John Cleese Revisits His 20 Years as an Ivy League Professor in His New Book, Professor at Large: The Cornell Years

in Books, Comedy | March 6th, 2019

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Paul Box­ley

It takes real intel­li­gence to suc­cess­ful­ly make dumb com­e­dy. John Cleese and his Mon­ty Python col­leagues are a pre­mi­um exam­ple. You can call sketch­es like the “Min­istry of Sil­ly Walks” and “Dead Par­rot” sur­re­al­ist, and they are com­pa­ra­ble to the absur­dist stunts favored by cer­tain ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ern artists. But you can also call them very smart kinds of stu­pid, a descrip­tion of some of the high­est forms of com­e­dy, I’d say, and one that applies to so much of Cleese’s best work, from the Pythons, to Fawl­ty Tow­ers, to A Fish Called Wan­da. We are moved by stu­pid­i­ty, Cleese believes, and silli­ness is the engine of good com­e­dy. “Some­times very, very sil­ly things,” he says in the inter­view with Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Press direc­tor Dean Smith below, “have the pow­er to touch us deeply.” Then he tells the old joke about a grasshop­per named Nor­man.

Is Cleese still fun­ny? Depends. Many lis­ten­ers of a recent BBC Radio 4 show found his act a lit­tle stale. He has also come off late­ly as a “clas­sic old man yelling at a cloud,” writes Fiona Sturges at The Guardian. (He called, sure­ly in jest, for the hang­ing of EU pres­i­dent Jean Claude Junck­er, for exam­ple, dur­ing the Brex­it cam­paign).

In cur­mud­geon­ly inter­views, he com­plains about hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ty with exam­ples of jokes con­tem­po­rary audi­ences sim­ply don’t find amus­ing, or at least not com­ing from him. Cleese has railed about the evils of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, espe­cial­ly on col­lege cam­pus­es, while spend­ing the past 20 years as a “pro­fes­sor-at-large” on the pres­ti­gious cam­pus of Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, where he has deliv­ered “incred­i­bly pop­u­lar events and classes—including talks, work­shops, and an analy­sis of A Fish Called Wan­da and The Life of Bri­an.”

These appear­ances draw hun­dreds of peo­ple, and their enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty should offer Cleese some reas­sur­ance that he may not need to fear cen­sor­ship, and that his wit—while it might not be as well appre­ci­at­ed in today’s mass entertainment—still has plen­ty of cur­ren­cy in places where smart peo­ple gath­er. From sem­i­nars on script writ­ing to lec­tures on psy­chol­o­gy and human devel­op­ment, Cleese’s appear­ances at Cor­nell lead to riv­et­ing, some­times hilar­i­ous, and often con­tro­ver­sial con­ver­sa­tions.

In the episodes here from the Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Press pod­cast, you can hear Cleese’s full con­ver­sa­tion with Smith, part of the pro­mo­tion of his 2018 book Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years, in which he includes an inter­view with Princess Bride screen­writer William Gold­man, a lec­ture about cre­ativ­i­ty called “Hare Brain, Tor­toise Mind,” a dis­cus­sion of facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy, and a talk on group dynam­ics with busi­ness stu­dents and fac­ul­ty. Like Cleese’s mind, these lec­tures and dis­cus­sions range far and wide, demon­strat­ing, once again in his long career, that it takes real smarts to not only speak with ease on sev­er­al aca­d­e­m­ic sub­jects, but to under­stand the mechan­ics of stu­pid­i­ty. You can pick up a copy of Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese on How “Stu­pid Peo­ple Have No Idea How Stu­pid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dun­ning-Kruger Effect)

John Cleese Explains the Brain — and the Plea­sures of DirecTV

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

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

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97-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders the Meaning of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

in Film, Life, Philosophy | March 5th, 2019

If you’ve sat by the bed­side of a dying friend or rel­a­tive, or recov­ered from a ter­mi­nal ill­ness your­self, you may know too well: the con­cerns of yesterday—career anx­i­eties, polit­i­cal high stakes, per­son­al grudges—can slip away into the rear view, becom­ing small­er and more mean­ing­less as hours pass into final days. What takes their place? Maybe a savor­ing of the moment, maybe regrets over moments not savored, maybe a grow­ing acknowl­edg­ment that grat­i­tude mat­ters more than being right. Maybe a will­ing­ness to let go of pri­or ideas—not to adopt new ones, but to open to the ques­tions again.

