat­ic set­ting of his elab­o­rate Dia­mond Dogs tour as well as for a film planned, but nev­er actu­al­ly shot, in the mid-1970s. Despite the con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence in medi­um between music and images, Bowie’s visu­al work still comes across clear­ly as Bowie’s work — espe­cial­ly a face drawn, true to ele­gant­ly nos­tal­gic form, on a pack of Gitanes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

96 Draw­ings of David Bowie by the “World’s Best Com­ic Artists”: Michel Gondry, Kate Beat­on & More

The Art from David Bowie’s Final Album, Black­star, is Now Free for Fans to Down­load and Reuse

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Bowie Lists His 25 Favorite LPs in His Record Col­lec­tion: Stream Most of Them Free Online

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspir­ing Artists: “Go a Lit­tle Out of Your Depth,” “Nev­er Ful­fill Oth­er People’s Expec­ta­tions”

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.

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Watch a Star Get Devoured by a Supermassive Black Hole

in Astronomy | June 19th, 2017

Like­ly, in a moment of qui­et down­time, you’ve won­dered: Just what would hap­pen if a star, burn­ing bright in the sky, wan­dered by a black hole? What would that meet­ing look like? What kinds of cos­mic things would go down?

Now, thanks to an artis­tic ren­der­ing made avail­able by NASA, you don’t have to leave much to imag­i­na­tion. Above, watch a star stray a lit­tle too close to a black hole and get shred­ded apart by “tidal dis­rup­tions,” caus­ing some stel­lar debris to get “flung out­ward at high speed while the rest falls toward the black hole.”

This ren­der­ing isn’t the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s based on obser­va­tions gleaned from “an opti­cal search by the All-Sky Auto­mat­ed Sur­vey for Super­novae (ASAS-SN) in Novem­ber 2014.” The “tidal dis­rup­tions” wit­nessed above, writes NASA, “occurred near a super­mas­sive black hole esti­mat­ed to weigh a few mil­lion times the mass of the sun in the cen­ter of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies about 290 mil­lion light-years away.” It’s a sight to behold.

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:

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

Free NASA eBook The­o­rizes How We Will Com­mu­ni­cate with Aliens

NASA Archive Col­lects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Plan­et

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Joni Mitchell Sings an Achingly Pretty Version of “Both Sides Now” on the Mama Cass TV Show (1969)

in Music, Television, Video - Arts & Culture | June 19th, 2017

“Records can be a bad trip. The audi­ence can play your mis­takes over and over. In a tele­vi­sion spe­cial they see you once and you work hard to make sure they’re see­ing you at your best.” 

—Mama Cass Elliot, The Argus

It’s hard to imag­ine any­one blessed with Mama Cass’ gold­en pipes being embar­rassed by a record­ed per­for­mance. A live gig, yes, though, celebri­ties of her era were sub­ject­ed to far few­er wit­ness­es.

The Inter­net was an undream­able lit­tle dream in 1969, when the sole episode of The Mama Cass Tele­vi­sion Show aired. The for­mer singer of the Mamas and the Papas died five years lat­er, pre­sum­ably unaware that future gen­er­a­tions would have knowl­edge of, let alone access to, her failed pilot.

She may have described her vari­ety show as “low key” to the Fre­mont, Cal­i­for­nia Argus, but the guest list was padded with high wattage friends, includ­ing come­di­an Bud­dy Hack­ett, and singers Mary Tra­vers and John Sebas­t­ian. Joni Mitchell, above, deliv­ered an above-reproach per­for­mance of “Both Sides Now.”

Lat­er, Mitchell and Tra­vers joined their host­ess for the heart­felt ren­di­tion of “I Shall Be Released” below, a per­for­mance that is only slight­ly marred by Elliot’s insane cos­tume and an unnec­es­sar­i­ly syrupy back­ing arrange­ment of strings and reeds.

