George Michael Gives a Stunning Performance of “Somebody to Love” with Queen, As David Bowie Nods Along in the Wings

It’s been a year tomor­row since David Bowie left the plan­et, just two days after his 69th birth­day and the release of his phe­nom­e­nal and dif­fi­cult final album. His death began a year of shock­ing loss­es, end­ing with two in quick suc­ces­sion that griev­ed not only their life­long fans, but also peo­ple who knew their work pri­mar­i­ly from sam­ples, remix­es, and reboots: the immor­tal­ly fun­ny Car­rie Fish­er and, of course, on Christ­mas Day, the uncan­ny pop music force-of-nature, George Michael. As cos­mic jus­tice would have it, these were two of the most out­spo­ken char­ac­ters in pop­u­lar culture—two peo­ple who refused to be shamed into silence or apol­o­gize for their lives.

George Michael weath­ered what is hard to believe was a gen­uine scan­dal at the time: his 1998 Bev­er­ly Hills arrest, sub­se­quent vicious out­ing by the press, and the sor­did por­ing over of his pri­vate life. He respond­ed to every provo­ca­tion with defi­ance and, writes Chris­to Foufas, “went on the offen­sive.”

In his con­tro­ver­sial video for the sin­gle “Out­side,” for exam­ple, his turn as a wicked­ly satir­i­cal dis­co cop so effec­tive­ly piqued the police that his arrest­ing offi­cer sued him for slan­der, and lost. The pub­lic­i­ty sur­round­ing Michael at the height of his post-Wham! fame seemed to lib­er­ate him to become more and more him­self in the pub­lic eye, but it nev­er obscured what made him a star in the first place—his soar­ing, con­fi­dent voice and impec­ca­ble musi­cal instincts.

It is these qualities—Michael’s brava­do and true skill as a vocal­ist and performer—that also made him an absolute per­fect choice to cov­er an ear­li­er gay icon gone before his time, Fred­die Mer­cury. In his ren­di­tion of “Some­body to Love” with Queen at Mercury’s 1992 trib­ute con­cert Michael deliv­ered a stun­ning per­for­mance; while he lacked Mercury’s range, he near­ly matched the for­mer Queen singer in pow­er and charis­ma. And while we see can this feat on dis­play in the offi­cial con­cert video, above, it’s just as evi­dent in rehearsal footage, which you can see at the top of the post.

Imme­di­ate­ly after Michael’s death, this rehearsal video began mak­ing the rounds on social media, and peo­ple high­light­ed not only his mas­tery of a very chal­leng­ing vocal melody, but the appre­ci­a­tion of fel­low Mer­cury trib­ute per­former David Bowie, whom we see nod­ding along in the wings at around 3:00. It’s a very poignant moment, in hind­sight, that under­lines some of the sig­nif­i­cant sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two stars. Not only were they both sex­u­al­ly adven­tur­ous chameleons and riv­et­ing per­form­ers, but—as we learned in sto­ry after sto­ry shared in their many posthu­mous tributes—both men used their sta­tus to help oth­ers, often anony­mous­ly.

The Mer­cury trib­ute con­cert, an AIDS ben­e­fit, took place five years before Michael’s arrest and pub­lic full dis­clo­sure of his sex­u­al­i­ty. But even before he felt com­fort­able dis­cussing his per­son­al life, he involved him­self in the lives of oth­ers who strug­gled with sim­i­lar issues, includ­ing depres­sion. From the ear­li­est Wham! days of “Choose Life” t‑shirts and “cheeky cri­tiques of het­ero­nor­ma­tive life” to Michael’s barn­burn­ing per­for­mance with Elton John at Live Aid in 1985 and beyond, he was “a father fig­ure for polit­i­cal pop,” writes Bar­ry Wal­ters at NPR, and a role mod­el for a gen­er­a­tion of young gay men and women. And “it didn’t hurt that he could write and sing soul music with effort­less pow­er and grace,” even record­ing a duet “with Aretha Franklin with­out mak­ing a fool of him­self,” and fill­ing the shoes, for one night at least, of the leg­endary Fred­die Mer­cury.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

The Mak­ing of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit “Under Pres­sure”: Demos, Stu­dio Ses­sions & More

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

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

An Animated Introduction to the Feminist Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir

How influ­en­tial are the writ­ings of Simone de Beau­voir? So influ­en­tial that even the rushed, by all accounts shod­dy first Eng­lish trans­la­tion (exe­cut­ed by a zool­o­gist not espe­cial­ly acquaint­ed with phi­los­o­phy, and only some­what more so with the French lan­guage) of her book Le deux­ième sexe became, in 1953, The Sec­ond Sex. Though not prop­er­ly trans­lat­ed until 2009, it nev­er­the­less pro­vid­ed the foun­da­tion for mod­ern fem­i­nist thought in the West. But what, if we can ask this ques­tion sure­ly at least a cou­ple of “waves” of fem­i­nism lat­er, did de Beau­voir, born 109 years ago today, actu­al­ly think?

