“If Life Were Only Like This”: Woody Allen Gets Marshall McLuhan to Put a Pontificating Professor in His Place

in Comedy, Film, Life | May 5th, 2017

The dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion cre­at­ed a mighty forum for those who once held forth from around the pick­le bar­rel or atop a stur­dy soap box.

The Inter­net has spawned many com­men­ta­tors whose thoughts are cogent, well researched and well argued, but they’re sad­ly out­num­bered by a mul­ti­tude of blowhards, wind­bags, and oth­er self-appoint­ed experts, force­ful­ly express­ing opin­ions as fact.

And, as you’ve like­ly heard, many con­sumers fail to check cre­den­tials before believ­ing unsub­stan­ti­at­ed state­ments are the rock sol­id truth, to be repeat­ed and act­ed upon, some­times to last­ing con­se­quence.

Com­pare the unman­age­abil­i­ty of our sit­u­a­tion to that of 40 years ago, when an obnox­ious blovi­a­tor could appar­ent­ly be silenced by the intro­duc­tion of irrefutable author­i­ty…

Ah, wait, this is fic­tion…

A notable thing about the above scene from 1977’s Annie Hall—besides how beau­ti­ful­ly the com­e­dy holds up—is that the bad guy’s not stu­pid. His qual­i­fi­ca­tions are actu­al­ly quite impres­sive.

(We speak here of the Guy in Line, not writer-direc­tor-star Woody Allen, whose rep­u­ta­tion has been per­ma­nent­ly tar­nished by per­son­al mis­con­duct, some of it easy to sub­stan­ti­ate.)

The scene’s best punch­line comes from pit­ting intel­lec­tu­al against intel­lec­tu­al, not intel­lec­tu­al against some myth­i­cal “reg­u­lar” Amer­i­can, as we’ve come to expect.

The audi­ence is well posi­tioned to side with Allen and his ace-in-the-hole, media philoso­pher Mar­shall McLuhan. It’s a revenge fan­ta­sy designed to appeal to any­one whose free­dom has been impinged by some loud­mouthed stranger sound­ing off in a pub­lic area.

That’s all of us, right? (Though how many of us are will­ing to cop to the occa­sions when we may have been the nar­cis­sis­tic jerk monop­o­liz­ing the con­ver­sa­tion at top vol­ume …)

The court­ly McLuhan, a last minute replace­ment for direc­tor Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, pos­sessed the per­fect tem­pera­ment to skew­er the over­in­flat­ed self-worth of a pon­tif­i­cat­ing ego­ma­ni­ac.

He was, how­ev­er, not much of a per­former, accord­ing to Rus­sell Hor­ton, who played the Guy in Line:

Woody would pull him out and he’d say some­thing like, ‘Well you’re wrong, young man.’ Or, ‘Oh, gee, I don’t know what to say.’… We did like 17 or 18 takes, and if you look at it care­ful­ly in the movie, McLuhan says, ‘You mean my whole fal­la­cy is wrong’ which makes no sense. How can you have your fal­la­cy wrong?

Read the recent, and extreme­ly amus­ing Enter­tain­ment Week­ly inter­view with Guy in Line (and voice of the Trix cere­al rab­bit) Hor­ton in its entire­ty here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan in Two Min­utes: A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1960s Media The­o­rist Who Pre­dict­ed Our Present

Woody Allen Tells a Clas­sic Joke About Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald & Gertrude Stein in 1965: A Pre­cur­sor to Mid­night in Paris

Woody Allen Amus­es Him­self by Giv­ing Untruth­ful Answers in Unaired 1971 TV Inter­view

Watch a 44-Minute Super­cut of Every Woody Allen Stam­mer, From Every Woody Allen Film

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

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“Play Without Bitching About the Key,” and Other Humorous, Blunt Annotations Added to Musical Scores

in Music | May 5th, 2017

The stan­dard sys­tem of musi­cal nota­tion has, through­out its evo­lu­tion, served many dif­fer­ent eras of human­i­ty, and increas­ing­ly many dif­fer­ent cul­tures, quite well indeed. Still, though, when its pure­ly visu­al ele­ments can’t get the com­po­si­tion­al inten­tion ful­ly across, one must resort to incor­po­rat­ing ver­bal instruc­tions, and some­times those instruc­tions can seem… uncon­ven­tion­al. Clas­sic FM’s list of “bizarre, per­plex­ing and dis­tress­ing per­for­mance direc­tions” includes com­mands to play at “tem­po di PBS doc­u­men­tary,” to “con­tin­ue in tem­po, ignor­ing con­duc­tor,” and — these favorites of Erik Satie — to play as if “imbi­bet” (drunk­en) and “cor­pu­len­tus” (cor­pu­lent).