Those who can’t live with­out see­ing the com­plete show can pur­chase DVDs online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Video of Joni Mitchell Per­form­ing in 1965 — Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell

James Tay­lor and Joni Mitchell, Live and Togeth­er (1970)

Watch 1970s Ani­ma­tions of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Son­ny & Cher Show

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She’ll is appear­ing onstage in New York City through June 26 in Paul David Young’s polit­i­cal satire, Faust 3. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The CIA Assesses the Power of French Post-Modern Philosophers: Read a Newly Declassified CIA Report from 1985

in History, Philosophy, Politics | June 16th, 2017

We might assume that phi­los­o­phy is an ivory tow­er dis­ci­pline that has lit­tle effect on the unlove­ly oper­a­tions of gov­ern­ment, dri­ven as they are by the con­cerns of mid­dle class wal­lets, upper class stock port­fo­lios, and the ever-present prob­lem of pover­ty. But we would be wrong. In times when pres­i­dents, cab­i­net mem­bers, or sen­a­tors have been thought­ful and well-read, the ideas of thinkers like Fran­cis Fukuya­ma, Leo Strauss, Jur­gen Haber­mas, and John Rawls—a favorite of the pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent—have exer­cised con­sid­er­able sway. Few philoso­phers have been as his­tor­i­cal­ly influ­en­tial as the Ger­man thinker Carl Schmitt, though in a thor­ough­ly destruc­tive way. Then there’s John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Aris­to­tle… even Socrates, who made him­self a thorn in the side of the pow­er­ful.

But when it comes to the most­ly French school of thinkers we asso­ciate with postmodernism—Michel Fou­cault, Roland Barthes, the Jacques Lacan and Der­ri­da, and many others—such influ­ence is far less direct. The work of these writ­ers has been often dis­missed as friv­o­lous and incon­se­quen­tial, speak­ing a lan­guage no one under­stands to out of touch coastal elites on the left edge of the spec­trum. Per­haps this is so in the Unit­ed States, where pow­er is often the­o­rized but rarely rad­i­cal­ly cri­tiqued in main­stream pub­li­ca­tions. But it has not been so in France. At least not accord­ing to the CIA, who close­ly mon­i­tored the effects of French phi­los­o­phy on the coun­try’s domes­tic and for­eign pol­i­cy dur­ing their long-run­ning cul­ture war against Com­mu­nism and “anti-Amer­i­can­ism,” and who, in 1985, com­piled a research paper to doc­u­ment their inves­ti­ga­tions. (See a sam­ple page above.)

Recent­ly made avail­able to the pub­lic in a “san­i­tized copy” through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request, the doc­u­ment, titled “France: Defec­tion of the Left­ist Intel­lec­tu­als,” shows itself sur­pris­ing­ly approv­ing of the polit­i­cal direc­tion post-struc­tural­ist thinkers had tak­en. ga**************@vi*******.edu&xsl=bio_long”>Villanova Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy and author of Rad­i­cal His­to­ry and the Pol­i­tics of Art Gabriel Rock­hill sum­ma­rizes the tenor of the agency’s assess­ment in the L.A. Review of Books’ Philo­soph­i­cal Salon:

…the under­cov­er cul­tur­al war­riors applaud what they see as a dou­ble move­ment that has con­tributed to the intel­li­gentsia shift­ing its crit­i­cal focus away from the US and toward the USSR. On the left, there was a grad­ual intel­lec­tu­al dis­af­fec­tion with Stal­in­ism and Marx­ism, a pro­gres­sive with­draw­al of rad­i­cal intel­lec­tu­als from pub­lic debate, and a the­o­ret­i­cal move away from social­ism and the social­ist par­ty. Fur­ther to the right, the ide­o­log­i­cal oppor­tunists referred to as the New Philoso­phers and the New Right intel­lec­tu­als launched a high-pro­file media smear cam­paign against Marx­ism.

The “spir­it of anti-Marx­ism and anti-Sovi­etism,” write the agents in their report, “will make it dif­fi­cult for any­one to mobi­lize sig­nif­i­cant intel­lec­tu­al oppo­si­tion to US poli­cies.” The influ­ence of “New Left intel­lec­tu­als” over French cul­ture and gov­ern­ment was such, they sur­mised, that “Pres­i­dent [Fran­cois] Mitterrand’s notable cool­ness toward Moscow derives, at least in part, from this per­va­sive atti­tude.”

These obser­va­tions stand in con­trast to the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of “left-lean­ing intel­lec­tu­als of the imme­di­ate post­war peri­od,” writes Rock­hill, who “had been open­ly crit­i­cal of US impe­ri­al­ism” and active­ly worked against the machi­na­tions of Amer­i­can oper­a­tives. Jean-Paul Sartre even played a role in “blow­ing the cov­er of the CIA sta­tion offi­cer in Paris and dozens of under­cov­er oper­a­tives,” and as a result was “close­ly mon­i­tored by the Agency and con­sid­ered a very seri­ous prob­lem.” By the mid-eight­ies, the Agency stat­ed, tri­umphant­ly, “there are no more Sartres, no more Gides.” The “last clique of Com­mu­nist savants,” they write, “came under fire from their for­mer pro­teges, but none had any stom­ach for fight­ing a rear­guard defense of Marx­ism.” As such, the late Cold War peri­od saw a “broad­er retreat from ide­ol­o­gy among intel­lec­tu­als of all polit­i­cal col­ors.”

A cer­tain weari­ness had tak­en hold, brought about by the inde­fen­si­ble total­i­tar­i­an abus­es of the “cult of Stal­in­ism” and the seem­ing inescapa­bil­i­ty of the Wash­ing­ton Con­sen­sus and the multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ratism engen­dered by it. By the time of Communism’s col­lapse, U.S. philoso­phers waxed apoc­a­lyp­tic, even as they cel­e­brat­ed the tri­umph of what Fran­cis Fukuya­ma called “lib­er­al democ­ra­cy” over social­ism. Fukuyama’s book The End of His­to­ry and the Last Man made its star­tling the­sis plain in the title. There would be no more rev­o­lu­tions. Har­vard thinker Samuel Hunt­ing­ton declared it the era of “endism,” amidst a rash of hyper­bol­ic argu­ments about “the end of art,” the “end of nature,” and so on. And, in France, in the years just pri­or to the fall of the Berlin wall, the pre­vi­ous­ly vig­or­ous philo­soph­i­cal left, the CIA believed, had “suc­cumbed to a kind of list­less­ness.”

While the agency cred­it­ed the dif­fi­dence of post-struc­tural­ist philoso­phers with sway­ing pop­u­lar opin­ion away from social­ism and “hard­en­ing pub­lic atti­tudes toward Marx­ism and the Sovi­et Union,” it also wrote that “their influ­ence appears to be wan­ing, and they are unlike­ly to have much direct impact on polit­i­cal affairs any time soon.” Is this true? If we take seri­ous­ly crit­ics of so-called “Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics,” the answer is a resound­ing No. As those who close­ly iden­ti­fy post­mod­ern phi­los­o­phy with sev­er­al recent waves of left­ist thought and activism might argue, the CIA was short­sight­ed in its con­clu­sions. Per­haps, bound to a Manichean view fos­tered by decades of Cold War maneu­ver­ing, they could not con­ceive of a pol­i­tics that opposed both Amer­i­can and Sovi­et empire at once.

And yet, the retreat from ide­ol­o­gy was hard­ly a retreat from pol­i­tics. We might say, over thir­ty years since this curi­ous research essay cir­cu­lat­ed among intel­li­gence gath­er­ers, that con­cepts like Foucault’s biopow­er or Derrida’s skep­ti­cal inter­ro­ga­tions of iden­ti­ty have more cur­ren­cy and rel­e­vance than ever, even if we don’t always under­stand, or read, their work. But while the agency may not have fore­seen the per­va­sive impact of post­mod­ern thought, they nev­er dis­missed it as obscu­ran­tist or incon­se­quen­tial sophistry. Their new­ly-released report, writes Rock­hill, “should be a cogent reminder that if some pre­sume that intel­lec­tu­als are pow­er­less, and that our polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions do not mat­ter, the orga­ni­za­tion that has been one of the most potent pow­er bro­kers in con­tem­po­rary world pol­i­tics does not agree.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

12 Mil­lion Declas­si­fied CIA Doc­u­ments Now Free Online: Secret Tun­nels, UFOs, Psy­chic Exper­i­ments & More

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self (UC Berke­ley, 1980–1983)

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

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

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The First Bloomsday: See Dublin’s Literati Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunken Fashion (1954)

in History, Literature | June 16th, 2017

Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse of the very first Blooms­day cel­e­bra­tion, filmed in Dublin in 1954.

The footage shows the great Irish comedic writer Bri­an O’Nolan, bet­ter known by his pen name Flann O’Brien, appear­ing very drunk as he sets off with two oth­er renowned post-war Irish writ­ers, Patrick Kavanagh and Antho­ny Cronin, and a cousin of James Joyce, a den­tist named Tom Joyce, on a pil­grim­age to vis­it the sites in James Joyce’s epic nov­el Ulysses.

The footage was tak­en by John Ryan, an artist, pub­lish­er and pub own­er who orga­nized the event. The idea was to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom and oth­er char­ac­ters from the nov­el, but as Peter Costel­lo and Peter van de Kamp explain in this humor­ous pas­sage from their book, Flann O’Brien: An Illus­trat­ed Biog­ra­phy, things began to go awry right from the start:

The date was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morn­ing, Bri­an O’Nolan was already drunk.

This day was the fifti­eth anniver­sary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wan­der­ings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immor­talised in Ulysses.

To mark this occa­sion a small group of Dublin literati had gath­ered at the Sandy­cove home of Michael Scott, a well-known archi­tect, just below the Martel­lo tow­er in which the open­ing scene of Joyce’s nov­el is set. They planned to trav­el round the city through the day, vis­it­ing in turn the scenes of the nov­el, end­ing at night in what had once been the broth­el quar­ter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Night­town.

Sad­ly, no-one expect­ed O’Nolan to be sober. By rep­u­ta­tion, if not by sight, every­one in Dublin knew Bri­an O’Nolan, oth­er­wise Myles na Gopaleen, the writer of the Cruiskeen Lawn col­umn in the Irish Times. A few knew that under the name of Flann O’Brien, he had writ­ten in his youth a now near­ly for­got­ten nov­el, At Swim-Two-Birds. See­ing him about the city, many must have won­dered how a man with such extreme drink­ing habits, even for the city of Dublin, could have sus­tained a career as a writer.

As was his cus­tom, he had been drink­ing that morn­ing in the pubs around the Cat­tle Mar­ket, where cus­tomers, sup­pos­ed­ly about their law­ful busi­ness, would be served from 7:30 in the morn­ing. Now retired from the Civ­il Ser­vice, on grounds of “ill-health”, he was earn­ing his liv­ing as a free-lance jour­nal­ist, writ­ing not only for the Irish Times, but for oth­er papers and mag­a­zines under sev­er­al pen-names. He need­ed to write for mon­ey as his pen­sion was a tiny one. But this left lit­tle time for more cre­ative work. In fact, O’Nolan no longer felt the urge to write oth­er nov­els.

The rest of the par­ty, that first Blooms­day, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young crit­ic Antho­ny Cronin, a den­tist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin rep­re­sent­ed the fam­i­ly inter­est, and John Ryan, the painter and busi­ness­man who owned and edit­ed the lit­er­ary mag­a­zine Envoy. The idea of the Blooms­day cel­e­bra­tion had been Ryan’s, grow­ing nat­u­ral­ly out of a spe­cial Joyce issue of his mag­a­zine, for which O’Nolan had been guest edi­tor.

Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old fash­ioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends dri­ve to poor Pad­dy Dig­nam’s funer­al. The par­ty were assigned roles from the nov­el. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O’Nolan for his father, Simon Dedalus, John Ryan for the jour­nal­ist Mar­tin Cun­ning­ham, and A.J. Lev­en­thal, the Reg­is­trar of Trin­i­ty Col­lege, being Jew­ish, was recruit­ed to fill (unkown to him­self accord­ing to John Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom.

Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by decid­ing they must climb up to the Martel­lo tow­er itself, which stood on a gran­ite shoul­der behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoist­ed him­self up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fear­ful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet­’s enor­mous farmer’s boot, the oth­ers has­tened to res­cue and restrain the rivals.

With some dif­fi­cul­ty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the oth­ers. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city.