She thought, as the Har­ry Shear­er-nar­rat­ed His­to­ry of Ideas ani­ma­tion from the BBC and Open Uni­ver­si­ty above puts it, that “a woman isn’t born a woman, rather she becomes one,” mean­ing that “there is no way women have to be, no giv­en fem­i­nin­i­ty, no ide­al to which all women should con­form.”

The basic bio­log­i­cal facts aside, “what it is to be a woman is social­ly con­struct­ed, and large­ly by males at that. It is through oth­er peo­ple’s expec­ta­tions and assump­tions that a woman becomes ‘fem­i­nine,’ ” strug­gling to meet male-defined stan­dards of beau­ty, act­ing like noth­ing more than “pas­sive objects” in soci­ety, and in the fem­i­nist view, often wast­ing their lives in so doing.

A bold dec­la­ra­tion, espe­cial­ly at the time. But de Beau­voir’s belief “that women are fun­da­men­tal­ly free to reject male stereo­types of beau­ty and attrac­tive­ness, and to become more equal as a result” basi­cal­ly aligned with the exis­ten­tial­ist move­ment then ris­ing up through the zeit­geist. (Demon­strat­ing that the philo­soph­i­cal extends to the per­son­al, she spent much of her life in an open rela­tion­ship with her fel­low exis­ten­tial­ist icon Jean-Paul Sartre.) Yet it has­n’t real­ly gone stale, and has indeed proven adapt­able to var­i­ous dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions, eras, and con­texts — includ­ing, as we can see in the 8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy video above, video games.

“This is Samus, defend­er of the galaxy,” says its nar­ra­tor, intro­duc­ing the space-suit­ed pro­tag­o­nist of the clas­sic Nin­ten­do game Metroid. “For those of you that don’t know, Samus is a woman.” This fact, revealed only after the defeat of the final boss, jolt­ed the gamers of the day. Metroid came out in 1986, just months after de Beau­voir’s death, and it came out onto a video-gam­ing land­scape where play­er char­ac­ters’ male­ness went with­out say­ing, where “man is a sav­ior and the fem­i­nine is a damsel in dis­tress. Man is a sub­ject where­as woman is the object of pos­ses­sion.” But to de Beau­voir’s mind, “a fun­da­men­tal ambi­gu­i­ty marks the fem­i­nine being,” leav­ing women — of any coun­try, of any time, or of actu­al or dig­i­tal real­i­ty — much greater free­dom to define them­selves than they may know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir & Jean-Paul Sartre Shoot­ing a Gun in Their First Pho­to Togeth­er (1929)

Pho­tos of Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Hang­ing with Che Gue­vara in Cuba (1960)

Edward Said Recalls His Depress­ing Meet­ing With Sartre, de Beau­voir & Fou­cault (1979)

The Fem­i­nist The­o­ry of Simone de Beau­voir Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games (and More)

A His­to­ry of Ideas: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain The­o­ries of Simone de Beau­voir, Edmund Burke & Oth­er Philoso­phers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, 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.

A Joan Miró-Inspired Animation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem, “Romance Sonámbulo”

What tod­dler is trans­fixed by a poem of trag­i­cal­ly thwart­ed desire?

Thou­sands of them, thanks to “The Sleep­walk­er,” ani­ma­tor Theodore Ushev’s cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tion of Fed­eri­co Gar­cía Lor­ca’s poem, “Romance Sonám­bu­lo.”

Ushev starts by scrap­ping the words, in favor of a pure­ly visu­al lan­guage that draws heav­i­ly on the work of Lorca’s con­tem­po­rary, sur­re­al­ist painter Joan Miró.

Would Lor­ca have approved?

Pos­si­bly. He had great admi­ra­tion for Miró, whose paint­ings he declared “the purest of all images” in a pub­lic lec­ture on mod­ern art at Grenada’s Athenaeum:

They come from dream, from the cen­ter of the soul, there where love is made flesh and incred­i­ble breezes of dis­tant sounds blow.

Ani­ma­tor Ushev is anoth­er who’s put a lot of stock in dreams:

I want­ed to cre­ate a joy­ful film, that makes the pub­lic hap­py – inex­plic­a­bly hap­py. The sur­re­al­ist move­ment was a play, a game itself. I often start my mas­ter­class­es with the quo­ta­tion, “The life is a dream (and every­thing is a game).” It is a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the roman­tic belief of anoth­er Span­ish writer – Pedro Calderón de la Bar­ca. This lit­tle film can be seen as such – an alle­go­ry over the joy and mys­tery of life.

