Revisiting Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” and the Album That Opened R&B to Resistance: Revisited 50 Years Later

in Life, Music, Politics | May 24th, 2021

I just want to be heard and that’s all that mat­ters. — Mar­vin Gaye

R&B super­star Mar­vin Gaye was more than will­ing to risk his career on a record.

His pol­ished pub­lic per­sona was a false front behind which lurked some seri­ous demons — depres­sion and addic­tion, exac­er­bat­ed by the ill­ness and death of his close friend and duet mate, Tam­mi Ter­rell.

His down­ward spi­ral was also fueled by his dis­tress over events of the late 60s.

How else to respond to the Viet­nam War, the mur­der of civ­il rights lead­ers, police bru­tal­i­ty, the Watts Riots, a dire envi­ron­men­tal sit­u­a­tion, and the dis­en­fran­chise­ment and aban­don­ment of low­er income Black com­mu­ni­ties?

Per­haps by refus­ing to adhere to pro­duc­er Bar­ry Gordy’s man­date that all Motown artists were to steer clear of overt polit­i­cal stances….

He con­trolled their careers, but art is a pow­er­ful out­let.

Obie Ben­son also came under Gordy’s thumb as a mem­ber of the R&B quar­tet, the Four Tops. The shock­ing vio­lence he wit­nessed in Berkeley’s Peo­ple’s Park on Bloody Thurs­day while on tour with his band pro­vid­ed the lyri­cal inspi­ra­tion for “What’s Goin’ On.”

When the oth­er mem­bers of the group refused to touch it, not want­i­ng to rock the boat with a protest song, he took it to Gaye, who had lost all enthu­si­asm for the “bull­shit” love songs that had made him a star

Ben­son recalled that Gaye added some “things that were more ghet­to, more nat­ur­al, which made it seem more like a sto­ry than a song… we mea­sured him for the suit and he tai­lored the hell out of it.”

Gordy was not pleased with the song’s mes­sage, nor his loosey goosey approach to lay­ing down the track. Eli Fontaine’s famous sax­o­phone intro was impro­vised and “Motown’s secret weapon,” bassist James Jamer­son was so plas­tered on Metaxa, he was record­ed sprawl­ing on the floor.

Jamer­son told his wife they’d been work­ing on a “mas­ter­piece,” but Gordy dubbed “What’s Going On” “the worst thing I ever heard in my life,” pooh-poohing the “Dizzy Gille­spie stuff in the mid­dle, that scat­ting.” He refused to release it.

Gaye stonewalled by going on strike, refus­ing to record any music what­so­ev­er.

Eight months in, Motown’s A&R Head Har­ry Balk, des­per­ate for anoth­er release from one of the label’s most pop­u­lar acts, direct­ed sales vice pres­i­dent Bar­ney Ales to drop the new sin­gle behind Gordy’s back.

It imme­di­ate­ly shot to the top of the charts, sell­ing 70,000 copies in its first week.

Gordy, warm­ing to the idea of more sales, abrupt­ly reversed course, direct­ing Gaye to come up with an entire album of protest songs. It ush­ered in a new era in which Black record­ing artists were not only free, but encour­aged to use their voic­es to bring about social change.

The album, What’s Going On, recent­ly claimed top hon­ors when Rolling Stone updat­ed its  500 Great­est Albums list. Now, it is cel­e­brat­ing its 50th anniver­sary, and as Poly­phon­ic, pro­duc­ers of the mini-doc above note, its sen­ti­ments couldn’t be more time­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Mar­vin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capel­la: The Haunt­ing Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her June 7 for a Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

John Steinbeck Wrote a Werewolf Novel, and His Estate Won’t Let the World Read It: The Story of Murder at Full Moon

in History, Literature | May 24th, 2021

Pho­to of Stein­beck by Sonya Noskowiak, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