Not long ago, jazz crit­ic Ted Gioia, a man who’s seen a more than a few scores in his time, tweet­ed out a set of images of what he called “blunt musi­cal direc­tions.” These instruct their per­form­ers to “play with­out bitch­ing about the key” — G‑flat major not, I gath­er, being the most enjoy­able of them all — to make a “soft moan through instru­ment if pos­si­ble,” to “STAND; TURN AROUND; BEND OVER AND PLAY OBOE BETWEEN LEGS,” to “play with­out tak­ing a pic­ture and upload­ing to Face­book,” and — per­haps most impor­tant of all — to “lay that shit down!”

To those who can’t read a score, the abil­i­ty to turn a bunch of lines, dots, and oth­er even less intu­itive­ly deci­pher­able sym­bols into full-bod­ied music on the fly looks like a super­pow­er. But those who can read a score know that the real musi­cian­ship all hap­pens between what some com­pos­er wrote on the page and what the audi­ence hears, bal­anc­ing loy­al­ty to the com­poser’s inten­tion with the degree of per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion that makes the piece come alive. All the dis­ci­pline cul­ti­vat­ed through musi­cal train­ing no doubt ensures that most of them can resist the temp­ta­tion of Face­book while actu­al­ly play­ing, but when a com­poser’s direc­tions get real­ly ambigu­ous, cranky, or sim­ply strange — well, that’s where their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment comes in. And so live music remains inter­est­ing, even this deep into the age of the record­ed stuff.

via @Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

See The Guidon­ian Hand, the Medieval Sys­tem for Read­ing Music, Get Brought Back to Life

“Hum­ming­bird,” A New Form of Music Nota­tion That’s Eas­i­er to Learn and Faster to Read

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

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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Watch Queen’s Stunning Live Aid Performance: 20 Minutes Guaranteed to Give You Goose Bumps (July 13, 1985)

in Music | May 4th, 2017

“The last peo­ple any­one expect­ed to come out of that gig as being the mem­o­rable ones was Queen,” said Bob Geld­of in an inter­view, look­ing back at the band’s stun­ning 24 minute set at Live Aid on July 13, 1985. In front of 72,000 peo­ple in Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um and mil­lions watch­ing world­wide, Queen resus­ci­tat­ed their career with a selec­tion of hits and new mate­r­i­al.

The band, as Roger Tay­lor says in the mini doc below, was “bored” and “in a bit of a trough.” They also had been crit­i­cized for play­ing Sun City in South Africa dur­ing the reign of Apartheid.

Going into Live Aid, a lot of the artists didn’t know what to expect of the entire event. Many, includ­ing Bob Geld­of him­self, won­dered if the event would flop. But Queen more than any of them seemed to intu­it right from the start the impor­tance of the day, though they were very ner­vous back­stage. But once onstage they com­plete­ly own it, even more so Fred­die Mer­cury who ris­es to the occa­sion as a front man and as a singer, giv­ing one of his best per­for­mances.

In that short set, Queen gives a full con­cert worth of ener­gy and the audi­ence responds. Not all were Queen fans, but by the end every­body had become one, singing along to “We Are the Cham­pi­ons” and “We Will Rock You.” Across the Atlantic, the 90,000 strong Philadel­phia audi­ence fol­lowed suit, watch­ing the jum­botron simul­cast.

“Do you now how hard it is to get someone’s atten­tion who’s on the oth­er side of the room?” asks Dave Grohl of Foo Fight­ers in this oth­er short doc on the set. “Imag­ine a sta­di­um and mak­ing them sing along with you.”

