The Appeal of UFO Narratives: Investigative Journalist Paul Beban Visits Pretty Much Pop #14

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | October 9th, 2019

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TV news reporter Paul Beban (ABC, Al Jazeera, Yahoo, and now fea­tured on the Dis­cov­ery Net­work’s Con­tact) joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the pub­lic fas­ci­na­tion with UFOs, both at the peak of their pop­u­lar­i­ty in the 50s and in the cur­rent resur­gence. Do accounts of sight­ings nec­es­sar­i­ly make for good TV? Do you have to believe to be enter­tained? Is belief in UFOs relat­ed to reli­gious belief? To beliefs in con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and anti-gov­ern­ment ven­om? To humor?

We get into the mechan­ics of Con­tact, the Area 51 hubbub,and also touch on the show Project Blue Book, films like Arrival (2016) and UFO (2018), the doc­u­men­tary Unac­knowl­edged (2017), the short sto­ry “Road­side Pic­nic,” and more. To learn more about UFO lore in Amer­i­ca, check out some of these pod­casts.

Some of the resources we used for this episode includ­ed:

Plus, here are some stats from Gallup about UFO sight­ings and belief, you might want to pick up the book Nos­tal­gia for the Absolute that Paul refers to, and here’s the 2014 talk by Rob­bie Gra­ham that Bri­an referred to describ­ing “hyper-real­i­ty” and the Hol­ly­wood UFO con­spir­a­cy. Here’s a list of UFO doc­u­men­tary series.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

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Hear a Radio Opera Narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, Based on His Adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 L’Histoire du Soldat

in Literature, Music | October 8th, 2019

In the leg­end of Robert John­son, Amer­i­can blues­man, a deal with the dev­il brings instant musi­cal genius, and a brief and trou­bled life in near obscu­ri­ty. A two-hun­dred-year-old Russ­ian folk­tale has sim­i­lar events in the oppo­site order: a sol­dier hands over his vio­lin, and his musi­cal tal­ent, to the dev­il in exchange for wealth, and sev­er­al more adven­tures and rever­sals before the final, inevitable path to perdi­tion.

This sto­ry struck a chord with Igor Stravin­sky, who was maybe ahead of his time in see­ing a musi­cal deal with the dev­il as an arche­typ­al sub­ject for pop­u­lar song. In the first act of his the­ater piece, “The Soldier’s Sto­ry” (L’Histoire du Sol­dat)—whose libret­to by Charles Fer­di­nand Ramuz adapts the Russ­ian folktale—the sol­dier trag­i­cal­ly relin­quish­es his abil­i­ty to turn sor­row into beau­ty in the first act, per­haps a poignant state­ment in 1918, when, as Kurt Von­negut says, “to be a sol­dier was real­ly some­thing.”

To have served in a war “in which 65 mil­lion per­sons had been mobi­lized and 35 mil­lion were becom­ing casu­al­ties,” to have wit­nessed the scar­i­fy­ing begin­ning of mod­ern war­fare, meant bear­ing the stamp of too much real­i­ty. In the folk­tales, we may see the dev­il as hard­ship, loss, or greed per­son­i­fied. These are meta­phys­i­cal moral­i­ty plays, far removed from cur­rent events. But war was poten­tial­ly upon us all by 1918, Von­negut sug­gests, in a ter­ri­fy­ing force that dev­as­tat­ed sol­diers, mowed down civil­ians by the thou­sands, and lev­eled whole cities.

Asked to nar­rate the Stravin­sky piece, Von­negut declined. He found Ramuz’s treat­ment of a soldier’s life “pre­pos­ter­ous” and unac­cept­able. So, George Plimp­ton chal­lenged him to write his own ver­sion. He did, in 1993, but rather than make his sol­dier a musi­cian (“you know, sol­diers get rained on, and a vio­lin wouldn’t have a chance”) or a name­less stock char­ac­ter, he plucked a fig­ure out of history—and out of his own non­fic­tion book The Exe­cu­tion of Pri­vate Slovik, pub­lished in 1954.

