How Martin Scorsese Directs a Movie: The Techniques Behind Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and More

in Film | December 10th, 2019

How does Mar­tin Scors­ese direct a movie? Younger film­mak­ers have been study­ing at his feet try­ing to fig­ure that out for more than four decades. Now in his late 70s and boast­ing a name that has long since become a byword for the Amer­i­can auteur, Scors­ese con­tin­ues to direct a major fea­ture (along­side almost equal­ly numer­ous doc­u­men­taries and shorts) at a much younger film­mak­er’s pace. This year saw the release of The Irish­man, the lat­est chap­ter in Scors­ese’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Robert De Niro that began back in 1973 with Mean Streets. This ambi­tious new film has prompt­ed Scors­ese fans to look back at the direc­tor’s career, trac­ing the lines that run through his both vig­or­ous­ly enter­tain­ing and high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic body of work.

Stu­dio Binder, whose primers on the direct­ing styles of Quentin Taran­ti­no and Wes Ander­son we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, has pro­duced a thor­ough break­down of what makes a Mar­tin Scors­ese Pic­ture — as their open­ing titles have announced since Rag­ing Bull — a Mar­tin Scors­ese Pic­ture.

In a break­down of Scors­ese’s tech­niques, film­mak­er SC Lan­nom high­lights how he builds flawed char­ac­ters, links cam­era move­ment to emo­tion, makes ener­getic edit­ing deci­sions (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his long­time edi­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er), uses char­ac­ter-dri­ven cam­era place­ment, builds “authen­tic and edu­ca­tion­al worlds,” com­pos­es movies to the music he has in mind, pairs mon­tages with voiceovers, and makes use of “extreme sound design.”

Of course, none of these descrip­tions con­vey the vis­cer­al impact of Scors­ese’s films at their best. You can get a taste of that in the Stu­dio Binder “Direc­tor’s Chair” video on Scors­ese at the top of the post, which assem­bles exam­ples of how he uses his roots in Ital­ian New York, cre­ates char­ac­ters on the edge (Taxi Dri­ver’s Travis Bick­le being per­haps the pro­to­type), builds “authen­tic worlds,” and keeps both the music and the edit in mind while direct­ing. These meth­ods are most clear­ly appar­ent in his hit “gang­ster movies” like Good­Fel­las, Casi­no, and The Depart­ed, but oth­er milieux — the time and place of pro­fes­sion­al box­ing, of Jesuit priests in 17th-cen­tu­ry Japan, of crooked 1990s stock­bro­kers, of Jesus Christ — have also proven amenable to the Scors­ese treat­ment.

Scors­ese’s faith­ful­ness to the real world, or at least the real world as he sees and feels it, is exceed­ed only by his faith­ful­ness to the world of cin­e­ma. While he usu­al­ly deals with real­is­tic sub­ject mat­ter, he does so with every trick in the styl­is­tic book: not just musi­cal mon­tages but sequences of slow and fast motion, freeze-frames, and zooms all meant to bring you, the view­er, into the emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence of his char­ac­ters. “Scors­ese knows how he wants you to feel, and he is a ‘dirty fight­er’ of cin­e­ma who will pull out all the tricks to get you feel­ing that way,” writes Lan­nom. “The dif­fer­ence between him and say, Michael Bay, is that Scorsese’s sto­ries, mes­sages, and gen­er­al approach is much more mature.” Indeed, Scors­ese can some­times seem to be one of the last grown-ups in Hol­ly­wood, but one whose love of cin­e­ma burns as intense­ly as it did in child­hood. For that rea­son, a new Scors­ese movie — rather, a new Mar­tin Scors­ese Pic­ture — will always be an event.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch an Incredible Performance of “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (1964)

in Music | December 9th, 2019

In 1959, pianist and com­pos­er Dave Brubeck “made one of the coolest and best-sell­ing jazz albums of all time,” writes Matt Schudel at The Wash­ing­ton Post. He did so at a time when dozens of oth­er jazz musi­cians were releas­ing career-defin­ing records that also changed jazz, almost overnight. Brubeck’s Time Out even­tu­al­ly became a “cer­ti­fied pop hit,” large­ly thanks to “the infec­tious qual­i­ty of its clas­sic instru­men­tal hit, ‘Take Five.’”

