Radio vs. Podcasting: A Discussion with Jason Bentley (KCRW, The Backstory) on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #81

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Radio | February 11th, 2021

Jason was music direc­tor at KRCW, the LA NPR sta­tion, is also a DJ with a lot of expe­ri­enced inter­view­ing musi­cians, and now hosts a new pod­cast, The Back­sto­ry. He joins Mark and Eri­ca to dis­cuss the cre­ative and busi­ness pos­si­bil­i­ties of pod­cast­ing in com­par­i­son to radio, what their futures may hold, and his own jour­ney between the two media.

Fol­low Jason @thejasonbentley. Lis­ten to his Back­sto­ry inter­view with Kris­ten Bell and his cur­rent radio show, Metrop­o­lis.

Here’s some com­par­i­son data and oth­er basic infor­ma­tion on radio and pod­casts:

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

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Monkey Sees A Magic Trick

in Random | February 10th, 2021

Hap­py Wednes­day.…

h/t Allie

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How the Food We Eat Affects Our Brain: Learn About the “MIND Diet”

in Health, Science | February 10th, 2021

We humans did a num­ber on our­selves, as they say, when we invent­ed agri­cul­ture, glob­al trade routes, refrig­er­a­tion, pas­teur­iza­tion, and so forth. Yes, we made it so that mil­lions of peo­ple around the world could have abun­dant food. We’ve also cre­at­ed food that’s full of emp­ty calo­ries and lack­ing in essen­tial nutri­ents. For­tu­nate­ly, in places where healthy alter­na­tives are plen­ti­ful, atti­tudes toward food have changed, and nutri­tion has become a para­mount con­cern.

“As a soci­ety, we are com­fort­able with the idea that we feed our bod­ies,” says neu­ro­sci­en­tist Lisa Mosconi. We research foods that cause inflam­ma­tion and increase can­cer risk, etc. But we are “much less aware,” says Mosconi—author of Brain Food: The Sur­pris­ing Sci­ence of Eat­ing for Cog­ni­tive Pow­er—“that we’re feed­ing our brains too. Parts of the foods we eat will end up being the very fab­ric of our brains…. Put sim­ply: Every­thing in the brain that isn’t made by the brain itself is ‘import­ed’ from the food we eat.”

We learn much more about the con­stituents of brain mat­ter in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above by Mia Naca­mul­li. Amino acids, fats, pro­teins, traces of micronu­tri­ents, and glucose—“the brain is, of course, more than the sum of its nutri­tion­al parts, but each com­po­nent does have a dis­tinct impact on func­tion­ing, devel­op­ment, mood, and ener­gy.” Post-meal blahs or insom­nia can be close­ly cor­re­lat­ed with diet.

What should we be eat­ing for brain health? Luck­i­ly, cur­rent research falls well in line with what nutri­tion­ists and doc­tors have been sug­gest­ing we eat for over­all health. Anne Linge, reg­is­tered dietit­ian and cer­ti­fied dia­betes care and edu­ca­tion spe­cial­ist at the Nutri­tion Clin­ic at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton Med­ical Cen­ter-Roo­sevelt, rec­om­mends what researchers have dubbed the MIND diet, a com­bi­na­tion of the Mediter­ranean diet and the DASH diet.

“The Mediter­ranean diet focus­es on lots of veg­eta­bles, fruits, nuts and heart-healthy oils,” Linge says. “When we talk about the DASH diet, the pur­pose is to stop high blood pres­sure, so we’re look­ing at more serv­ings of fruits and veg­eta­bles, more fiber and less sat­u­rat­ed fat.” The com­bi­na­tion of the two, reports Angela Cab­o­ta­je at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton Med­i­cine blog Right as Rain, results in a diet high in folate, carotenoids, vit­a­min E, flavonoids and antiox­i­dants. “All of these things seem to have poten­tial ben­e­fits to the cog­ni­tive func­tion,” says Linge, who breaks MIND foods down into the 10 cat­e­gories below:

Leafy greens (6x per week)
Veg­eta­bles (1x per day)
Nuts (5x per week)
Berries (2x per week)
Beans (3x per week)
Whole grains (3x per day)
Fish (1x per week)
Poul­try (2x per week)
Olive oil (reg­u­lar use)
Red wine (1x per day)

As you’ll note, red meat, dairy, sweets, and fried foods aren’t includ­ed: researchers rec­om­mend we con­sume these much less often. Harvard’s Health­beat blog fur­ther breaks down some of these cat­e­gories and includes tea and cof­fee, a wel­come addi­tion for peo­ple who pre­fer caf­feinat­ed bev­er­ages to alco­hol.