Eddie Slovik was one of at least 30,000 desert­ers at the Bat­tle of the Bulge. 49 were tried, and only Slovik was exe­cut­ed, at the express order of Gen­er­al Eisen­how­er. “He was the only per­son to be exe­cut­ed for cow­ardice in the face of the ene­my since the Civ­il War,” Von­negut told New York mag­a­zine. “Ike signed his death cer­tifi­cate. They stood him up in front of his com­rades, and they shot him.” Von­negut saw par­tic­u­lar mal­ice in the act. “Slovik deserves to be kept alive. If his name had been McCoy or John­son, I don’t think he would have been shot.”

Instead of The Dev­il, in Vonnegut’s A Soldier’s Sto­ry, we have the char­ac­ter of The Gen­er­al. The nov­el­ist’s replace­ment of the orig­i­nal text both­ered some when his libret­to pre­miered, with Stravinsky’s music, at Lin­coln Center’s Alice Tul­ly Hall in 1993. Respond­ing to the New York Times’ crit­ic, Von­negut said, “Well, it was a des­e­cra­tion. It was a sacred text, and I dared to fool with it. And some peo­ple just find that unbear­able. That critic—I spoiled his evening.” In oth­er words, he couldn’t have cared less.

Vonnegut’s libret­to with Stravinsky’s music was not record­ed for inter­na­tion­al copy­right rea­sons until 2009, but he did record a version—playing The Gen­er­al himself—with music by Dave Sol­dier (hear it at the top). This record­ing of “A Soldier’s Sto­ry” appeared on the album Ice‑9 Bal­lads, a com­pi­la­tion of lyrics adapt­ed, and nar­rat­ed, by Von­negut from his nov­el Cat’s Cra­dle, with music by Sol­dier. Hear that full album here. And pur­chase a copy An Amer­i­can Soldier’s Tale: His­toire Du Sol­dat, with text by Kurt Von­negut, with music by Igor Stravin­sky, per­formed by the Amer­i­can Cham­ber Winds, and con­duct­ed by David A. Way­bright. You can hear sam­ples in this playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Roger Waters Adapts and Nar­rates Igor Stravinsky’s The­atri­cal Piece, The Soldier’s Sto­ry

A New Kurt Von­negut Muse­um Opens in Indi­anapo­lis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

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

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Talking Heads Songs Become Midcentury Pulp Novels, Magazines & Advertisements: “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and More

in Art, Design, Music | October 8th, 2019

Do you like Talk­ing Heads? Writer and visu­al artist Dou­glas Cou­p­land once pro­posed that ques­tion as the truest test of whether you belong to the cohort named by his nov­el Gen­er­a­tion X. Cou­p­land’s con­tem­po­rary col­league in let­ters Jonathan Lethem summed up his own ear­ly Talk­ing Heads mania thus: “At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion was so com­plete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clear­ly seen by those around me.” What makes the band that record­ed “Psy­cho Killer,” “This Must Be the Place,” “Once In a Life­time,” and “Burn­ing Down the House” so appeal­ing to the book­ish, and espe­cial­ly the both book­ish and visu­al, born after the Baby Boom or oth­er­wise?

What­ev­er the essence at work, screen­writer and “graph­ic-arts prankster” Todd Alcott taps into it with his lat­est round of pop­u­lar songs-turned-mid­cen­tu­ry book cov­ers, posters, mag­a­zine cov­ers, and oth­er pieces of non-musi­cal graph­ic design. You may remem­ber Alcot­t’s pre­vi­ous adap­ta­tions of the Bea­t­les, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, and Radio­head appear­ing here on Open Cul­ture.