John Stein­beck wrote Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden, but not before he’d put a few less-acclaimed nov­els under his belt. He did­n’t even break through to suc­cess of any kind until 1935’s Tor­tilla Flat, which lat­er became a pop­u­lar roman­tic-com­e­dy film with Spencer Tra­cy and Hedy Lamarr. That was already Stein­beck­’s fourth pub­lished nov­el, and he’d writ­ten near­ly as many unpub­lished ones. Two of those three man­u­scripts he destroyed, but a fourth sur­vives at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas in Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter, which spe­cial­ized in hoard­ing lit­er­ary ephemera, espe­cial­ly from Nobel lau­re­ates. The unpub­lished nov­el deals not with labor­ers, farm­ers, or wastrels, but a were­wolf.

“Set in a fic­tion­al Cal­i­forn­ian coastal town, Mur­der at Full Moon tells the sto­ry of a com­mu­ni­ty gripped by fear after a series of grue­some mur­ders takes place under a full moon,” writes The Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “Inves­ti­ga­tors fear that a super­nat­ur­al mon­ster has emerged from the near­by marsh­es. Its char­ac­ters include a cub reporter, a mys­te­ri­ous man who runs a local gun club and an eccen­tric ama­teur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using tech­niques based on his obses­sion with pulp detec­tive fic­tion.”

Alberge quotes Stan­ford lit­er­ary schol­ar Gavin Jones describ­ing the book as relat­ed to Stein­beck­’s “inter­est in vio­lent human trans­for­ma­tion – the kind of human-ani­mal con­nec­tion that you find all over his work; his inter­est in mob vio­lence and how humans are capa­ble of oth­er states of being, includ­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly vio­lent mur­der­ers.”

Then still in his twen­ties, Stein­beck wrote Mur­der at Full Moon under the pseu­do­nym Peter Pym. After receiv­ing only rejec­tions from pub­lish­ers, he shelved the man­u­script and seems not to have giv­en it anoth­er thought, even in order to dis­pose of it. Though Stein­beck­’s estate has declared its lack of inter­est in its posthu­mous pub­li­ca­tion, Jones believes it would find a recep­tive read­er­ship today:  “It’s a hor­ror pot­boil­er, which is why I think read­ers would find it more inter­est­ing than a more typ­i­cal Stein­beck.” It also “pre­dicts Cal­i­forn­ian noir detec­tive fic­tion. It is an unset­tling sto­ry whose atmos­phere is one of fog-bound, mali­cious, malig­nant secre­cy.” It could at least have made quite a noir film, ide­al­ly one star­ring Lon Chaney, Jr., whose per­for­mance in Of Mice and Men proved he could play a Stein­beck char­ac­ter — to say noth­ing of his sub­se­quent turn in The Wolf Man.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

John Stein­beck Reads Two Short Sto­ries, “The Snake” and “John­ny Bear” in 1953

John Stein­beck Has a Cri­sis in Con­fi­dence While Writ­ing The Grapes of Wrath: “I am Not a Writer. I’ve Been Fool­ing Myself and Oth­er Peo­ple”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Ancient Philosophy: Free Online Course from the University of Pennsylvania

in Online Courses, Philosophy | May 23rd, 2021

This two part course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia (Part 1 here — Part 2 here) “traces the ori­gins of phi­los­o­phy in the West­ern tra­di­tion in the thinkers of Ancient Greece,” begin­ning with “the Pre­so­crat­ic nat­ur­al philoso­phers who were active in Ionia in the 6th cen­tu­ry BCE and are also cred­it­ed with being the first sci­en­tists.” The course descrip­tion con­tin­ues:

Thales, Anax­i­man­der, and Anax­imines made bold pro­pos­als about the ulti­mate con­stituents of real­i­ty, while Her­a­cli­tus insist­ed that there is an under­ly­ing order to the chang­ing world. Par­menides of Elea for­mu­lat­ed a pow­er­ful objec­tion to all these pro­pos­als, while lat­er Greek the­o­rists (such as Anaxago­ras and the atom­ist Dem­ocri­tus) attempt­ed to answer that objec­tion. In fifth-cen­tu­ry Athens, Socrates insist­ed on the impor­tance of the fun­da­men­tal eth­i­cal question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Pla­to, and Plato’s pupil, Aris­to­tle, devel­oped elab­o­rate philo­soph­i­cal sys­tems to explain the nature of real­i­ty, knowl­edge, and human hap­pi­ness. After the death of Aris­to­tle, in the Hel­lenis­tic peri­od, Epi­cure­ans and Sto­ics devel­oped and trans­formed that ear­li­er tra­di­tion.