His take may con­fuse those who’ve been debat­ing the orig­i­nal poem’s far-from-joy­ful mean­ing.

There are rec­og­niz­able forms … Lorca’s “gyp­sy girl,” for instance.

What’s going on?

Ask a tod­dler what’s he or she sees.

A wound­ed con­tra­band run­ner drag­ging him­self back to his for­bid­den lady love?

A grief-strick­en Juli­et throw­ing her­self in a cis­tern?

More like­ly, danc­ing, and lots of it, thanks to the irre­sistible score — Bul­gar­i­an musi­cian Kot­tarashky’s “Opa Hey.”

(Ushev made a con­scious deci­sion to expand the gyp­sy theme beyond Lorca’s native Andalucía to the Balkan region.)

“Romance Sonám­bu­lo”

Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branch­es.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the moun­tain. 

With the shade around her waist 

she dreams on her bal­cony, 

green flesh, her hair green, 

with eyes of cold sil­ver. 

Green, how I want you green. 

Under the gyp­sy moon, 

all things are watch­ing her 

and she can­not see them.

Green, how I want you green. 

Big hoar­frost stars 

come with the fish of shad­ow 

that opens the road of dawn. 

The fig tree rubs its wind 

with the sand­pa­per of its branch­es, 

and the for­est, cun­ning cat, 

bris­tles its brit­tle fibers. 

But who will come? And from where? 

She is still on her bal­cony 

green flesh, her hair green, 

dream­ing in the bit­ter sea.

—My friend, I want to trade 

my horse for her house, 

my sad­dle for her mir­ror, 

my knife for her blan­ket. 

My friend, I come bleed­ing 

from the gates of Cabra.

—If it were pos­si­ble, my boy, 

I’d help you fix that trade. 

But now I am not I, 

nor is my house now my house.

—My friend, I want to die

decent­ly in my bed. 

Of iron, if that’s pos­si­ble, 

with blan­kets of fine cham­bray. 

Don’t you see the wound I have 

from my chest up to my throat?

—Your white shirt has grown 

thirsty dark brown ros­es. 

Your blood oozes and flees a

round the cor­ners of your sash. 

But now I am not I, 

nor is my house now my house.

—Let me climb up, at least, 

up to the high bal­conies; 

Let me climb up! Let me, 

up to the green bal­conies. 

Rail­ings of the moon 

through which the water rum­bles.

Now the two friends climb up, 

up to the high bal­conies.

Leav­ing a trail of blood. 

Leav­ing a trail of teardrops. 

Tin bell vines

were trem­bling on the roofs.

A thou­sand crys­tal tam­bourines 

struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green, 

green wind, green branch­es. 

The two friends climbed up. 

The stiff wind left 

in their mouths, a strange taste 

of bile, of mint, and of basil 

My friend, where is she—tell me—

where is your bit­ter girl?

How many times she wait­ed for you! 

How many times would she wait for you, 

cool face, black hair, 

on this green bal­cony! 

Over the mouth of the cis­tern

the gyp­sy girl was swing­ing, 

green flesh, her hair green, 

with eyes of cold sil­ver. 

An ici­cle of moon

holds her up above the water. 

The night became inti­mate 

like a lit­tle plaza.

Drunk­en “Guardias Civiles”

were pound­ing on the door. 

Green, how I want you green. 

Green wind. Green branch­es. 

The ship out on the sea. 

And the horse on the moun­tain.

Read “Romance Sonám­bu­lo” in the orig­i­nal Span­ish here

Read an inter­view with ani­ma­tor Ushev here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith Reads Fed­eri­co Gar­cia Lorca’s “Lit­tle Vien­nese Waltz” in New York City

Hear Jorge Luis Borges Read 30 of His Poems (in the Orig­i­nal Span­ish)

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Two Ita­lo Calvi­no Sto­ries: “The False Grand­moth­er” and “The Dis­tance from the Moon”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Stream David Bowie’s New EP No Plan and Hear His Final Four Recordings

Today marks what would have been David Bowie’s 70th birth­day. And you can com­mem­o­rate that bit­ter­sweet occa­sion by stream­ing his brand new EP called No Plan. It fea­tures four tracks–the last four songs Bowie ever record­ed.

Lis­ten­ers might be famil­iar with the first track, “Lazarus.” But not so much with the remain­ing three–“No Plan,” “Killing a Lit­tle Time” and “When I Met You.” You can stream the EP for free on Spo­ti­fy below. (If you need their soft­ware, down­load a copy here.) You can also pur­chase copies of No Plan on Ama­zon and iTunes. Watch the video for “No Plan” above.