The cul­tur­al­ly lit­er­ate and oblique­ly ref­er­en­tial cat­a­logue of Talk­ing Heads, how­ev­er, may have pro­vid­ed his most suit­able mate­r­i­al yet: “Burn­ing Down the House” becomes a “a 1950s pulp nov­el,” “Life Dur­ing Wartime” a “1950s men’s adven­ture mag­a­zine,” “This Must Be the Place” an “adver­tise­ment for a 1950s sub­ur­ban hous­ing devel­op­ment,” and “Take Me to the Riv­er” the “cov­er of a 1950s-era issue of Field & Stream, with the four mem­bers of the band enjoy­ing a day on the lake.”

Amus­ing even at first glance, these cul­tur­al mash-ups also repay knowl­edge of the band’s work and his­to­ry. “Psy­cho Killer,” with its French lyrics, becomes an issue of Cahiers du Ciné­ma fea­tur­ing David Byrne on a cov­er dat­ed March 1974, “the ear­li­est date the song ‘Psy­cho Killer’ is known to have been per­formed by David Byrne’s band The Artis­tics.” “Once in a Life­time,” quite pos­si­bly the band’s most impres­sive piece of songcraft, becomes an equal­ly lay­ered Alcott image: a “a mag­a­zine adver­tise­ment for the 1962 clas­sic The Man in the Gray Flan­nel Suit, based on the best-sell­er by Sloan Wil­son” — in oth­er words, an ad designed for a mag­a­zine meant to sell a movie based on a book, and a book as tied up with the themes of alien­ation in post­war Amer­i­ca as “Once in a Life­time” itself.

Talk­ing Heads fans will rec­og­nize in Alcot­t’s graph­ics the very same kind of genius for resound­ing lit­er­al-mind­ed­ness cou­pled with sub­tle, some­times obscure wit that char­ac­ter­izes the work of Byrne and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. You can buy prints of these images at his Etsy shop, which also offers many oth­er works of inter­est to those for whom music, books, mag­a­zines, media, and his­to­ry con­sti­tute not sep­a­rate sub­jects but one vast, dense­ly inter­con­nect­ed cul­tur­al field. To those who see the world that way, Alcot­t’s design­ing the cov­er for an album by Byrne or anoth­er of the ex-Heads — or indeed a Jonathan Lethem nov­el — is only a mat­ter of time. Enter Todd Alcot­t’s store here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bea­t­les Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers and Mag­a­zine Pages: “Dri­ve My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds” & More

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers & Vin­tage Movie Posters

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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26-Year-Old Steve Jobs Debates the Utopian & Dystopian Promise of the Computer (1981)

in History, Technology | October 8th, 2019

The deep­er we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the few­er aspects of our lives remain dis­con­nect­ed from the dig­i­tal realm. The con­ve­nience of this arrange­ment is unde­ni­able, but the increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty of get­ting through a day with­out hear­ing the lat­est ver­sion of the pub­lic argu­ment about pri­va­cy and data secu­ri­ty sug­gests an accom­pa­ny­ing dis­com­fort as well. Have our online lives stolen our pri­va­cy — or have we per­haps freely giv­en it away? Some us now even look long­ing­ly back­ward to a time before not just social media but the inter­net as we know it, a time in which, we imag­ine, nobody had to wor­ry about the large-scale har­vest­ing and sale of per­son­al infor­ma­tion.

As the 1981 Night­line clip above reveals, these con­cerns went main­stream well before most Amer­i­cans owned com­put­ers, much less went online with them. Even so, Ted Kop­pel could open the seg­ment claim­ing that “as a soci­ety, we’ve become used to com­put­er prob­lems of one kind or anoth­er, just as we’ve become used to com­put­ers. We’re so used to them, in fact, that few of us stop to think of the extent to which they now play a role in our every­day lives, a role that shows every sign of grow­ing even big­ger.”