Part I cov­ers Pla­to and his pre­de­ces­sors. Part II cov­ers Aris­to­tle and his suc­ces­sors. Both cours­es are taught by pro­fes­sor Susan Sauvé Mey­er.

You can take these cours­es for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the cours­es for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Both cours­es will be added to our list of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern

Free Clas­sics Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast, Now at 370 Episodes, Expands into East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 17 ) |

Watch the Building of the Eiffel Tower in Timelapse Animation

in Architecture | May 21st, 2021

“They didn’t want it but he built it any­way” — The Pix­ies, “Alec Eif­fel”

When the Eif­fel Tow­er — gate­way to the Paris World’s Fair and cen­ten­ni­al mark­er of the Rev­o­lu­tion — was first designed and built, it was far from beloved. Its cre­ator, Alexan­dre Gus­tave Eif­fel, an engi­neer known for build­ing bridges, faced wide­spread con­dem­na­tion, both from the city’s cre­ative class and in the pop­u­lar press. French writer Guy de Mau­pas­sant summed up the pre­vail­ing sen­ti­ment when he called Eif­fel “a boil­er­mak­er with delu­sions of grandeur.”

Before con­struc­tion began, Mau­paus­sant joined a com­mis­sion of 300 artists, archi­tects, and promi­nent cit­i­zens who opposed in a let­ter what they imag­ined as “a gid­dy, ridicu­lous tow­er dom­i­nat­ing Paris like a gigan­tic black smoke­stack…. [A]ll of our humil­i­at­ed mon­u­ments will dis­ap­pear in this ghast­ly dream.” One crit­ic wrote of it as a “hideous col­umn with rail­ings, this infundibu­li­form chick­en wire, glo­ry to the wire and the slab, arrow of Notre-Dame of bric-a-brac.…”

To these objec­tions, Eif­fel cooly replied it made no sense to judge a build­ing sole­ly from its plans. He also repeat­ed his promise: the tow­er, he said, would sym­bol­ize “not only the art of the mod­ern engi­neer, but also the cen­tu­ry of indus­try and sci­ence in which we are liv­ing.” His “unapolo­get­i­cal­ly indus­tri­al lan­guage,” writes Archi­tiz­er, “did not please all.” But Eif­fel did not boast in vain. When com­plet­ed, the tow­er stood almost twice as high as the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment, then the tallest build­ing in the world at 555 feet.

Not only extreme­ly tall for its time, the Eif­fel Tow­er was also very intri­cate. It would be made of 18,000 wrought iron pieces held togeth­er with 2.5 mil­lion riv­ets, with four curved iron piers con­nect­ed by a lat­tice of gird­ers. After care­ful cal­cu­la­tions, the tow­er’s curves were designed to offer the max­i­mum amount of effi­cient wind resis­tance. 

In the video just above, you can see the tower’s incred­i­ble con­struc­tion from August 1887 to March 1889, mod­eled in an ani­mat­ed time­lapse ani­ma­tion. Its design has far out­last­ed its orig­i­nal­ly short lifes­pan. Slat­ed to be torn down after 20 years, the tow­er stands as tall as ever, though it’s been dwarfed sev­er­al times over by struc­tures that would appall the sig­na­to­ries against Gus­tave Eif­fel in 1887.