It is indeed rare for a song to become both a jazz stan­dard and an instru­men­tal so pop­u­lar that it’s cov­ered by dozens of artists in dozens of pop­u­lar gen­res over six decades, includ­ing some rev­er­ent ska and dub reg­gae trib­utes. “It has cer­tain­ly shown up in some unjazzy set­tings over the years,” writes Ted Gioia in The Jazz Stan­dard: A Guide to the Reper­toire. The song has been “rapped over and sam­pled, played by march­ing bands and sung by choirs… I am sure I will hear it on a cell phone ring­tone some­day soon.”

The orig­i­nal tune, com­posed not by Brubeck but long­time sax­o­phon­ist Paul Desmond, was adapt­ed into more pop­u­lar forms almost as soon as it came out. In 1961, Brubeck and his wife Iola penned lyrics for a ver­sion record­ed by Car­men McRae. Al Jar­reau adapt­ed this ver­sion for a 1977 record­ing on his Gram­my-win­ning album Look to the Rain­bow, which “intro­duced a new gen­er­a­tion of fans to this song. “

Over time “Take Five” may have “lost much of its capac­i­ty to sur­prise,” but “it can still delight.” That is no more so the case when we hear as it was orig­i­nal­ly played by the Dave Brubeck quar­tet itself, formed in 1951 by Brubeck and Desmond, who first met in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia in 1944. After cycling through sev­er­al rhythm play­ers through­out the ear­ly fifties, they found drum­mer Joe Morel­lo in 1956, then two years lat­er, bassist Eugene Wright, who first joined them for a U.S. State Depart­ment tour of Europe and Asia.

While trav­el­ing to osten­si­bly pro­mote U.S. good will, Brubeck and his band­mates also picked up the Eurasian folk music that inspired “Take Five,” with its 5/4 time (which in turn inspired the name). No mat­ter how many times you’ve heard Desmond’s East­ern-inspired melodies over Brubeck’s two-chord blues vamp and Morello’s relent­less fills, you can always hear it afresh when the clas­sic quar­tet plays the song live. Above, see them in one of their absolute great­est per­for­mances, a rol­lick­ing, dynam­ic attack in Bel­gium in 1964 that serves as all the argu­ment one needs for “Take Five”’s great­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz Music

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play an Enchant­i­ng Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

Remem­ber­ing Jazz Leg­end Dave Brubeck (RIP) with a Very Touch­ing Musi­cal Moment

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

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How to Improve Your Memory: Four TED Talks Explain the Techniques to Remember Anything

in Psychology, TED Talks | December 9th, 2019

Offered the abil­i­ty to remem­ber every­thing, who among us could turn it down? For that mat­ter, who among us could turn down even a slight increase in our mem­o­ry capac­i­ty? If we’re old­er, we com­plain of for­get­ful­ness. If we’re younger, we com­plain that so lit­tle of what we’re sup­posed to learn for tests sticks. If we’re in the mid­dle, we com­plain of being “bad with names” and hav­ing trou­ble prop­er­ly orga­niz­ing all the tasks we need to com­plete. What­ev­er our stage in life, we could all use the kind of mem­o­ry-improv­ing tech­niques explained in these four TED Talks, the most pop­u­lar of which offers Swedish “mem­o­ry ath­lete” Idriz Zoga­j’s method of “How to Become a Mem­o­ry Mas­ter.”

Fram­ing his talk with the sto­ry of how he trained him­self to com­pete in the World Mem­o­ry Cham­pi­onships (yes, they exist), Zogaj rec­om­mends remem­ber­ing by mak­ing “a fun, vivid, ani­mat­ed sto­ry,” using all your sens­es.” “And do it in 3D, even though you don’t have the 3D gog­gles. Your brain is amaz­ing; it can do it any­way.” Telling your­self a sto­ry in such a way that con­nects seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed images, words, num­bers, or oth­er pieces of infor­ma­tion gives those con­nec­tions strength in our brains.

In “How to Triple Your Mem­o­ry by Using This Trick,” Ricar­do Lieuw On rec­om­mends a sim­i­lar­ly sto­ry-based method, but empha­sizes the impor­tance of con­struct­ing it with “bizarre images.” And “if you tie these bizarre images to a place you know well, like your body, sud­den­ly mem­o­riz­ing things in order becomes a lot eas­i­er.”

