Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism (1978)

in Art, Film, History | May 7th, 2018

“Dada thrives on con­tra­dic­tions. It is cre­ative and destruc­tive. Dada denounces the world and wish­es to save it.” So says one nar­ra­tor of jour­nal­ist-film­mak­er Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Coun­cil of Great Britain doc­u­men­tary on not just the inter­na­tion­al avant-garde move­ment called Dada but the asso­ci­at­ed cur­rents of sur­re­al­ism churn­ing around that con­ti­nent dur­ing the first half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. “Dada want­ed to replace the non­sense of man with the illog­i­cal­ly sense­less. Dada is sense­less, like nature. Dada is for nature, and against art. Philoso­phers have less val­ue for Dada than an old tooth­brush, and Dada aban­dons them to the great lead­ers of the world.”

Of the many bold and often con­tra­dic­to­ry claims made about Dada, none describe it as eas­i­ly under­stood. But Dada has less to do with intel­lec­tu­al, aes­thet­ic, or polit­i­cal coher­ence than with a cer­tain ener­gy. That ener­gy could fire up the likes of André Bre­ton, Sal­vador Dalí, René Magritte, Gior­gio de Chiri­co, and many oth­er artists besides, chan­nel­ing frus­tra­tions with the state of post-World War I Europe into a sen­si­bil­i­ty that demand­ed rip­ping every­thing up and build­ing it all again, begin­ning with the very foun­da­tions of sense.

Gold and his col­lab­o­ra­tors on Europe After the Rain under­stand this, audio­vi­su­al­ly inter­pret­ing the lega­cy of Dada, which despite its short lifes­pan left behind a host of still-strik­ing works in text, image, and sculp­ture, in a vari­ety of ways.

“The movie is full of trea­sures,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Oliv­er Hall, includ­ing “BBC inter­views with Max Ernst and Mar­cel Duchamp from the Six­ties, a read­ing of Artaud’s ‘Address to the Dalai Lama,’ an account of Freud’s meet­ing with Dalí.” He adds that its “re-enact­ment of Breton’s dia­logue with an offi­cial of the Par­ti com­mu­niste français is illu­mi­nat­ing, and com­ple­ments the oth­er valu­able mate­r­i­al on the ‘Pope of Sur­re­al­ism’: his work with shell-shocked sol­diers in World War I, tri­als and expul­sions of oth­er Sur­re­al­ists, col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leon Trot­sky in Mex­i­co, less-than-hero­ic con­tri­bu­tions to the French Resis­tance, and study of the occult.” But then, the kind of mind that could launch a move­ment like Dada — which fifty years after its end remained fas­ci­nat­ing enough to inspire a doc­u­men­tary that itself holds its fas­ci­na­tion forty years on — is capa­ble, one sus­pects, of any­thing.

Watch the uncut ver­sion of Europe After the Rain above.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anar­chic, Irra­tional “Anti-Art” Move­ment of Dadaism

Read and Hear Tris­tan Tzara’s “Dada Man­i­festo,” the Avant-Garde Doc­u­ment Pub­lished 100 Years Ago (March 23, 1918)

Three Essen­tial Dadaist Films: Ground­break­ing Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Mar­cel Duchamp

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Music of the Dada Move­ment: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Cen­tu­ry Ago

Dress Like an Intel­lec­tu­al Icon with Japan­ese Coats Inspired by the Wardrobes of Camus, Sartre, Duchamp, Le Cor­busier & Oth­ers

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.

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Yale’s Free Course on The Moral Foundations of Political Philosophy: Do Governments Deserve Our Allegiance, and When Should They Be Denied It?

in Online Courses, Politics, Yale | May 7th, 2018

“When do gov­ern­ments deserve our alle­giance, and when should they be denied it?” It’s a ques­tion that has per­haps crossed your mind late­ly. And it’s pre­cise­ly the ques­tion that’s at the heart of The Moral Foun­da­tions of Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy, a free course taught by Yale polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Ian Shapiro.