In pubs along the way an enor­mous amount of alco­hol was con­sumed, so much so that on Sandy­mount Strand they had to relieve them­selves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses. Tom Joyce and Cronin sang the sen­ti­men­tal songs of Tom Moore which Joyce had loved, such as Silent, O Moyle. They stopped in Irish­town to lis­ten to the run­ning of the Ascot Gold Cup on a radio in a bet­ting shop, but even­tu­al­ly they arrived in Duke Street in the city cen­tre, and the Bai­ley, which John Ryan then ran as a lit­er­ary pub.

They went no fur­ther. Once there, anoth­er drink seemed more attrac­tive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long van­ished plea­sures of Night­town.

 The First Bloomsday 1954

Cel­e­brants of the first Blooms­day pause for a pho­to in Sandy­mount, Dublin on the morn­ing of June 16, 1954. From left are John Ryan, Antho­ny Cronin, Bri­an O’Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O’Brien), Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, cousin of James Joyce.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2013–likely before many of you start­ed to fre­quent our site. So it’s time to bring it back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov Cre­ates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses

On Blooms­day, Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

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How to Build Leonardo da Vinci’s Ingenious Self-Supporting Bridge: Renaissance Innovations You Can Still Enjoy Today

in History, Physics | June 16th, 2017

Leonar­do da Vin­ci, the most accom­plished exam­ple of the poly­math­ic, artist-engi­neer “Renais­sance man,” came up with an aston­ish­ing num­ber of inven­tions great and small in the late 15th and ear­ly 16th cen­tu­ry, from the heli­copter to the musi­cal vio­la organ­ista, the tank to the auto­mat­ed bob­bin winder. Even the devices he was born too late to invent, he improved: humans had crossed the hum­ble bridge, for instance, for count­less cen­turies, but then Leonar­do cre­at­ed a new, self-sup­port­ing vari­ety whose design, as fol­lowed by a kid and his dad in the video above, still impress­es today.

“With a series of wood­en poles and beams, ‘Stick-Boy’ shows his Dad how to build Leonar­do da Vinci‘s self-sup­port­ing arch bridge, also known as the emer­gency bridge,” say the descrip­tion by Rion Nakaya at The Kid Should See This. “No nails, screws, rope, glues, notch­es, or oth­er fas­ten­ers are hold­ing the bridge in place… just fric­tion and grav­i­ty.”

Clear­ly it works, but how? Accord­ing to a post at the blog ArchiS­crip­tor on self-sup­port­ing struc­tures, all such bridges, from Leonar­do’s on down, real­ly do rely on only those two forces. “Notch­es in the mem­bers make it eas­i­er to con­struct, but strict­ly speak­ing aren’t nec­es­sary as long as there is some fric­tion. Grav­i­ty will do the rest.”

Leonar­do, the post con­tin­ues, “explored two forms of the struc­ture – a bridge and a dome. His work was com­mis­sioned by the Bor­gia fam­i­ly, with the man­date to design light and strong struc­tures which could be built and tak­en down quick­ly. This was to aid them in their con­stant strug­gle for pow­er with the Medici fam­i­ly in Renais­sance Italy.” The site of the Leonardo3 Muse­um adds, “we do not know whether this bridge was ever put to prac­ti­cal use, but it is not hard to believe that such a mod­u­lar con­struc­tion, extreme­ly easy to trans­port and to assem­ble, must have met with great favor from the Renais­sance lords who were always on the look­out for new tech­nolo­gies to put to mil­i­tary use.”

Leonar­do him­self called this “the bridge of safe­ty,” and it counts as only one of the inge­nious bridges he designed in his life­time. For the Duke Sforza he also invent­ed sev­er­al oth­ers includ­ing a revolv­ing bridge which, accord­ing to Leonar­do da Vin­ci Inven­tions, “could be quick­ly packed up and trans­port­ed for use by armies on the move to pass over bod­ies of water,” could “swing across a stream or moat and set down on the oth­er side so that sol­diers could pass with lit­tle trou­ble,” and “incor­po­rat­ed a rope-and-pul­ley sys­tem for both quick employ­ment and easy trans­port.” All use­ful tools indeed for those who once sought mil­i­tary dom­i­nance in Italy, but even more ben­e­fi­cial as inspi­ra­tion for the Renais­sance boys and girls of the 21st cen­tu­ry.

via The Kid Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before The Mona Lisa?

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.

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