In his TED Talk about dai­ly prac­tices to improve mem­o­ry, Kris­han Cha­hal divides “the art of mem­o­riz­ing” into two parts. The first entails “design­ing the infor­ma­tion or mod­i­fy­ing the infor­ma­tion in such a way so that it can catch your atten­tion,” mak­ing what you want to mem­o­rize more nat­u­ral­ly palat­able to “the taste of human mind” — sto­ries and strong visu­al images being per­haps the human mind’s tasti­est treat. The sec­ond involves cre­at­ing what he calls a “self-mean­ing sys­tem,” the best-known vari­ety of which is the mem­o­ry palace. The Mem­o­ry Tech­niques Wiki describes a mem­o­ry palace as “an imag­i­nary loca­tion in your mind where you can store mnemon­ic images,” typ­i­cal­ly mod­eled on “a place you know well, like a build­ing or town.” When mem­o­riz­ing, you store pieces infor­ma­tion in dif­fer­ent “loca­tions” with­in your mem­o­ry palace; when recall­ing, you take that same men­tal jour­ney through your palace and find every­thing where you left it.

The mem­o­ry palace came up here on Open Cul­ture ear­li­er this year when we fea­tured a video about how to mem­o­rize an entire chap­ter of Moby-Dick. Its cre­ator drew on Joshua Foer’s book Moon­walk­ing With Ein­stein: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing, and if you want a taste of what Foer has learned about mem­o­ry, watch his TED Talk above. Foer, too, has spent time at the World Mem­o­ry Cham­pi­onships, and his ques­tions about how mem­o­ry ath­letes do what they do led him to the con­cept psy­chol­o­gists call “elab­o­ra­tive encod­ing,” the prac­tice of tak­ing infor­ma­tion “lack­ing in con­text, in sig­nif­i­cance, in mean­ing” and trans­form­ing it “so that it becomes mean­ing­ful in the light of all the oth­er things that you have in your mind.”

Elab­o­ra­tive encod­ing under­lies the effec­tive­ness of mem­o­riz­ing even the dri­est lists of facts in the form of sto­ries full of strik­ing and unusu­al sights. (Foer him­self opens with a mem­o­ry-aid­ing sto­ry star­ring “a pack of over­weight nud­ists on bicy­cles.”) No won­der so many of the great­est sto­ry­tellers have had a the­mat­ic pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with mem­o­ry. Take Jorge Luis Borges, author of “Shake­speare’s Mem­o­ry” (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) and the even more (dare I say) mem­o­rable “Funes the Mem­o­ri­ous.” In the lat­ter a horse-rid­ing acci­dent robs a rur­al teenag­er of the abil­i­ty to for­get, bestow­ing upon him an effec­tive­ly infi­nite mem­o­ry — a pow­er that has him tak­ing an entire day to remem­ber an entire day and assign­ing a dif­fer­ent name (“the train,” “Máx­i­mo Perez,” “the whale,” “Napoleon”) to each and every num­ber in exis­tence. As much as we all want to remem­ber more things, sure­ly none of us wants to remem­ber every­thing.

Relat­ed Com­ment:

How to Mem­o­rize an Entire Chap­ter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

This Is Your Brain on Exer­cise: Why Phys­i­cal Exer­cise (Not Men­tal Games) Might Be the Best Way to Keep Your Mind Sharp

Play Mark Twain’s “Mem­o­ry-Builder,” His Game for Remem­ber­ing His­tor­i­cal Facts & Dates

Hear “Shakespeare’s Mem­o­ry” by Jorge Luis Borges

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Revisit the Infamous Rolling Stones Free Festival at Altamont: The Ill-Fated Concert Took Place 50 Years Ago

in History, Music | December 9th, 2019

The Tate-LaBi­an­ca mur­ders and the vio­lence at Alta­mont in 1969 have become emblems of the end of “the notion of spon­tane­ity,” writes Richard Brody at The New York­er, “the sense that things could hap­pen on their own and that benev­o­lent spirts would pre­vail. What end­ed was the idea of the unpro­duced.” Per­haps it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that this was only ever an idea, nur­tured by those with the means and tal­ent to pro­duce it, and to over­shad­ow, for a time, fig­ures like Man­son, a Lau­rel Canyon hang­er-on before he became a cult-lead­ing, spree-killing mas­ter­mind.

Like­wise, the Hells Angels had been present at the birth of the coun­ter­cul­ture. As any­one who’s read Tom Wolfe’s Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test knows, they were reg­u­lar atten­dees of Ken Kesey’s Acid Test par­ties and ear­ly Grate­ful Dead shows, at the same time as the release of the famous 1965 Lynch report, a six-month study detail­ing the crim­i­nal activ­i­ties of motor­cy­cle gangs in Cal­i­for­nia. Two years lat­er, Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels book would both cor­rob­o­rate and down­play the report’s shock­ing rev­e­la­tions.