In 25 lec­tures (all avail­able above, on YouTube and iTunes), the course “starts with a sur­vey of major polit­i­cal the­o­ries of the Enlightenment—Utilitarianism, Marx­ism, and the social con­tract tradition—through clas­si­cal for­mu­la­tions, his­tor­i­cal con­text, and con­tem­po­rary debates relat­ing to pol­i­tics today. It then turns to the rejec­tion of Enlight­en­ment polit­i­cal think­ing. Last­ly, it deals with the nature of, and jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for, demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics, and their rela­tions to Enlight­en­ment and Anti-Enlight­en­ment polit­i­cal think­ing.”

You can find an archived web page that includes a syl­labus for the course. Or you can now take the course as a full-blown MOOC. Below find the texts used in the course.

The Moral Foun­da­tions of Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy will be added to our list of Free Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Texts:

Arendt, Han­nah. Eich­mann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking, 1963.

Bromwich, David. “Intro­duc­tion” to On Empire, Lib­er­ty, and Reform: Speech­es and Let­ters. New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2000.

Burke, Edmund. Reflec­tions on the Rev­o­lu­tion in France. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2009.

Hamil­ton, Alexan­der, John Jay, and James Madi­son. The Fed­er­al­ist Papers. Ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2009.

Locke, John. Two Trea­tis­es of Gov­ern­ment and a Let­ter Con­cern­ing Human Under­stand­ing. Ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1988.

Mac­In­tyre, Alas­dair. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Mill, John Stu­art. On Lib­er­ty. Ed. David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2003.

Noz­ick, Robert. Anar­chy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

Rawls, John. A The­o­ry of Jus­tice. 2nd edi­tion. Cam­bridge, MA: Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1999.

Shapiro, Ian. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Jus­tice. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1999.

Shapiro, Ian. Moral Foun­da­tions of Pol­i­tics. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2003.

Tuck­er, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Read­er. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Nor­ton, 1978.

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Visit an Online Collection of 64,259 Musical Instruments from Across the World

in History, Museums, Music | May 7th, 2018

The study of musi­cal instru­ments opens up vast his­to­ries of sound rever­ber­at­ing through the cen­turies. Should we embark on a jour­ney through halls of Europe’s musi­cal instru­ment muse­ums, for exam­ple, we should soon dis­cov­er how lim­it­ed our appre­ci­a­tion for music his­to­ry has been, how nar­rowed by the rel­a­tive hand­ful of instru­ments allowed into orches­tras, ensem­bles, and bands of all kinds. The typ­i­cal diet of clas­si­cal, roman­tic, mod­ern, jazz, pop, rock, R&B, or what­ev­er, the music most of us in the West grow up hear­ing and study­ing, has result­ed from a care­ful sort­ing process that over time chose cer­tain instru­ments over oth­ers.

Some of those his­toric instruments—the vio­lin, cel­lo, many wind and brass—remain in wide cir­cu­la­tion and pro­duce music that can still sound rel­e­vant and con­tem­po­rary. Oth­ers, like the Mel­lotron (above) or bar­rel organs (like the 1883 Cylin­der­pos­i­tiv at the top), remain wed­ded to their his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, mak­ing sounds that might as well have dates stamped on them.

You could—and many an his­to­ri­an has, no doubt—travel the world and pay a per­son­al vis­it to the muse­ums hous­ing thou­sands of musi­cal instru­ments humans have used—or at least invented—to car­ry melodies and har­monies and keep time. Such a tour might con­sti­tute a life’s work.

But if you’re on a bud­get or your grant doesn’t come through, you can still tour Europe’s musi­cal instru­ment muse­ums, and two muse­ums in Africa, from the com­fort of your home, office, or library thanks to MIMO, Musi­cal Instru­ment Muse­ums Online, a “con­sor­tium of some of Europe’s most impor­tant musi­cal instru­ment muse­ums” offer­ing “the world’s largest freely acces­si­ble data­base for infor­ma­tion on musi­cal instru­ments held in pub­lic col­lec­tions.”

