If you’re an aspiring guitar player, you’re in luck. In the age of YouTube, there’s no shortage of talented YouTubers who will teach you how to play the guitar parts of your favorite songs. How to play George Harrison’s guitar solo on “Let It Be”? This video has every little detail covered. Meanwhile, other videos neatly map out the finer points of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Pick your favorite song, and chances are someone has created a primer.
Then occasionally you run into videos like this–a tutorial straight from the artist him or herself. Above, Wayne Kramer, co-founder of Detroit’s ur-punk band, the MC5, sets the record straight and shows you the authentic way to play the 1969 anthem, “Kick Out the Jams.” “There are guys out there trying to show you how to play ‘Kick Out the Jams,’ and they’re all getting it wrong,” says Kramer. “They’re all messing it up. None of them are doing it right, and I’ve had enough.” So here is the “the proper, correct and official way” to play it. Let the lesson begin.
For good measure, he includes the lyrics and chords in the YouTube blurb:
Ten years ago, airlines were straightforward about complying with the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other governing bodies’ requirements. These instructions were serious business. Children and other first time travelers paid strict attention to information about tray tables, exits, and inflatable life vests that jaded frequent flyers ignored, confident that most take offs and landings tend to go according to plan, and the overwhelming number of planes tend stay in the air for the duration of one’s flight.
What about the ones that don’t though? There are times when a too-cool-for-school business traveler seated next to an emergency exit could spell disaster for everyone onboard.
For the .0001% of you who have never operated a seatbelt before, it works like this…
The cocky tone was dialed down for more critical information, like how to assist the child in the seat next to you when the yellow oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartment. (Imagine the mayhem if indie animator Bill Plympton had been in the pilot’s seat for this one…)
The irreverent approach was a hit. The FAA took note, encouraging creativity in a 2010 Advisory Circular:
Every airline passenger should be motivated to focus on the safety information in the passenger briefing; however, motivating people, even when their own personal safety is involved, is not easy. One way to increase passenger motivation is to make the safety information briefings and cards as interesting and attractive as possible.
For a while EVA Air, an innovator whose fleet includes several Hello Kitty Jets, played it safe by sticking to crowd pleasing schtick. Its 2012 CGI safety demo video, below, must’ve played particularly well with the Hello Kitty demographic.
…looks a bit 2012, no?
A few months ago, EVA took things in a direction few industry professionals could’ve predicted: modern dance, performed with utmost sincerity.
Choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava, a member of Taiwan’s indigenous Paiwan community, and a small crew of dancers spent three months translating the familiar directives into a vocabulary of symbolic gestures. See the results at the top of the post.
You’ll find none of the stock characters who populate other airlines’ videos here—no sneaky smokers, no concerned moms, no sleepy businesspeople. There’s barely a suggestion of a cabin.
Unfettered by seats or overhead bins, the brightly clad, barefoot dancers leap and roll as they interact with 3D projections, behavior that would certainly summon a flight attendant if performed on an actual plane.
Does it work?
The answer may depend on whether or not the plane on which you’re traveling takes a sudden nose dive.
In “No Joking,” an essay about airport security, University of Ottawa professor Mark B. Salter writes that it is “difficult to motivate passengers to contemplate their own mortality.” The fashion for jokiness in safety videos “naturalizes areas of anxiety,” a mental trick of which Freud was well aware.
What then are we to make of the EVA Air dancer at the 4:35 minute mark, who appears to be falling backward through the night sky?
Would you show a jet’s worth of travelers the modern dance equivalent of Airplane 1975, Fearless, or Snakes on a Plane before they taxi down the runway?
Mercifully, the narrator steps in to remind passengers that smoking is prohibited, before the digitally projected dark waters can swallow the writhing soloist up.
There’s also some question as to whether the video adequately addresses the question of tray table operation.
Readers, what do you think? Does this new video make you feel secure about taking flight?
The ways that Othello, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and Shylock from The Merchant of Venice—Shakespeare’s “explicitly racialized characters,” as George Washington University’s Ayanna Thompson puts it—have been interpreted over the centuries may have less to do with the author’s intentions and more with contemporary ideas about race, the actors cast in the roles, and the directorial choices made in a production. To a great degree, these characters have been played as though their identities were like the costumes put on by actors who darkened their faces or wore stereotypical markers of ethnic or religious Judaism (including “an obnoxiously large nose”).
Such portrayals risk turning complex characters into caricatures, validating much of what we might see as overt and implicit racism in the text. But there are those, Thompson says, who think such roles are actually “about racial impersonation.” Othello, for example, is “a role written by a white man, intended for a white actor in black makeup.”
For centuries, that is what most audiences fully expected to see. The tradition continued in Britain until the 19th century, when the Shakespearean color line, so to speak, was first crossed by Ira Aldridge, an American actor born in New York City in 1807.
“Educated at the African Free School,” notes the Folger Shakespeare Library, Aldridge “was able to see Shakespeare plays at the Park Theatre and the African Grove Theatre.” He took on roles like Romeo with the African Company, but “New York was generally not a welcoming place for black actors… some white theatergoers even attempted to prevent black companies from performing Shakespeare at all.” As Tony Howard, an English professor at the University of Warwick, tells PRI, “he was beaten up in the streets.” And so Aldridge left for England in 1824, where he played Othello at the Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden, at only 17 years old, the first black actor to play a Shakespearean role in Britain.