“You might think of the MIND diet as a list of best prac­tices,” says Linge. “You don’t have to fol­low every guide­line, but wow, if how you eat can pre­vent or delay cog­ni­tive decline, what a fab­u­lous thing.” It is, indeed. For a schol­ar­ly overview of the effects of nutri­tion on the brain, read the 2015 study on the MIND diet here and anoth­er, 2010 study on the crit­i­cal impor­tance of “brain foods” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Live to Be 100 and Beyond: 9 Diet & Lifestyle Tips

Nutri­tion­al Psy­chi­a­try: Why Diet May Play an Essen­tial Role in Treat­ing Men­tal Health Con­di­tions, Includ­ing Depres­sion, Anx­i­ety & Beyond

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

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Hear an Ancient Chinese Historian Describe The Roman Empire (and Other Voices of the Past)

in History | February 10th, 2021

Those who see the world from only one nar­row point of view get called a num­ber of things–parochial, provin­cial, and worse–and are encour­aged to seek out oth­er per­spec­tives and broad­en their view. Not every­one can trav­el the world, but the world comes to us through immi­gra­tion and the inter­net, restau­rants and recipes. Most of us, if we are inclined, can learn about and appre­ci­ate the cul­tures, cuisines, and his­to­ries of oth­ers.

But can we see our­selves the way that oth­ers see us? This is a hard­er ask, I think, espe­cial­ly for Amer­i­cans, who are used to the world com­ing to us and to defin­ing the world on our terms, whether through soft pow­er or mil­i­tary force.

When we read about his­to­ry, we might diver­si­fy our sources, tak­ing in per­spec­tives from writ­ers with dif­fer­ent ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments and beliefs. But how often do we hear the obser­va­tions, say, of Japan­ese his­to­ri­ans, record­ing their impres­sions of the U.S. as they saw it in the 19th cen­tu­ry?

A great part of why we don’t read such his­to­ries is that we gen­er­al­ly don’t even know they exist. The YouTube project Voic­es of the Past aims to rem­e­dy this, intro­duc­ing view­ers to pri­ma­ry his­tor­i­cal sources from the past, and from all over the world, that show pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ri­ans and ordi­nary peo­ple record­ing events across bar­ri­ers of lan­guage, cul­ture, nation state, and social class. At the top, we have a read­ing from “Konyo Zuk­ishi,” writ­ten in 1845 by Japan­ese geo­g­ra­ph­er and his­to­ri­an Mit­sukuri Shō­go, who, in turn, based much of his knowl­edge of the out­side world on Dutch books, “as they were the only Euro­pean trad­ing part­ner through the Sakoku peri­od of iso­la­tion,” a cap­tion in the video informs us.

Mit­sukuri Shōgo’s his­to­ry accepts as fact that the ter­ri­to­ries of North Amer­i­ca “didn’t even have a name” before the arrival of Euro­pean set­tlers, com­plete­ly ignor­ing the pres­ence of hun­dreds of indige­nous nations. The descrip­tions of those set­tlers are charm­ing­ly reveal­ing, if not whol­ly accu­rate. “Sev­er­al tens of thou­sands of Eng­lish­men, who refused to sub­scribe to the tenets of the Angli­can church, were arrest­ed and sent to this dis­tant coun­try,” we learn. “These peo­ple lacked suf­fi­cient food and cloth­ing at that time, but they pri­vate­ly rejoiced because there were no rulers in this land.”

Fur­ther up, we have an ear­ly third cen­tu­ry com­men­tary writ­ten by Chi­nese his­to­ri­an Yu Huan. Hun­dreds of years before Euro­pean nav­i­ga­tors set out to find and appro­pri­ate the rich­es of the Indies, only to end up in the Amer­i­c­as, the Chi­nese wrote of a world his­to­ry that includ­ed the Roman Empire, reached by way of Egypt, which is called Haixi, “because it is west of the sea,” and which con­tains the great city of Wuchisan, or Alexan­dria. Yu Huan writes as though he’s giv­ing dri­ving direc­tions, and leaves every impres­sion of hav­ing made the jour­ney him­self or tran­scribed the words of those who had.

Above, a young sol­dier in Napoleon’s Grande Armée describes the real hor­ror of the death march­es through Rus­sia in 1812 in excerpts from Jakob Walter’s Diary of Napoleon­ic Foot Sol­dier. He calls one march “inde­scrib­able and incon­ceiv­able for peo­ple who have not seen any­thing of it,” then goes on to paint a gris­ly scene in the kind of grim detail we do not get in Napoleon’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of the inva­sion, below, tak­en from The Cor­si­can: A Diary of Napoleon’s Life in His Own Words. There are many more his­to­ries we rarely, if ever, encounter, which show a world that has been net­worked and con­nect­ed for thou­sands of years, as in excerpts below from an Ara­bic com­pi­la­tion of trav­el accounts, Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī’s “Accounts of Chi­na and India,” writ­ten in 852.

Hear many more fas­ci­nat­ing and usu­al­ly inac­ces­si­ble pri­ma­ry sources from ancient and mod­ern his­to­ry read aloud at Voic­es of the Past.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Get the His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures, Cour­tesy of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy 

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

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

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The “Academic Tarot”: 22 Major Arcana Cards Representing Life in the Academic Humanities Under COVID-19

in Current Affairs, Education, Life | February 10th, 2021

“Spec­u­la­tions about the cre­ators of Tarot cards include the Sufis, the Cathars, the Egyp­tians, Kab­bal­ists, and more,” writes “expert car­tomancer” Joshua Hehe. All of these sup­po­si­tions are wrong, it seems. “The actu­al his­tor­i­cal evi­dence points to north­ern Italy some­time in the ear­ly part of the 1400s,” when the so-called “major arcana” came into being. “Con­trary to what many have claimed, there is absolute­ly no proof of the Tarot hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed in any oth­er time or place.”

A bold claim, yet there are prece­dents much old­er than tarot: “A few decades before the Tarot was born, ordi­nary play­ing cards came to Europe by way of Arabs, arriv­ing in many dif­fer­ent cities between 1375 and 1378. These cards were an adap­ta­tion of the Islam­ic Mam­luk cards,” with suits of cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks, “the lat­ter of which were seen by Euro­peans as staves.”

Whether the play­ing cards invent­ed by the Mam­luks were used for div­ina­tion may be a mat­ter of con­tro­ver­sy. The his­to­ry and art of the Mam­luk sul­tanate itself is a sub­ject wor­thy of study for the tarot his­to­ri­an. Orig­i­nal­ly a slave army (“mam­luk” means “slave” in Ara­bic) under the Ayyu­bid sul­tans in Egypt and Syr­ia, the Mam­luks over­threw their rulers and cre­at­ed “the great­est Islam­ic empire of the lat­er Mid­dle Ages.”

What does this have to do with tarot read­ing? These are aca­d­e­m­ic con­cerns, per­haps, of lit­tle inter­est to the aver­age tarot enthu­si­ast. But then, the aver­age tarot enthu­si­ast is not the audi­ence for the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot,” a project of the Vision­ary Futures Col­lec­tive, or VFC, a group of 22 schol­ars “fight­ing for what high­er edu­ca­tion needs most,” Stephanie Malak writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “a bring­ing togeth­er of thinkers who ‘believe in the trans­for­ma­tion­al pow­er and vital impor­tance of the human­i­ties.’”

To that end, the Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot fea­tures exact­ly the kinds of char­ac­ters who love to chase down abstruse his­tor­i­cal questions—characters like the low­ly, con­fused Grad Stu­dent, stand­ing in here for The Fool. It also fea­tures those who can make aca­d­e­m­ic life, with its end­less rounds of meet­ings and com­mit­tees, so dif­fi­cult: fig­ures like The Pres­i­dent (see here), doing duty here as the Magi­cian, and pic­tured shred­ding “cam­pus-wide COVID results.”

The VFC, found­ed in the time of COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and “in the midst of the long-over­due nation­al reck­on­ing led by the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment,” aims to “trace the con­tours of things that define our shared human con­di­tion,” says Col­lec­tive mem­ber Dr. Bri­an DeGrazia. In the case of the Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot, the con­di­tions rep­re­sent­ed are shared by a spe­cif­ic sub­set of humans, many of whom respond­ed to “feel­ings sur­veys” put out by the VFC in a biweek­ly newslet­ter.