The enor­mous online col­lec­tion hous­es, vir­tu­al­ly, tens of thou­sands of instru­ments from over two dozen regions around the globe. (There are 64,259 instru­ments in total.) Find an Ital­ian Basse de Vio­le (above) from 1547 or an ornate Egypt­ian darabuk­ka (below). And, of course, plen­ty of iconic—and rare—elec­tric gui­tars and bass­es.

You can search instru­ments by mak­er, coun­try, city, or con­ti­nent, time peri­od, muse­um, and type. (Wind, Per­cus­sion, Stringed, Zithers, Rat­tles, Bells, Lamel­la­phones, etc….) Researchers may encounter a few lan­guage hurdles—MIMO’s about page men­tions “search­ing in six dif­fer­ent lan­guages,” and the site actu­al­ly lists 11 lan­guage cat­e­gories in tabs at the top. But users may still need to plug pages into Google trans­late unless they read French or Ger­man or some of the oth­er lan­guages in which descrip­tions have been writ­ten. Refresh­ing­ly con­sis­tent, the pho­tographs of each instru­ment con­form to a stan­dard set by the con­sor­tium that pro­vides “detailed guide­lines on how to set up a repos­i­to­ry to enable the har­vest­ing of dig­i­tal con­tent.”

But enough about the site func­tions, what about the sounds? Well, in a phys­i­cal muse­um, you wouldn’t expect to take a three-hun­dred-year-old flute out of its case and hear it played. Just so, most of the instru­ments here can be seen and not heard, but the site does have over 400 sound files, includ­ing the enchant­i­ng record­ing of Sym­pho­nion Eroica 38a (above), as played on a mechan­i­cal clock from 1900.

As you dis­cov­er instru­ments you nev­er knew existed—such as the theramin-like Croix Sonore (Sonorus Cross), cre­at­ed by Russ­ian com­pos­er Nico­las Obukhov between 1926 and 1934—you can under­take your own research to find sam­ple record­ings online, such as “The Third and Last Tes­ta­ment,” below, Obukhov’s com­po­si­tion for 5 voic­es, organ, 2 pianos, orches­tra, and croix sonore. Obukhov’s exper­i­ments with instru­ments of his own inven­tion prompt­ed his exper­i­ments in 12-tone com­po­si­tion, in which, he declared, “I for­bid myself any rep­e­ti­tion.” Just one exam­ple among many thou­sands demon­strat­ing how instru­ment design forms the basis of a wild­ly pro­lif­er­at­ing vari­ety of musi­cal expres­sions that can start to seem end­less after a while.

via @dark_shark

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Musi­cian Impro­vise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instru­ment, The Car­il­lon

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

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

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Visit a Gallery of 300 Striking Posters from the May 1968 Uprising in Paris

in Art, History, Politics | May 4th, 2018

Among the many oth­er 50ths com­mem­o­rat­ed this year, one will large­ly go unno­ticed by the U.S. press, giv­en that it hap­pened in France, a coun­try we like to ignore as much as pos­si­ble, and con­cerned the pol­i­tics of anar­chists and com­mu­nists, peo­ple we like to pre­tend don’t exist except as car­i­ca­tures in scare-mon­ger­ing car­toons. But the French remem­ber May 1968, and not only on its fifti­eth. The wild­cat strikes, stu­dent march­es, and bar­ri­cades in the Latin Quar­ter haunt French pol­i­tics. “We’re slight­ly pris­on­ers of a myth,” laments his­to­ri­an Danielle Tar­takowsky.

The inter­na­tion­al his­tor­i­cal events sur­round­ing the strikes and march­es are well-known or should be. The found­ing ethos of the move­ment, Sit­u­a­tion­ism, per­haps less so. Read­ing Guy Debord’s Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle and the 1968 movement’s oth­er essen­tial texts can feel like look­ing into a fun­house mir­ror.