Indeed, it is impos­si­ble now to imag­ine Paris with­out Eiffel’s cre­ation. Mau­pas­sant, how­ev­er, spent his life try­ing to do just that. He report­ed­ly had his lunch in the tower’s restau­rant every day, since it was the only place in Paris one could not see it.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

Build­ing The Eif­fel Tow­er: Three Google Exhi­bi­tions Revis­it the Birth of the Great Parisian Mon­u­ment

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Story of Elizebeth Friedman, the Pioneering Cryptologist Who Thwarted the Nazis & Got Burned by J. Edgar Hoover

in Gender, History, Language | May 21st, 2021

Elize­beth S. Fried­man: Sub­ur­ban Mom or Nin­ja Nazi Hunter?

Both, though in her life­time, the press was far more inclined to fix­ate on her lady­like aspect and home­mak­ing duties than her career as a self-taught cryp­to­an­a­lyst, with head­lines such as “Pret­ty Woman Who Pro­tects Unit­ed States” and “Solved By Woman.”

The nov­el­ty of her gen­der led to a brief stint as America’s most rec­og­niz­able code­break­er, more famous even than her fel­low cryp­tol­o­gist, hus­band William Fried­man, who was instru­men­tal in the found­ing of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency dur­ing the Cold War.

Renowned though she was, the high­ly clas­si­fied nature of her work exposed her to a secu­ri­ty threat in the per­son of FBI direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover cred­it­ed the FBI, and by exten­sion, him­self, for deci­pher­ing some 50 Nazi radio cir­cuits’ codes, at least two of them pro­tect­ed with Enig­ma machines.

He also rushed to raid South Amer­i­can sources in his zeal to make an impres­sion and advance his career, scup­per­ing Fried­man’s mis­sion by caus­ing Berlin to put a stop to all trans­mis­sions to that area.

Too bad no one asked him to demon­strate the meth­ods he’d used to crack these impos­si­ble nuts.

The Ger­man agents used the same codes and radio tech­niques as the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Exporters Cor­po­ra­tion, a mob-backed rum-run­ning oper­a­tion whose codes and ciphers Elize­beth had trans­lat­ed as chief cryp­tol­o­gist for the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion.

As an expert wit­ness in the crim­i­nal tri­al of inter­na­tion­al rum­run­ner Bert Mor­ri­son and his asso­ciates, she mod­est­ly assert­ed that it was “real­ly quite sim­ple to decode their mes­sages if you know what to look for,” but the sam­ple decryp­tion she pro­vid­ed the jury made it plain that her work required tremen­dous skill. The Mob Museum’s Jeff Bur­bank sets the scene:

She read a sam­ple mes­sage, refer­ring to a brand of whiskey: “Out of Old Colonel in Pints.” She showed how the three “o” and “l” let­ters in “Colonel” had iden­ti­cal cipher code let­ters. From the cipher’s let­ters for “Colonel” she could fig­ure out the let­ter the rack­e­teers chose for “e,” the most fre­quent­ly occur­ring let­ter in Eng­lish, based on oth­er brand names of liquor they men­tioned in oth­er mes­sages. The “o” and “l” let­ters in “alco­hol,” she said, had the same cipher let­ters as “Colonel.” 

Cinchy, right?

Elizebeth’s biog­ra­ph­er, Jason Fagone, notes that in dis­cov­er­ing the iden­ti­ty, code­name and ciphers used by Ger­man spy net­work Oper­a­tion Bolí­var’s leader, Johannes Siegfried Beck­er, she suc­ceed­ed where “every oth­er law enforce­ment agency and intel­li­gence agency failed. She did what the FBI could not do.”

Sex­ism and Hoover were not the only ene­mies.

William Friedman’s crit­i­cism of the NSA for clas­si­fy­ing doc­u­ments he thought should be a mat­ter of pub­lic record led to a rift result­ing in the con­fis­ca­tion of dozens of papers from the cou­ple’s home that doc­u­ment­ed their work.

