An Architect Breaks Down the Design Details of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

in Architecture, Film | May 17th, 2022

Wes Ander­son­’s The Grand Budapest Hotel fea­tures many notable play­ers: Willem Dafoe, Til­da Swin­ton, F. Mur­ray Abra­ham, and pre­sid­ing above all, Ralph Fiennes as cel­e­brat­ed concierge Mon­sieur Gus­tave H. But it is Gus­tave’s domain, the tit­u­lar alpine health resort, that fig­ures most promi­nent­ly in the film, tran­scend­ing place, time, and polit­i­cal regime. Such an estab­lish­ment could only exist with­in Ander­son­’s cin­e­mat­ic imag­i­na­tion, which dic­tates the man­ner in which he intro­duces it to his view­ers. “It’s obvi­ous­ly a mod­el,” says archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er in the video above. “It’s fake” — an adjec­tive that, when applied to a Wes Ander­son pro­duc­tion, can only be a com­pli­ment.

Wyet­zn­er sure­ly means it that way, giv­en how much inter­est he shows through the video in the details of the Grand Budapest Hotel as con­struct­ed and revealed, one set at a time, by Ander­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. Envi­sioned as a kind of “French chateau grow­ing out of the moun­tain,” the build­ing incor­po­rates a mansard roof, a “rus­ti­cat­ed base” with the look of an ancient aque­duct, and Art Nou­veau canopies of the kind still seen at the entrances of the Paris Métro.

Wyet­zn­er explains the over­all image as “one of those sana­to­ri­ums you would see in the moun­tains of Europe up until the nine­teen-thir­ties” but designed by the Seces­sion­ists, who intend­ed to “uni­fy archi­tec­ture, paint­ing, and the dec­o­ra­tive arts.”

The atri­um, the cir­cu­lar recep­tion desk, the elab­o­rate­ly mul­lioned win­dows, the palette of pinks and reds: these fea­tures under­score the tit­u­lar grandeur of the tit­u­lar hotel. (They also, like the sym­me­try of so much of its con­struc­tion, remind us whose movie we’re watch­ing.) But before long, every­thing changes: the hotel finds itself in the Sovi­et nine­teen-six­ties, topped with anten­nae, paint burnt orange and avo­ca­do green, out­fit­ted with plas­tic lam­i­nate and illu­mi­nat­ed ceil­ings. “Sovi­et archi­tec­ture has this rep­u­ta­tion for being very drab, and very sad, almost,” says Wyet­zn­er, and the “updat­ed” Grand Budapest Hotel reflects this. But the Sovi­ets were also “one of the orig­i­na­tors of mod­ernism,” a move­ment whose stern opti­mism comes through in the film’s set designs — as, faint­ly but per­sis­tent­ly, does the fin de siè­cle ele­gance of the ever-more-dis­tant past.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

What’s the Big Deal About Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel? Matt Zoller Seitz’s Video Essay Explains

Acci­den­tal Wes Ander­son: Every Place in the World with a Wes Ander­son Aes­thet­ic Gets Doc­u­ment­ed by Red­dit

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Why Do Wes Ander­son Movies Look Like That?

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Rolling Stones Play a Gig in Communist Warsaw and a Riot Ensues (1967)

in History, Music, Politics | May 17th, 2022

My Name is called Dis­tur­bance.… – “Street Fight­ing Man”

More than two decades before Ger­man band the Scor­pi­ons blew their alleged­ly CIA-penned “Wind of Change” over the end of the Cold War; before the “hard rock Wood­stock” in Moscow; before Bruce Spring­steen rocked East Berlin and rang the “Chimes of Free­dom,” anoth­er band took the stage behind the Iron Cur­tain: one not par­tic­u­lar­ly well-known at the time for mak­ing geopo­lit­i­cal state­ments.

In 1967, the Rolling Stones record­ed and released Between the But­tons and major hits “Ruby Tues­day” and “Let’s Spend the Night Togeth­er.” They tried to com­pete with the Bea­t­les with stabs at psy­che­delia on Their Satan­ic Majesties Request. They did­n’t record what is some­times con­sid­ered their most polit­i­cal song, “Street Fight­ing Man,” for anoth­er two years, and that song — with its options of street fight­ing or singing for a rock and roll band — has nev­er been mis­tak­en for a peace anthem.

It was­n’t peace the band court­ed in their orig­i­nal plan to play Moscow. “They start­ed toy­ing with the idea of per­form­ing in Moscow and becom­ing the most con­tro­ver­sial rock band to play on the oth­er side of the Iron Cur­tain,” writes Woj­ciech Olek­si­ak at Culture.pl. “Both the Sovi­et Union and the UK denied their requests. How is it, Olek­si­ak asks, “that in 1967 — the mid­dle of the Cold War — Mick, Kei­th, Bri­an, Bill, and Char­lie came to Poland and per­formed in War­saw, at a huge hall known for being tra­di­tion­al­ly used for the Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s ple­nary con­gress­es?” You’ll find the answer in the video at the top from Band­splain­ing.

Just above, see footage of the con­cert itself, culled from news­reel footage and TV broad­casts. The uploader has done us the kind­ness of putting time­stamps in the video for the three songs shown here:

00:00 — Paint It Black

00:43 — 19th Ner­vous Break­down

01:06 — (I Can’t Get No) Sat­is­fac­tion

The Stones were “by no means the first west­ern group to play in com­mu­nist Poland,” writes Pol­ish musi­cian and jour­nal­ist Paweł Brodowsky, who was in the audi­ence. “By that time I had already seen The Ani­mals, The Hol­lies, Lulu, and Cliff Richard and the Shad­ows.” It did­n’t hurt that Władysław Jakubows­ki, the deputy direc­tor of Pagart — “a state-owned con­cert agency,” writes Sam Kemp at Far Out — “had some sym­pa­thy for Poland’s young music fans” (just as Gor­bachev would in the time of glas­nost). None of the oth­er acts caused any­thing like the chaos that would ensue when the Stones came to War­saw.

Bands allowed into the coun­try came from a list of names Jakubows­ki col­lect­ed from young Pol­ish jour­nal­ists. How Jakubows­ki achieved the required per­mis­sions from his high­er-ups is some­thing of a mys­tery, Olek­siek writes. Why the deputy direc­tor let the Stones into the coun­try even more so. Their rep­u­ta­tion for destruc­tion pre­ced­ed them: “He must have heard about The Rolling Stones’ wreck­ing of the Olympia, the most famous con­cert hall in Paris. He was a close friend of Bruno Coqua­trix, its direc­tor.” At any rate, the War­saw con­cert turned into a riot. The band could not be blamed, entire­ly.

Hear­ing about the Stones’ arrival, thou­sands of young fans lined up for tick­ets. “What most of them did­n’t know,” Kemp writes, “was that the bulk of them had already been reserved for com­mu­nist par­ty mem­bers and their fam­i­lies.” The hall was also packed beyond capac­i­ty, “with fans hang­ing off the edge of bal­conies.” Police fought to keep fans away from the stage and the seat­ed crowds of dour bureau­crats. Richards and Jag­ger antag­o­nized the cops with obscen­i­ties, mak­ing tick­et­less fans who’d breached the doors even more rabid.

Out­side, as you can see in the short Pol­ish doc­u­men­tary above, a full-blown riot with tear gas and dogs had bro­ken out. This was a time when riots seemed to break out every­where. (Mick Jag­ger has cit­ed the Paris upris­ings of 1968 as a source for “Street Fight­ing Man.”) But at the end of the six­ties, few oth­er bands could boast not only of play­ing the com­mu­nist East­ern Bloc, but of inspir­ing may­hem from the stage on both sides of the Cold War lines.

And yet, this is not the end of the sto­ry. The Stones returned to War­saw over fifty years lat­er, in 2018, this time with a point­ed polit­i­cal state­ment made at the behest of Lech Wałęsa, in oppo­si­tion to a rule lim­it­ing the age of judges to 65. “I am too old to be a judge but not too old to sing,” Jag­ger shout­ed in Pol­ish from the stage. He then launched into the band’s first song on the setlist. And, yes, it was my favorite and maybe yours too: “Street Fight­ing Man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

A Char­lie Watts-Cen­tric View of the Rolling Stones: Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Footage of Char­lie & the Band Per­form­ing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line”

The Rolling Stones Jam with Mud­dy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Leg­endary Checker­board Lounge (1981)

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

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The White House’s Forgotten 1970s Vinyl Record Collection: Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, Captain Beefheart, Donna Summer & More

in History, Music | May 16th, 2022

Though it may not be for every­one, the job of Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca does have its perks. Take, for exam­ple, the abil­i­ty to screen any film you like at the White House: here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured lists of movies watched by Richard Nixon, Jim­my Carter, and Ronald Rea­gan. But for Carter in par­tic­u­lar, music seems to have been even more impor­tant than cin­e­ma. So explains John Chuldenko, step­son of that for­mer pres­i­den­t’s son Jack, in the episode of The 1600 Ses­sions above. In it, he tells of his redis­cov­ery of an insti­tu­tion cre­at­ed under Nixon, great­ly expand­ed under Carter, and packed away under Rea­gan: the White House Record Library.

“The Library, begun by First Lady Pat Nixon, was curat­ed by a vol­un­teer com­mis­sion of not­ed music jour­nal­ists, schol­ars, and oth­er experts,” says the White House His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. When it came time to update it at the end of the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, writes Wash­ing­to­ni­an’s Rob Brun­ner, “the selec­tion process would be head­ed by John Ham­mond, a huge­ly influ­en­tial fig­ure who had signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Spring­steen.” Ham­mond also enlist­ed genre experts like “Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet pianist John Lewis, who was respon­si­ble for jazz, and Boston music crit­ic Bob Blu­men­thal, who led the pop picks.”

The result­ing col­lec­tion of more than 2,000 LPs con­tains more than a few albums you would­n’t expect to hear at the White House. These include Van Mor­rison’s Astral Weeks, Randy New­man’s Good Old Boys (which con­tains “one of the great­est cri­tiques of both South­ern and North­ern racism,” as Blu­men­thal recalls), Talk­ing Heads’ More Songs About Build­ings and Food, Cap­tain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Repli­ca, and Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s the Sex Pis­tols. On the more dance­able end of the spec­trum, the White House Record Library also includes Funkadelic’s, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Don­na Sum­mer — all of their work select­ed express­ly for pres­i­den­tial use.

Hav­ing last been updat­ed in 1981 and sum­mar­i­ly cart­ed off to “a secure undis­closed stor­age facil­i­ty,” the Library remains a musi­cal time cap­sule of that era. So Chuldenko dis­cov­ered when, fol­low­ing a thread of fam­i­ly lore, he man­aged to track down a cura­tor who could arrange a lis­ten­ing ses­sion for him. “There is no rap or hip-hop in there,” he said to Wash­ing­ton­ian. “There’s no elec­tron­ic music. There are no boy bands, no Madon­na or Brit­ney Spears. No Michael Jack­son!” Hav­ing suc­ceed­ed in his mis­sion of find­ing the White House Record Library, he’s set for him­self the even more for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of bring­ing it up to date. Cer­tain­ly its geo­graph­i­cal purview will have to widen, giv­en how Amer­i­ca now lis­tens to so much music from beyond its bor­ders. Would the White House care to hear any K‑pop rec­om­men­da­tions?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Announces an Archive That Will House His Man­u­scripts, Let­ters & Col­lec­tion of 10,000+ Vinyl Records

Google Gives 360° Tour of the White House

Lis­ten to James Baldwin’s Record Col­lec­tion in a 478-track, 32-Hour Spo­ti­fy Playlist

The Library of Con­gress Makes Its Archives Free for DJs to Remix: Intro­duc­ing the “Cit­i­zen DJ” Project

David Bowie Lists His 25 Favorite LPs in His Record Col­lec­tion: Stream Most of Them Free Online

The Inter­net Archive Is Dig­i­tiz­ing & Pre­serv­ing Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Helen Keller Was a “Firebrand” Socialist (or How History Whitewashed Her Political Life)

in History, Politics | May 16th, 2022

We expect that his­to­ries of famous fig­ures will prune their lives, sand down rough edges, rewrite and revise awk­ward and incon­ve­nient facts. What we may not expect – at least in the U.S. – is that decades of a famous person’s life will be redact­ed from the record. This is essen­tial­ly what hap­pened, how­ev­er, to the biog­ra­phy of Helen Keller even before her death in 1968. Per­haps the main offend­er remains play­wright William Gibson’s 1957 The Mir­a­cle Work­er, adapt­ed from the 1903 auto­bi­og­ra­phy she wrote at 23. Osten­si­bly about Keller, the sto­ry cen­ters instead, begin­ning with its title, on her teacher, Anne Sul­li­van.

The play (and 1962 film with Anne Ban­croft and Pat­ty Duke repris­ing their stage parts), por­trays Keller as a child, a role she was per­pet­u­al­ly assigned by her crit­ics through­out her adult life. She authored and pub­lished 14 books and dozens of essays dur­ing her 87 years, deliv­ered hun­dreds of speech­es, and main­tained a friend­ship and cor­re­spon­dence with many impor­tant fig­ures of the day. But in addi­tion to the usu­al sex­ism, she had to con­tend with those who thought her dis­abil­i­ty ren­dered her unfit to express opin­ions on mat­ters such as pol­i­tics. They asked that she “con­fine my activ­i­ties to social ser­vice and the blind,” she wrote in a sar­don­ic reply.

Keller’s polit­i­cal vision was writ­ten off as “a Utopi­an dream, and one who seri­ous­ly con­tem­plates its real­iza­tion indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.” What did she see in her mind that made crit­ics rush to belit­tle her? An end to war and Jim Crow; wom­en’s suf­frage, labor rights; an end to pover­ty and the pre­ventable child­hood ill­ness­es it engen­dered.… In a word, Helen Keller was a social­ist — and a pub­licly com­mit­ted one. “That we know so lit­tle of her avowed social­ism is aston­ish­ing, because she was an extro­vert­ed fire­brand who deliv­ered hun­dreds of rad­i­cal speech­es dur­ing” — writes Eileen Jones at Jacobin, quot­ing the 2020 doc­u­men­tary Her Social­ist Smile — “ ‘a fifty-year run on the lec­ture cir­cuit.’ ”

Keller pub­lished fre­quent arti­cles on the new­ly formed Sovi­et Union, Eugene Debs and the IWW (includ­ing “Why I Became an IWW” in 1916), and “Why Men Need Woman Suf­frage” (in 1913). “Turn­ing the yel­low­ing pages of rad­i­cal news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines from 1910 to the ear­ly 1920’s,” writes his­to­ri­an Philip Fon­er in an intro­duc­tion to her col­lect­ed social­ist writ­ings, “one fre­quent­ly finds the name Helen Keller beneath speech­es, arti­cles, and let­ters deal­ing with major social ques­tions of the era. The vision which runs through most of these writ­ings is the vision of social­ism.”

Mark Twain may have been the first to call Anne Sul­li­van a “mir­a­cle work­er” and Keller “a mir­a­cle,” but he treat­ed Keller “not as a freak,” she wrote, but as an equal and shared many of her views. He helped fund her edu­ca­tion at Rad­cliffe Col­lege (then a part of Har­vard ) and encour­aged her to speak and pub­lish. Keller joined the social­ist par­ty at age 29, in 1909, and in 1912, she pub­lished an arti­cle in The New York Call titled “How I Became a Social­ist.” The answer, she writes: “by read­ing.” As would be the case through­out her life, Keller felt the need to take a defen­sive pos­ture: crit­ics had accused John and Anne Macy (for­mer­ly Sul­li­van) of cor­rupt­ing her, to which she replied that she nei­ther shared Mr. Macy’s pro­pa­gan­dis­tic vari­ety of Marx­ism nor did Mrs. Macy share either of their views.

Keller’s polit­i­cal writ­ing is now wide­ly avail­able thanks to the inter­net, and can no longer be sup­pressed by edu­ca­tors who want to use her child­hood and dis­abil­i­ty but ignore most of her adult life. Even stu­dents watch­ing the PBS Amer­i­can Mas­ters doc­u­men­tary Becom­ing Helen Keller (see clip at the top) will learn that, gasp, yes, she was a social­ist. Dig deep­er, and they’ll find her views were unique and sig­nif­i­cant to the U.S. left: Kei­th Rosen­thal writes at Inter­na­tion­al Social­ist Review:

She was a seri­ous polit­i­cal thinker who made impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions in the fields of social­ist the­o­ry and prac­tice.… [S]he was a pio­neer in point­ing the way toward a Marx­ist under­stand­ing of dis­abil­i­ty oppres­sion and liberation—this real­i­ty has been over­looked and cen­sored. The mytho­log­i­cal Helen Keller that we are famil­iar with has apt­ly been described as a sort of “plas­ter saint;” a hol­low, emp­ty ves­sel who is lit­tle more than an apo­lit­i­cal sym­bol for per­se­ver­ance and per­son­al tri­umph.

Get to know the real Helen Keller — or a seri­ous­ly over­looked (at least) side of her life — in her polit­i­cal writ­ings here, here, and here and watch a video intro­duc­tion to her pol­i­tics by His­tor­i­cal­ly Fan­tas­tic fur­ther up.

via Jacobin

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A New Mas­sive Helen Keller Archive Gets Launched: Take a Dig­i­tal Look at Her Pho­tos, Let­ters, Speech­es, Polit­i­cal Writ­ings & More

Watch Helen Keller & Teacher Annie Sul­li­van Demon­strate How Helen Learned to Speak (1930)

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

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

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How Hans Zimmer Created the Otherworldly Soundtrack for Dune

in Film, Music | May 16th, 2022

Many emo­tion­al moments were made at this year’s big awards shows. The Slap, amidst so many his­toric wins; poignant trib­utes and crim­i­nal omis­sions; for­mer actor-turned-wartime-hero-pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky’s speech, the return of Louis C.K…. Everybody’s got a lot to process. Pop cul­ture can feel like a St. Vitus dance. One half-expects celebri­ties to start drop­ping from exhaus­tion. But then there’s Hans Zimmer’s Oscar accep­tance speech, deliv­ered in a white ter­ry bathrobe, a minia­ture Oscar stat­uette in his pock­et, a big goofy, 2 a.m. grin on his face. The man could not have looked more relaxed, win­ning his sec­ond Oscar 30 years after The Lion King.

Was he still in lock­down? No. On the night in ques­tion, Zim­mer was in a hotel in Ams­ter­dam, on tour with his band. “His cat­e­go­ry was among the eight that were hand­ed out before the tele­vised broad­cast began,” Yahoo reports, “but he made sure his fans knew just how thrilled he was.” Zim­mer post­ed a mini-accep­tance speech to social media. “Who else has paja­mas like this?” he joked to the oth­er musi­cians gath­ered in the room. “Actu­al­ly, let me say this, and this is for real. Had it not been for you, most of the peo­ple in this room, this would nev­er have hap­pened.” He is, as he says, “for real.”

As the musi­cians who worked with Zim­mer on his Oscar-win­ning Dune sound­track (stream it here) have gone on the record to say, the process was high­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive. “He’ll out­line the desired end result rather than pre­scrib­ing a spe­cif­ic means of get­ting there,” gui­tarist Guthrie Gov­an told The New York Times. “For one cue, he just said, ‘This needs to sound like sand.’ ” Zim­mer’s meth­ods offer new ways out of the cul-de-sac much of the cre­ative indus­try seems to find itself in, repeat­ing the same unhealthy com­pul­sions. “If some­one has a great idea,” he says, “I’m the first one to say, yes. Let’s go on that adven­ture.”

Along with col­lab­o­ra­tion, there is vision, and the willingness–as Zim­mer says in Van­i­ty Fair video inter­view at the top–to “invent instru­ments that don’t exist. Invent sounds that don’t exist.” Such future-think­ing has always char­ac­ter­ized his approach, from his synth pop and new wave work in the late 70s, includ­ing a stint killing the radio star with the Bug­gles, to his ground­break­ing film com­po­si­tion work on Rain Man, The Thin Red Line, and the grit­ty block­busters of Christo­pher Nolan. Though he’s scored action and adven­ture films unlike­ly to ever be con­sid­ered art, Zim­mer’s own way of work­ing is thor­ough­ly avant-garde.

As he tells it above, the point, in com­pos­ing for Dune, was to throw out the sci­ence fic­tion boil­er­plate, the “orches­tral sounds, roman­tic peri­od tonal­i­ties” that have dom­i­nat­ed at least since Kubrick­’s 2001. On the oth­er hand, Zim­mer says, he want­ed to get rid of mod­ern syn­co­pa­tion. “Maybe in the future, we will not have reg­u­lar beats. Maybe we will have actu­al­ly pro­gressed as human beings that we don’t need dis­co beats to enjoy our­selves,” he says laugh­ing, before going on to demon­strate how he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors cre­at­ed some of the most orig­i­nal music in film his­to­ry. Of course, the dis­co beat is com­fort­ing because it mim­ics the human heart. In mak­ing his Dune score, Zim­mer was com­pos­ing for a kind of post-human future, one dom­i­nat­ed not by award-show dra­ma but by giant sand­worms.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Exper­i­men­tal Score for the New Dune Film

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

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

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How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

in Creativity, Productivity, Psychology | May 13th, 2022

You can be for­giv­en for think­ing the con­cept of “flow” was cooked up and pop­u­lar­ized by yoga teach­ers. That word gets a lot of play when one is mov­ing from Down­ward-Fac­ing Dog on through War­rior One and Two.

Actu­al­ly, flow — the state of  “effort­less effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the Ger­man “rausch”, a dizzy­ing sort of ecsta­sy.

Friedrich Niet­zsche and psy­chol­o­gist William James both con­sid­ered the flow state in depth, but social the­o­rist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, author of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Flow and the Psy­chol­o­gy of Dis­cov­ery and Inven­tion, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his def­i­n­i­tions of flow:

Being com­plete­ly involved in an activ­i­ty for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, move­ment, and thought fol­lows inevitably from the pre­vi­ous one, like play­ing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Author Steven Kotler, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Flow Research Col­lec­tive, not only seems to spend a lot of time think­ing about flow, as a lead­ing expert on human per­for­mance, he inhab­its the state on a fair­ly reg­u­lar basis, too.

Chalk it up to good luck?

Good genes? (Some researchers, includ­ing retired NIH geneti­cist Dean Hamer and psy­chol­o­gist C. Robert Cloninger, think genet­ics play a part…)

As Kotler points out above, any­one can hedge their bets by clear­ing away dis­trac­tions — all the usu­al bad­dies that inter­fere with sleep, per­for­mance, or pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

It’s also impor­tant to know thy­self. Kotler’s an ear­ly bird, who gets crackin’ well before sun­rise:

I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn every­thing off at the end of the day includ­ing unplug­ging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morn­ing there’s nobody jump­ing into my inbox or assault­ing me emo­tion­al­ly with some­thing, you know what I mean?… I real­ly pro­tect that ear­ly morn­ing time.

By con­trast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clear­ing the cob­webs ’til ear­ly evening.

In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow trig­gers have been dis­cov­ered, pre-con­di­tions that keep atten­tion focused in the present moment.

His web­site lists many of those trig­gers:

  • Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion in the Present Moment
  • Imme­di­ate Feed­back
  • Clear Goals
  • The Chal­lenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the chal­lenge should seem slight­ly out of reach
  • High con­se­quences 
  • Deep Embod­i­ment 
  • Rich Envi­ron­ment 
  • Cre­ativ­i­ty (specif­i­cal­ly, pat­tern recog­ni­tion, or the link­ing togeth­er of new ideas)

Kotler also shares Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na psy­chol­o­gist Kei­th Sawyer’s trig­ger list for groups hop­ing to flow like a well-oiled machine:

  • Shared Goals
  • Close Lis­ten­ing 
  • “Yes And” (addi­tive, rather than com­bat­ive con­ver­sa­tions)
  • Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion (total focus in the right here, right now)
  • A sense of con­trol (each mem­ber of the group feels in con­trol, but still
  • Blend­ing Egos (each per­son can sub­merge their ego needs into the group’s)
  • Equal Par­tic­i­pa­tion (skills lev­els are rough­ly equal every­one is involved)
  • Famil­iar­i­ty (peo­ple know one anoth­er and under­stand their tics and ten­den­cies)
  • Con­stant Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (a group ver­sion of imme­di­ate feed­back)
  • Shared, Group Risk

One might think peo­ple in the flow state would be float­ing around with an expres­sion of ecsta­t­ic bliss on their faces. Not so, accord­ing to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slight­ly. Good news for any­one with rest­ing bitch face!

(We’ll thank you to refer to it as rest­ing flow state face from here on out.)

Relat­ed Con­tent

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

David Lynch Explains How Sim­ple Dai­ly Habits Enhance His Cre­ativ­i­ty

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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This Is Spinal Tap Will Get a Sequel 40 Years Later, Reuniting Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer

in Film, Music | May 13th, 2022

Fans of James Cameron’s Avatar are express­ing aston­ish­ment that its long-expect­ed sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, will have tak­en thir­teen years to get to the­aters. That delay, of course, is noth­ing next to the 35 years that sep­a­rat­ed Blade Run­ner and Blade Run­ner 2049, or the 36 between Top Gun and Top Gun: Mav­er­ick, which comes out next month. But the recent­ly announced sequel to This Is Spinal Tap tops them all: “Spinal Tap II will see Rob Rein­er return as both film-mak­er on and off the screen along with Michael McK­ean, Har­ry Shear­er, and Christo­pher Guest,” writes the Guardian’s Ben­jamin Lee. “The film will be released in 2024 on the 1984 orig­i­nal’s 40th anniver­sary.”

Crit­ics praised This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984, but it took time to become a revered clas­sic of the impro­vised-mock­u­men­tary genre. In fact that genre had­n’t exist at all, which result­ed in some view­ers not quite get­ting the joke. “When the film first came out, we showed it in Dal­las and peo­ple came up to me and said, why would you make a movie about a band nobody’s ever heard of?” says direc­tor Rob Rein­er. “And one that’s so bad?”

Or as Christo­pher Guest remem­bers a cou­ple girls at the con­ces­sion counter observ­ing: “These guys are so stu­pid.” The befud­dle­ment extend­ed even to col­lab­o­ra­tors in the film­mak­ing process: “I don’t under­stand this,” said cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Peter Smok­ler, who’d worked on the Alta­mont doc­u­men­tary Gimme Shel­ter. “This isn’t fun­ny. This is exact­ly what they do.”

Such reac­tions pay indi­rect but great trib­ute to the painstak­ing craft and obser­va­to­ry wit of Spinal Tap’s cre­ators. Those cre­ators — Rein­er, Guest, Michael McK­ean, and Har­ry Shear­er — tell these sto­ries in the Today inter­view above, con­duct­ed in 2019 to mark This Is Spinal Tap’s 35th anniver­sary. In that time they’d occa­sion­al­ly reunit­ed as Spinal Tap for live per­for­mances and real albums, the last of which came out in 2009. Per­haps that’s kept them ready to get back into char­ac­ter, pitch-per­fect Eng­lish accents and all, and put on — as they’ll be forced to in a plot shaped by real­is­tic-sound­ing music-indus­try vagaries — one last con­cert. But like any belat­ed sequel, it brings pro­por­tion­al­ly inflat­ed fan expec­ta­tions: specif­i­cal­ly, about whether they’ll be able to go up to twelve.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ori­gins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Cre­at­ed to Pitch the Clas­sic Mock­u­men­tary

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Pro­motes World’s Largest Online Gui­tar Les­son

Ian Rub­bish (aka Fred Armisen) Inter­views the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mock­u­men­tary

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Business, Education, Online Courses | May 13th, 2022

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now comes their latest–a cer­tifi­cate ded­i­cat­ed to Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate con­sists of sev­en cours­es, all col­lec­tive­ly designed to help stu­dents “devel­op dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce strate­gies; attract and engage cus­tomers through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels like search and email; mea­sure mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, ana­lyze e‑commerce per­for­mance, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.” The cours­es include:

In total, this pro­gram “includes over 190 hours of instruc­tion and prac­tice-based assess­ments, which sim­u­late real-world dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce sce­nar­ios that are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place.” Along the way, stu­dents will learn how to use tools and plat­forms like Can­va, Con­stant Con­tact, Google Ads, Google Ana­lyt­ics, Hoot­suite, Hub­Spot, Mailchimp, Shopi­fy, and Twit­ter. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

If you don’t want to pay, you can audit each course for free, with­out ulti­mate­ly receiv­ing the cer­tifi­cate.

Explore the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Google Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate: 8 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.