Television host and children’s advocate Fred Rogers was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, for whom spiritual reflection was as natural and necessary a part of daily life as his vegetarianism and morning swims.
His quiet personal practice could take a turn for the public and interactive, as he demonstrated from the podium at the Daytime Emmy Awards in 1997, above.
Accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award, he refrained from running through the standard laundry list of thanks. Instead he invited the audience to join him in spending 10 seconds thinking of the people who “have loved us into being.”
He then turned his attention to his wristwatch as hundreds of glamorously attired talk show hosts and soap stars thought of the teachers, relatives, and other influential adults whose tender care, and perhaps rigorous expectations, helped shape them.
(Play along from home at the 2:15 mark.)
Ten seconds may not seem like much, but consider how often we deploy emojis and “likes” in place of sitting with others’ feelings and our own.
Fifteen years after his death, the Internet ensures that he will continue to inspire us to be kinder, try harder, listen better.
That effect should quadruple when Morgan Neville’s Mister Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is released next month.
Another sweet Emmy moment comes at the top, when the honoree smooches his wife, Joanne Rogers, before heading off to join presenter Tim Robbins at the podium. Described in Esquire as “hearty and almost whooping in (her) forthrightness,” the stalwart Mrs. Rogers appeared in a handful of episodes, but never played the sort of highly visible role Mrs. Claus inhabited within her husband’s public realm.
The full text of Mister Rogers’ Lifetime Achievement Award award speech is below:
So many people have helped me to come here to this night. Some of you are here, some are far away and some are even in Heaven. All of us have special ones who loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. 10 seconds, I’ll watch the time. Whomever you’ve been thinking about, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they have made. You know they’re kind of people television does well to offer our world. Special thanks to my family, my friends, and my co-workers in Public Broadcasting and Family Communications, and to this Academy for encouraging me, allowing me, all these years to be your neighbor. May God be with you. Thank you very much.
Professor Einstein was surprised tonight into loud and long laughter.
Hollywood demonstrated its principles of “relativity,” how it makes things seem what they are not, by use of a dilapidated motor car.
At the First National studio, German technicians persuaded Professor Einstein to change his mind about not being photographed and photographed him in the old car with Frau Elsa, his wife. He cannot drive a car.
Tonight the German technicians brought the film to the Einstein bungalow. The lights went out.
Then the ancient automobile appeared on the screen with Einstein at the wheel, driving Frau Elsa on a sight-seeing tour.
Down Broadway, Los Angeles they drove, then to the beaches. Suddenly the car rose like an airplane, and as Einstein took one hand from the wheel to point out the scenery, the Rocky Mountains appeared below. Then the car landed on familiar soil and the drive continued through Germany.
It was just a Hollywood trick of double exposure and a thrilling comedy, but not for the public. The master film was destroyed, and the only copy was given to the Einsteins.
That one surviving copy of the film eventually ended up in the archives at Lincoln Center, where it sat unnoticed for decades, until Becca Bender, an archivist, stumbled up on it last year. And fortunately now we can all enjoy that light moment shot so long ago.
To learn more about the discovery of the 1931 film, watch the video below. Or read this article over at From the Grapevine.
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From time to time, Americans will talk about the mass killing, treaty-breaking, impoverishment, and forced removal or assimilation of Native peoples in the U.S. as “a shameful period in our history.” While this may sound like the noble acknowledgement of a genocidal crime, it is far too half-hearted and disingenuous, since these acts are central to the entirety of U.S. history, from the first landing of European ships on North American shores to the recent events at Standing Rock and beyond. An enormous body of scholarly and popular literature testifies to the facts.
For a thorough one-volume survey, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the Unites States, a book that exhaustively cites several hundred years of well-documented events, like orders for extermination and land theft under military leaders George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Army general Thomas S. Jesup. Dunbar-Ortiz shows how many U.S. military practices and terms (such as the phrase “in country”) came directly from the so-called “Indian Wars.”
Take the practice of “scalp hunting,” encouraged during the Pequot War and becoming routine throughout the period of New England settlement in the late 1600’s:
Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.