Some­times, this expe­ri­ence is bewil­der­ing and fright­en­ing, espe­cial­ly when cou­pled with the pains of ill­ness and old age. What­ev­er insights one might have at the thresh­old of death, they can­not eas­i­ly over­come “life­long habits,” says Her­bert Fin­garette in the can­did short film Being 97, a doc­u­men­tary made in the last months of the con­trar­i­an Amer­i­can philosopher’s life. By the time of his death,” notes Aeon, “Fin­garette (1921–2018) had lived what most would con­sid­er a full and mean­ing­ful life. His mar­riage to his wife, Leslie, was long and hap­py. His career as a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia was both accom­plished and con­tro­ver­sial.”

By this time, his wife of sev­en­ty years had been gone for sev­en. And at 97, phys­i­cal­ly frail and his career long over, Fin­garette was com­ing to terms with “lone­li­ness and absence” as well as with his need for help from oth­er peo­ple to do sim­ple tasks. After 42 years of teaching—and writ­ing on sub­jects like self-decep­tion, Con­fu­cian­ism, eth­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty, and addiction—he was also grap­pling with the fact he had been wrong about one par­tic­u­lar­ly press­ing mat­ter, at least.

Fin­garette became infa­mous when, with­out under­tak­ing any sci­en­tif­ic research him­self, he claimed in the 1988 book Heavy Drink­ing that alco­holism was a prob­lem of self con­trol, not a dis­ease. But he does not speak of the polit­i­cal furor in this minor con­tro­ver­sy. Eleven years lat­er, he took on an even heav­ier sub­ject in Death: Philo­soph­i­cal Sound­ings. “What I said was in a nut­shell,” he recalls, “is there’s no rea­son to be afraid or con­cerned or any­thing about death because when you die, there’s noth­ing. You’re not going to suf­fer, you’re not going to be unhap­py… you’re not going to be…. It’s not ratio­nal to be afraid of death.”

He admits, “I now think that is not a good state­ment, because I think it’s impor­tant to fig­ure out why it is then that peo­ple are afraid of death. Why am I con­cerned about it?” His best think­ing aside, “my sense of real­ism tells me, well, no good rea­son or not, it is some­thing that haunts me. I walk around the house and I ask myself, ‘What is the point of it all? There must be some­thing I’m miss­ing in this argu­ment.’” He asks, he says, know­ing “that there isn’t any good answer.” But that doesn’t stop him from look­ing for one. We see Fingarette’s life­long habits as a thinker push him for­ward in pur­suit of what he calls a “fool­ish ques­tion,” although he intu­its that “the answer might be… the silent answer.”

It’s a painful exis­ten­tial real­iza­tion for a man so devot­ed to log­i­cal argu­ment and pro­nounce­ments of cer­tain­ty. This film of Fin­garette in his last months is both a per­son­al­ly mov­ing por­trait and a dra­ma in minia­ture of a uni­ver­sal human dilem­ma: why is it so hard to accept the inevitable? Why do we have minds that strug­gle against it? The mul­ti­tude of pos­si­ble answers may be far less mean­ing­ful than the expe­ri­ence of the ques­tion itself, painful and tran­scen­dent as it is, whether we are griev­ing the loss of oth­ers, fac­ing our own mor­tal­i­ty, or, as in Fin­garet­te’s case, both at once.

Being 97 will be added to our list of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale Helps You Grap­ple with the Inescapable

Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adven­ture and Cre­ative Act

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

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

 

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A Visualization of the United States’ Exploding Population Growth Over 200 Years (1790 – 2010)

in Data, History, Maps | March 5th, 2019

The U.S. is bare­ly even an ado­les­cent com­pared to many oth­er coun­tries around the world. Yet it ranks third, behind Chi­na and India, in pop­u­la­tion. How did the coun­try go, in a lit­tle over 200 years, from 6.1 peo­ple per square mile in 1800 to 93 per square mile today? We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured maps of how the real estate came on the mar­ket. And we’ve brought you a map that tells the loca­tions and sto­ries of the peo­ples who used to live there. The map above takes a dif­fer­ent approach, show­ing pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty growth from 1790 to 2010, in num­bers based on Cen­sus records.

Orig­i­nal­ly appear­ing on Vivid Maps, the ani­mat­ed time­line con­tains no infor­ma­tion about the how, who, or why of things. But we know that since it only accounts for those who were count­ed, the num­bers of peo­ple actu­al­ly liv­ing with­in the bor­ders is often much high­er. “Not only did the pop­u­la­tion boom as a result of births and immi­grants,” writes Jeff Des­jardins at the site Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist, “but the bor­ders of the coun­try kept chang­ing as well.” This change, and the fact that indige­nous peo­ple were not record­ed, leads to an inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of west­ward expan­sion from the point of view of the set­tlers.