It was evi­dent to peo­ple pay­ing atten­tion that the sup­ply chain mov­ing drugs through the scene was a par­tic­u­lar­ly nasty busi­ness, a shad­ow side of hip­pie cul­ture as men­ac­ing as Manson’s pow­er trip­ping race war delu­sions. Leave it to the Rolling Stones to move this back­ground to the fore­ground when they hired the Hells Angels to do secu­ri­ty at Alta­mont on Decem­ber 6, 1969, pay­ing them in beer. The drunk­en bik­ers respond­ed to unrest in the crowd by beat­ing fans with weight­ed pool cues and motor­cy­cle chains before stab­bing 18-year-old black fan Mered­ith Hunter to death, as the band, unaware, played “Under My Thumb.”

All of this now plays out before us close up in footage from the Maysles broth­ers’ icon­ic doc­u­men­tary, Gimme Shel­ter, with a view almost no one among the 300,000 fans present that day could claim. “Many peo­ple who attend­ed Alta­mont thought it was a great day and a great con­cert,” says Joel Selvin, author of Alta­mont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Sto­ry of Rock­’s Dark­est Day. No one at the back of the crowd noticed the fights in front of the stage, such as those that break­ing out between fans and bik­ers dur­ing “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il,” above.

George Lucas hap­pened to be there, work­ing with Robert Elf­strom on the Maysles crew. The two were sent “to the top of this hill and they spent all day futz­ing with this long lens,” says Selvin, “try­ing to keep it in focus. When it was all over, they were both con­vinced they had been to Wood­stock.” Indeed, “Wood­stock of the West” is how Alta­mont was char­ac­ter­ized until Rolling Stone pub­lished its in-depth cov­er­age of events. How then did Alta­mont become known there­after as the “anti-Wood­stock” that broke the six­ties?

Wood­stock itself “was very close to being a total dis­as­ter,” Selvin points out, a point Jer­ry Gar­cia him­self makes in post-Alta­mont inter­view above. They were “two sides of the same coin, two ways that that kind of expres­sion can go.” The stig­ma sur­round­ing the Hells Angels great­ly con­tributed the infamy, as news of their full involve­ment spread. Had accused killer Alan Pas­saro not been in a noto­ri­ous­ly vio­lent bik­er gang, Selvin believes, he would have been seen as a hero, since Hunter had rushed the stage with a gun after an ear­li­er alter­ca­tion with the gang. (Pas­saro was charged but not con­vict­ed.)

But per­haps no arti­fact has helped mythol­o­gize the trag­ic events at Alta­mont more than Gimme Shel­ter, a film that also doc­u­ments just how elec­tri­fy­ing the Stones were onstage, how trans­formed as a band after the death of Bri­an Jones months ear­li­er and addi­tion of gui­tarist Mick Tay­lor.

They debuted “Brown Sug­ar” at Alta­mont (hear it above), a song that wouldn’t be released until three years lat­er on Sticky Fin­gers and that would define their take on road­house blues in the ear­ly sev­en­ties. At least in per­for­mance, they held up remark­ably well in a fes­ti­val that bris­tled with rest­less, over­crowd­ed men­ace even before the bik­ers start­ed a riot. (A fan punched Mick Jag­ger as he got out of his heli­copter.)

As we reflect on the 50th anniver­sary of Alta­mont, we might also rethink its immor­tal­iza­tion as a sym­bol of the death of six­ties’ inno­cence. Some­thing else died instead, writes Brody. “The haunt­ing freeze-frame on Jag­ger star­ing into the cam­era, at the end of the film, after his foren­sic exam­i­na­tion of the footage of the killing of Mered­ith Hunter at the con­cert, reveals not the film­mak­ers’ accu­sa­tion or his own sense of guilt but lost illu­sions” of con­trol over the cul­ture’s dark­er side.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the First Live Per­for­mance of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sug­ar:” Record­ed at the Fate­ful Alta­mont Free Con­cert in 1969

Gimme Shel­ter: Watch the Clas­sic Doc­u­men­tary of the Rolling Stones’ Dis­as­trous Con­cert at Alta­mont

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: From Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

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

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The Trick That Made Animation Realistic: Watch a Short History of Rotoscoping

in Film | December 9th, 2019

Can we run a line of influ­ence from the Incred­i­ble Hulk back through Super­man all the way to…Koko the Clown? If we’re talk­ing about roto­scop­ing we are.

Vox has returned with anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing mini-doc in their “Hollywouldn’t” series, explor­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary film inven­tions cre­at­ed out­side the main stu­dio sys­tem.

If you don’t know roto­scop­ing as a word, you’ve no doubt seen it: essen­tial­ly it is a way for ani­ma­tors to cre­ate more real­is­tic move­ment by trac­ing over live action, one frame at a time.

The man who invent­ed it was Max Fleis­ch­er, who also cre­at­ed Bet­ty Boop and ani­mat­ed Segar’s Pop­eye and Super­man. As the Vox doc shows, Fleis­ch­er saw that ear­ly ani­ma­tion was stiff and lack­ing in real­ism, and so he invent­ed a device to project a live action frame of film onto the back of a glass draw­ing board so a fig­ure could be traced. With his broth­er Dave dressed up and filmed as Koko the Clown, Fleis­ch­er was able to bring an uncan­ny real­ism to his “Out of the Inkwell” car­toons, as Koko moved just like a human (when he need­ed to do so), a feat that attract­ed the atten­tion of the New York Times and oth­ers.

Fleis­ch­er was con­stant­ly push­ing the tech­nique. Not sat­is­fied with real­ism, he used footage of singer/band leader Cab Cal­loway and turned him into a danc­ing wal­rus. What­ev­er the trans­for­ma­tion, Calloway’s moon­walk­ing, slinky gate is main­tained, and the Bet­ty Boop car­toon from which it hails, “Min­nie the Moocher,” along with its sequel “Snow White,” are two of the weird­est, spook­i­est bits of ani­ma­tion out there still to this day.

You can see more roto­scop­ing in the sub­se­quent col­or “Super­man” car­toons and the real­is­tic Gulliver’s Trav­els, which would go on to bank­rupt the stu­dio.

Dis­ney would use roto­scop­ing in Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarves and all sub­se­quent Dis­ney princess­es of the clas­sic era were ani­mat­ed in part from live action sources.

Exper­i­men­tal ani­ma­tors used roto­scop­ing to all dif­fer­ent effects, not always want­i­ng to attempt real­ism. Ralph Bak­shi used some very odd roto­scop­ing in sec­tions of his ani­mat­ed Lord of the Rings fea­ture and Amer­i­can Pop, and strange­ly, as he got clos­er to real­ism, the fak­er and more lethar­gic it looked. Once com­put­er graph­ics entered the pic­ture, roto­scop­ing took a back seat, but motion cap­ture is a three-dimen­sion­al ver­sion of the con­cept, essen­tial­ly over­lay­ing com­put­er ani­ma­tion on a filmed actor.

How­ev­er, a form of roto­scop­ing can be seen in Richard Linklater’s Wak­ing Life and A Scan­ner Dark­ly, where, assist­ed by com­put­ers to do most of the hard work, it was chris­tened Roto­shop by ani­ma­tor and MIT sci­en­tist Bob Sabis­ton.

And to bring it all back home to your pock­et, the video fil­ters on your phone that can turn your face into a dog or a wiz­ard or a glam­or model…that all start­ed just over a cen­tu­ry ago by one plucky inven­tor and his broth­er, dressed as a clown.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon: Watch 17 Clas­sic Episodes Free Online

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

Why Car­toon Char­ac­ters Wear Gloves: A Curi­ous Trip Through the His­to­ry of Ani­ma­tion

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Tom Waits For No One: Watch the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Tom Waits Music Video from 1979

Free Ani­mat­ed Films: From Clas­sic to Mod­ern

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.

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Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

in History, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | December 6th, 2019

Those of us who are deeply dis­ap­point­ed to learn we won’t be see­ing Har­ri­et Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tub­man tea tow­el… or could if the revered abo­li­tion­ist and activist wasn’t one of the fam­i­ly-owned Rad­i­cal Tea Towel’s hottest sell­ing items.

The pop­u­lar design, based on one of Charles Ross’ murals in Cam­bridge, Maryland’s Har­ri­et Tub­man Memo­r­i­al Gar­den is cur­rent­ly out of stock.

For­tu­nate­ly, the com­pa­ny has immor­tal­ized plen­ty of oth­er inspi­ra­tional fem­i­nists, activists, civ­il rights lead­ers, authors, and thinkers on cot­ton rec­tan­gles, suit­able for all your dish dry­ing and gift giv­ing needs.

Or wave them at a demon­stra­tion, on the cre­ators’ sug­ges­tion.

The need for rad­i­cal tea tow­els was hatched as one of the company’s Welsh co-founder’s was search­ing in vain for a prac­ti­cal birth­day present that would reflect her 92-year-old father’s pro­gres­sive val­ues.

Five years lat­er, bom­bard­ed with dis­tress­ing post-elec­tion mes­sages from the States, they decid­ed to expand across the pond, to high­light the achieve­ments of “amaz­ing Amer­i­cans who’ve fought the cause of free­dom and equal­i­ty over the years.”

The descrip­tion of each tow­el’s sub­ject speaks to the pas­sion for his­to­ry, edu­ca­tion  and jus­tice the founders—a moth­er, father, and adult son—bring to the project. Here, for exam­ple, is their write up on Muham­mad Ali, above:

He was born Cas­sius Clay and changed his name to Muham­mad Ali, but the name the world knew him by was sim­ply, ‘The Great­est.’ Through his remark­able box­ing career, Ali is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and cel­e­brat­ed sports fig­ures of the 20th cen­tu­ry and was an inspir­ing, con­tro­ver­sial and polar­is­ing fig­ure both inside and out­side the ring. 

Ali start­ed box­ing as a 12-year-old because he want­ed to take revenge on the boy who stole his bike, and at 25, he lost his box­ing licence for refus­ing to fight in Viet­nam. (‘Why should they ask me to put on a uni­form and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bul­lets on brown peo­ple in Viet­nam when so-called Negro peo­ple in Louisville are treat­ed like dogs and denied sim­ple human rights?’ He demand­ed.) It was per­haps the only time he sur­ren­dered: mil­lions of dol­lars, the love of his nation, his career… but it was for what he believed in. And although his views on race were often con­fused, this was just exam­ple of his Civ­il Rights activism.

Ali became a light­ning rod for dis­sent, set­ting an exam­ple of racial pride for African Amer­i­cans and resis­tance to white dom­i­na­tion dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. And he took no punch lying down – nei­ther inside the box­ing ring nor in the fight for equal­i­ty: after being refused ser­vice in a whites-only restau­rant in his home­town of Louisville, Ken­tucky, he report­ed­ly threw the Olympic gold medal he had just won in Rome into the Ohio Riv­er. So, here’s an empow­er­ing gift cel­e­brat­ing the man who nev­er threw in the (tea) tow­el.

The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el blog is such stuff as will bring a grate­ful tear to an AP US His­to­ry teacher’s eye. The Fore­bears We Share: Learn­ing from Rad­i­cal His­to­ry is a good place to start. Oth­er top­ics include Abi­gail Adam’s Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion advo­ca­cy, the bridge designs of rev­o­lu­tion­ary philoso­pher Thomas Paine, and Bruce Springsteen’s love of protest songs.

(The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el design team has yet to pay trib­ute to The Boss, but until they do, we can rest easy know­ing author John Steinbeck’s tow­el embod­ies Springsteen’s sen­ti­ment. )

Lest our edu­ca­tion­al dish­cloths lull us into think­ing we know more about our coun­try than we actu­al­ly do, the company’s web­site has a rad­i­cal his­to­ry quiz, mod­eled on the US his­to­ry and gov­ern­ment nat­u­ral­iza­tion test which would-be Amer­i­cans must pass with a score of at least 60%. This one is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, geared toward pro­gres­sive his­to­ry. Test your knowl­edge to earn a tea tow­el dis­count code.

Begin your Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el explo­rations here, and don’t neglect to take in all the rad designs cel­e­brat­ing the upcom­ing cen­ten­ni­al of wom­en’s suf­frage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

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

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Music Is Truly a Universal Language: New Research Shows That Music Worldwide Has Important Commonalities

in Music, Science | December 6th, 2019

Pho­to by Jo Duse­po, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfellow’s descrip­tion of music as a uni­ver­sal lan­guage has become a well-worn cliché, usu­al­ly uttered in a sen­ti­men­tal and not par­tic­u­lar­ly seri­ous way. Maybe this is why it does­n’t inspire a cor­re­spond­ing breadth of appre­ci­a­tion for the music of the world. We are con­di­tioned and accul­tur­at­ed, it can seem, by for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence to grav­i­tate toward cer­tain kinds of music. We can expand our tastes but that usu­al­ly requires some care­ful study and accul­tur­a­tion.

In the sci­ences, the “uni­ver­sal lan­guage” hypoth­e­sis in music has been tak­en far more seri­ous­ly, and, more recent­ly, so has its cri­tique. “In eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gy,” notes the Uni­ver­si­tat Wien’s Medi­en­por­tal, “uni­ver­sal­i­ty became some­thing of a dirty word.” The diver­si­ty of world music is pro­found, as Kevin Dick­in­son writes at Big Think.

Kata­j­jaq, or Inu­it throat singing, express­es play­ful­ness in strong, throaty expres­sions. Japan’s nogaku punc­tu­ates haunt­ing bam­boo flutes with the stiff punc­tu­a­tion of per­cus­sion. South of Japan, the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­ines also used winds and per­cus­sions, yet their didgeri­doos and clap­sticks birthed a dis­tinct sound. And the staid echoes of medieval Gre­go­ri­an chant could hard­ly be con­fused for a rous­ing track of thrash met­al.

The idea that all of these kinds of music and thou­sands more are all the same in some way strikes many as “ground­less or even offen­sive.” But even hard­core skep­tics might be per­suad­ed by papers pub­lished just last month in Sci­ence.

Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na Cog­ni­tive Biol­o­gists W. Tecum­seh Fitch and Tudor Popes­cu begin their arti­cle “The World in a Song” with a brief sketch of the his­to­ry of “the empir­i­cal quest for musi­cal uni­ver­sals.” The search began in Berlin in 1900, almost as soon as phono­graphs could be used to record music. The Nazis stamped out this research in Ger­many in the 1930s, though it flour­ished in the U.S.—in the work of Alan Lomax, for exam­ple. Yet “by the 1970s eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gists were dis­cour­aged from even dis­cussing musi­cal ‘uni­ver­sals.’ ”

Nonethe­less, as a team of researchers led by Harvard’s Samuel Mehr show in their paper “Uni­ver­sal­i­ty and Diver­si­ty in Human Song,” there are indeed uni­ver­sal musi­cal qual­i­ties, though they man­i­fest in some spe­cif­ic ways. Using the “tools of com­pu­ta­tion­al social sci­ence” to ana­lyze a huge archive of audio record­ings of world music, the researchers found that “iden­ti­fi­able acoustic fea­tures of songs (accent, tem­po, pitch range, etc.) pre­dict their pri­ma­ry behav­ioral con­text (love, heal­ing, etc.).” Soci­eties around the world use sim­i­lar musi­cal prop­er­ties to accom­pa­ny sim­i­lar emo­tion­al con­texts, in oth­er words.

More­over, the meta-analy­sis found that “melod­ic and rhyth­mic bigrams fall into pow­er-law dis­tri­b­u­tions” and “tonal­i­ty is wide­spread, per­haps uni­ver­sal.” Focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on vocal song, since instru­men­ta­tion var­ied too wide­ly, the sci­en­tists test­ed “five sets of hypothe­ses about uni­ver­sal­i­ty and vari­abil­i­ty in musi­cal behav­ior and musi­cal forms.” All of these analy­ses make use of ethno­graph­ic data. Crit­ics might point out that such data is rid­dled with bias.

Ethno­g­ra­phers, from the pure­ly aca­d­e­m­ic to pop­u­lar cura­tors like Lomax, applied their own fil­ters, choos­ing what to record and what to ignore based on their own assump­tions about what mat­ters in music. Nonethe­less, Mehr and his co-authors write that they have adjust­ed for “sam­pling error and ethno­g­ra­ph­er bias, prob­lems that have bedev­iled pri­or tests.” Their method­ol­o­gy is rig­or­ous, and their con­clu­sions are backed by some dense ana­lyt­ics.

It would indeed seem from their exhaus­tive research that, in many respects, music is gen­uine­ly uni­ver­sal. The find­ings should not sur­prise us. Humans, after all, are bio­log­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar across the globe, with gen­er­al­ly the same propen­si­ties for lan­guage learn­ing and all the oth­er things that humans uni­ver­sal­ly do. Many pre­vi­ous com­par­a­tive projects in his­to­ry have used gen­er­al­iza­tions to cre­ate racial hier­ar­chies and attempt to show the supe­ri­or­i­ty of one cul­ture or anoth­er. “Uni­ver­sal­i­ty is a big word,” said Leonard Bern­stein, “and a dan­ger­ous one”—a word beloved by empires through­out time.

But the data-dri­ven approach used by the most recent stud­ies adheres more close­ly to the sci­ence. Wide vari­a­tion is a giv­en, and sev­er­al indi­ca­tors show great “vari­abil­i­ty across cul­tures” when it comes to music, as the intro­duc­tion to “Uni­ver­sal­i­ty and Diver­si­ty in Human Song” acknowl­edges. Nonethe­less, forms of music appear in every human soci­ety, accom­pa­ny­ing cer­e­monies, rit­u­als, and rites. Echo­ing the con­clu­sions of mod­ern genet­ics, the authors point out that “there is more vari­a­tion in musi­cal behav­ior with­in soci­eties than between soci­eties.” Read Mehr and his team’s study here.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Why Catchy Songs Get Stuck in Our Brains: New Study Explains the Sci­ence of Ear­worms

A Playlist of Music Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven to Increase Cows’ Milk Pro­duc­tion: REM, Lou Reed & More

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

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David Sedaris Teaches Storytelling & Humor His New Masterclass

in Online Courses, Writing | December 6th, 2019

For more than 25 years, the hol­i­day sea­son has brought to the radio not just Christ­mas car­ols but a diaris­tic mono­logue by a writer with, in every sense, a dis­tinc­tive voice. When it first aired on Morn­ing Edi­tion, “San­ta­land Diaries” made David Sedaris’ name, not that he holds the piece in esteem as high as some of his fans do. “Peo­ple will say, ‘Oh, I loved that San­ta­land thing,’ ” Sedaris said in a recent inter­view, but “that thing is so clunki­ly writ­ten. I mean, it’s just hor­ri­bly writ­ten, and peo­ple can’t even see it.” Most are “lis­ten­ing to the sto­ry, but they’re not pay­ing atten­tion to how it’s con­struct­ed, or they’re not pay­ing atten­tion to the words that you used. They’re not hear­ing the craft of it.” Sedaris fans who do hear the craft of it may well be in the tar­get audi­ence for a new Mas­ter­class taught by the man him­self.

Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Mas­ter­class­es by writ­ers as intel­lec­tu­al­ly and styl­is­ti­cal­ly var­i­ous as Joyce Car­ol Oates, Mal­colm Glad­well, Mar­garet Atwood, and Dan Brown. But we’ve nev­er con­duct­ed inves­ti­ga­tions into any of their writ­ing process­es in the same way we have into Sedaris’ writ­ing process, his own view of which con­sti­tutes the core of his Mas­ter­class’ con­tent. “If you write about peo­ple, you have to be inter­est­ed in peo­ple,” he says in the trail­er above. For him that means ask­ing unex­pect­ed ques­tions, like “Do your chil­dren show­er?” or “Who’s the drunk­est cus­tomer you’ve had today?” It also means keep­ing a diary in which to record the answers, and with which, even more impor­tant­ly, to main­tain a dai­ly writ­ing habit.

Even now, with a full sched­ule of read­ings to give around the world, Sedaris writes every day with­out fail. But he also did it for fif­teen years before “The San­ta­land Diaries” brought him the atten­tion that got his first book pub­lished. “I meet a lot of young writ­ers and I say, ‘Do you write every day?’ ” he men­tions in one les­son. “They say, ‘No, but just — you know, I write when it strikes me.’ I don’t know. I sup­pose that might work for some peo­ple.” But it cer­tain­ly would­n’t work for him, nor would doing few­er than his cus­tom­ary twelve to eigh­teen rewrites of each piece. In oth­er lessons he cov­ers such aspects of the craft as “observ­ing the world,” “con­nect­ing with the read­er,” “end­ing with weight,” and “writ­ing about loved ones.”

For that last les­son Sedaris brings in a spe­cial guest: his sis­ter Lisa, there to talk about what it feels like to be writ­ten about by her famous­ly obser­vant broth­er. That will come as a spe­cial treat for any­one who rec­og­nizes her from all her appear­ances in Sedaris’ fam­i­ly sto­ries, but each les­son seems to play to Sedaris’ strengths as a writer as well as a per­former: he gives read­ings of diary entries and pub­lished pieces, but also gives his stu­dents advice on how to han­dle read­ings of their own in the future. Sedaris makes no promis­es that the course will bestow upon all who take it a world­view as dis­tinc­tive as his, to say noth­ing of a fan base as lucra­tive as his, but it will sure­ly make them bet­ter at “hear­ing the craft of it,” a skill as wor­thy of cul­ti­va­tion as it is rare. You can sign up for Sedaris’ course here.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Note: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writ­ing Process: Keep a Diary, Car­ry a Note­book, Read Out Loud, Aban­don Hope

Why David Sedaris Hates America’s Favorite Word, “Awe­some”

David Sedaris Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Jazz Tracks: Stream Them Online

Steve Mar­tin Teach­es His First Online Course on Com­e­dy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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