The American football team currently bearing that name and representing the nation’s capital, as Baxter Holmes shows at Esquire, pays tribute to the extreme brutality of murdering Indigenous people and using their scalps as cash. “This way of war,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.”
In the GIF above, we see a dramatically telescoped visualization of the “violent seizing of Native Americans’ land” after 1776, writes Dylan Matthews at Vox, documented by historians like Dunbar-Ortiz and University of Georgia’s Claudio Saunt, who, along with Slate’s Rebecca Onion, created the graphic as a supplement for his book West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. “The project’s source data,” write Saunt and Onion, “is a set of maps produced in 1899 by the Bureau of American Ethnology,” a Smithsonian research unit that “published and collected anthropological, archaeological, and linguistic research… as the nineteenth century drew to a close.”
Blue areas show Indigenous homelands, red areas show reservations. The “time-lapse function,” note the map’s creators, “is the most visually impressive aspect of this interactive,” but you can access a “deep level of detail” at the map’s site, such as the names of the hundreds of dispossessed and displaced nations and links to the historical documentation of their land “cession.”
Many of the boundaries are vague, write Saunt and Onion, “a broad approach that left a lot of room for creative implementation.” As Saunt puts it, “greater legality and more precision would have made it impossible to seize so much land in so short a time,” just over 100 years shown here, from the 1776 founding to 1887, during which over 1.5 billion acres were seized and occupied by frontier settlers and the U.S. army in what Saunt calls in the map’s title the “Invasion of America.”
The social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm lived through just about the first 80 years of the 20th century, beginning in Germany, ending in Switzerland, and spending periods in between in places like New York, Mexico City, and Lansing, Michigan. But his intellectual experience exceeded even his clearly formidable historical and cultural experience: he engaged in not just psychoanalytic theory and practice but theological scholarship, political critique, and what he called a kind of “mysticism.”
To the wider public, which first got to know him through his 1956 bestseller The Art of Loving: An Enquiry into the Nature of Love, Fromm — who had already experienced so much of humanity — was an authority on human relationships. Before one can love, one must, in a broad sense, be able to listen, and he treats that subject at length in The Art of Listening, a posthumously published book adapted from a 1974 seminar in Switzerland.
Speaking in terms of psychoanalysis, Fromm objects to framing listening as a “technique,” since that word applies “to the mechanical, to that which is not alive, while the proper word for dealing with that which is alive is ‘art.’ ” And so if “psychoanalysis is a process of understanding man’s mind, particularly that part which is conscious… it is an art like the understanding of poetry.” He then provides six basic rules for this art as follows:
The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
Fromm’s rules apply not just outside his profession but independently of era or culture: wherever you are or whenever it happens to be, you can always practice freeing your mind so as to concentrate as completely as possible on the person talking to you, honing your imagination so as to vividly experience in your mind what they have to verbally communicate. Of course, to love, in Fromm’s sense, remains a particular challenge in this process, and for humans may well stand as the challenge of existence. But whether or not you credit psychoanalysis itself, the fact remains that we all must, to the greatest extent possible, understand one another’s minds as our own; the very survival of humanity has always depended on it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Chances are most of us won’t be immediately familiar with the eight mostly British playwrights reflecting on their process in the National Theatre’s video, above.
That’s a good thing.
It’s easier to choose which pieces of inspiring, occasionally conflicting writing advice to follow when the scale’s not weighted down by the thumb of celebrity.
(Though rest assured that there’s no shortage of people who do know their work, if the National Theater is placing them in the hot seat.)
It’s impossible to follow all of their suggestions on any given project, so go with your gut.
Or try your hand at one that doesn’t come naturally, especially if you’ve been feeling stuck.
These approaches are equally valid for those writing fiction, and possibly even certain types of poetry and song.
The National wins points for assembling a diverse group—there are four women and four men, three of whom are people of color.
Within this crew, it’s the women who overwhelmingly bring up the notions of permission and perfection, as in it’s okay to let your first draft be absolutely dreadful.
Most of the males are prone to plotting things out in advance.