This hot sum­mer con­cert would turn out to be the zenith of Queen’s career. There would be more albums and sin­gles, but Fred­die Mer­cury would slow­ly suc­cumb to AIDS, and dis­ap­pear from pub­lic view, until pass­ing in 1991. The Live Aid set stands as one of the band’s final, icon­ic, and major achieve­ments. Watch it, in all of its glo­ry, above. You can find this, and oth­er Live Aid per­for­mances, on this 4 disc DVD.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Geld­of Talks About the Great­est Day of His Life, Step­ping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Mor­ris

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

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

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Museum of Failure: A New Swedish Museum Showcases Harley-Davidson Perfume, Colgate Beef Lasagne, Google Glass & Other Failed Products

in Business, Museums, Technology | May 4th, 2017

Here, in Sil­i­con Val­ley, fail­ure isn’t always fail­ure. At least accord­ing to the local mythol­o­gy, it’s some­thing to be embraced, accept­ed, even cel­e­brat­ed. “Fail fast, fail often,” they say. And even­tu­al­ly you’ll learn enough to achieve real suc­cess.

On June 7th, the Muse­um of Fail­ure will open in Hels­ing­borg, Swe­den. There you’ll find the remains of failed inno­va­tion. Google Glass, the Sony Beta­max, the Apple New­ton, Noki­a’s N‑gage–they’re all there. Dit­to a bot­tle of Harley-David­son Per­fume, Coca-Cola BlāK (aka cof­fee-fla­vored coke), and a Col­gate Beef Lasagne TV Din­ner. And, don’t for­get the Trump monop­oly-style board game–part of a long line of failed Trump prod­ucts and busi­ness­es.

Above, cura­tor Samuel West high­lights items in the col­lec­tion. Bring­ing togeth­er over 60 failed prod­ucts and ser­vices from around the world, the col­lec­tion pro­vides “unique insight into the risky busi­ness of inno­va­tion.” You can get anoth­er glimpse of the new insti­tu­tion below. Fit­ting­ly, the muse­um is 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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Long Game of Cre­ativ­i­ty: If You Haven’t Cre­at­ed a Mas­ter­piece at 30, You’re Not a Fail­ure

Oprah Winfrey’s Har­vard Com­mence­ment Speech: Fail­ure is Just Part of Mov­ing Through Life

Paulo Coel­ho on The Fear of Fail­ure

How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Course from Y Com­bi­na­tor Taught at Stan­ford

Seth Godin’s Start­up School: A Free Mini-Course for New Entre­pre­neurs

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Watch “A Family Tree,” Jonathan Demme’s 1980s Sitcom Episode with David Byrne & Rosanna Arquette

in Film, Television | May 4th, 2017

It comes as some­thing of a sur­prise to real­ize that the film­mak­er Jonathan Demme, who died last week, nev­er made a tele­vi­sion series of his own. He did, in addi­tion to fea­tures like Some­thing Wild and The Silence of the Lambs and doc­u­men­taries like Stop Mak­ing Sense, direct a few episodes of TV shows as var­ied as Sat­ur­day Night Live and Enlight­ened. But we nev­er got to see a full-on cre­at­ed-by-Demme series that, in this long Gold­en Age of Tele­vi­sion in which we live, could sure­ly have show­cased in an even deep­er way his much-praised inter­est in and empa­thy for human­i­ty. But we can get a sense of how one might have played from “A Fam­i­ly Tree,” the Rosan­na Arquette-star­ring sit­com episode he made in 1987 for the PBS prime-time com­e­dy series Try­ing Times.

Demme, in the words of The New York­er’s Dan Piepen­bring, “direct­ed an ensem­ble com­e­dy about CB-radio enthu­si­asts, a doc­u­men­tary on an Epis­co­palian min­is­ter, and the only episode of Colum­bo to traf­fic in the dra­ma of haute cui­sine. But nev­er did he roam far­ther afield than he does in ‘A Fam­i­ly Tree,’ a pitch-black anti-sit­com about an anx­ious young woman whose desire to belong leads her — per­haps in a nod to Stop Mak­ing Sense — to lit­er­al­ly burn down the house. Fit­ting­ly, David Byrne him­self is there to watch the flames go up, enjoy­ing an impe­ri­ous turn as a cig­ar-puff­ing, pie-hid­ing, rep­tile-obsessed broth­er-in-law.” And who could resist, hav­ing read a descrip­tion like that, giv­ing the episode a watch on Youtube, avail­able there in three parts (watch them above and below)?