The sur­veys have been used to make art that reflects the expe­ri­ences of the grad stu­dents, pro­fes­sors, and pro­fes­sion­al staff work­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties at this time:

VFC artist-in-res­i­dence Claire Chenette, a Gram­my-nom­i­nat­ed Knoxville Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra musi­cian fur­loughed due to COVID-19, brought the tarot cards to life. What began as a three-card project to com­ple­ment the VFC newslet­ter grew in spir­it and in num­ber. 

“In tarot, the cards read us,” the VFC writes, “telling a sto­ry about our­selves that can pro­vide clar­i­ty, guid­ance and hope.” What sto­ry do the 22 Major Arcana cards in the Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot tell? That depends on who’s ask­ing, as always, but one gets the sense that unless the quer­ent is famil­iar with life in a high­er-ed human­i­ties depart­ment, these cards may not reveal much. For those who have seen them­selves in the cards, how­ev­er, “the images made them laugh out loud,” says Chenette, or “they hit hard. Or… they even made them cry, but… it need­ed to hap­pen.”

Strug­gling through yet anoth­er pan­dem­ic semes­ter of attempt­ing to teach, research, write, and gen­er­al­ly stay afloat? The Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot cards are cur­rent­ly sold out, but you can pre-order now for the sec­ond run.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Divine Decks: A Visu­al His­to­ry of Tarot: The First Com­pre­hen­sive Sur­vey of Tarot Gets Pub­lished by Taschen

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

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

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The Animations That Changed Cinema: The Groundbreaking Legacies of Prince Achmed, Akira, The Iron Giant & More

in Animation, Film | February 10th, 2021

Ani­ma­tion is child­ish. So believe those who nev­er watch ani­mat­ed films — but also, on anoth­er, deep­er lev­el, those who hold up ani­mat­ed films as the most com­plete form of cin­e­ma. What­ev­er our gen­er­a­tion, most of us alive today grew up watch­ing car­toons meant in every sense for chil­dren, and often artis­ti­cal­ly flim­sy ones at that. But even on such a low-nutri­tion view­ing reg­i­men, we could now and again glimpse the vast pos­si­bil­i­ties of the form. Or per­haps it was just our imag­i­na­tion — but then, as Stephen King once point­ed out, noth­ing is “just” our imag­i­na­tion in child­hood, a time when we occu­py “a secret world that exists by its own rules and lives in its own cul­ture.”

In order to nav­i­gate this real­i­ty apart, where noth­ing is entire­ly for real and noth­ing entire­ly pre­tend, chil­dren “think around cor­ners instead of in straight lines.” The best ani­ma­tors retain this abil­i­ty into adult­hood, har­ness­ing it to cre­ate a pur­er kind of cin­e­ma that reflects and engages the imag­i­na­tion in a way even the freest live-action films nev­er can. The work of such ani­ma­tors con­sti­tutes the sub­ject mat­ter of “The Ani­ma­tion that Changed Cin­e­ma,” a new essay from The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy. In just over half an hour, the series’ cre­ators Lewis Bond and Luiza Liz Bond explore ani­ma­tion pro­duced all over the world over near­ly the past cen­tu­ry in search of the films that have widened the bound­aries of the medi­um.

Though most video essays from The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy and its pre­de­ces­sor Chan­nel Criswell have focused on con­ven­tion­al film, Bond has already demon­strat­ed his pro­found under­stand­ing of ani­ma­tion in video essays on Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder Hayao Miyaza­ki and the acclaimed cult ani­me series Cow­boy Bebop. “The Ani­ma­tion that Changed Cin­e­ma” spends a great deal of time on oth­er works from Japan, the one coun­try that has done more than any oth­er to ele­vate the ani­mat­ed film, includ­ing that of Miyaza­k­i’s Ghi­b­li part­ner Isao Taka­ha­ta, Per­fect Blue auteur Satoshi Kon, and Kat­suhi­ro Oto­mo, whose Aki­ra per­ma­nent­ly changed much of the world’s under­stand­ing of “car­toons” as cin­e­mat­ic art. But as with The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy’s pre­vi­ous “The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy that Changed Cin­e­ma,” the cul­tur­al-geo­graph­i­cal man­date ranges wide­ly.

Among these vision­ary ani­ma­tors are sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture: the Ger­man Lotte Reiniger, cre­ator of the all-sil­hou­ette The Adven­tures of Prince Achmed; Euro­peans from far­ther east (and pos­sessed of wilder sen­si­bil­i­ties) like Jan Švankma­jer; Amer­i­cans like Don Hertzfeldt, the Broth­ers Quay, and Wes Ander­son (whose fil­mog­ra­phy includes the stop-motion The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs). That last group includes even Hol­ly­wood direc­tor Brad Bird, now best known for Pixar movies like The Incred­i­bles and Rata­touille, but here cel­e­brat­ed for The Iron Giant, a pic­ture that sank upon its release, but in the two decades since has come to be appre­ci­at­ed as just the kind of work of art that, as Bond puts it, “makes us for­get that we’re watch­ing mov­ing draw­ings” — what­ev­er age we hap­pen to be.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Ani­mat­ed Films: From Clas­sic to Mod­ern

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

What Made Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Ani­ma­tor Isao Taka­ha­ta (RIP) a Mas­ter: Two Video Essays

The Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Cow­boy Bebop, the Cult Japan­ese Ani­me Series, Explored in a Thought­ful Video Essay

How Mas­ter Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Satoshi Kon Pushed the Bound­aries of Mak­ing Ani­me: A Video Essay

The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma: Explor­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Stan­ley Kubrick, Peter Green­away & Oth­er Auteurs

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.

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How Jazz Became the “Mother of Hip Hop”

in Music | February 9th, 2021

Jazz and hip hop have been in a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion in recent years, break­ing new ground for both forms, as the work of artists like Kendrick Lamar and his col­lab­o­ra­tors amply shows. Lamar cre­at­ed his major­ly-acclaimed albums To Pimp a But­ter­fly and Damn with the indis­pens­able play­ing and arrang­ing of jazz-fusion sax­o­phon­ist Kamasi Wash­ing­ton and his fre­quent side­man, bassist Stephen “Thun­der­cat” Bruner, who have con­tributed to the work of Fly­ing Lotus. That’s the artist name of Stephen Elli­son, nephew of Alice and John Coltrane, who has also been instru­men­tal, no pun intend­ed, in reshap­ing the sound of con­tem­po­rary hip hop.

“The influ­ence cuts both ways—from jazz to hip hop and back again,” writes John Lewis at The Guardian. Or as Wash­ing­ton puts it, “We’ve now got a whole gen­er­a­tion of jazz musi­cians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We’ve grown up along­side rap­pers and DJs, we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as flu­ent in J Dil­la and Dr Dre as we are in Min­gus and Coltrane.”

The fusion of avant-garde hip hop with live jazz impro­vi­sa­tion, instru­men­ta­tion, and arrang­ing may seem like a new phe­nom­e­non, though one could date it at least as far back as the Roots’ ear­ly 90s debut.

“Hip hop’s love affair with jazz goes back more than 30 years,” Lewis writes. The music was every­where in the 90s, in the fore­ground on the records of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Diga­ble Plan­ets and in more cut-and-paste ways in albums like Nas’ instant clas­sic Ill­mat­ic, pro­duced by Pete Rock, who craft­ed tracks like “N.Y. State of Mind” from lay­ered sam­ples of Ahmad Jamal, Don­ald Byrd, and lit­tle-known jazz-funk out­fits like Jim­my Gor­don & His Jaz­zn­pops Band. As pianist Robert Glasper shows above in the brief NPR Jazz Night in Amer­i­ca video at the top, “Jazz is the moth­er of hip-hop.”

Both jazz and hip hop were born out of oppres­sion, and both are forms of protest music, “going against the grain,” Glasper argues. But there’s more to it. Why do hip hop pro­duc­ers grav­i­tate toward jazz, chop­ping and lift­ing clas­sics and obscure rar­i­ties? For a wealth of melod­ic content—”for a mood, for a son­ic tim­bre, for a unique rhyth­mic com­po­nent,” writes inter­view­er Alex Ariff on YouTube; for a shared his­to­ry of strug­gle and cel­e­bra­tion and a desire to change the sound of music with each release. Glasper’s brief, three-minute demon­stra­tion is fas­ci­nat­ing and it could, as one YouTube com­menter points out, eas­i­ly extend to three hours.