He later began performing under the name Keene, “a homonym,” notes the site Black History 365, “for the then popular British actor, Edmund Kean.” Aldridge’s big break came after he met Kean and his son Charles, also an actor, in 1831, and both became supporters of his career. When the elder Kean collapsed onstage in 1833, then died, Aldridge took over his role as Othello at London’s Royalty Theatre in two performances. “Critics objected,” the Folger writes, “to his race, his youth, and his inexperience.” As Howard tells it, this characterization is a gross understatement:
There were those who said this is a very interesting and extraordinary young actor. And the fact that he’s a black actor makes it more interesting and fascinating. But for many people, it was an insult because this is still a society where there is a great deal of slavery in the British Empire. And in order to combat the idea of increasing abolition, performers like Ira had to be stopped. And so there was a great deal of violent aggression. Not physical violence this time, but violence in the press.
Some of that verbal violence included comparing Aldridge to “performing horses” and “performing dogs.” Many London critics saw his entry on the Shakespearean stage as an affront to English literary tradition. Performing the bard’s works was “a kind of violation,” Howard summarizes, “he has no right to do that, not even to play Othello.”
Photo via the Folger Library
From his beginnings in Coventry to his experience in London, Aldridge made the once-blackface role his own, perhaps increasingly drawing “on his own experience and his own feeling.” He also portrayed Aaron in Titus, and as he persevered through negative press and prejudice, he took on other starring roles, including Richard III, Shylock, Iago, King Lear, and Macbeth. He “toured the English provinces extensively,” the BBC writes, “and stayed in Coventry for a few months, during which time he gave a number of speeches on the evils of slavery. When he left, people inspired by his speeches went to the county hall and petitioned for its abolition.”
By the end of the 1840s, however, Aldridge felt he had gone as far as he could go in England and left to tour the Continent in what had become his signature role, Othello. While first touring with an English company, he “later began to work with local theater troupes,” the Folger writes, “performing in English while the rest of the cast would perform in German, Swedish, etc. Despite the language barrier, Aldridge’s performances in Europe were highly acclaimed, a testament to his acting skills.” (See a playbill further up from a Bonn performance.) After winning great fame in Europe and Russia, the actor returned in triumph to London in 1855, and this time was very well-received.
Aldridge died in 1867. And though he was the subject of many portraits of the period—like that by James Northcote at the top of the post, portraying the 19-year-old Aldridge as Othello, and this 1830 painting by Henry Perronet Briggs—he was “largely forgotten by theater historians.” (See him above in an 1858 drawing by Ukranian artist Taras Shevchenko.) But his legacy has been revived in recent years. Aldridge was the subject of two recent plays, Black Othello, by Cecilia Sidenbladh, and Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti. And last year, he was honored in Coventry by a plaque on the site of the theater where he first achieved fame.
While he succeeded in becoming an all-around great Shakespearean actor, Aldridge’s legacy rests especially in the way he helped transform roles performed as “racial impersonation” for a few hundred years into the provenance of talented black actors who bring new depth, complexity, and authenticity to characters often played as stock ethnic villains. While white actors like Orson Welles and Lawrence Olivier continued to play Othello well into the 20th century, these days such casting can be seen as “ridiculous,” as Hugh Muir writes at The Guardian, especially if that actor “blacks up” for the role.
Above, you can watch him teach an Oxford course on Deep Learning, a hot subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence which creates neural networks–essentially complex algorithms modeled loosely after the human brain–that can recognize patterns and learn to perform tasks.
The bombast, arrogance and bloviation–maybe you need a break from it all. You may need exactly the opposite–a little Fred Rogers. If so, we’ve got two things for you. First, head over to Twitch.TV where they’re currently livestreaming all 856 episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (for a limited time). It’s a grand way of celebrating what would have been Fred’s 90th birthday this week. And then, above, watch the brand new trailer for Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the upcoming documentary by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom). Due out in June, the film “takes us beyond the zip-up cardigans and the land of make-believe, and into the heart of a creative genius who inspired generations of children with compassion and limitless imagination.” As you watch the trailer, you’ll be reminded that Rogers worked his magic during other periods of chaos and discontent, and how sorely his calming presence is missing today.
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I don’t know how many people still watch WKRP in Cincinnati (apparently it is streaming on Hulu), or how well the jokes have aged, but there is a small but dedicated fan base out there. Part of it might be nostalgia not just for the sitcom itself, but for a time when radio stations were idiosyncratic things, not just part of vast media conglomerates that have a song playlist you could fit onto a thumb drive. Ask any boomer and they’ll recall their own favorite real-life versions of rock DJ Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and funk/soul DJ Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid).
Recently, one dedicated fan went through the first season and identified every song played on the shows, and produced this spreadsheet first mentioned on BoingBoing. That then led to somebody wishing for a Spotify playlist and of course the Internet has provided. Find the playlist and stream all 202 tracks below.