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:

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

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

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Income

One of the most propul­sive forces in our social and eco­nom­ic lives is the rate at which emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy trans­forms every sphere of human labor. Despite the polit­i­cal lever­age obtained by fear­mon­ger­ing about immi­grants and for­eign­ers, it’s the robots who are actu­al­ly tak­ing our jobs. It is hap­pen­ing, as for­mer SEIU pres­i­dent Andy Stern warns in his book Rais­ing the Floor, not in a gen­er­a­tion or so, but right now, and expo­nen­tial­ly in the next 10–15 years.

Self-dri­ving cars and trucks will elim­i­nate mil­lions of jobs, not only for truck­ers and taxi (and Uber and Lyft) dri­vers, but for all of the peo­ple who pro­vide goods and ser­vices for those dri­vers. AI will take over for thou­sands of coders and may even soon write arti­cles like this one (warn­ing us of its impend­ing con­quest). What to do? The cur­rent buzzword—or buzz-acronym—is UBI, which stands for “Uni­ver­sal Basic Income,” a scheme in which every­one would receive a basic wage from the gov­ern­ment for doing noth­ing at all. UBI, its pro­po­nents argue, is the most effec­tive way to mit­i­gate the inevitably mas­sive job loss­es ahead.

Those pro­po­nents include not only labor lead­ers like Stern, but entre­pre­neurs like Peter Barnes and Elon Musk (lis­ten to him dis­cuss it below), and polit­i­cal philoso­phers like George­town University’s Karl Widerquist. The idea is an old one; its mod­ern artic­u­la­tion orig­i­nat­ed with Thomas Paine in his 1795 tract Agrar­i­an Jus­tice. But Thomas Paine did not fore­see the robot angle. Alan Watts, on the oth­er hand, knew pre­cise­ly what lay ahead for post-indus­tri­al soci­ety back in the 1960s, as did many of his con­tem­po­raries.

The Eng­lish Epis­co­pal priest, lec­tur­er, writer, and pop­u­lar­iz­er of East­ern reli­gion and phi­los­o­phy in Eng­land and the U.S. gave a talk in which he described “what hap­pens when you intro­duce tech­nol­o­gy into pro­duc­tion.” Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion enables us to “pro­duce enor­mous quan­ti­ties of goods… but at the same time, you put peo­ple out of work.”

You can say, but it always cre­ates more jobs, there’ll always be more jobs. Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs mak­ing every kind of frip­pery and unnec­es­sary con­trap­tion, and one will also at the same time beguile the pub­lic into feel­ing that they need and want these com­plete­ly unnec­es­sary things that aren’t even beau­ti­ful.

Watts goes on to say that this “enor­mous amount of non­sense employ­ment and busy­work, bureau­crat­ic and oth­er­wise, has to be cre­at­ed in order to keep peo­ple work­ing, because we believe as good Protes­tants that the dev­il finds work for idle hands to do.” Peo­ple who aren’t forced into wage labor for the prof­it of oth­ers, or who don’t them­selves seek to become prof­i­teers, will be trou­ble for the state, or the church, or their fam­i­ly, friends, and neigh­bors. In such an ethos, the word “leisure” is a pejo­ra­tive one.

So far, Watts’ insights are right in line with those of Bertrand Rus­sell and Buck­min­ster Fuller, whose cri­tiques of mean­ing­less work we cov­ered in an ear­li­er post. Rus­sell, writes philoso­pher Gary Gut­ting, argued “that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is vir­tu­ous.” Harm to our intel­lects, bod­ies, cre­ativ­i­ty, sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty, envi­ron­ment. Watts also sug­gests that our fix­a­tion on jobs is a rel­ic of a pre-tech­no­log­i­cal age. The whole pur­pose of machin­ery, after all, he says, is to make drudgery unnec­es­sary.

Those who lose their jobs—or who are forced to take low-pay­ing ser­vice work to survive—now must live in great­ly dimin­ished cir­cum­stances and can­not afford the sur­plus of cheap­ly-pro­duced con­sumer goods churned out by auto­mat­ed fac­to­ries. This Neolib­er­al sta­tus quo is thor­ough­ly, eco­nom­i­cal­ly unten­able. “The pub­lic has to be pro­vid­ed,” says Watts, “with the means of pur­chas­ing what the machines pro­duce.” That is, if we insist on per­pet­u­at­ing economies of scaled-up pro­duc­tion. The per­pet­u­a­tion of work, how­ev­er, sim­ply becomes a means of social con­trol.