The 1966 pam­phlet man­i­festo that began the stu­dent agi­ta­tion—“On the Pover­ty of Stu­dent Life”—might sound mighty famil­iar: it has no kind words for con­sumerist stu­dent rad­i­cals who “con­vert their uncon­scious con­tempt into a blind enthu­si­asm.” Yet they have been attacked, it clar­i­fies, “from the wrong point of view.”

Since we seem to be, in some dena­tured way, reliv­ing events of fifty years ago, the think­ing of that not-so-dis­tant moment illu­mi­nates our cir­cum­stances. “If there’s one thing in com­mon between 1968 and today,” remarks Antoine Gué­gan, whose father Gérard staged Paris cam­pus sit-ins, “it’s young people’s despair. But it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of despair…. Today’s youth is fac­ing a moment of stag­na­tion, with lit­tle to lean on.” Despite the riotous, bloody nature of the times, a glob­al move­ment then found rea­son for hope.

We see it reflect­ed in the defi­ant art and cin­e­ma of the time, from rev­o­lu­tion­ary work by a 75-year-old Joan Miró to vérité film by 20-year-old wun­derkind Philippe Gar­rel. And we see it, espe­cial­ly, in the huge num­ber of posters print­ed to adver­tise the move­ment, rad­i­cal graph­ic designs that illus­trate the exhil­a­ra­tion and defi­ance of the loose col­lec­tive of Marx­ists-Lenin­ists, Trot­skyites, Maoists, Anar­chists, Sit­u­a­tion­ists, and so on who pro­pelled the move­ment for­ward.

Last year, we fea­tured a gallery of these arrest­ing images from the Ate­lier Pop­u­laire, a group of artists and stu­dents, notes Dan­ger­ous Minds, which “occu­pied the École des Beaux-Arts and ded­i­cat­ed its efforts to pro­duc­ing thou­sands of silk-screened posters using bold, icon­ic imagery and slo­gans as well as explic­it­ly collective/anonymous author­ship.” Today, we bring you a huge gallery of more than 300 such images, housed online at Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to.

Some of the images are down­load­able. You can request down­loads of oth­ers from the uni­ver­si­ty library for pri­vate use or pub­li­ca­tion. These posters rep­re­sent a move­ment con­fronting an oppres­sive soci­ety with its own log­ic, a soci­ety of which Debord wrote just the pre­vi­ous year, “the spec­ta­cle is not a col­lec­tion of images; it is a social rela­tion between peo­ple that is medi­at­ed by images.” There is no under­stand­ing of the events of May 1968 with­out an under­stand­ing of its visu­al cul­ture as, Debord wrote, “a means of uni­fi­ca­tion.” Enter the gallery of posters and prints here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Gallery of Visu­al­ly Arrest­ing Posters from the May 1968 Paris Upris­ing

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

Bed Peace Revis­its John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Viet­nam Protests

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

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How Master Japanese Animator Satoshi Kon Pushed the Boundaries of Making Anime: A Video Essay

in Animation, Film | May 4th, 2018

To casu­al view­ers, most Japan­ese ani­ma­tion (at least apart from the ele­gant work of Hayao Miyaza­ki and his col­lab­o­ra­tors at Stu­dio Ghi­b­li) can look like a pret­ty unso­phis­ti­cat­ed and even dis­rep­utable affair, char­ac­ter­ized by crude flashi­ness, con­vo­lut­ed sto­ry­lines, and bizarre, sopho­moric humor. All those things do, of course, exist in the realm of ani­me, but only because every­thing does: if Japan’s ver­sion of ani­ma­tion often ris­es above those of oth­er cul­tures, it does so as a result of that cul­ture regard­ing ani­ma­tion as sim­ply cin­e­ma by oth­er means. And any cin­e­mat­ic form will inevitably pro­duce diverse vir­tu­os­i­ty: to see how a mas­ter Japan­ese ani­ma­tor can have a sen­si­bil­i­ty com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from that of Miyaza­ki, look no fur­ther than Satoshi Kon.