And no one seems entirely at home marooned against a seamless white background on a plain wooden stool.
Jewish identity, school shootings, immigration, race, climate change, and homophobia are just some of the topics they have considered in their plays.
Some have worked in film and TV, adapted the classics, or written for young audiences.
They have won prestigious awards, seen their plays staged ‘round the globe, and had success with other artistic pursuits, including poetry, performance, and dance.
Clearly, you’ll find some great advice below, though it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Let us know in the comments which rules you personally consider worth following.
Eleven Rules for Writing from Eight Contemporary Playwrights
1. Start
or
2. Don’t start. Let your idea marinate for a minimum of six months, then start.
3.. Have some sort of outline or plan before you start
4. Do some research
5. Don’t be judgmental of your writing while you’re writing
6. Embrace the terrible first draft
7. Don’t show anyone your first draft, unless you want to.
8. Know how it’s going to end
or
9. Don’t know how it’s going end
10. Work with others
11. Print it, and read it like someone experiencing it for the first time. No editing aloud. Get that pen out of your hand.
And now, it’s time to discover the work of the participating playwrights. Go see a show, or at least read about one in the links:
In 1975, the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend published his highly contrarian Against Method, a book in which he argued that “science is essentially an anarchic enterprise,” and as such, ought to be accorded no more privilege than any other way of knowing in a democratic society. Motivated by concerns about science as a domineering ideology, he argued the historical messiness of scientific practice, in which theories come about not through elegant logical thinking but often by complete accident, through copious trial and error, intuition, imagination, etc. Only in hindsight do we impose restrictions and tidy rules and narratives on revolutionary discoveries.
Several years later, in the third, 1993 edition of the book, Feyerebend observed with alarm the same widespread anti-science bias that Carl Sagan wrote of two years later in Demon-Haunted World. “Times have changed,” he wrote, “Considering some tendencies in U.S. education… and in the world at large I think that reason should now be given greater weight.”
Feyerabend died the following year, but I wonder how he might revise or qualify a 2018 edition of the book, or whether he would republish it at all. Politically-motivated science denialism reigns. Indeed, a blithe denial of any observable reality, aided by digital technology, has become a dystopian new norm. But as the philosopher also commented, such circumstances may “occur frequently today… but may disappear tomorrow.”
In the recorded history of human inquiry across cultures and civilizations, we see ideas we call scientific co-existing with what we recognize as pseudo- and anti-scientific notions. The differences aren’t always very clear at the time. And then, sometimes, they are. During the so-called Age of Reason, when the development of the modern sciences in Europe slowly eclipsed other modes of explanation, one obscure group of contrarians persisted in almost comically stubborn unreason. Calling themselves the Muggletonians, the Protestant sect—like those today who deny climate change and evolution—resisted an overwhelming consensus of empirical science, the Copernican view of the solar system, despite all available evidence the contrary. In so doing, they left behind a series of “beautiful celestial maps,” notes Greg Miller at National Geographic, some of which resemble William Blake’s visual poetry.
The sect began in 1651, when a London tailor named John Reeve “claimed to have received a message from God” naming his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton as the “’last messenger for a great work unto this bloody unbelieving world.’… One of the main principles of their faith, a later observer wrote, was that ‘There is no Devil but the unclean Reason of men.’” Their view of the universe, based, of course, on scripture, resembles the Medieval Catholic view that Galileo attempted to correct, but their principle antagonist was not the Italian polymath or the earlier Renaissance astronomer Copernicus, but the great scientific mind of the time, Isaac Newton, whom Muggletonians railed against into the 19th and even 20th century. Muggletonians, Miller writes,” had remarkable longevity—the last known member died in 1979 after donating the sect’s archive of books and papers… to the British Library.”