What to make of the choices? DJ Johnny Fever starts off with Ted Nugent’s “Queen of the Forest” to announce the station’s switch from muzak to a rock/Top 40 format in the first episode. A majority of the songs are major label selections, with the Rolling Stones the favorite choice through the season with five songs total. Other bands are still staples of classic rock format stations to this day: Bob Seger, Boston, Styx, Van Morrison, Foreigner, The Grateful Dead, Blondie, The Doors. Venus Flytrap’s selections aren’t as common, but they are also a familiar cross-section of the disco era: Chic, A Taste of Honey, Evelyn Champagne King, and Marvin Gaye.
One interesting appearance was Michael Des Barres, former frontman of the rock band Detective (who were signed to Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label), and post-Robert Palmer frontman of Power Station. He was cast as the lead singer of the punk band “Scum of the Earth” in one WKRP episode, where he sang three Detective tunes. (The band actually came dressed in business suits, so I’m not sure how “punk” they were). Now, the producers must have liked Michael Des Barres, because when the ill-fated sequel The New WKRP in Cincinnati premiered in 1991, he played one half of a morning show team.
Creator Hugh Wilson explains in this video how costly some of the original rights usages could be, where maybe “I could get 17 seconds of Pink Floyd for $3,000.” But as the show grew in popularity, record companies started to treat the show “like a real station” and providing music and merchandise to dress the sets.
The use of actual radio hits (and not “soundalikes”) became a problem for the show in syndication. When it was time to renew the rights, the various media companies wanted 10 times as much. As Wilson says, that was the end of WKRP in syndication.
The Shout Factory DVD boxset was able to reproduce most of Season one with 80 percent of the original music intact, and it’s possibly why only one season is out there.
That also may be why that $3,000 worth of Pink Floyd only exists as a very blurry YouTube video up at the top of the post.
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.
Ask anyone who’s pursued a career in the sciences what first piqued their interest in what would become their field, and they’ll almost certainly have a story. Gazing at the stars on a camping trip, raising a pet frog, fooling around with computers and their components: an experience sparks a desire for knowledge and understanding, and the pursuit of that desire eventually delivers one to their specific area of specialization.
Or, as they say in science, at least it works that way in theory; the reality usually unrolls less smoothly. On such a journey, just like any other, it might help to have a map.
Enter the work of science writer and physicist Dominic Walliman, whose animated work on the Youtube channel Domain of Science we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. (See the “Related Content” section below for the links.)
Walliman’s videos astutely explain how the subfields of biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and computer science relate to each other, but now he’s turned that same material into infographics readable at a glance: maps, essentially, of the intellectual territory. He’s made these maps, of biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and computer science, freely available on his Flickr account: you can view them all on a single page here along with a few more of his infographics..
As much use as Walliman’s maps might be to science-minded youngsters looking for the best way to direct their fascinations into a proper course of study, they also offer a helpful reminder to those farther down the path — especially those who’ve struggled with the blinders of hyperspecialization — of where their work fits in the grand scheme of things. No matter one’s field, scientific or otherwise, one always labors under the threat of losing sight of the forest for the trees. Or the realm of life for the bioinformatics, biophysics, and biomathematics; the whole of mathematics for the number theory, the differential geometry, and the differential equations; the workings of computers for the scheduling, the optimization, and the boolean satisfiability.
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.
In these times of high anxiety, battles over “free speech”—on college campuses, in corporate offices, on airwaves and the internet—can seem extremely myopic from a certain perspective. The perspective I mean is one in which a disturbing number of messages broadcast perpetually to millions of people bear little relationship to scientific, historical, or social facts, so that it becomes increasingly difficult for many people to tell fact from fiction. Debating whether or not such speech is “free” outside of any consideration for what purpose it serves, who it harms, and why it should drown out other speech because it appeals to widespread prejudices or powerful, monied interests seems grossly irresponsible at best.
Most philosophers who have considered these matters have stressed the important relationship between reason and ethics. In the classical formula, persuasive speech was considered to have three dimensions: logos—the use of facts and logical arguments; ethos—the appeal to common standards of value; and pathos—a consideration for the emotional resonance of language. While the forceful dialectical reasoning of Plato and his contemporaries valued parrhesia—which Michel Foucault translates as “free speech,” but which can also means “bold” or “candid” speech—classical thinkers also valued social harmony and did not intend that philosophical debate be a scorched-earth war with the intention to win at all costs.
Bertrand Russell, the brilliant mathematician, philosopher, and anti-war activist, invoked this tradition often (as in his letter declining a debate with British fascist Oswald Mosley). In the video above he answers the question, “what would you think it’s worth telling future generations about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it.” His answer may not validate the prejudices of certain partisans, but neither does it evince any kind of special partisanship itself. Russell breaks his advice into two, interdependent categories, “intellectual and moral.”
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we should learn the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
The gist: our speech should conform to the facts of the matter; rather than wishful thinking, we should accept that people will say things we don’t like, but if we cannot love but only hate each other, we’ll probably end up destroying ourselves.
The video above, from the BBC program Face-to-Face, was recorded in 1959.
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