Watts has his own the­o­ries about how we would pay for a UBI, and every advo­cate since has var­ied the terms, depend­ing on their lev­el of pol­i­cy exper­tise, the­o­ret­i­cal bent, or polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. It’s impor­tant to point out, how­ev­er, that UBI has nev­er been a par­ti­san idea. It has been favored by civ­il rights lead­ers like Mar­tin Luther King and con­tro­ver­sial con­ser­v­a­tive writ­ers like Charles Mur­ray; by Key­ne­sians and sup­ply-siders alike. A ver­sion of UBI at one time found a pro­po­nent in Mil­ton Fried­man, as well as Richard Nixon, whose UBI pro­pos­al, Stern notes, “was passed twice by the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.” (See Stern below dis­cuss UBI and this his­to­ry.)

Dur­ing the six­ties, a live­ly debate over UBI took place among econ­o­mists who fore­saw the sit­u­a­tion Watts describes and also sought to sim­pli­fy the Byzan­tine means-test­ed wel­fare sys­tem. The usu­al con­gres­sion­al bick­er­ing even­tu­al­ly killed Uni­ver­sal Basic Income in 1972, but most Amer­i­cans would be sur­prised to dis­cov­er how close the coun­try actu­al­ly came to imple­ment­ing it, under a Repub­li­can pres­i­dent. (There are now exist­ing ver­sions of UBI, or rev­enue shar­ing schemes in lim­it­ed form, in Alas­ka, and sev­er­al coun­tries around the world, includ­ing the largest exper­i­ment in his­to­ry hap­pen­ing in Kenya.)

To learn more about the long his­to­ry of basic income ideas, see this chronol­o­gy at the Basic Income Earth Net­work. Watts men­tions his own source for many of his ideas on the sub­ject, Robert Theobald, whose 1963 Free Men and Free Mar­kets defied left and right ortho­dox­ies, and was con­sis­tent­ly mis­tak­en for one or the oth­er. (Theobald intro­duced the term guar­an­teed basic income.) Watts, who would be 101 today, had oth­er thoughts on eco­nom­ics in his essay “Wealth Ver­sus Mon­ey.” Some of these now seem, writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, “bit­ter­sweet­ly naïve” in ret­ro­spect. But when it came to tech­no­log­i­cal “dis­rup­tions” of cap­i­tal­ism and the effect on work, Watts was can­ni­ly per­cep­tive. Per­haps his ideas about basic income were as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

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

Inside the Creepy, “Abandoned” Wizard of Oz Theme Park: Scenes of Beautiful Decay

The roman­tic allure of the ghost­ly, aban­doned theme park is dif­fi­cult to resist. Case in point: The Land of Oz, above, a not-entire­ly-defunct attrac­tion nes­tled atop North Carolina’s Beech Moun­tain.

Deb­bie Reynolds, accom­pa­nied by her 13-year-old daugh­ter, Car­rie Fish­er, cut the rib­bon on the park’s open­ing day in 1970.

Its road was far from smooth, even before urban explor­ers began filch­ing its 44,000 cus­tom-glazed yel­low bricks, even­tu­al­ly forc­ing man­age­ment to repave with paint­ed stand issue mod­els.

One of its two founders died of can­cer six months before open­ing, and lat­er a fire destroyed the Emer­ald City and a col­lec­tion of mem­o­ra­bil­ia from the 1939 MGM film.

Crip­pled by the gas cri­sis and insur­mount­able com­pe­ti­tion from Dis­ney World and its ilk, the Land of Oz closed in 1980, thus spar­ing it the indig­ni­ties of Yelp reviews and dis­cern­ing child vis­i­tors whose expec­ta­tions have been formed by CGI.

Its shut­ter­ing attract­ed anoth­er kind of tourist: the cam­era-tot­ing, fence hop­ping con­nois­seurs of what is now known as “ruin porn.”

An iso­lat­ed, aban­doned theme park based on the Wiz­ard of Oz? Could there be a holi­er grail?

Only trou­ble is…the Land of Oz didn’t stay shut­tered. Local real estate devel­op­ers cleaned it up a bit, lur­ing overnight vis­i­tors with rentals of Dorothy’s house. They start­ed a tra­di­tion of reopen­ing the whole park for one week­end every Octo­ber, and demand was such that June is now Land of Oz Fam­i­ly Fun Month. The Inter­na­tion­al Wiz­ard of Oz Club held its annu­al con­ven­tion there in 2011. How aban­doned can it be?

And yet, unof­fi­cial vis­i­tors, sneak­ing onto the grounds off-sea­son, insist that it is. I get it. The quest of adven­ture, the desire for beau­ti­ful decay, the brag­ging rights… After pho­tograph­ing the invari­ably leaf strewn Yel­low Brick Road, they turn their lens­es to the lumpy-faced trees of the Enchant­ed For­est.