This, togeth­er with the 50-year “TOP SECRET ULTRA” clas­si­fi­ca­tion of her WWII records, ensured that Elize­beth’s life would end beneath “a vast dome of silence.”

Recog­ni­tion is mount­ing, how­ev­er.

Near­ly 20 years after her 1980 death, she was induct­ed into the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency’s Cryp­to­log­ic Hall of Hon­or as “a pio­neer in code break­ing.”

A Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency build­ing now bears both Fried­mans’ names.

The U.S. Coast Guard will soon be adding a Leg­end Class Cut­ter named the USCGC Fried­man to their fleet.

In addi­tion to Fagone’s biog­ra­phy, a pic­ture book, Code Break­er, Spy Hunter: How Elize­beth Fried­man Changed the Course of Two World Wars, was pub­lished ear­li­er this year.

As far as we know, there are no pic­ture books ded­i­cat­ed to the pio­neer­ing work of J. Edgar Hoover….

Elize­beth Fried­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Watch The Code­break­er, PBS’s Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence biog­ra­phy of Elize­beth Fried­man here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

How British Code­break­ers Built the First Elec­tron­ic Com­put­er

Three Ama­teur Cryp­tog­ra­phers Final­ly Decrypt­ed the Zodi­ac Killer’s Let­ters: A Look Inside How They Solved a Half Cen­tu­ry-Old Mys­tery

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her June 7 for a Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

167 Pieces of Life & Work Advice from Kevin Kelly, Founding Editor of Wired Magazine & The Whole Earth Review

in Creativity, Life | May 21st, 2021

Image by Christo­pher Michel, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I am a big admir­er of Kevin Kel­ly for the same rea­son I am of Bri­an Eno—he is con­stant­ly think­ing. That thirst for knowl­edge and end­less curios­i­ty has always been the back­bone to their par­tic­u­lar art forms. For Eno it’s music, but for Kel­ly it’s in his edi­tor­ship of the Whole Earth Review and then Wired mag­a­zine, pro­vid­ing a space for big ideas to reach the widest audi­ence. (He’s also the rea­son one of my buck­et lists is the Nakasendo, after see­ing his pho­to essay on it.)

On his 68th birth­day in 2020, Kel­ly post­ed on his blog a list of 68 “Unso­licit­ed Bits of Advice.” One bit of advice that frames his thought process and his work is this one:

“I’m pos­i­tive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embar­rass­ing­ly wrong, and I try real­ly hard to iden­ti­fy what it is that I am wrong about today.”

How­ev­er, the list is more about wis­dom from a life well-spent. Many fall into the art of being a curi­ous human among oth­er humans:

  • Every­one is shy. Oth­er peo­ple are wait­ing for you to intro­duce your­self to them, they are wait­ing for you to send them an email, they are wait­ing for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
  • The more you are inter­est­ed in oth­ers, the more inter­est­ing they find you. To be inter­est­ing, be inter­est­ed.
  • Being able to lis­ten well is a super­pow­er. While lis­ten­ing to some­one you love keep ask­ing them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

And this is prob­a­bly the hard­est piece of advice these days:

  • Learn how to learn from those you dis­agree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

Oth­er bits of advice have to do with cre­ativ­i­ty and being an artist:

  • Always demand a dead­line. A dead­line weeds out the extra­ne­ous and the ordi­nary. It pre­vents you from try­ing to make it per­fect, so you have to make it dif­fer­ent. Dif­fer­ent is bet­ter.
  • Don’t be the smartest per­son in the room. Hang­out with, and learn from, peo­ple smarter than your­self. Even bet­ter, find smart peo­ple who will dis­agree with you.
  • To make some­thing good, just do it. To make some­thing great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to mak­ing fine things is in remak­ing them.
  • Art is in what you leave out.

And some of the more inter­est­ing ones are his dis­agree­ments with per­ceived wis­dom:

  • Fol­low­ing your bliss is a recipe for paral­y­sis if you don’t know what you are pas­sion­ate about. A bet­ter mot­to for most youth is “mas­ter some­thing, any­thing”. Through mas­tery of one thing, you can drift towards exten­sions of that mas­tery that bring you more joy, and even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­er where your bliss is.