“Even if you don’t know his work, you have cer­tain­ly seen some of these images,” says Every Frame a Paint­ing’s Tony Zhou in the series’ video essay on Kon’s work, which includes the inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed films Per­fect Blue, Tokyo God­fa­thers, and Papri­ka.

“He is an acknowl­edged influ­ence on both Dar­ren Aronof­sky and Christo­pher Nolan, and he has a fan base that includes just about every­one who loves ani­ma­tion.” The essay shows us how those two West­ern live-action auteurs, among Kon’s oth­er fans, have bor­rowed his images for their own sto­ries, just as Kon, in turn, drew a great deal of inspi­ra­tion from a sim­i­lar­ly unlike­ly source: George Roy Hill’s 1972 cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of Kurt Von­negut’s nov­el Slaugh­ter­house-Five.

More specif­i­cal­ly, Kon drew inspi­ra­tion from the film’s inven­tive and sur­pris­ing cuts from one scene to anoth­er, a for­mal reflec­tion of its chronol­o­gy-and-geog­ra­phy-jump­ing pro­tag­o­nist’s state of being “unstuck in time.” Through­out his decade-long fea­ture film­mak­ing career, Kon “was con­stant­ly show­ing one image and then reveal­ing that it was­n’t what you thought it was.” Kon died in 2010, hav­ing “pushed ani­ma­tion in ways that aren’t real­ly pos­si­ble in live action, not just elas­tic images but elas­tic edit­ing, a unique way of mov­ing from image to image, scene to scene.” His accom­plish­ments live on not just in his own work, but in all the ways the cre­ators who admire it con­tin­ue to adapt his inno­va­tions for their own, even in the tra­di­tion­al­ly “respectable” forms of cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Hand-Drawn Japan­ese Ani­me: A Deep Study of How Kat­suhi­ro Otomo’s Aki­ra Uses Light

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

The Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Cow­boy Bebop, the Cult Japan­ese Ani­me Series, Explored in a Thought­ful Video Essay

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Free Online 64 Ani­ma­tions That Launched the Japan­ese Ani­me Tra­di­tion

A Salute to Every Frame a Paint­ing: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Fine­ly-Craft­ed (and Now Con­clud­ed) Video Essay Series on Cin­e­ma

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.

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Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory of the Cosmos Now Published & Available Online

in Physics | May 4th, 2018

Image by NASA, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the weeks before he died, Stephen Hawk­ing wrote what would be his final the­o­ry of the cos­mos. Co-writ­ten with Bel­gian physi­cist Thomas Her­tog, and now pub­lished in the Jour­nal of High Ener­gy Physics, “A smooth exit from eter­nal infla­tion?” asserts that “real­i­ty may be made up of mul­ti­ple uni­vers­es, but each one may not be so dif­fer­ent to our own.” Or so that’s how the the­o­ry gets trans­lat­ed into col­lo­qui­al Eng­lish by The Guardian. You can read an abstract of the the­o­ry here, or the com­plete pub­lished ver­sion here.

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 Physics Cours­es

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er 

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Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Debuted on Broadway 50 Years Ago: Watch Footage of the Cast Performing in 1968

in History, Music, Theatre | May 4th, 2018

As years go, 1968 is packed with notable events.

The Tet Offen­sive and the Apol­lo 8 mis­sion to the moon.

The assas­si­na­tions of Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first 747 took to the skies. Star Trek showed television’s first inter­ra­cial kiss.

And Hair: The Amer­i­can Trib­al Love-Rock Musi­cal, which debuted down­town hard on the heels of the Sum­mer of Love, reopened on Broad­way.