Yes, they’re creepy, but it’s less from “aban­don­ment” than a low-bud­get approx­i­ma­tion by the hands of artists less expert than those of the orig­i­nal.

It’s safe to pre­sume that any leaves and weeds lit­ter­ing the premis­es are mere­ly evi­dence of chang­ing sea­sons, rather than total neglect.

What I want to know is, where’s the sex, drugs & rock’n’roll evi­dence of local teens’ off-sea­son blowouts—no spray paint­ed f‑bombs? No dead sol­diers? Secu­ri­ty must be pret­ty tight.

If creepy’s what the per­pet­u­a­tors of the aban­don­ment myth crave, they could con­tent them­selves with the ama­teur footage above, shot by a vis­it­ing dad in 1970.

Those cos­tumes! The scare­crow and the tin man in par­tic­u­lar… Buz­zfeed would love ’em, but it’s hard to imag­ine a mil­len­ni­al tot going for that mess. Their Hal­loween cos­tumes were 1000 times more accu­rate.

(In inter­views, the one gen­er­a­tion who can remem­ber the Land of Oz in its prime is a loy­al bunch, recall­ing only their long ago sense of won­der and excite­ment. Ah, life before Beta­max…)

The doc­u­men­tary video below should set­tle the aban­don­ment myth once and for all. It opens not in Kansas, but New York City, as a car­load of young per­form­ers heads off for their annu­al gig at the Land of Oz. They’re con­ver­sant in jazz hands and cer­tain Friends of Dorothy tropes, sure­ly more so than the local play­ers who orig­i­nal­ly staffed the park. Clear­ly, these ringers were hired to turn in cred­i­ble imper­son­ations of the char­ac­ters immor­tal­ized by Ray Bol­ger, Burt Lahr, and Judy Gar­land. Pre­sum­ably, their updat­ed cos­tumes also passed muster with Autumn at Oz’s savvy child atten­dees.

Still crav­ing that ruin porn? Busi­ness Insid­er pub­lished Seph Law­less’ pho­tos of “the crum­bling park” here.

If you’d pre­fer to rub­ber­neck at a tru­ly aban­doned theme park, check out the Carpetbagger’s video tour of Cave City, Kentucky’s Fun­town Moun­tain. (Though be fore­warned. It was sold at auc­tion in April 2016 and plans are afoot to reengi­neer it as as “an epic play­ground of won­der, imag­i­na­tion, and dreams.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Dis­ney­land 1957: A Lit­tle Stroll Down Mem­o­ry Lane

Juras­sic Park Tells You Every­thing You Need to Know About the Dan­gers of Glob­al Cap­i­tal­ism

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Trainwreck: The Teach to One Math Experiment in Mountain View, CA Is a Cautionary Tale About the Perils of Digital Math Education

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I live in Sil­i­con Val­ley, which oper­ates on the assump­tion that there’s no prob­lem that tech­nol­o­gy can’t solve. It suf­fus­es our cul­ture here, and some­times we pay the price for this tech­no­crat­ic utopi­anism. Case in point: Right now, I’m send­ing my kid to a pub­lic school in Moun­tain View, CA–the home of Google–where the admin­is­tra­tors have upend­ed the entire sixth grade math pro­gram. Last August, they abol­ished the tra­di­tion­al math program–you know, where stu­dents get to sit in a class­room and learn from a trained and qual­i­fied math teacher. And instead the admin­is­tra­tors asked stu­dents to learn math main­ly from a com­put­er pro­gram called Teach to One. Run by a ven­ture called New Class­roomsTeach to One promis­es to let each stu­dent engage in “per­son­al­ized learn­ing,” where a com­put­er pro­gram gauges each stu­den­t’s knowl­edge of math, then con­tin­u­al­ly cus­tomizes the math edu­ca­tion that stu­dents receive. It all sounds like a great con­cept. Bill Gates has sup­pos­ed­ly called it the “Future of Math Edu­ca­tion.” But the rub is this: Teach to One does­n’t seem ready for the present. And our kids are pay­ing the price.

A new arti­cle fea­tured in our local paper, The Moun­tain View Voice, out­lines well the prob­lems that stu­dents and par­ents have expe­ri­enced with the Teach to One pro­gram. I would encour­age any par­ent or edu­ca­tor inter­est­ed in the pit­falls of these “inno­v­a­tive” math pro­grams to give the arti­cle a good look. (Update: The Moun­tain View Voice has done a series of excel­lent arti­cles on the Teach to One exper­i­ment in Moun­tain View and all that went wrong. They’re all list­ed below.)