These plates come from an 1846 book called Two Systems of Astronomy. Written by Muggletonian Isaac Frost, it “pitted the scientific system of Isaac Newton—which held that the gravitational pull of the sun holds the Earth and other planets in orbit around it—against an Earth-centered universe based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.” The plate above, for example, “attempts to show the absurdity of the Newtonian system by depicting our solar system as one of many in an infinite and godless universe.” Ironically, in attempting to ridicule Newton (who was himself a pseudo-scientist and Biblical literalist in other ways), the Muggletonians stumbled upon the view of modern astronomers, who extrapolate a mind-boggling number of possible solar systems in an observable universe of over 100 billion galaxies (though these systems are not enclosed cells crammed together side-by-side). Another plate, below, shows Frost’s depiction of the hated Newtonian system, with the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter orbiting the Sun.
The other maps, further up, all represent the Muggletonian view. Historian of science Francis Reid describes it thus:
According to Frost, Scripture clearly states that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars are embedded in a firmament made of congealed water and revolve around the Earth, that Heaven has a physical reality above and beyond the stars, and that the planets and the Moon do not reflect the Sun’s rays but are themselves independent sources of light.
Frost gave lectures at “establishments set up for the education of artisans and other workmen.” It seems he didn’t attract much attention and was frequently heckled by audience members. Like flat earthers, Muggletonians were treated as cranks, and unlike today’s religious anti-science crusaders, they never had the power to influence public policy or education. For this reason, perhaps, it is easy to see them as quaintly humorous. Frost’s maps, as Miller writes, “remain strangely alluring” for both their artistic quality and their astonishingly determined credulity. The plates are now part of the massive David Rumsey collection, which houses thousands of rare historical maps. For another fascinating look at religious cartography, see Miller’s National Geographic post “mapping the Apocalypse.”
A lifetime of rock star excess has taken its toll on Eddie Vedder’s voice but not on his talent. Most recent performances have tilted towards the gentle, the acoustic, the Americana, reflecting his larger embrace of the broad expanse of American music. And yes, he can still rock when needs be.
But these isolated vocal tracks–”Alive” above and “Black” and “Porch” below–show how powerful Vedder’s pipes were back in the day at the height of grunge. Vedder used a lot of vibrato, more than one can hear in the full band versions. He doesn’t use it so much when he holds a note, but on all the little notes in between.
And on “Porch” there’s a powerful pleading to the entire delivery that’s both vulnerable and hypermasculine at the same time. Where Kurt Cobain always seemed to be delivering rage inward, Vedder delivered it outwards, like the sound of mountains as a logging company got to work.
The videos try to match up concert footage with these studio tracks and the fact they sync so well show the consistency in his delivery. (The sped up tempo changes, not so much.)
Of course, isolated vocals also mean remixers attack! Here’s a few that might horrify a few grunge stalwarts.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Back in 1915, French filmmakers decided to revisit the evolution of the bicycle during the 19th century, moving from the invention of the bicycle in 1818, to the bikes that emerged during the 1890s. As the resulting film above shows, the bike went from being clunky, cumbersome and seemingly perilous to ride, to taking on the tried and true shape that we still recognize today.
This film was preserved by the Netherlands’ EYE Film Institute. Hence the subtitles are in Dutch. But thanks to Aeon Magazine, you can read English translations below:
1. The draisine was invented only a century ago, in 1818 by Baron Drais de Sauerbrun.
2. [This subtitle never appears in the film.
3. The vehicle that lies between the draisine and the 1850 bicycle has an improved steering wheel and a fitted brake.
4. In 1863, Pierre Lallement invented pedals that worked on the front wheel.
5. Around 1868, a third wheel was added. Although these tricycles were heavier than the two-wheelers, they were safer.
6. Between 1867 and 1870, various improvements were made, including the increased use of rubber tyres.
7. In 1875, following an invention by the engineer Trieffault, the frame was made of hollow pipes.
8. Following the fashion of the day, the front wheel was made as large as possible.
9. In 1878, Renard created a bicycle with a wheel circumference of more than 7 feet. Just sitting down on one of these was an athletic feat!
11. At the beginning of 1879, Rousseau replaced the large front wheel with a smaller one, and the chain was introduced on the front wheel for driving power.
12. The bicycle of today.
For another look at the Birth of the Bike, you can watch a 1937 newsreel that gives its own narrative account. It comes the from British Pathé film archives.
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