There fol­lows footage of the con­texts in which com­put­ers involved them­selves in the lives of the aver­age per­son in the ear­ly 80s: mak­ing a phone call, get­ting mon­ey from the ATM, buy­ing gro­ceries at the super­mar­ket, book­ing an air­line tick­et. Nev­er­the­less, actu­al­ly own­ing a com­put­er your­self could still get you inter­viewed on the news with the chy­ron “Home-Com­put­er Own­er” beneath your name. After we hear from one such enthu­si­ast, the scene switch­es to the head­quar­ters of the five-year-old Apple Com­put­er, “the Big Apple in this land of high tech­nol­o­gy.”

A 26-year-old Steve Jobs appears to describe his com­pa­ny’s cre­ation as “a 21st-cen­tu­ry bicy­cle that ampli­fies a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al abil­i­ty that man has,” one whose effects on soci­ety will “far out­strip even those that the petro­chem­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion has had.” But then comes the anti-com­put­er coun­ter­point: “Some peo­ple feel threat­ened by them,” says reporter Ken Kashi­wa­hara. “Some think they tend to dehu­man­ize, and oth­ers fear they may even­tu­al­ly take over their jobs.” Over satel­lite links, Kop­pel then brings on Jobs and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Daniel Burn­ham for a debate about the promise and per­il of the com­put­er.

“The gov­ern­ment has the capac­i­ty, by using com­put­ers, to get all kinds of infor­ma­tion on us that we’re real­ly not even aware that they have,” Kop­pel asks Jobs, under­scor­ing Burn­ham’s line of argu­ment. “Isn’t that dan­ger­ous?” For Jobs, “the best pro­tec­tion against some­thing like that is a very lit­er­ate pub­lic, and in this case com­put­er lit­er­ate.” Pre­dict­ing, cor­rect­ly, that every house­hold in the coun­try would even­tu­al­ly have its own com­put­er, he finds reas­sur­ance in the inevitably wide dis­tri­b­u­tion of com­put­ing pow­er and com­put­er lit­er­a­cy across the pub­lic, mean­ing “that cen­tral­ized intel­li­gence will have the least effect on our lives with­out us know­ing it.”

But Burn­ham nev­er­the­less warns of “a tremen­dous dan­ger that the pub­lic is not aware of enough at this moment.” He did­n’t describe that dan­ger in the forms of over­grown e‑commerce or social media giants — both of those con­cepts hav­ing yet to be real­ized in any form — or even ide­o­log­i­cal­ly opposed for­eign coun­tries, but the Unit­ed States’ own Army and Cen­sus Bureau. What hap­pens when they decide to use the data in their pos­ses­sion to “break the rules”? Com­put­ers are here to stay, it seems, but so are our incli­na­tions as human beings, and one won­ders how clean­ly the two can ever be rec­on­ciled. As apho­rist Aaron Haspel puts it, “We can have pri­va­cy or we can have con­ve­nience, and we choose con­ve­nience, every time.”

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish”

A Young Steve Jobs Teach­es a Class at MIT (1992)

Steve Jobs Mus­es on What’s Wrong with Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tion, 1995

Steve Jobs Shares a Secret for Suc­cess: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Lost Depeche Mode Documentary Is Now Online: Watch Our Hobby is Depeche Mode

in Music | October 7th, 2019

Like bud­ding ten-year-old pale­on­tol­o­gists with their dinosaur guides, music nerds who came of age in the 80s and 90s might spend whole days read­ing about obscure one-off bands and indie, punk, and alter­na­tive giants from all over the Eng­lish-speak­ing world in Ira Rob­bins’ ency­clo­pe­dic Trouser Press Record Guide ref­er­ence books. Their crit­i­cal entries were notable espe­cial­ly for what they were not: fan trib­utes.

Just the oth­er day, for exam­ple, I was brows­ing through the Trouser Press Guide to ‘90s Rock and was star­tled to read that Depeche Mode’s 101, a live album I lis­tened to repeat­ed­ly in my moody mid­dle school years, offered “per­ma­nent evi­dence of the band’s—a pitch-impaired singer cru­ci­fied on racks of keyboards—concert inad­e­qua­cy.”