New York Times crit­ic Clive Barnes—a fan—caved to pres­sure from anx­ious pre­view audi­ence mem­bers, who want­ed him to warn prospec­tive tick­et buy­ers what they were in for. Tongue firm­ly in cheek, he com­plied with­in the body of a rave review:

A great many four let­ter words such as “love”

A num­ber of men and women (I should have count­ed)… total­ly nude

Fre­quent approv­ing ref­er­ences… to the expand­ing ben­e­fits of drugs

Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty

Mis­ce­gena­tion

Flow­ers

Then, as now, a grow­ing youth move­ment occu­pied the Amer­i­can public’s imag­i­na­tion.

If 2018’s Broad­way pro­duc­ers are will­ing to take a risk on a musi­cal that’s not adapt­ed from a pop­u­lar movie, we may well be enter­ing tick­et lot­ter­ies for Gon­za­lez! some­time in the very near future.

Back then, young peo­ple were in revolt against the Viet­nam War and the val­ues their par­ents held dear.

The orig­i­nal ver­sions, both on and off Broad­way, fea­tured two of the show’s three authors, Gerome Rag­ni and James Rado, as anti­heroes Berg­er and Claude. (Galt Mac­Der­mot wrote the music.)

While oth­er cast mem­bers emerged from New York’s hip­pie scene, Rag­ni and Rado’s back­grounds were some­what lack­ing in patchouli. Rado was an aspi­rant com­pos­er of tra­di­tion­al Broad­way musi­cals. Rag­ni, as a mem­ber of The Open The­ater, was a bit more tuned in, the­atri­cal­ly speak­ing.

As Rado recalled in an inter­view:

There was so much excite­ment in the streets and the parks and the hip­pie areas, and we thought if we could trans­mit this excite­ment to the stage it would be won­der­ful. … We hung out with them and went to their Be-Ins (and) let our hair grow.

Barnes wry­ly not­ed in his review that “these hard-work­ing and tal­ent­ed actors are in real­i­ty about as hip­pie as May­or Lind­say.”

But there’s noth­ing too wig-like about the hair swing­ing around in the above footage—from the Gram­mys, The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour, and the 1969 Tony Awards where the cast was intro­duced by Har­ry Bela­fonte. There’s a spon­tane­ity sel­dom seen in big bud­get musi­cals these days, though with a nation­al tour hit­ting the road and dozens of 50th anniver­sary pro­duc­tions pop­ping up across the coun­try, we may be in for a redux.

To learn more about Hair’s role in the­ater history—including under­study Diane Keaton’s refusal to get naked and a page from the Times’ the­ater list­ings show­ing what else was play­ing at the time—read The Bow­ery Boys pho­to-packed 50th anniver­sary salute.

Sing along with the orig­i­nal Off-Broad­way cast below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage of the “Human Be-In,” the Land­mark Counter-Cul­ture Event Held in Gold­en Gate Park, 1967

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

Fed­eri­co Felli­ni Intro­duces Him­self to Amer­i­ca in Exper­i­men­tal 1969 Doc­u­men­tary

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Wednes­day, May 16 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Peter Sellers Gives a Quick Demonstration of British Accents

in Comedy | May 3rd, 2018

A while ago we brought you a hilar­i­ous series of record­ings of the British comedic actor Peter Sell­ers read­ing The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in four dif­fer­ent accents. Today we have a brief clip from a tele­phone call by Sell­ers on the set of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb (in which Sell­ers played three dif­fer­ent roles). Here he demon­strates the nuances of a few of the many accents around Great Britain. From cock­ney to upper class and from Lon­don to Edin­burgh, it’s clas­sic Sell­ers all the way.

If this whets your appetite, don’t miss the items in the Relat­eds below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Reads The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in 4 Dif­fer­ent Accents: Dr. Strangelove, Cock­ney, Irish & Upper Crust

Peter Sell­ers Recites The Bea­t­les’ “A Hard Day’s Night” in the Style of Shakespeare’s Richard III

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.