The pro­duc­tion cer­tain­ly stood out from the Amer­i­can tele­vi­su­al land­scape of the time. The Chica­go Tri­bune’s TV crit­ic Clif­ford Per­ry, after trash­ing the then-new Full House, described Dem­me’s episode of Try­ing Times, the series’ pre­miere, as “built upon sick humor and a per­va­sive nas­ti­ness,” high­light­ing “an appeal­ing­ly vul­ner­a­ble per­for­mance by Arquette as the harassed out­sider who suf­fers through cig­ar smoke, belch­ing, home­made apple­jack, intra­mur­al bick­er­ing and a bar­rage of insults — as well as her own inep­ti­tude, which results in a series of house­hold dis­as­ters. Fine sup­port is giv­en by Hope Lange as the shrewish moth­er, Robert Ridge­ly as the just-fired father,” and par­tic­u­lar­ly Byrne “as the acer­bic yet bor­ing broth­er-in-law-to-be.”

Ulti­mate­ly, Per­ry judged “A Fam­i­ly Tree” as a “schiz­o­phrenic half-hour” that “veers between the far­ci­cal and the sur­re­al,” which pre­sum­ably was­n’t intend­ed as a straight­for­ward com­pli­ment. Today, how­ev­er, its laugh track-free tone of inti­mate unease and real­ism unapolo­get­i­cal­ly tinged with the bizarre would no doubt win it a con­sid­er­able fol­low­ing. The trib­utes paid to Demme have described him as a mak­er of films well root­ed in their eras and set­tings, but now we know he could make tele­vi­sion thir­ty years ahead of its time as well.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Jonathan Demme Put Human­i­ty Into His Films: From The Silence of the Lambs to Stop Mak­ing Sense

Jonathan Demme Nar­rates I Thought I Told You To Shut Up!!, a Short Film About the Coun­ter­cul­ture Car­toon Reid Flem­ing

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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Hear a Reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Set to Music: Features 100+ Musicians and Readers from Across the World

in Literature, Music | May 4th, 2017

In a post last year on an ambi­tious musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake, I not­ed that—when most in baf­fle­ment over the Irish writer’s final, seem­ing­ly unin­ter­pretable, work—I turn to Antho­ny Burgess, who not only pre­sumed to abridge the book, but wrote more lucid com­men­tary than any oth­er schol­ar­ly crit­ic or writer­ly admir­er of Joyce. In his study ReJoyce, Burgess described the novel—or whatever-you-call-it—as a “man-made moun­tain… as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got—massive, baf­fling, serv­ing noth­ing but itself, sug­gest­ing a mean­ing but nev­er quite yield­ing any­thing but a frac­tion of it, and yet (like a tree) des­per­ate­ly sim­ple.”

Joyce did seem to aspire to omni­science and the pow­er of god­like cre­ation, to sup­plant the “old father, old arti­fi­cer” he beseech­es at the end of A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man. And if Finnegans Wake is a work of nature, it seems to me that we might approach it like nat­u­ral­ists, look­ing for its inner laws and mech­a­nisms, per­form­ing dis­sec­tions and mount­ing it, flayed open, on dis­play boards.

Or we might approach it like poets, painters, field recordists—like artists, in oth­er words. We might leave its innards intact, and instead rep­re­sent what it does to our minds when we con­front its nigh-inscrutable ontol­ogy.

This lat­ter approach is the one adopt­ed by Way­words and Mean­signs’ lat­est release, which brings togeth­er record­ings from over 100 artists from 15 dif­fer­ent coun­tries—some semi-famous, most thrilling­ly obscure. Joyce’s book, explains project direc­tor Derek Pyle, is “the kind of thing that demands cre­ative approaches—from jazz and punk musi­cians to sound artists and mod­ern com­posers, each per­son hears and per­forms the text in a way that’s total­ly unique and end­less­ly excit­ing.” We first com­ment­ed on the endeav­or two years ago, when it released 31 hours of unabridged Joyce inter­pre­ta­tion. Last year’s sec­ond edi­tion great­ly expand­ed on the singing, read­ing, and exper­i­men­tal noodling of and around Finnegans Wake.

The third edi­tion con­tin­ues what has becom­ing a very fine tra­di­tion, and per­haps one of the most appro­pri­ate respons­es to the nov­el in the 78 years since its pub­li­ca­tion. This release (stream­able above, or on Archive.org) adds to the sec­ond edi­tion a belat­ed con­tri­bu­tion from icon­ic bassist and song­writer Mike Watt (of The Min­ute­men, fIRE­HOSE, and solo fame) and “actor and ‘JoyceGeek” Adam Har­vey. (And a Gum­by-star­ring illus­tra­tion, above, by punk rock cov­er artist Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon). The third unabridged col­lec­tion of inter­pre­ta­tive musi­cal read­ings, fur­ther up, offers con­tri­bu­tions from:

Mer­cury Rev vet­er­ans Jason Sebas­t­ian Rus­so and Paul Dil­lon, Joe Cas­sidy of But­ter­fly Child, Rail­road Earth’s Tim Car­bone and Lewis & Clarke’s Lou Rogai, psych-rock­ers Kin­s­ki, vocal­ist Phil Minton, poet S.A. Grif­fin, trans­la­tor Krzysztof Bart­nic­ki, “krautrock” pio­neer Jean-Hervé Péron of faUSt, British fringe musi­cian Neil Camp­bell, Mar­tyn Bates of Eye­less in Gaza, Lit­tle Spar­ta with Sal­ly Timms (Mekons) and Mar­tin Bill­heimer, com­pos­er Seán Mac Erlaine, indi­etron­i­ca pio­neer Schnei­der TM, and many more.

If some­thing on that list doesn’t grab you, you may have stum­bled into the wrong par­ty. In any case, you’ll find hun­dreds oth­er read­ings, songs, etc. to choose from in the expand­ing three-vol­ume com­pi­la­tion. Or you can lis­ten to it straight through, from the first edi­tion, to the sec­ond, to the third. Like the book, this project cel­e­brates, imi­tates, reflects, and refracts, Way­words and Mean­signs admits entry at any point, and near­ly always charms even as it per­plex­es. The fact that no one can real­ly grasp the slip­pery nature of Finnegans Wake per­haps makes the book, and its best cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tions, all the more gen­uine­ly for every­one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

H.G. Wells Reads Finnegans Wake & Tells James Joyce: It’s “A Dead End,” “You Have Turned Your Back on Com­mon Men” (1928)

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

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Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

in Philosophy, Psychology | May 3rd, 2017

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

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

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A Three-Minute Introduction to Buckminster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Productive Design Visionaries

in Design, Technology | May 3rd, 2017

Archi­tect, inven­tor, the­o­rist, and all-around fount of ideas Buck­min­ster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us asso­ciate him with one above all: geo­des­ic domes. Those dis­tinc­tive hemi­spher­ic struc­tures built out of strong tri­an­gu­lar parts, hav­ing gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recent­ly reap­peared in the zeit­geist as the type of lodg­ing promised to the atten­dees of the ill-con­ceived Fyre Fes­ti­val — an ultra-lux­u­ry mar­ket-tar­get­ed dis­as­ter not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career try­ing to real­ize. His vision of a future for “Space­ship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to cre­ate all he cre­at­ed, from new maps to new hous­es to new cars to new sleep­ing meth­ods. But what did he base that vision on?

“Fuller’s phi­los­o­phy could be best sum­ma­rized as being a social thinker, believ­ing that human­i­ty’s sur­vival is con­tin­gent upon how it man­ages Space­ship Earth and the resources it con­tains,” says the nar­ra­tor of the three-minute Proso­cial Progress Foun­da­tion primer above, “and that cre­at­ing abun­dance whilst doing lit­tle to no harm to the envi­ron­ment would help to alle­vi­ate a lot of the prob­lems in the world today.”

With every project he empha­sized “sys­tems think­ing,” or think­ing premised on “the idea that the world is an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem with inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems, and that a way to solve these prob­lems would be to call upon col­lec­tive action.” We’d all have to work togeth­er, in his view, to solve the prob­lems we suf­fer togeth­er.

That notion may strike us as utopi­an even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inven­tions only saw lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion dur­ing his life­time. But the label of utopi­an, which sug­gests a dis­re­gard for the rig­ors of real­i­ty, does­n’t quite fit the man him­self, so much con­cern did he have for prac­ti­cal­i­ties like the effi­cient allo­ca­tion of resources, quick con­struc­tion and deploy­ment, and ease of use. But giv­en the dystopi­an terms we’ve increas­ing­ly come to use to describe events here on Space­ship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style prac­ti­cal utopi­anism now more than ever. If these three min­utes have giv­en you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lec­ture series Every­thing I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your cal­en­dar first. The future of human­i­ty may depend on it!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

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

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

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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