Until he makes that video, you can find jazz sam­ples in hip hop records to your heart’s eter­nal con­tent at Whosampled.com and con­sid­er how the influ­ence of hip hop on jazz musi­cians has cre­at­ed new forms of fusion akin to Miles Davis’ exper­i­ments in the 70s. “I nev­er had a prob­lem mov­ing between jazz and hip hop,” says Wash­ing­ton. “Peo­ple like to com­part­men­tal­ize music, espe­cial­ly African-Amer­i­can music, but it’s real­ly one thing. One very wide thing…. When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the Pimp a But­ter­fly ses­sions, Kendrick got it imme­di­ate­ly. ‘I want it to sound like it’s on fire,’ he’d say. That’s the kind of com­mon ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.”

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

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

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Alan Watts Reads “One of the Greatest Things Carl Jung Ever Wrote”

in Photography, Religion | February 9th, 2021

Carl Jung found­ed the field of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy more than a cen­tu­ry ago, and many ref­er­ence his insights into the human mind and con­di­tion still today. Alan Watts cer­tain­ly did his bit to keep the Jun­gian flame alive, what­ev­er the out­ward dif­fer­ences between a Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and an Eng­lish inter­preter of Tao­ism, Hin­duism, and Bud­dhism, espe­cial­ly of the Zen vari­ety. Both men believed in cast­ing a wide spir­i­tu­al net, all the bet­ter to expose the com­mon core ele­ments of seem­ing­ly dis­parate ancient tra­di­tions. And in so doing they could hard­ly afford to ignore the reli­gious under­pin­nings of the Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion, broad­ly speak­ing, from which they emerged. In fact, Watts became an ordained Epis­co­pal priest at the age of 30 — though, owing to the com­plex­i­ties of his beliefs as well as his per­son­al life, he resigned the min­istry by age 35.

But Watts’ invest­ment in cer­tain tenets of Chris­tian­i­ty endured, and he named as one of Jung’s great­est writ­ings a lec­ture deliv­ered to a Swiss cler­gy group. “Peo­ple for­get that even doc­tors have moral scru­ples and that cer­tain patient’s con­fes­sions are hard even for a doc­tor to swal­low,” begins the speech as Watts reads it aloud in the video above. “Yet the patient does not feel him­self accept­ed unless the very worst in him is accept­ed too. No one can bring this about by mere words. It comes only through reflec­tion and through the doctor’s atti­tude towards him­self and his own dark side.” To help anoth­er per­son, in oth­er words, one must first accept that per­son as he is; but to accept anoth­er per­son as he is first requires tak­ing one­self straight, less-than-admirable qual­i­ties and all.

Accord­ing to Watts, Jung him­self demon­strat­ed this rare self-aware­ness. “He knew and rec­og­nized what I some­times call the ele­ment of irre­ducible ras­cal­i­ty in him­self,” says Watts in a talk of his own pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “He knew it so strong­ly and so clear­ly, and in a way so lov­ing­ly, that he would not con­demn the same thing in oth­ers, and would there­fore not be led into those thoughts, feel­ings, and acts of vio­lence towards oth­ers which are always char­ac­ter­is­tic of the peo­ple who project the dev­il in them­selves upon the out­side, upon some­body else, upon the scape­goat.” As Jung puts it to his cler­i­cal audi­ence, “In the sphere of social or nation­al rela­tions, the state of suf­fer­ing may be civ­il war, and this state is to be cured by the Chris­t­ian virtue of for­give­ness and love of one’s ene­mies.”

What Chris­tian­i­ty holds as true of the out­er world goes just as well, Jung argues, for the inner one. “This is why mod­ern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sore­ly beset by his own bad con­science and wants, rather, to know how he is to rec­on­cile him­self with his own nature, how he is to love the ene­my in his own heart and call the wolf his broth­er.” He “does not want to know in what way he can imi­tate Christ, but in what way he can live his own indi­vid­ual life, how­ev­er mea­gre and unin­ter­est­ing it may be.” Only by being allowed to fol­low this “ego­ism” to its con­clu­sion of “com­plete iso­la­tion” can he “get to know him­self and learn what an invalu­able trea­sure is the love of his fel­low beings”; it is only “in the state of com­plete aban­don­ment and lone­li­ness that we expe­ri­ence the help­ful pow­ers of our own natures.” With­out know­ing our own natures, we can hard­ly expect even the most time-test­ed belief sys­tems to put an end to the civ­il wars inside us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’ (1959)

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

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.

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