This, I protest­ed, is too much.

But, I admit, that album, played at full vol­ume in head­phones, once car­ried me as an ado­les­cent through a grim three-day trek across the coun­try, in a van with my frac­tious fam­i­ly, dri­ving the entire length of Arkansas in sub-zero late Decem­ber and spend­ing New Years’ Eve in a motel room in a des­o­late nowheresville out­side Pine Bluff, AR.

My sense that there might be a roman­ti­cal­ly gloomy, weird­ly seduc­tive world beyond the frost­ed win­dows of our shab­by Ford Club Wag­on is what I will always asso­ciate with the album, its musi­cal mer­its aside. (That and a seri­ous crush on some­one who real­ly loved Depeche Mode.) I can’t remem­ber if I’ve lis­tened to it since.

It’s true Depeche Mode got a lot of mileage out of a lim­it­ed range of skills and musi­cal ideas, but that seems to be no valid crit­i­cism in pop music. The best pop songs are those peo­ple expe­ri­ence as oper­at­ic state­ments of their own emo­tion­al lives. As we see in the open­ing scenes of the Depeche Mode doc­u­men­tary above, Our Hob­by is Depeche Mode, their most fer­vent Eng­lish fans believe that they too might be Depeche Mode.

U.S., Mex­i­can, and Russ­ian fans roman­ti­ciz­ing Basil­don, Depeche Mode’s home­town, as a placid Eng­lish vil­lage say more about their own long­ings than about the band’s sound. Depeche Mode may have looked like a New Wave boy band in the 80s, but that was also the decade in which they were at their nois­i­est and most exper­i­men­tal, “seam­less­ly blend­ing con­crète sounds—factory din, clank­ing chains and so forth—into the music,” writes Trouser Press.

The sound—says one Eng­lish fan of “Depeche” from its beginnings—“came from the bricks” of Basil­don, a grit­ty place with fre­quent fight­ing in the streets. The bulk of the dense­ly crowd­ed town’s con­crete blocks, and fac­to­ries sprang up after WWII, a work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ty cre­at­ed to house the Lon­don pop­u­la­tion dis­placed by the bomb­ings. What set Depeche Mode apart from their syn­th­pop peers and inspi­ra­tions (aside from Siouxsie Sioux and Damned-inspired fetish cos­play) was the indus­tri­al noise that pop­u­lat­ed their sac­cha­rine off-key bal­lads and naughty S&M tracks.

The sound of work­ing-class streets embed­ded in their music drew fans from Moscow—where singer Dave Gahan’s birth­day has become an unof­fi­cial hol­i­day. Their music is “tech­nol­o­gy, the sounds of life, of real­i­ty,” says one Mus­covite fan above. Depeche Mode bootlegs, which spread over the Sovi­et world, get par­tial cred­it for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fans in Tehran risk severe pun­ish­ment from the Islam­ic author­i­ties for lis­ten­ing to illic­it copies of their albums.

They became gloomi­er, more navel-gaz­ing and “dis­mal,” our Trouser Press crit­ic writes, and the quirky sounds of Basil­don seemed to fade away, replaced by the cav­ernous reverb and goth-blues gui­tar riffs of their 90s apoth­e­o­sis. Their appeal to sen­si­tive and trou­bled kids every­where remained as pow­er­ful, if not more so. Our Hob­by is Depeche Mode doc­u­ments the band’s spread around the world in ded­i­cat­ed fan com­mu­ni­ties. Made in 2007, the film mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared and has only just resur­faced recent­ly, as Dan­ger­ous Minds reports. “No one’s quite sure what hap­pened there.”

It will be inter­est­ing to com­pare this redis­cov­ered doc­u­ment with a new Depeche Mode movie, Spir­its in the For­est, get­ting a the­atri­cal release Novem­ber 21st. Shot by Anton Cor­bi­jn, the film, as you can see from trail­er (above), also keeps its focus on the fans, mix­ing six sto­ries, writes Rolling Stone, “shot in each of their home­towns, with footage of the con­cert” in Berlin pro­mot­ing the band’s newest album Spir­it.

They may nev­er have been the great­est live band or most accom­plished of musi­cians, but Depeche Mode has always known how to work a crowd, and how to speak to the pri­vate long­ings of every indi­vid­ual fan. What more can one ask of inter­na­tion­al pop stars? Gahan says in a state­ment about the new con­cert film, a tra­di­tion that reached its apex with the 101 doc­u­men­tary com­pan­ion to the album, “It’s amaz­ing to see the very real ways that music has impact­ed the lives of our fans.” He’s talk­ing about an evi­dent con­nec­tion that spans gen­er­a­tions and cross­es many unlike­ly cul­tur­al, lin­guis­tic, and nation­al bound­aries.

Our Hob­by is Depeche Mode will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries.

The film by  Jere­my Deller & Nicholas Abra­hams is host­ed on Abra­hams’ Vimeo chan­nel.

via The Qui­etus

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Depeche Mode Releas­es a Goose­bump-Induc­ing Cov­er of David Bowie’s “Heroes”

The Cure Per­formed the Entire “Dis­in­te­gra­tion” Album on the 30th Anniver­sary of Its Release: Watch The Com­plete Con­cert Online

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Goth

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

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Hear a Full-Cast Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

in Audio Books, Literature | October 7th, 2019

A good heads up from Metafil­ter. They write:

Avail­able for a lim­it­ed time, BBC Radio 4 has a full-cast abridged read­ing of Mar­garet Atwood’s new nov­el, The Tes­ta­ments. This sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale picks up 15 years after the events in the pre­vi­ous book (very mild­ly reveal­ing review of The Tes­ta­ments by Anne Enright). All 14-minute episodes have now been released: The first episode is avail­able until Oct. 15, 2019; the fif­teenth and final episode is avail­able until Oct. 30.

Stream it all here. And find more audio books in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for 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:

Mar­garet Atwood Offers a New Online Class on Cre­ative Writ­ing

Pret­ty Much Pop #10 Exam­ines Mar­garet Atwood’s Night­mare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale

Hear Mar­garet Atwood’s Sto­ry “Stone Mat­tress,” Read by Author A. M. Homes

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See Why Ginger Baker (RIP) Was One of the Greatest Drummers in Rock & World Music

in Music | October 7th, 2019

When talk of clas­sic rock drum­mers turns to Kei­th Moon and John Bon­ham, I smile and nod. What’s the point in argu­ing? They were both, in their dis­tinc­tive ways, incredible—and in their ear­ly deaths, immor­tal leg­ends. Who knows what their careers would have looked like had either lived past 32? But tru­ly, for the all-around breadth of his influ­ence, for the amount of respect he gained in musi­cal cir­cles around the world, no greater clas­sic rock drum­mer ever lived, in my opin­ion, than Gin­ger Bak­er, may he final­ly rest in peace.

The famous­ly rest­less, vio­lent­ly can­tan­ker­ous drum­mer died yes­ter­day at age 80, out­liv­ing most of his peers, despite liv­ing twice as hard for well over twice as long as many of them—a feat of strength we might impute to his ath­let­ic phys­i­cal sta­mi­na and fright­en­ing will.

Like Moon and Bon­ham, he com­bined raw pow­er with seri­ous jazz chops. (Bak­er insist­ed he nev­er played rock drums at all.) After his polyrhyth­mic pum­mel­ing defined the sound of super­groups Cream and Blind Faith, he burned out and moved to Africa to find sobri­ety and new sounds.

Bak­er trav­eled the con­ti­nent with Fela Kuti to learn its rhythms, record­ing live with Kuti’s band in ’71. Afrobeat drum­mer Tony Allen remarked that he under­stood “the African beat more than any oth­er West­ern­er.” (See him jam­ming in Lagos fur­ther down.) Baker’s discog­ra­phy includes clas­sic records with Eric Clap­ton and Jack Bruce, Kuti, Hawk­wind, and oth­er leg­ends. He trav­eled the world play­ing drums for over fifty years. Why, then, did he have such a low pro­file for much of his lat­er life? A 2012 doc­u­men­tary, Beware of Mr. Bak­er, based on a 2009 Rolling Stone arti­cle, offers some answers.

Baker’s seri­ous drug addic­tion and ter­ri­fy­ing per­son­al­i­ty alien­at­ed near­ly every­one around him. The doc­u­men­tary opens with an endorse­ment from anoth­er prick­ly and unlik­able red-haired char­ac­ter, John Lydon (for­mer­ly John­ny Rot­ten), whose Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed is yet anoth­er project Bak­er ele­vat­ed with his play­ing. “He helped me rise,” says Lydon, and Bak­er would no doubt agree. He was not a mod­est man. He was, by most accounts, a right bas­tard, through and through, all of his life.

But he was too con­trar­i­an to be dis­missed as a mere nar­cis­sist. As a musi­cian, for exam­ple, he always thought of him­self as a sup­port­ing play­er. “I nev­er had a style,” he said in 2013. “I play to what I hear, so who­ev­er I’m play­ing with, what they play has a great influ­ence on what I play, because I lis­ten to what peo­ple are play­ing.” His skill at destroy­ing per­son­al rela­tion­ships was matched by his abil­i­ty for form­ing deep, awe-inspir­ing, if short-lived, musi­cal con­nec­tions. It’s a dichoto­my many drum­mers inspired by him have strug­gled to reconcile—taking lessons from Bak­er the drum­mer but not from Bak­er the man.

How do we sep­a­rate the man from his art? Why try? His mad pirate life makes for an epic saga, and Bak­er is a wild­ly excit­ing main char­ac­ter. He had ear­ly ambi­tions of becom­ing a pro­fes­sion­al cyclist. Though they didn’t pan out, he always retained the char­ac­ter­is­tics: he was both fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive and fierce­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive. Lat­er he picked up an even more rar­i­fied team sport—polo—keeping a sta­ble of hors­es on his gat­ed South African ranch, where he lived in his old age like a colo­nial ex-baron in a Nadine Gordimer nov­el. (He even­tu­al­ly had to sell the spread and move back to Lon­don.)

Bak­er was nev­er one to make apolo­gies, so his fans need not make any on his behalf. See him in some clas­sic per­for­mances above—at the top, solo­ing after an inter­view, at Cream’s Roy­al Albert Hall farewell con­cert; then play­ing a solo in a Cream reunion in that same venue almost forty years lat­er. After footage of him jam­ming in Lagos in 1971, we see what the inter­net calls the “BEST DRUM SOLO EVER,” fur­ther up. Just above, meet the man him­self, in all his unre­pen­tant glo­ry, and hear from those who knew him best, in the full doc­u­men­tary, Beware of Mr. Bak­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Neil Peart, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Kei­th Moon Plays Drums Onstage with Led Zep­pelin in What Would Be His Last Live Per­for­mance (1977)

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

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Do Octopi Dream? An Astonishing Nature Documentary Suggests They Do

in Biology, Nature | October 7th, 2019

With regard to the sleep­ing and wak­ing of ani­mals, all crea­tures that are red-blood­ed and pro­vid­ed with legs give sen­si­ble proof that they go to sleep and that they wak­en up from sleep; for, as a mat­ter of fact, all ani­mals that are fur­nished with eye­lids shut them up when they go to sleep. 

Fur­ther­more, it would appear that not only do men dream, but hors­es also, and dogs, and oxen; aye, and sheep, and goats, and all vivip­a­rous quadrupeds; and dogs show their dream­ing by bark­ing in their sleep. With regard to oviparous ani­mals we can­not be sure that they dream, but most undoubt­ed­ly they sleep. 

And the same may be said of water ani­mals, such as fish­es, mol­luscs, crus­taceans, to wit craw­fish and the like. These ani­mals sleep with­out doubt, although their sleep is of very short dura­tion. The proof of their sleep­ing can­not be got from the con­di­tion of their eyes-for none of these crea­tures are fur­nished with eyelids—but can be obtained only from their motion­less repose.

-Aris­to­tle, The His­to­ry of Ani­mals, Book IV, Part 10,350 B.C.E

2,369 years lat­er, Marine Biol­o­gist David Scheel, a pro­fes­sor at Alas­ka Pacif­ic Uni­ver­si­ty, wit­nessed a star­tling event, above, that allowed him to expand on Aristotle’s obser­va­tions, at least as far as eight-armed cephalo­pod mollusks—or octopi—are con­cerned

Appar­ent­ly, they dream.

Scheel, whose spe­cial­ties include preda­tor-prey ecol­o­gy and cephalo­pod biol­o­gy, is afford­ed an above-aver­age amount of qual­i­ty time with these alien ani­mals, cour­tesy of Hei­di, an octo­pus cyanea (or day octo­pus) who inhab­its a large tank of salt water in his liv­ing room.

Scheel’s usu­al beat is cold water species such as the giant Pacif­ic octo­pus. Hei­di, who earned her name by shy­ly stick­ing to the far­thest recess­es of her arti­fi­cial envi­ron­ment upon arrival, belongs to a warmer water species who are active dur­ing the day. Very active. Once she real­ized that Scheel and his 16-year-old daugh­ter, Lau­rel, were instru­ments of food deliv­ery, she came out of her shell, so to speak.

The hours she keeps affords her plen­ty of stim­u­lat­ing play­time with Lau­rel, who’s thrilled to have an ani­mal pal who’s less ambiva­lent than her pet gold­fish and out­door rab­bit.

Mean­while, the co-hous­ing arrange­ment pro­vides Pro­fes­sor Scheel with an inti­ma­cy that’s impos­si­ble to achieve in the lab.

He was not expect­ing the aston­ish­ing noc­tur­nal behav­ior he record­ed, above, for the hour-long PBS Nature doc­u­men­tary Octo­pus: Mak­ing Con­tact.

As Hei­di slept, she changed col­ors, rapid­ly cycling through pat­terns that cor­re­spond to her hunt­ing prac­tices. Scheel walks view­ers through:

So, here she’s asleep, she sees a crab, and her col­or starts to change a lit­tle bit.

Then she turns all dark.

Octo­pus­es will do that when they leave the bot­tom.

This is a cam­ou­flage, like she’s just sub­dued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she does­n’t want any­one to notice her.

It’s a very unusu­al behav­ior to see the col­or come and go on her man­tel like that.

I mean, just to be able to see all the dif­fer­ent col­or pat­terns just flash­ing, one after anoth­er.

You don’t usu­al­ly see that when an ani­mal is sleep­ing.

This real­ly is fas­ci­nat­ing.

But, yeah, if she’s dream­ing, that’s the dream.

As dreams go, the nar­ra­tive Scheel sup­plies for Hei­di seems extreme­ly mun­dane. Per­haps some­where out on a coral reef, anoth­er octo­pus cyanea is dream­ing she’s trapped inside a small glass room, feast­ing on eas­i­ly got­ten crab and occa­sion­al­ly crawl­ing up a teenaged human’s arm.

Watch the full episode for free through Octo­ber 31 here.

via Laugh­ing Squid/This is Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every U.S. Vice Pres­i­dent with an Octo­pus on His Head: Kick­start The Veep­to­pus Book

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

Envi­ron­ment & Nat­ur­al Resources: Free Online Cours­es 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC tonight, Mon­day, Octo­ber 7 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates the art of Aubrey Beard­s­ley. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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