If you read the arti­cle, here’s what you will learn. The Moun­tain View school dis­trict appar­ent­ly bud­get­ed $521,000 to imple­ment and oper­ate this new-fan­gled math pro­gram in two local schools (Gra­ham and Crit­ten­den Mid­dle Schools). Had they ade­quate­ly beta test­ed the pro­gram before­hand, the school dis­trict might have dis­cov­ered that Teach to One teach­es math–we have observed–in a dis­joint­ed, non-lin­ear and often errat­ic fash­ion that leaves many stu­dents baf­fled and dis­en­chant­ed with math. The pro­gram con­tains errors in the math it teach­es. Par­ents end up hav­ing to teach kids math at home and make up for the pro­gram’s defi­cien­cies. And all the while, the math teach­ers get essen­tial­ly rel­e­gat­ed to “man­ag­ing the [Teach to One] pro­gram rather than to pro­vid­ing direct instruc­tion” them­selves.

By Octo­ber, many par­ents start­ed to reg­is­ter indi­vid­ual com­plaints with the school dis­trict. By Decem­ber, 180 par­ents signed a let­ter metic­u­lous­ly out­lin­ing the many prob­lems they found with the Teach to One pro­gram. (You can read that let­ter here.) When the school lat­er con­duct­ed a sur­vey on Teach to One (review it here), 61% of the par­ents “said they do not believe the pro­gram match­es the needs of their chil­dren,” and test scores show that this crop of sixth graders has mas­tered math con­cepts less well than last year’s. (Note: there was a big decrease in the num­ber of kids who say they love math, and con­verse­ly a 413% increase in the num­ber of kids who say they hate math.) Giv­en the mediocre eval­u­a­tion, the par­ents have asked for one sim­ple thing–the option to let their kids learn math in a tra­di­tion­al set­ting for the remain­der of the year, until it can be demon­strat­ed that Teach to One can deliv­er bet­ter results. (Teach to One would ide­al­ly con­tin­ue as a small­er pilot, where the kinks would get worked out.) So far the school dis­trict, head­ed by Ayindé Rudolph, has con­tin­ued to cham­pi­on the Teach to One pro­gram in fine­ly-spun bureau­crat­ic let­ters that effec­tive­ly dis­re­gard parental con­cerns and actu­al data points. But the schools have now agreed to let stu­dents spend 5o% of their time learn­ing math with Teach to One, and the oth­er 50% learn­ing math from a qual­i­fied teacher. Why the imprac­ti­cal half mea­sure? I can only spec­u­late.

I post­ed this so that inter­est­ed par­ents and edu­ca­tors, wher­ev­er you live, can be pru­dent and thought­ful when it comes to adopt­ing com­put­er-dri­ven math pro­grams. Per­haps you can learn some­thing from our cau­tion­ary tale. Do your research, run a con­trolled pilot, and make sure the prod­uct is actu­al­ly a good fit for your school. Again, I would encour­age you to read the fine arti­cle in The Moun­tain View Voice, the par­ents’ let­ter out­lin­ing the observed defi­cien­cies in the Teach to One pro­gram, and the eye-open­ing sur­vey results on Teach to One.

Update: It was announced on Jan­u­ary 12 that the Moun­tain View will dis­con­tin­ue the Teach to One math pilot effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly.  Patron­iz­ing­ly, New Class­rooms has attrib­uted the scrap­ping of the pilot to a com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lem. “There was a sub­set of par­ents of high­er-achiev­ing stu­dents who didn’t ful­ly under­stand how Teach to One oper­at­ed and how much it ben­e­fit­ed their chil­dren,” Joel Rose is quot­ed as say­ing in The Wall Street Jour­nal. Once again, I’d refer you back to the actu­al data col­lect­ed by our schools. It speaks for itself.

Great Arti­cles by The Moun­tain View Voice: Moun­tain View’s local paper has done some excel­lent report­ing on this fias­co. I would encour­age you to read them all.

This sto­ry has also received cov­er­age from The Wall Street Jour­nal and Edsurge

Update 2019: It sounds like anoth­er Teach-to-One pilot in Eliz­a­beth, NJ has its own issues. Read here and here.

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Famed Art Critic Robert Hughes Hosts the Premiere of 20/20, Where Tabloid TV News Began (1978)

A few years ago we fea­tured The Shock of the New, respect­ed crit­ic Robert Hugh­es’ eight-part doc­u­men­tary series on mod­ern art, which since its first broad­cast in 1980 has stood as a sig­nal achieve­ment in intel­li­gent tele­vi­sion. But Hugh­es also had a hand in the devel­op­ment of, shall we say, unin­tel­li­gent tele­vi­sion, hav­ing two years ear­li­er co-host­ed the pre­mier of ABC’s still-run­ning news­magazine show 20/20. His new­ly (and posthu­mous­ly) pub­lished vol­ume of essays and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal writ­ings The Spec­ta­cle of Skill devotes an entire chap­ter to the sto­ry of this tele­vi­su­al event, much bal­ly­hooed in pro­mos like the one just above.