One year lat­er, Kel­ly has returned with 99 more bits of advice. I guess he couldn’t wait til his 99th birth­day for it. Some favorites include:

  • If some­thing fails where you thought it would fail, that is not a fail­ure.
  • Being wise means hav­ing more ques­tions than answers.
  • I have nev­er met a per­son I admired who did not read more books than I did.
  • Every per­son you meet knows an amaz­ing lot about some­thing you know vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing about. Your job is to dis­cov­er what it is, and it won’t be obvi­ous.

and final­ly:

  • Don’t let your email inbox become your to-do list.

There is a small shift in Kelly’s 2021 list from his 2020 list, like a lit­tle more frus­tra­tion with the world, a need for more order in the chaos. I won­der what his advice will be in a few more years?

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kel­ly Gives 36 Lec­tures on Our Future World: Edu­ca­tion, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More

The Best Mag­a­zine Arti­cles Ever, Curat­ed by Kevin Kel­ly

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Young Janis Joplin Plays a Passionate Set at One of Her First Gigs in San Francisco (1963)

in Music | May 20th, 2021

From her ear­ly, unhap­py teen years in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin seemed to know she want­ed to be a blues singer. She once said she decid­ed to become a singer when a friend “loaned her his Bessie Smith and Lead­bel­ly records,” writes biog­ra­ph­er Ellis Amburn. “Ten years lat­er, Janis was hailed as the pre­mier blues singer of her time. She paid trib­ute to Bessie by buy­ing her a head­stone for her unmarked grave.” She was devot­ed to the blues, from her ear­li­est encoun­ters with the music in her youth to her last record­ed song, the lone­ly, a capel­la blues, “Mer­cedes Benz.”

But when Joplin first appeared on the San Fran­cis­co scene in 1963, she did so as a Dylan-influ­enced folkie fresh from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin. The year before, she had been described by a pro­file in The Dai­ly Tex­an as an artist who “goes bare­foot­ed when she feels like it, wears Levis to class because they’re more com­fort­able, and car­ries her auto­harp with her every­where she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy.” The arti­cle was titled “She Dares to Be Dif­fer­ent.”

Joplin’s folk per­sona was hard­ly unique in either San Fran­cis­co or Austin in the ear­ly 60s. “In fact, her love of Dylan and folk sim­ply marked her out as a rid­er of the zeit­geist,” writes music jour­nal­ist Chris Salewicz. “When, for exam­ple, a for­mer Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas alum­nus called Chet Helms passed through [Austin] he was aston­ished at the wealth of folk music.” Helms, who had already moved west, promised Joplin gigs in San Fran­cis­co. The pair hitch­hiked to the city “mid­way through Jan­u­ary 1963, with con­sid­er­able trep­i­da­tion… a trek in which they spent 50 hours on the road.”

Once in North Beach, a neigh­bor­hood defined by City Lights book­store and the Beats, Helms found Joplin gigs at Cof­fee and Con­fu­sion, then the Cof­fee Gallery, where she “was just one of many future rock­ers to play the Cof­fee Gallery as a folkie,” writes Alice Echols. In South Bay cof­fee­hous­es, she met Jer­ry Gar­cia and future Jef­fer­son Air­plane gui­tarist Jor­ma Kauko­nen. Every­one made the cof­fee­house rounds, acoustic gui­tar in hand. It was the way to make a name in the scene, which Janis did quick­ly, appear­ing the same year she arrived in San Fran­cis­co on the side stage at the Mon­terey Folk Fes­ti­val.