As Des­jardins notes, the state of Okla­homa appears as an “emp­ty gap” on the map in the late-1800s, light­ly shad­ed while its bor­ders are sur­round­ed by dark brown. This is because “the area was orig­i­nal­ly des­ig­nat­ed as Indi­an Ter­ri­to­ry…. How­ev­er, in 1889, the land was opened up to a mas­sive land rush, and approx­i­mate­ly 50,000 pio­neers lined up to grab a piece of the two mil­lion acres opened for set­tle­ment.” Thou­sands of the peo­ple liv­ing there had already, of course, been pushed off their land dur­ing the decades-long “Trail of Tears.” The ques­tion of who “exact­ly is count­ed as a whole per­son?” comes up in the com­ments on Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist post, anoth­er key con­sid­er­a­tion for under­stand­ing this data in its prop­er con­text.

The ways peo­ple have been cat­e­go­rized are prod­ucts of con­tem­po­rary bias­es, polit­i­cal atti­tudes, and legal and social dis­crim­i­na­tions. These atti­tudes are not inci­den­tal to the pop­u­lat­ing of the coun­try, but mate­ri­al­ly inte­gral. As we see the mas­sive, yet huge­ly uneven, spread of peo­ple across the expand­ing coun­try, we might be giv­en the impres­sion that it con­sti­tutes a uni­fied surge of expan­sion and devel­op­ment, when the his­tor­i­cal real­i­ty, of course, is any­thing but. Of the many ques­tions we can ask of this data, “who ful­ly count­ed as an Amer­i­can dur­ing each of these peri­ods and why or why not?” might be one of the most rel­e­vant, in 1790 and today. Or, if you’d rather just watch the map fill up with sepia and burnt umber pix­els, to the tune of some mar­tial-sound­ing drum & bass, watch the video above.

via Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

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

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60 Free-to-Stream Movies for Women’s History Month: Classic Agnès Varda, a Portrait of Susan Sontag, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and More

in Film | March 5th, 2019

March is Wom­en’s His­to­ry Month, and every month is a good one for watch­ing movies. Well aware of both those facts, the peo­ple behind free-to-user online stream­ing ser­vice Kanopy have made a range of 60 woman-cen­tric and most­ly woman-made films avail­able this month. Some of the women involved include Nou­velle Vague auteur Agnès Var­da, direc­tor of Cléo from 5 to 7 and The Beach­es of Agnès; Susan Son­tag, the pro­lif­ic writer and sub­ject of Regard­ing Susan Son­tag; and Gre­ta Ger­wig, who went from respect­ed indie-cin­e­ma actress to even more respect­ed indie-cin­e­ma direc­tor with 2017’s Lady Bird.

If the trail­ers for these films in this post intrigue you, you can, of course, go right to Kanopy to watch them in full. First, though, you’ll want to pull out your local library card. “We stream thought­ful enter­tain­ment to your pre­ferred device with no fees and no com­mer­cials by part­ner­ing with pub­lic libraries and uni­ver­si­ties,” says Kanopy­’s about page, explain­ing that you need only “log in with your library mem­ber­ship and enjoy our diverse cat­a­log with new titles added every month.”

To check and see whether your library (or uni­ver­si­ty) is among Kanopy­’s part­ners, just type it into the search win­dow on this page.

After log­ging in you can explore the full breadth of Kanopy­’s list of Wom­en’s His­to­ry Month selec­tions, which also includes doc­u­men­taries like Won­der Women: The Untold Sto­ry of Amer­i­can Super­heroines, The Girls in the Band: Female Jazz Musi­cians, Who Does She Think She Is?: A Por­trait of Female Artists, and Women of ’69: Unboxed: Women from the Six­ties Share their Sto­ries, as well as oth­er exam­i­na­tions of women in pol­i­tics, women in gam­ing, women in STEM, and women in prison. Once you’ve seen them all, you might con­sid­er explor­ing Kanopy­’s oth­er cin­e­mat­ic offer­ings, from a vari­ety of oth­er doc­u­men­taries to dra­ma, com­e­dy, and even hor­ror and thriller as well as sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy.

That last sec­tion, one can’t help but notice, comes head­ed by Mark Saw­ers’ No Men Beyond This Point, which takes as its set­ting a world that has­n’t been able to pro­duce male babies for the past 60 years. Its main char­ac­ter is the last man alive. Kanopy describes it as “a wry mock­u­men­tary that asks the ques­tion, what would the world be like if women were in charge?” How­ev­er pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive an answer to that ques­tion just popped into your head, all these films will sure­ly give it a bit more nuance, and at no charge at that.

Kanopy­’s own list of five Wom­en’s His­to­ry Month films rec­om­mend­ed from each of their major col­lec­tion runs as fol­lows:

Films Direct­ed by Women
  1. Lady Bird — Direct­ed by Gre­ta Ger­wig and nom­i­nat­ed for five Oscars, this warm, affect­ing com­e­dy fol­lows a high school­er who must nav­i­gate a lov­ing, but tur­bu­lent rela­tion­ship with her strong-willed moth­er over the course of her event­ful and poignant senior year of high school.
  2. Cleo from 5 to 7 — Direc­tor Agnes Var­da elo­quent­ly cap­tures Paris in the ‘60s with this real-time por­trait of a singer (Corinne Marc­hand) set adrift as she awaits test results fol­low­ing a biop­sy.
  3. The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of Cameron Post — Direct­ed by Desiree Akha­van and Grand Jury Prize win­ner at the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, the film fol­lows Cameron when she’s sent to a gay con­ver­sion ther­a­py cen­ter after get­ting caught with anoth­er girl in the back­seat of a car.
  4. Amer­i­can Hon­ey — Nom­i­nat­ed for six Film Inde­pen­dent Spir­it Awards and win­ner of two Spe­cial Jury Prizes at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, the film fol­lows an ado­les­cent girl from a trou­bled home who runs away with a trav­el­ing sales crew across the Amer­i­can Mid­west to sell sub­scrip­tions door-to-door.
  5. Made­line’s Made­line — From direc­tor Josephine Deck­er, the lines between per­for­mance and real­i­ty begin to blur when a young actress is pushed too far. An Offi­cial Selec­tion at the Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Fes­ti­val, Madeline’s Made­line stars Mol­ly Park­er (“Lost in Space”).
His­to­ry
  1. Ani­ta — Against a back­drop of sex, pol­i­tics, and race, Ani­ta reveals the inti­mate sto­ry of a woman who spoke truth to pow­er.
  2. Killing Us Soft­ly (Four-Part Series) — Jean Kil­bourne takes a fresh look at how print and tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments bare a stun­ning pat­tern of dam­ag­ing gen­der stereo­types, dis­tort­ing the ideals of fem­i­nin­i­ty over the decades.
  3. Women of ’69: Unboxed — An inti­mate, per­son­al­ized por­trait of women of the 1960s through the eyes of one col­or­ful class that grad­u­at­ed in 1969 and start­ed to explore the New Old Age.
  4. Polit­i­cal Ani­mals — This mul­ti-award win­ning film tells the sto­ry of the civ­il rights strug­gle of this cen­tu­ry — the gay rights move­ment — through the eyes of the first four mem­bers of the LGBT Leg­isla­tive Cau­cus.
  5. The Girls in the Band — An award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary film that tells the poignant, untold sto­ries of female jazz and big band instru­men­tal­ists and their fas­ci­nat­ing, his­to­ry-mak­ing jour­neys from the late ‘30s to present day.
Major Fig­ures
  1. Regard­ing Susan Son­tag — An inti­mate and nuanced inves­ti­ga­tion into the life of one of the most impor­tant lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal and fem­i­nist icons of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Susan Son­tag.
  2. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise — The film traces Dr. Angelou’s incred­i­ble jour­ney, shed­ding light on the untold aspects of her life through nev­er-before-seen footage, rare archival pho­tographs and videos in her own words.
  3. Jane’s Jour­ney — A 2010 film that fol­lows Jane Goodall across sev­er­al con­ti­nents, from her child­hood home in Eng­land to the Gombe Nation­al Park in Tan­za­nia, where she began her ground­break­ing research and where she still returns every year to enjoy the com­pa­ny of chim­panzees.
  4. The Beach­es of Agnes — From direc­tor Agnes Var­da, this cin­e­mat­ic self-por­trait touch­es on every­thing from the fem­i­nist move­ment and the Black Pan­thers to the filmmaker’s hus­band Jacques Demy and the birth of the French New Wave.
  5. Mavis! — An award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary on gospel/soul music leg­end and civ­il rights icon, Mavis Sta­ples and her fam­i­ly group, The Sta­ple Singers.
Cur­rent Events
  1. Wom­en’s March — Shot on loca­tion in five U.S. cities in 2017, this is a sto­ry about democ­ra­cy, human rights and what it means to stand up for val­ues in today’s Amer­i­ca.
  2. I am a Girl — Nom­i­nat­ed for four Aus­tralian Acad­e­my Awards includ­ing Best Doc­u­men­tary and Best Direc­tor, this inspi­ra­tional fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary fol­lows six girls from around the world, paint­ing a clear pic­ture of the real­i­ty of what it means to be a female in the 21st cen­tu­ry.
  3. Miss Rep­re­sen­ta­tion — Writ­ten and direct­ed by Jen­nifer Siebel New­som, this film expos­es how main­stream media con­tributes to the under-rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women in posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence in Amer­i­ca.
  4. Star­less Dreams — A stark tes­ti­mo­ni­al of the pre­vi­ous­ly unseen and unheard, this award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary plunges into the lives of young teenage girls shar­ing tem­po­rary quar­ters at a reha­bil­i­ta­tion and cor­rec­tion cen­ter on the out­skirts of Tehran.
  5. Hooli­gan Spar­row — Mav­er­ick activist Ye Haiyan (a.k.a Hooli­gan Spar­row) and her band of col­leagues trav­el to Hainan Province in south­ern Chi­na to protest the case of six ele­men­tary school girls who were sex­u­al­ly abused by their prin­ci­pal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 48 Clas­sic & Con­tem­po­rary Ger­man Films Free Online: From Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis to Mar­garethe von Trotta’s Han­nah Arendt

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

An Ambi­tious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Film­mak­ers

Watch Four Dar­ing Films by Lois Weber, “the Most Impor­tant Female Direc­tor the Amer­i­can Film Indus­try Has Known” (1913–1921)

The First Fem­i­nist Film, Ger­maine Dulac’s The Smil­ing Madame Beudet (1922)

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

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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Watch Lin-Manuel Miranda Perform the Earliest Version of Hamilton at the White House, Six Years Before the Play Hit the Broadway Stage (2009)

in History, Music, Politics, Theatre | March 4th, 2019

Anoth­er immi­grant comin’ up from the bot­tom

His ene­mies destroyed his rep, Amer­i­ca for­got him… 

Holler if you can remem­ber a time when few Amer­i­cans were well-versed enough in found­ing father Alexan­der Hamil­ton’s ori­gin sto­ry to recite it in rhyme at the drop of a hat.

Believe it or not, as recent­ly as the sum­mer of 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miran­da’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning Hamil­ton: An Amer­i­can Musi­cal explod­ed on Broad­way, Hamil­ton the man was, as the Tony award win­ning lyrics above sug­gest, large­ly for­got­ten, a rel­ic whose por­trait on the $10 bill aroused lit­tle curios­i­ty.

Back then, Hamil­ton was per­haps best known as the hap­less soul embod­ied by Michael Cera in the web series Drunk His­to­ry.

Ron Chernow’s 2005 biog­ra­phy served up a more nuanced por­trait to read­ers with the sta­mi­na to make it through his mas­sive tome.

That’s the book Miran­da famous­ly took along on vaca­tion in the peri­od between his musi­cal In the Heights’ Broad­way and Off-Broad­way runs.

The rest, as they say, is his­to­ry.

As is the above video, in which a 29-year-old Miran­da per­forms The Hamil­ton Mix­tape for Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, the First Lady, and oth­er lumi­nar­ies as part of a White House evening of poet­ry, music, and spo­ken word.

There’s your Hamil­ton (the musi­cal) ori­gin sto­ry.

Its cre­ator ini­tial­ly con­ceived of it as a hip hop con­cept album in which cel­e­brat­ed rap­pers would give voice to dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters.

Music direc­tor Alex Lacamoire’s jubi­lant expres­sion at the White House piano con­firms that they had some inkling that they were on to some­thing very big.

A few months lat­er, Miran­da reflect­ed on the expe­ri­ence in an inter­view with Play­bill:

The whole day was a day that will exist out­side any oth­er day in my life. Any day that starts with you shar­ing a van to the White House with James Earl Jones is going to be a crazy day! I was the clos­ing act of the show and I had nev­er done this project in pub­lic before so I was already ner­vous. I looked at the Pres­i­dent and the First Lady only once and when I looked at him he was whis­per­ing some­thing to her and I couldn’t let that get to me. After­wards, George Stephanopou­los came up to me and said, “The Pres­i­dent is back there talk­ing about your song, he’s say­ing ‘Where is (Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury) Tim­o­thy Geit­ner? We need him to hear the Hamil­ton rap!’” To hear that the Pres­i­dent enjoyed the song was a real dream come true. 

The Oba­mas enjoy­ment was such that they appeared in a pre-taped seg­ment to intro­duce the Hamil­ton cast at the 2016 Tony awards (a tough year for any oth­er musi­cal unlucky enough to have debuted in the same peri­od as this jug­ger­naut).

They also host­ed a Hamil­ton work­shop for DC-area youth, for which the Broad­way cast trav­eled down on their day off, per­form­ing the open­ing num­ber out of cos­tume. Biog­ra­ph­er Ron Cher­now was in the front row for that one, as Oba­ma remarked that “Hamil­ton is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

(“Dick Cheney attend­ed the show tonight,” Miran­da tweet­ed after Cheney’s vis­it. “He’s the OTHER vice-pres­i­dent who shot a friend while in office.” Cur­rent Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence also took in a per­for­mance short­ly before his swear­ing in, though his appear­ance was met with a much less pithy response.)

As for The Hamil­ton Mix­tape, many of Miran­da’s dream rap­pers turned out for its record­ing, though the tracks they laid down diverge from the one per­formed live for the Oba­mas in 2009, which legions of ador­ing fans can chant along to thanks to the musi­cal’s over­whelm­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty. Instead, this mixtape’s con­tribut­ing artists were invit­ed to reimag­ine and expand upon the themes of the play—immigration, ambi­tion, and stubble—placing them in an explic­it­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry con­text.

Lis­ten to The Hamil­ton Mix­tape and the orig­i­nal cast record­ing of Hamil­ton for free on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lin-Manuel Miran­da & Emi­ly Blunt Take You Through 22 Clas­sic Musi­cals in 12 Min­utes

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miran­da Reimag­ines Hamil­ton as a Girl on Drunk His­to­ry

Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miran­da Cre­ates a 19-Song Playlist to Help You Get Over Writer’s Block

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She has yet to win the Hamil­ton lot­tery. Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this March. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Tactile Map of the Roman Empire: An Innovative Map That Allowed Blind & Sighted Students to Experience Geography by Touch (1888)

in History, Maps | March 4th, 2019

From curb cuts to safer play­grounds, the pub­lic spaces we occu­py have been trans­formed for the bet­ter as they become eas­i­er for dif­fer­ent kinds of bod­ies to nav­i­gate. Closed cap­tion­ing and print­able tran­scripts ben­e­fit mil­lions, what­ev­er their lev­el of abil­i­ty. Acces­si­bil­i­ty tools on the web improve everyone’s expe­ri­ence and pro­vide the impe­tus for tech­nolo­gies that engage more of our sens­es. While smell may not be a high pri­or­i­ty for devel­op­ers, atten­tion to a sense most sight­ed peo­ple tend to take for grant­ed could open up an age of using feed­back sys­tems to make visu­al media touch respon­sive.

One such tac­tile sys­tem designed for Smith­son­ian Muse­ums has devel­oped “new meth­ods for fab­ri­cat­ing repli­cas of muse­um arti­facts and oth­er 3D objects that describe them­selves when touched,” report­ed the Nation­al Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter in a Feb­ru­ary post for Low Vision Aware­ness Month. “Depth effects are achieved by vary­ing the height of relief of raised lines, and tex­ture fills help improve aware­ness of fig­ure-ground dis­tinc­tions.” Hap­tic feed­back tech­nol­o­gy, like that the iPhone and var­i­ous video game sys­tems have intro­duced over the past few years, promis­es to open up much more of the world to the visu­al­ly-impaired… and to every­one else.

One inven­tion intro­duced over a cen­tu­ry ago held out the same promise. The tac­tile map, “an inno­va­tion of the 19th cen­tu­ry,” writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, “allowed both blind and sight­ed stu­dents to feel their way across a giv­en geog­ra­phy.” One pop­u­lar­iz­er of the tac­tile map, for­mer school super­in­ten­dent L.R. Klemm, who made the exam­ple above, believed that “while the water­proof map could be used to teach stu­dents with­out sight,” it could also “fruit­ful­ly engage sight­ed stu­dents through the sense of touch.”

Though cre­at­ed in Europe, tac­tile maps have had a rel­a­tive­ly long his­to­ry in the U.S., debut­ing in 1837 with an atlas of the Unit­ed States devel­oped by Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe of the Perkins School for the Blind. (See Michi­gan above.) Klemm’s map up top, depict­ing the Roman Empire (284–476 CE), is a lat­er entry, patent­ed in 1888, and, he promis­es it’s a decid­ed improve­ment on ear­li­er mod­els. In an arti­cle that year for The Amer­i­can Teacher, he described “the painstak­ing process of cre­at­ing one of these relief maps,” notes Onion, “a process he used as anoth­er teach­ing tool, enlist­ing stu­dents to help him scrape and carve plas­ter casts into neg­a­tive shapes of moun­tain ranges and plateaus.”

Those stu­dents, he wrote, devel­oped “so clear a con­cep­tion of the topog­ra­phy and irri­ga­tion of the respec­tive coun­try that it can scarce­ly be improved.” Tac­tile accu­ra­cy meant a lot to Klemm. In text pub­lished along­side the map, he took Howe and oth­er pub­lish­ers to task for rais­ing water above land, an idea “so unnat­ur­al, that the mind nev­er thor­ough­ly becomes accus­tomed to it.” Klemm also cri­tiques a French map of “very per­fect con­struc­tion.” This hand­made ver­sion, he says, though inge­nious, is “expen­sive and very inef­fi­cient.” While its util­i­ty “in the case of insti­tu­tions, and for the use of pupils of the wealthy class­es is undoubt­ed… the cost­li­ness of maps con­struct­ed on such a prin­ci­ple places the advan­tages of the sys­tem beyond the reach of the blind gen­er­al­ly.”

Klemm’s con­cern for the qual­i­ty, accu­ra­cy, util­i­ty, and eco­nom­ic acces­si­bil­i­ty of this ear­ly acces­si­bil­i­ty tool is admirable. And though you can’t expe­ri­ence it through your screen, his method is prob­a­bly a vast­ly-improved way of learn­ing geog­ra­phy for many peo­ple, sight­ed or not. Tac­tile maps did not quite become gen­er­al use tech­nolo­gies, but their dig­i­tal prog­e­ny may soon have us all expe­ri­enc­ing more of the world through touch. View and down­load a larg­er (2D) ver­sion of Klem­m’s map and learn more at 19th Cen­tu­ry Dis­abil­i­ty Cul­tures & Con­texts.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Geo­log­i­cal Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topo­graph­i­cal Won­ders

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

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

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An Animated Introduction to the Chaotic Brilliance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Homeless Graffiti Artist to Internationally Renowned Painter

in Animation, Art | March 4th, 2019

By the late 1970s, New York City had fall­en into such a sham­bol­ic state that nobody could have been expect­ed to notice the occa­sion­al streak of addi­tion­al spray paint here and there. But some­how the repeat­ed appear­ance of the word “SAMO” caught the atten­tion of even jad­ed Low­er Man­hat­tan­ites. That tag sig­ni­fied the work of Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the lat­ter of whom would cre­ate work that, four decades lat­er, would sell for over $110 mil­lion at auc­tion, a record-break­ing num­ber for an Amer­i­can artist. But by then he had already been dead for near­ly 20 years, brought down by a hero­in over­dose at 27, an age that reflects not just his rock-star sta­tus in life but his increas­ing­ly leg­endary pro­file after it.

“Born in 1960 to a Hait­ian father and a Puer­to Rican moth­er, Basquiat spent his child­hood mak­ing art and mis­chief in Boerum Hill,” Brook­lyn, says Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Jor­dana Moore Saggese in the ani­mat­ed Ted-Ed intro­duc­tion above. “While he nev­er attend­ed art school, he learned by wan­der­ing through New York gal­leries, and lis­ten­ing to the music his father played at home.”

He seems to have drawn inspi­ra­tion from every­thing around him, “scrib­bling his own ver­sions of car­toons, com­ic books and bib­li­cal scenes on scrap paper from his father’s office” (lead­ing to a method that has some­thing in com­mon with William Bur­roughs’ cut-up tech­niques). He also spent a great deal of artis­ti­cal­ly for­ma­tive time laid up in the hos­pi­tal after a car acci­dent, por­ing over a copy of Gray’s Anato­my giv­en to him by his moth­er, which “ignit­ed a life­long fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my that man­i­fest­ed in the skulls, sinew and guts of his lat­er work.”

A skull hap­pens to fea­ture promi­nent­ly in that $110 mil­lion paint­ing of Basquiat’s, but he also made lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of oth­er works in his short life, hav­ing turned full-time to art after SAMO hit it big on the Soho art scene. The day job he quit was at a cloth­ing ware­house, a posi­tion he land­ed, after a peri­od of unem­ploy­ment and even home­less­ness, when the com­pa­ny’s founder spot­ted him spray-paint­ing a build­ing at night. Suc­cess came quick­ly to the young Basquiat, but it cer­tain­ly did­n’t come with­out effort: still, when we regard his paint­ings today, don’t we feel com­pelled by not just what Saggesse calls a dis­tinc­tive “inven­tive visu­al lan­guage” and hyper-ref­er­en­tial “phys­i­cal evi­dence of Basquiat’s rest­less and pro­lif­ic mind,” but also of the glimpse they offer into the rare life lived at max­i­mum pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, max­i­mum inten­si­ty, and max­i­mum speed?

To delve deep­er into the world of Basquiat, you can watch two doc­u­men­taries online: Basquiat: Rage to Rich­es, and Jean Michel Basquiat-The Radi­ant Child.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by TASCHEN

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Female Graf­fi­ti & Street Artists Will Be Cel­e­brat­ed in Street Hero­ines, a New Doc­u­men­tary

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

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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40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

in History, TED Talks | March 1st, 2019

We may take it for grant­ed that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems devel­oped with the Sume­ri­ans around 3400 B.C.E. The archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence so far sup­ports the the­o­ry. But it may also be pos­si­ble that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems pre­date 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by sev­er­al thou­sand years. And what’s more, it may be pos­si­ble, sug­gests pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gist Genevieve von Pet­zinger, that those pre­his­toric forms of writ­ing, which include the ear­li­est known hash­tag marks, con­sist­ed of sym­bols near­ly as uni­ver­sal as emo­ji.

The study of sym­bols carved into cave walls all over the world—including pen­ni­forms (feath­er shapes), clav­i­forms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could even­tu­al­ly push us to “aban­don the pow­er­ful nar­ra­tive,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of his­to­ry as total dark­ness until the Sume­ri­ans flip the switch.” Though the sym­bols may nev­er be tru­ly deci­pher­able, their pur­pos­es obscured by thou­sands of years of sep­a­ra­tion in time, they clear­ly show humans “undim­ming the light many mil­len­nia ear­li­er.”

While bur­row­ing deep under­ground to make cave paint­ings of ani­mals, ear­ly humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also devel­oped a sys­tem of signs that is remark­ably con­sis­tent across and between con­ti­nents. Von Pet­zinger spent years cat­a­logu­ing these sym­bols in Europe, vis­it­ing “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Ali­son George, “in France, Span, Italy and Por­tu­gal. The sym­bols she found ranged from dots, lines, tri­an­gles, squares and zigza­gs to more com­plex forms like lad­der shapes, hand sten­cils, some­thing called a tec­ti­form that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feath­er shapes called pen­ni­forms.”

She dis­cov­ered 32 signs found all over the con­ti­nent, carved and paint­ed over a very long peri­od of time. “For tens of thou­sands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ances­tors seem to have been curi­ous­ly con­sis­tent with the sym­bols they used.” Von Pet­zinger sees this sys­tem as a car­ry­over from mod­ern humans’ migra­tion into Europe from Africa. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new inven­tion,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlock­ing the mys­ter­ies of the world’s old­est sym­bols.

In her TED Talk at the top, von Pet­zinger describes this ear­ly sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through abstract signs as a pre­cur­sor to the “glob­al net­work of infor­ma­tion exchange” in the mod­ern world. “We’ve been build­ing on the men­tal achieve­ments of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to for­get that cer­tain abil­i­ties haven’t already exist­ed,” long before the for­mal writ­ten records we rec­og­nize. These sym­bols trav­eled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung togeth­er in an ancient neck­lace.

Von Pet­zinger believes, writes George, that “the sim­ple shapes rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal shift in our ancestor’s men­tal skills,” toward using abstract sym­bols to com­mu­ni­cate. Not every­one agrees with her. As the Brad­shaw Foun­da­tion notes, when it comes to the Euro­pean sym­bols, emi­nent pre­his­to­ri­an Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or near­ly always) asso­ci­at­ed with ani­mal fig­ures and thus can­not be said to be the first steps toward sym­bol­ism.”

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that both the signs and the ani­mals were meant to con­vey ideas just as a writ­ten lan­guage does. So argues MIT lin­guist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper pub­lished in Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy last year. Cave art might show ear­ly humans “con­vert­ing acoustic sounds into draw­ings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. Lesure says her research “sug­gests that the cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms nec­es­sary for the devel­op­ment of cave and rock art are like­ly to be anal­o­gous to those employed in the expres­sion of the sym­bol­ic think­ing required for lan­guage.”

In oth­er words, under her the­o­ry, “cave and rock [art] would rep­re­sent a modal­i­ty of lin­guis­tic expres­sion.” And the sym­bols sur­round­ing that art might rep­re­sent an elab­o­ra­tion on the theme. The very first sys­tem of writ­ing, shared by ear­ly humans all over the world for tens of thou­sands of years.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

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

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