“I was hired in some fit of aber­ra­tion,” Hugh­es wrote in a 1995 New York Review of Books piece that would become the chap­ter’s basis. “My fel­low anchor was the now, alas, late Harold Hayes, who had been a bril­liant edi­tor of Esquire but, like me, proved to have lit­tle tal­ent for sit­ting in front of a TV cam­era with make­up all over his face and recit­ing lines that had been writ­ten for him by oth­er peo­ple.” Their pro­duc­er made it clear that “nei­ther Hayes nor I was to have any say in what we would say,” that “the sto­ries had to have an ‘inter­est­ing’ angle; mere news val­ue would not do,” and that “the audi­ence out there could be assumed to have the atten­tion span of cad­dis flies.”

View­ers who tuned in to the very first 20/20 on the evening of June 6th, 1978 were treat­ed to cul­tur­al announce­ments such as that of Sat­ur­day Night Fever’s posi­tion at the top of the record charts; an inter­view with Flip Wil­son offer­ing “a long stretch of pushy bathos” about the come­di­an’s fam­i­ly trou­bles; jokes about Pet Rocks; a young Ger­al­do Rivera, “fired up with sym­pa­thy,” expos­ing the use of live rab­bits to train rac­ing grey­hounds (the unmoved Hugh­es remem­bers his child­hood in Aus­tralia, where “the rab­bit is just an agri­cul­tur­al pest, a lit­tle high­er on the lad­der of exis­tence than a cane toad or a cock­roach”); a vocab­u­lary-build­ing “absur­di­ty” after each com­mer­cial break; and, bizarrely, a clay-ani­ma­tion Jim­my Carter singing “Geor­gia on My Mind.”

“All across Amer­i­ca the next morn­ing there was a col­lec­tive exha­la­tion of rage from TV crit­ics about the triv­i­al­iza­tion of news,” recalls Hugh­es. “In addi­tion to being point­less, the new ABC news mag­a­zine is dizzy­ing­ly absurd,” wrote the New York Times’ John J. O’Con­nor. The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Tom Shales likened it to “being trapped for an hour at the super­mar­ket check­out counter and hav­ing to read the front pages of blab­by tabloids over and over again,” though he did praise its “slight­ly more respectable” exam­i­na­tion of the then- and cur­rent Cal­i­for­nia gov­er­nor Jer­ry Brown’s bid for the White House. Carl Sagan, who in 1980 would make his own mon­u­men­tal con­tri­bu­tion to intel­li­gent tele­vi­sion with Cos­mos, also showed up as a promis­ing pres­ence on the cor­re­spon­dent ros­ter.

Any­one watch­ing today will, at least, appre­ci­ate the rel­a­tive brevi­ty and infre­quen­cy of the adver­tise­ments. They, along with much else seen and every­thing derid­ed in 20/20’s pre­miere, would grow enor­mous­ly more both­er­some as the decades wore on, a fact that ulti­mate­ly made Hugh­es real­ize that he had, “how­ev­er briefly and inept­ly, been part of the avant-garde of net­work tele­vi­sion. The first issue of 20/20 was unques­tion­ably one of the worst turkeys ever seen on an Amer­i­can net­work, and yet it was curi­ous­ly prophet­ic, and crit­ics like Tom Shales who saw in it an omen of the future of the TV news-mag­a­zine pro­gram were not wrong.”

Soon all of Amer­i­ca, and much of the rest of the world, would find itself set­tling for the cal­iber of view­ing mate­r­i­al set by the first 20/20, with “its sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, its far­ci­cal chum­mi­ness, its dis­mal fix­a­tion on celebri­ty, its kitschy mock human­ism, its voyeurism, and above all its belief that real­i­ty must always take the back­seat to enter­tain­ment.” Hugh­es, in the NYRB essay and in the new book, sums up this regret­table de-evo­lu­tion with the words of Ovid. Video melio­ra proboque: dete­ri­o­ra sequor: “I see bet­ter things and approve them: I go for the worse.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Art Crit­ic Robert Hugh­es Demys­ti­fies Mod­ern Art in The Shock of the New

Remem­ber­ing Robert Hugh­es, the Art Crit­ic Who Took No Pris­on­ers

1978 News Report on the Rocky Hor­ror Craze Cap­tures a Teenage Michael Stipe in Drag

How ABC Tele­vi­sion Intro­duced Rap Music to Amer­i­ca in 1981: It’s Painful­ly Awk­ward

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, 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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