But Janis brought some­thing dif­fer­ent than oth­er stu­dents of Dylan — big­ger and bold­er and loud­er and deeply root­ed in a South­ern blues tra­di­tion Joplin spread to aston­ished beat­niks like a “Blues His­to­ri­an,” one com­menter notes, “turn­ing a small audi­ence on to some obscure and for­got­ten per­form­ers, whose music would serve as the foun­da­tion for an entire genre yet to come.” You can hear her do just that in the gig above at the Cof­fee Gallery in 1963: “no drums, no crowds. Just Janis and a small group of peo­ple gath­ered to hear some sam­ples of rur­al blues, done by an enthu­si­ast from Texas.”

See the full setlist below. Oth­er per­form­ers on the record­ing, accord­ing to the YouTube uploader, are Lar­ry Han­ks on acoustic gui­tar and vocals, and Bil­ly Roberts (or pos­si­bly Roger Perkins) on acoustic gui­tar, as well as ban­jo, vocals, and har­mon­i­ca.

Leav­ing’ This Morn­ing (K.C. Blues)
Dad­dy, Dad­dy, Dad­dy
Care­less Love
Bour­geois Blues
Black Moun­tain Blues
Gospel Ship
Stealin’

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Janis Joplin’s Last TV Per­for­mance & Inter­view: The Dick Cavett Show (1970)

Hear a Rare First Record­ing of Janis Joplin’s Hit “Me and Bob­by McGee,” Writ­ten by Kris Kristof­fer­son

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

in History, Technology | May 20th, 2021

We get the cul­ture our tech­nol­o­gy per­mits, and in the 21st cen­tu­ry no tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment has changed cul­ture like that of the smart­phone. As with every piece of per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy that we strug­gle to remem­ber how we lived with­out, it evolved into being from a series of sim­pler pre­de­ces­sors that, no mat­ter how clunky they seem now, were received as tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels in their day. Take it from Mar­tin Coop­er, the Motoro­la Engi­neer who invent­ed the first hand­held cel­lu­lar mobile phone. “We did­n’t know it was going to be his­toric in any way at all,” he says of the first pub­licly demon­strat­ed cell­phone call in 1973 in the Bloomberg video above. “We were only wor­ried about one thing: is the phone going to work when we turn it on?”

The device Coop­er had in hand was the pro­to­type that would even­tu­al­ly become the Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X, the first com­mer­cial portable cel­lu­lar phone. (This as dis­tinct from the exist­ing car-phone sys­tems that Coop­er cred­its with inspir­ing him to devel­op an entire­ly hand­held ver­sion.) Brought to mar­ket in 1983, it weighed about two pounds, took ten hours to charge a bat­tery that last­ed only 30 min­utes, could store no more than 30 phone num­bers, and cost near­ly $10,000 in today’s dol­lars.

Yet “con­sumers were so impressed by the con­cept of being always acces­si­ble with a portable phone that wait­ing lists for the DynaT­AC 8000X were in the thou­sands,” says Motoro­la design mas­ter Rudy Krolopp as quot­ed by the Project Man­age­ment Insti­tute. “In 1983, the notion of sim­ply mak­ing wire­less phone calls was rev­o­lu­tion­ary.”

38 years after “the brick,” as the 8000X was known, we’ve grown so used to that notion that many of us hard­ly ever make wire­less phone calls any­more, pre­fer­ring to com­mu­ni­cate on our phones through text mes­sages or an ever-expand­ing uni­verse of inter­net-based apps — to say noth­ing of the oth­er aspects of our lives increas­ing­ly han­dled through palm-sized touch­screens. “The mod­ern smart­phone is a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel,” says Coop­er. “It real­ly is incred­i­ble, all the stuff that is squeezed into that cell­phone.” Yet despite the aston­ish­ing evo­lu­tion of his inven­tion it rep­re­sents, he’s not sat­is­fied. “We think that we can make a smart­phone that does all things for all peo­ple, and yet we know that it does­n’t do any of those things per­fect­ly. We’ve still got a ways to go.” If you’re read­ing this on a smart­phone, know that you hold in your hand the “brick” of 2059.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

Sci­en­tist Cre­ates a Work­ing Rotary Cell­phone

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast