The MC5 Performs at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, Right Before All Hell Breaks Loose

in Music, Politics | May 16th, 2017

With some rare excep­tions (Sid and Nan­cy, I’m Not There, maybe Walk the Line and Cadil­lac Records), biopics usu­al­ly stum­ble bad­ly when they try to recre­ate the per­son­al­i­ties and atmos­pheres of famous musi­cians. For this rea­son I am grate­ful that no stu­dio has yet attempt­ed a nar­ra­tive of one of my favorite bands, the not-quite-famous MC5. On the oth­er hand, it’s hard to believe there’s no script in devel­op­ment some­where. If there’s one band whose story—and music—deserves a wider audi­ence, it’s this one. Sad­ly, gui­tarist Wayne Kramer has sup­pressed a very well-reviewed doc­u­men­tary that might do them as much jus­tice as any film can.

Formed in Lin­coln Park Michi­gan in 1964, the “Motor City 5” became syn­ony­mous with Detroit’s left­ist polit­i­cal scene. They were also some of the most uncom­pro­mis­ing garage rock­ers to emerge from the era, along with pro­to-punks The Stooges, with whom they often per­formed.

By the time of the infa­mous 1968 Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion in Chica­go—well-known for the bru­tal attacks of police against thou­sands of aggriev­ed protesters—the MC5 had become heav­i­ly influ­enced by Fred Hamp­ton and Huey New­ton. Under their man­ag­er John Sin­clair, they became promi­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the “White Pan­thers,” an anti-racist ana­logue of the Black Pan­thers formed on a sug­ges­tion of Newton’s.

In Sep­tem­ber of 1968, Sin­clair would be indict­ed for tak­ing part in the bomb­ing a CIA office in Ann Arbor. But exact­ly one month pri­or, he presided over the MC5’s appear­ance at the riotous Chica­go Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion. The band was booked as part of Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to stage a “Fes­ti­val of Life,” bring­ing 100,000 young peo­ple to the city “for five days of peace, love, and music,” writes the site Chica­go ’68, to “redi­rect youth cul­ture and music toward polit­i­cal ends.” Fit­ting­ly, per­haps, the MC5 was the only band that showed up after Hoff­man and his Yip­pies failed to secure the per­mits. They played for less than an hour to a crowd of a few thou­sand. Kramer remem­bered the day in a 2008 inter­view:

There was no stage, there was no flatbed truck, there was no sound sys­tem, there were no por­ta-toi­lets, there was no elec­tric­i­ty. We had to run an elec­tri­cal cord from the hot dog stand to pow­er our gear. We played on the ground in the mid­dle of Lin­coln Park in Chica­go with the crowd all around us sit­ting on the ground, in the back stand­ing. I’m going to guess there were maybe 3,000 young peo­ple there. And it was very tense. The Chica­go police had been very aggres­sive and very intim­i­dat­ing all day, and even though it was a rock con­cert and we were the only band to play, it didn’t feel like a rock con­cert. There was a dark cloud over the day because we knew the like­li­hood of peo­ple being hurt was great.

The only film we seem to have of the event is silent sur­veil­lance footage at the top of the post. Fur­ther down, see clips of the riot­ing that ensued, with the band’s hit “Kick Out the Jams” played over it. And just below, see a video of them play­ing the song over a back­drop of riot footage. They released their debut album, Kick Out the Jams , the fol­low­ing year. It was an uneven col­lec­tion of per­for­mances, but “when they got it right,” says Michael Hann, “they sim­ply got it com­plete­ly right.” It was cer­tain­ly their phi­los­o­phy to go all in. As Kramer described it, “You have to come ear­ly, and you have to stay late. The song doesn’t say, ‘Slide out the jams.” It doesn’t say, ‘Stroll out the jams.” It says, ‘Kick out the jams!’”

What I find fas­ci­nat­ing about the emer­gence of the MC5 at this time in his­to­ry is how great of a con­trast they pre­sent­ed to the weary blues of the Rolling Stones, who became grim­ly linked in ’69 at Alta­mont with the cyn­i­cal end of flower pow­er. Despite their asso­ci­a­tion with the vio­lent spec­ta­cle of the DNC riots—another sign of the hip­pie apocalypse—the MC5 became the sound­track for peo­ple pow­er, and in a way bridged the R&B, garage rock, psy­che­delia, punk, and met­al of the grit­ty 1970s to come. But addic­tion, polit­i­cal repres­sion, and cen­sor­ship killed the band a few years lat­er. Lead singer Rob Tyn­er died in 1991, and gui­tarist Fred “Son­ic” Smith, who mar­ried Pat­ti Smith, passed away in 1994.

Kramer has car­ried on, and still tours (and gives lec­tures). When he revis­it­ed the DNC in 2008 for an unof­fi­cial per­for­mance and anti-war protest, he reflect­ed on the pol­i­tics of the day. “It will be help­ful not to have to bat­tle as hard as we have with the Bush admin­is­tra­tion,” he told The Huff­in­g­ton Post, “but Barack Oba­ma can­not save us. It’s real­ly a mat­ter of peo­ple them­selves tak­ing action in their own neigh­bor­hoods, at their own jobs, in their own homes, with their own friends, their own co-work­ers, to move us into the future, a more just world.” The peo­ple pow­er the MC5 rep­re­sent­ed lives on even into this grim era, and the band itself will always live in leg­end, if not—for good or ill—in cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Com­ic Revis­its the Artists & Writ­ers at the Bloody ’68 Con­ven­tion: Jean Genet, William S. Bur­roughs & More

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

A Gallery of Visu­al­ly Arrest­ing Posters from the May 1968 Paris Upris­ing

New Jim Jar­musch Doc­u­men­tary on Iggy Pop & The Stooges Now Stream­ing Free on Ama­zon Prime

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

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John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963)

in Poetry, Politics | May 2nd, 2017

The Greek word poe­sis did not con­fine itself to the lit­er­ary arts. Most broad­ly speak­ing, the word meant “to make”—as in, to cre­ate any­thing, god­like, out of the stuff of ideas. But the Eng­lish word “poet­ry” has always retained this grander sense, one very present for poets steeped in the clas­sics, like Per­cy Shel­ley, who famous­ly called poets the “unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world” in his essay “A Defence of Poet­ry.” Shel­ley argued, “If no new poets should arise to cre­ate afresh the asso­ci­a­tions which have been thus dis­or­ga­nized, lan­guage will be dead to all the nobler pur­pos­es of human inter­course.”

It can feel at times, watch­ing cer­tain of our lead­ers speak, that lan­guage may be dying for “nobler pur­pos­es.” But cer­tain poets would seek to con­vince us oth­er­wise. As Walt Whit­man wrote of his coun­try­men in an intro­duc­tion to Leaves of Grass, “pres­i­dents shall not be their com­mon ref­er­ee so much as their poets shall.”

Whit­man lived in a time that val­ued rhetor­i­cal skill in its lead­ers. So too did anoth­er of the country’s revered nation­al poets, Robert Frost, who accept­ed the request of John F. Kennedy to serve as the first inau­gur­al poet in 1961 with “his sig­na­ture ele­gance of wit,” com­ments Maria Popo­va. Frost, 86 years old at the time, read his poem “The Gift Out­right” from mem­o­ry and offered Kennedy some full-throat­ed advice on join­ing “poet­ry and pow­er.”

Kennedy, an “arts patron in chief,” as the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed describes him, was so moved that two years lat­er, after the poet’s death, he deliv­ered an elo­quent eulo­gy for Frost at Amherst Col­lege that picked up the poet’s theme, and acknowl­edged the pow­er of poet­ry as equal to, and per­haps sur­pass­ing, that of pol­i­tics. “Our nation­al strength mat­ters,” he began, “but the spir­it which informs and con­trols our strength mat­ters just as much.” That ani­mat­ing spir­it for Kennedy was not reli­gion, civ­il or super­nat­ur­al, but art. Frost’s poet­ry, he said, “brought an unspar­ing instinct for real­i­ty to bear on the plat­i­tudes and pieties of soci­ety.”

His sense of the human tragedy for­ti­fied him against self-decep­tion and easy con­so­la­tion… it is hard­ly an acci­dent that Robert Frost cou­pled poet­ry and pow­er, for he saw poet­ry as the means of sav­ing pow­er from itself. When pow­er leads men towards arro­gance, poet­ry reminds him of his lim­i­ta­tions. When pow­er nar­rows the areas of man’s con­cern, poet­ry reminds him of the rich­ness and diver­si­ty of his exis­tence. When pow­er cor­rupts, poet­ry cleans­es. For art estab­lish­es the basic human truth which must serve as the touch­stone of our judg­ment.

The tragedy of hubris and cel­e­bra­tion of diver­si­ty, how­ev­er, we can see not only in Frost, but in Shel­ley, Whit­man, and per­haps every oth­er great poet whose “per­son­al vision… becomes the last cham­pi­on of the indi­vid­ual mind and sen­si­bil­i­ty against an intru­sive soci­ety and an offi­cious state.” Kennedy’s short speech, with great clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion, makes the case for using the country’s resources to “reward achieve­ment in the arts as we reward achieve­ment in busi­ness or state­craft.” But just as impor­tant­ly, he argues against any kind of state impo­si­tion on an artist’s vision: “If art is to nour­ish the roots of our cul­ture, soci­ety must set the artist free to fol­low his vision wher­ev­er it takes him. We must nev­er for­get that art is not a form of pro­pa­gan­da; it is a form of truth.”

You can hear Kennedy deliv­er the speech in the audio above, read a full tran­script in Eng­lish here and in 12 oth­er lan­guages here. In the audi­ence at Amherst sat poet and crit­ic Archibald MacLeish, who, in his “Ars Poet­i­ca,” had sug­gest­ed that poet­ry should not be stripped of its sounds and images and turned into a didac­tic tool. Kennedy agrees. “In free soci­ety art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ide­ol­o­gy.” Yet poet­ry is not a lux­u­ry, but a neces­si­ty if a body politic is to flour­ish. “The nation which dis­dains the mis­sion of art,” Kennedy warned, “invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of hav­ing ‘noth­ing to look back­ward to with pride, and noth­ing to look for­ward to with hope.’”

Kennedy’s is a point of view, per­haps, that might get under a lot of peo­ple’s skin. It’s worth con­sid­er­ing, as a less opti­mistic crit­ic argued at the time, whether an over­abun­dance of didac­tic polit­i­cal state­ments in art may be as cul­tur­al­ly dam­ag­ing as the absence of art in pol­i­tics. Or whether art like Frost’s is ever “dis­in­ter­est­ed,” in Kennedy’s phras­ing, or apo­lit­i­cal, or can oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly as a check to pow­er. Frost him­self may express ambiva­lence in his embrace of “human tragedy.” But in his doubt he ful­fills the poet­’s role, enter­ing into the kind of crit­i­cal dialec­tic Kennedy claims for poet­ry and democ­ra­cy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

New Film Project Fea­tures Cit­i­zens of Alaba­ma Read­ing Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a Poet­ic Embod­i­ment of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ideals

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

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

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Artist is Creating a Parthenon Made of 100,000 Banned Books: A Monument to Democracy & Intellectual Freedom

in Art, Current Affairs, Politics | April 27th, 2017

With the rise of Far Right can­di­dates in Europe and in Amer­i­ca, along with creep­ing dic­ta­tor­ship in Turkey and author­i­tar­i­an­ism in the Philip­pines, the idea of democ­ra­cy and free­dom of speech feels under threat more than ever. While we don’t talk about polit­i­cal solu­tions here on Open Cul­ture, we do believe in the pow­er of art to illu­mi­nate.

Argen­tine artist Mar­ta Min­u­jín is cre­at­ing a large-scale art­work called The Parthenon of Books that will be con­struct­ed on Friedrich­splatz in Kas­sel, Ger­many, and will be con­struct­ed from as many as 100,000 banned books from all over the world.

The loca­tion has been cho­sen for its his­tor­i­cal impor­tance. In 1933, the Nazis burned two-thou­sand books there dur­ing the so-called “Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist” (Cam­paign against the Un-Ger­man Spir­it), destroy­ing books by Com­mu­nists, Jews, and paci­fists, along with any oth­ers deemed un-Ger­man.

Min­u­jín chose the Parthenon—one of the great struc­tures of Ancient Greece—for its con­tin­u­ing sym­bol­ism of the endur­ing pow­er of democ­ra­cy through­out the ages.

When it comes to mate­ri­als, she using a list of 100,000 books that have been, or still are, banned in coun­tries across the world, going all the way back to the year 1500. You can browse that list here, but for less eye-strain, try this short­er list of 170 or so titles. New titles can be sug­gest­ed for the project here.

Some of the books that have been banned over the years include Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Lit­tle Prince (banned in Argenti­na), Lewis Car­rol­l’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (banned in Chi­na), and Nor­man Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (banned in Cana­da).

Min­u­jín con­struct­ed a sim­i­lar Parthenon in 1983 after the fall of her country’s dic­ta­tor­ship. The orig­i­nal El Partenón de libros fea­tured the books that the for­mer gov­ern­ment had banned, and, at the end of the instal­la­tion, Min­u­jín let the pub­lic take what they want­ed home. (She will be allow­ing the same thing to hap­pen this time.)

Her peo­ple, as she says in the video above, didn’t know what democ­ra­cy was after years of mil­i­tary rule. We might be on the oppo­site side of the spec­trum: we won’t know what democ­ra­cy is until we lose it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

It’s Banned Books Week: Lis­ten to Allen Gins­berg Read His Famous­ly Banned Poem, “Howl,” in San Fran­cis­co, 1956

John Waters Reads Steamy Scene from Lady Chatterley’s Lover for Banned Books Week (NSFW)
Read 14 Great Banned & Cen­sored Nov­els Free Online: For Banned Books Week 2014

The Cov­er of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Cen­sored with Wear and Tear

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. 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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Neil deGrasse Tyson Says This Short Film on Science in America Contains Perhaps the Most Important Words He’s Ever Spoken

in Politics, Science | April 26th, 2017

Astro­physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson has won a rep­u­ta­tion as a genial, yet pedan­tic nerd, a sci­en­tif­ic gad­fly whose point of view may near­ly always be tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, but whose mode of deliv­ery some­times miss­es the point, like some­one who explains a joke. His earnest­ness is endear­ing; it’s what makes him so relat­able as a sci­ence edu­ca­tor. He’s whole­heart­ed­ly devot­ed to his sub­ject, like his boy­hood hero Carl Sagan, whose shoes Tyson did his best to fill in a remake of the clas­sic Cos­mos series. Tyson’s coun­try­men and women, how­ev­er, have made his job a lot hard­er than they did in Sagan’s day, when ordi­nary Amer­i­cans were hun­gry for sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion.

The change has been decades in the mak­ing. Like Sagan, Tyson’s voice fills with awe as he con­tem­plates the mys­ter­ies of nature and won­ders of sci­ence, and with alarm as he com­ments on wide­spread Amer­i­can igno­rance and hos­til­i­ty to crit­i­cal inquiry and the sci­en­tif­ic method. These atti­tudes have led us to a cri­sis point. Elect­ed and appoint­ed offi­cials at the high­est lev­els of gov­ern­ment deny the facts of cli­mate change and are active­ly gut­ting all efforts to com­bat it. The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives’ Com­mit­tee on Sci­ence, Space, and Tech­nol­o­gy mocks cli­mate sci­ence on social media even as NASA announces that the evi­dence is “unequiv­o­cal.”

How did this hap­pen? Are we rapid­ly return­ing, as Sagan warned before his death, to an age of “super­sti­tion and dark­ness”? Tyson has recent­ly addressed these ques­tions with earnest­ness and urgency in a short video called “Sci­ence in Amer­i­ca,” which you can watch above, “con­tain­ing,” he wrote on Face­book, “what may be the most impor­tant words I have ever spo­ken.” He opens with a state­ment that echoes Sagan’s dire pre­dic­tions: “It seems to me that peo­ple have lost the abil­i­ty to judge what is true and what is not.” The prob­lem is not sim­ply an aca­d­e­m­ic one, but a press­ing­ly polit­i­cal one: “When you have peo­ple,” says Tyson, “who don’t know much about sci­ence, stand­ing in denial of it, and ris­ing to pow­er, that is a recipe for the com­plete dis­man­tling of our informed democ­ra­cy.”

One must ask if the issue sole­ly comes down to edu­ca­tion. We are fre­quent­ly remind­ed of how much denial is moti­vat­ed and will­ful when, for exam­ple, a gov­ern­ment offi­cial begins a com­plete­ly unsup­port­ed claim with, “I’m not a sci­en­tist, but….” We know that fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies like Exxon have known the facts about cli­mate change for forty years, and have hid­den or mis­rep­re­sent­ed them. But the prob­lem is even more wide­spread. Evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, vac­cines, GMOs… the amount of mis­in­for­ma­tion and “alter­na­tive fact” in the pub­lic sphere has drowned out the voic­es of sci­en­tists. “That’s not the coun­try I remem­ber grow­ing up in,” Tyson laments.

There are plen­ty of good philo­soph­i­cal rea­sons for skep­ti­cism, such as those raised by David Hume or by crit­i­cal the­o­rists and his­to­ri­ans who point out the ways in which sci­en­tif­ic research has been dis­tort­ed and mis­used for some very dark, inhu­mane pur­pos­es. Yet cri­tiques of method­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, and ethics only strength­en the sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise, which—as Tyson pas­sion­ate­ly explains—thrives on vig­or­ous and informed debate. We can­not afford to con­fuse thought­ful delib­er­a­tion and hon­est reflec­tion with spe­cious rea­son­ing and will­ful igno­rance.

I imag­ine we’ll have a good laugh at cre­ative rede­ploy­ments of some clas­sic Tyson harangues. (“This is sci­ence! It’s not some­thing to toy with!”) And a good laugh some­times feels like all we can do to relieve the ten­sion. The real dan­ger is that many peo­ple will dis­miss his mes­sage as “politi­ciz­ing” sci­ence rather than defend­ing the very basis of its exis­tence. We must agree on the basis of sci­en­tif­ic truth, as dis­cov­er­able through rea­son and evi­dence, Tyson warns, before we can even get to the polit­i­cal ques­tions over cli­mate change, vac­cines, etc. Whether Amer­i­cans can still do that has become an unset­tling­ly open ques­tion.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

An Ani­mat­ed Neil deGrasse Tyson Gives an Elo­quent Defense of Sci­ence in 272 Words, the Same Length as The Get­tys­burg Address

Neil deGrasse Tyson Remem­bers His First Meet­ing with Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Issues a Chill­ing Warn­ing to Amer­i­ca in His Final Inter­view (1996)

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

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138 Short Animated Introductions to the World’s Greatest Ideas: Plato, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir & More

in Animation, Education, History, Philosophy, Politics | April 11th, 2017

The Open Cul­ture audi­ence, by my esti­ma­tion, divides into two basic groups: those who’ve read the col­lect­ed works of the likes of Simone de Beau­voir, Michel Fou­cault, and Pla­to, and those who’d like to. Whichev­er body of oft-ref­er­enced ideas you’ve been want­i­ng to dig deep into your­self, get­ting a brief, con­cept-dis­till­ing primer before­hand can make the task eas­i­er, improv­ing your under­stand­ing and abil­i­ty to con­tex­tu­al­ize the orig­i­nal texts when you get around to them. Online edu­ca­tion com­pa­ny Macat has pro­duced 138 such primers in the form of ani­mat­ed videos freely avail­able on YouTube which can put you in the right frame of mind to study a vari­ety of ideas in lit­er­a­ture, eco­nom­ics, soci­ol­o­gy, pol­i­tics, his­to­ry, and phi­los­o­phy.

De Beau­voir, in Macat’s analy­sis, argued in The Sec­ond Sex that “the views of indi­vid­u­als are social­ly and cul­tur­al­ly pro­duced. Fem­i­nin­i­ty is not inher­ent,” but a soci­etal mech­a­nism long used “to keep men dom­i­nant.”

Accord­ing to their video on Fou­cault’s Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, that famous book “explores the evo­lu­tion of pow­er since the Mid­dle Ages,” cul­mi­nat­ing in the argu­ment that “mod­ern states have moved away from explor­ing their author­i­ty phys­i­cal­ly to enforc­ing it psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly,” a phe­nom­e­non exem­pli­fied as much by late 18th- and ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Jere­my Ben­tham’s Panop­ti­con as by mod­ern closed-cir­cuit tele­vi­sion urban omni-sur­veil­lance (a tech­nol­o­gy now spread far beyond the infa­mous­ly CCTV-zeal­ous Lon­don all the way to Seoul, where I live). In The Repub­lic, Pla­to asks more basic ques­tions about soci­ety: “What would an ide­al state look like, and how would it work?”

For that ancient Greek, says the video’s nar­ra­tor, “the ide­al soci­ety offered the guar­an­tee of jus­tice and would be ruled over not by a tyrant, but by an all-pow­er­ful philoso­pher-king.” Whether or not that strikes you as an appeal­ing prospect, or indeed whether you agree with de Beau­voir and Fou­cault’s bold propo­si­tions, you stand to sharp­en your mind by engag­ing with these and oth­er influ­en­tial ideas, includ­ing (as cov­ered in Macat’s oth­er three- to four-minute analy­ses) those of Machi­avel­li, David Hume, Edward Said, and Thomas Piket­ty. “Crit­i­cal think­ing is about to become one of the most in-demand set of skills in the glob­al jobs mar­ket,” insists Macat’s mar­ket­ing. “Are you ready?” Whether or not you’ll ever ref­er­ence these thinkers on the job, prepar­ing your­self to read them with an active mind will put you on the fast track to the exam­ined life.

You can find the com­plete list of ani­ma­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

47 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry Ani­mat­ed Mon­ty Python-Style

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

Edward Said Recalls His Depress­ing Meet­ing With Sartre, de Beau­voir & Fou­cault (1979)

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, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Animal Farm into Their 1977 Concept Album, Animals (a Critique of Late Capitalism, Not Stalin)

in Music, Politics | April 7th, 2017

Pink Floyd will always be known for their mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful con­cept albums, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ tense, and per­son­al­ly explo­sive, dynam­ic on albums like Dark Side of the Moon seems rem­i­nis­cent of anoth­er mas­ter­ful song­writ­ing duo known for rock high con­cepts. Indeed, “there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no drag­ons-and-war­locks-themed prog-rock epics,” writes Jody Rosen at Slate, “had the Bea­t­les not decid­ed to don epaulets for their lark of an album cov­er and imper­son­ate a vaude­ville band.”

But where The Bea­t­les’ loose con­cep­tu­al mas­ter­pieces had their stormy and sad moments, they gen­er­al­ly kept things chip­per on albums like Sgt. Pep­per’s. Pink Floyd seemed deter­mined to do pre­cise­ly the oppo­site, set­ting a tem­plate for entire gen­res of met­al to fol­low. 1977’s Ani­mals espe­cial­ly reminds me of noth­ing so much as an album by Megadeth or Mastodon. Musi­cal and the­mat­ic sim­i­lar­i­ties abound: epic, boom­ing, doomy songs with lyrics com­plete­ly unin­ter­est­ed in charm­ing their lis­ten­ers. “Sheep,” for exam­ple, con­tains a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shep­herd. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and coverteth me to lamb cut­lets.”

As the brutish title alerts us, Ani­mals is an adap­ta­tion of George’s Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm (and the ori­gin of Pink Floyd’s giant inflat­able pig). The schemat­ic alle­go­ry of Orwell’s book lends a high degree of coher­ence to Waters’ extend­ed songs—only five in total. But he sup­plies his own char­ac­ter­is­tic bile (he famous­ly spit on a fan dur­ing one tour, an inci­dent that inspired The Wall). It couldn’t be more appro­pri­ate. Where Orwell’s nov­el is a trans­par­ent attack on Stal­in­ism, Waters adapts his cri­tique to “the eco­nom­ic and ide­o­log­i­cal sys­tems with­in late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry lib­er­al democ­ra­cies.” So argues Phil Rose in an in-depth study of Waters’ lyri­cal ideas. The album’s “pri­ma­ry con­cern… is to reveal the effects that tech­no­crat­ic cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions have on the nature of human beings and the evi­dent divi­sions that unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic struc­tures of pow­er cre­ate among us as indi­vid­u­als.”

Orwell showed the effects of “unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic struc­tures” by reduc­ing indi­vid­u­als to ani­mal types, and so does Waters, sim­pli­fy­ing the class­es fur­ther into three (and leav­ing out humans alto­geth­er): the rul­ing pigs, prae­to­ri­an and aspir­ing cap­i­tal­ist dogs, and the sheep, the mind­less mass­es. The open­er, “Pigs on the Wing (Part One)” (top), an urgent acoustic strum­mer that gets picked up at the end of the album in a strange­ly upbeat reprise, sets a dystopi­an tone with images that may now seem old hat (bear in mind Ani­mals debuted five years before Blade Run­ner).

If you did­n’t care what hap­pened to me,
And I did­n’t care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the bore­dom and pain
Occa­sion­al­ly glanc­ing up through the rain.
Won­der­ing which of the bug­gers to blame
And watch­ing for pigs on the wing.

Most of the songs began their lives as a rough col­lec­tion that came togeth­er after Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters insist­ed on the lit­er­ary con­ceit, against Gilmour’s objec­tions, but the themes had already been very much on his mind. “Dogs,” above, was once a sar­don­ic rant called “You’ve Got­ta Be Crazy,” and one of its bleak­est stan­zas sur­vives from that ear­li­er track:

You got­ta keep one eye look­ing over your shoul­der.
You know it’s going to get hard­er, and hard­er, and hard­er as you
get old­er.
And in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand,
Just anoth­er sad old man,
All alone and dying of can­cer.

There may be no sharp­er an antithe­sis to “When I’m 64.” The image is made all the more dev­as­tat­ing by the homi­ci­dal para­noia sur­round­ing it. Not all of the Orwell over­lay works so well, but when it does, it does so with dev­as­tat­ing force. Con­sid­er these lines from “Sheep,” as ter­ri­fy­ing as any late Medieval judge­ment scene, and more effec­tive for an age that may not believe in hell but has seen the slaugh­ter­hous­es:

What do you get for pre­tend­ing the dan­ger’s not real.
Meek and obe­di­ent you fol­low the leader
Down well trod­den cor­ri­dors into the val­ley of steel.
What a sur­prise!
A look of ter­mi­nal shock in your eyes.
Now things are real­ly what they seem.

The band’s “bleak­est stu­dio album,” argues Brice Ezell at Con­se­quence of Sound, “feels eeri­ly rel­e­vant in these grave times.” I can’t help but agree. Pink Floyd great­ly inspired much of the heavy music to fol­low, doing as much as Black Sab­bath or Led Zep­pelin, I’d argue, to engage the imag­i­na­tions of met­al­heads and prog-rock sto­ry­tellers. Much of the music that fol­lowed them sounds very dat­ed, but forty years after its release, their gloomi­est record—which is say­ing a lot—seems more rel­e­vant than ever. Ani­mals ends on an ambiva­lent note, hope­ful but wary. The pigs are still on the wing, and the only rem­e­dy at hand, Waters sug­gests in the last few lines, may be to “know that I care what hap­pens to you / And I know that you care for me.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Stun­ning

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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

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Harvard Students Launch a Free Course on How to Resist: Now You Can Watch the Lectures

in Current Affairs, Politics | April 5th, 2017

NOTE: As of July 22, we updat­ed this post to include the videos from the class ses­sions. Watch the playlist of lec­tures above.

I have my doubts about whether we should call reg­u­lar acts of civic duty “resis­tance,” rather than Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-pro­tect­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic free­doms.  Yes­ter­day we remem­bered Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. on the 49th anniver­sary of his assas­si­na­tion (and the 50th anniver­sary of his speech oppos­ing the Viet­nam War). As King and count­less oth­er civ­il rights and anti-war cam­paign­ers have demonstrated—some at the cost of their lives—civil dis­obe­di­ence is very often required and moral­ly jus­ti­fied when legal appeals for jus­tice fail. But for bet­ter or worse, “The Resis­tance” has become a catch-all media term for a loose and very often frac­tious col­lec­tion of main­stream Democ­rats, pro­gres­sives, and rad­i­cals of all stripes, whose tac­tics range from polite phone lob­by­ing to brawl­ing with white suprema­cists in the streets.

Mil­lions of peo­ple who for­mer­ly had lit­tle to no involve­ment in pol­i­tics have thrown them­selves into activism, and vet­er­an orga­niz­ers have been over­whelmed with new recruits. Just as quick­ly, those orga­niz­ers have met the chal­lenge by dis­sem­i­nat­ing guides for lob­by­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives, run­ning for office, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in more direct forms of action.

Every move­ment has its res­i­dent schol­ars and edu­ca­tors, whether they be eru­dite laypeo­ple, pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics, or enter­pris­ing col­lege stu­dents. A group from the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, “pro­gres­sive stu­dents,” writes CNN, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment, begin today what they’re call­ing “Resis­tance School,” a “4‑week course in anti-Trump activism… open to peo­ple across the coun­try and the world.” (You can watch the video from the course above.)

At their site, the stu­dents bill “Resis­tance School” as a series of “prac­ti­cal skills for tak­ing back Amer­i­ca” and open their online syl­labus with a quote spu­ri­ous­ly attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son: “When injus­tice becomes law, resis­tance becomes duty.” It’s pos­si­ble that who­ev­er said it had blood­i­er things in mind. Resis­tance School sticks to peace­ful means, with four ses­sions that teach, in order, “How to Com­mu­ni­cate our Val­ues in Polit­i­cal Advo­ca­cy,” “How to Mobi­lize and Orga­nize our Com­mu­ni­ties,” “How to Struc­ture and Build Capac­i­ty for Action,” and “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” Instruc­tors are drawn from the ranks of acad­e­mia, labor orga­niz­ing, and the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, and you can stream the ses­sions on the school’s site or on Face­book, or attend in per­son.

The Resis­tance School is sure to attract crit­i­cism, not only from the expect­ed sources but from more anti-estab­lish­ment fac­tions on the left. But that may be unlike­ly to deter the more than 10,000 peo­ple who have reg­is­tered for the first class. Orga­niz­ers have encour­aged peo­ple to attend in groups, and cur­rent­ly have about 3,000 groups enrolled. “Some are com­ing with groups of 700 peo­ple,” says co-founder Shanoor Seer­vai, “some are small­er groups, potlucks, gath­er­ing in people’s kitchens.”

Ser­vaai and fel­low Kennedy School stu­dents have been tak­en aback and are now, writes CNN, “grap­pling with ques­tions of scale.” How, they won­der, will such large num­bers of peo­ple coor­di­nate; how to mea­sure the impact of the pro­gram?.… ques­tions, per­haps, they will resolve by the fourth ses­sion, “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” But they’re cer­tain­ly not alone in try­ing to steer a mas­sive surge of new inter­est in activism and elec­toral pol­i­tics. As the mil­lions now plan­ning and par­tic­i­pat­ing in civ­il actions across the coun­try attest, peo­ple have begun to take to heart sen­ti­ments recent­ly expressed by orga­niz­er Alice Mar­shall: “If we wait for some great leader to save us we are lost. We have to save our­selves.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence,” a Call for Amer­i­cans to Take Action

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Watch The March, the Mas­ter­ful, Dig­i­tal­ly Restored Doc­u­men­tary on The Great March on Wash­ing­ton

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

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An Animated Introduction to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and How He Used Semiotics to Decode Popular Culture

in Current Affairs, Philosophy, Politics | April 4th, 2017

In 1979, French the­o­rist Jean-François Lyotard declared the end of all “grand narratives”—every “the­o­ry or intel­lec­tu­al sys­tem,” as Blackwell’s dic­tio­nary defines the term, “which attempts to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion of human expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge.” The announce­ment arrived with all the rhetor­i­cal bom­bast of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead,” sweep­ing not only the­ol­o­gy into the dust­bin but also over­ar­ch­ing sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries, Freudi­an psy­chol­o­gy, Marx­ism, and every oth­er “total­iz­ing” expla­na­tion. But as Lyotard him­self explained in his book The Post­mod­ern Con­di­tion, the loss of uni­ver­sal coherence—or the illu­sion of coherence—had tak­en decades, a “tran­si­tion,” he wrote, “under way since at least the end of the 1950s.”

We might date the onset of Post­mod­ernism and the end of “mas­ter nar­ra­tives” even earlier—to the dev­as­ta­tion at the end of World War II and the appear­ance of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialec­tic of Enlight­en­ment and of Roland Barthes’ slim vol­ume Mytholo­gies, a col­lec­tion of essays writ­ten between 1954 and 56 in which the French lit­er­ary the­o­rist and cul­tur­al crit­ic put to work his under­stand­ing of Fer­di­nand de Saussure’s semi­otics.

As a result of read­ing the Swiss lin­guist, Barthes wrote in a pref­ace to the 1970 edi­tion of his book, he had “acquired the con­vic­tion that by treat­ing ‘col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions’ as a sign-sys­tems, one might hope to go fur­ther than the pious show of unmask­ing them and account in detail for the mys­ti­fi­ca­tion which trans­forms petit-bour­geois cul­ture into a uni­ver­sal nature.”

While gen­er­al­ly lumped into the cat­e­go­ry of “struc­tural­ist” thinkers, as opposed to “post-struc­tural­ists” like Lyotard, Barthes nonethe­less paved the way for a par­tic­u­lar­ly French mis­trust of “petit-bour­geois cul­ture” and its pop­ulist spec­ta­cles and all-know­ing talk­ing heads. He was an oppo­nent of total­iz­ing nar­ra­tives just as he was “an unre­lent­ing oppo­nent of French impe­ri­al­ism,” writes Richard Brody at The New York­er. Like Adorno and many oth­er post-war Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als, Barthes riffed on Marx’s notion of “false consciousness”—the men­tal fog pro­duced by dog­mat­ic edu­ca­tion, mass media, and pop­u­lar culture—and applied the idea relent­less­ly to his analy­sis of the post-indus­tri­al West.

“Barthes’s work on myths,” writes Andrew Robin­son at Cease­fire Mag­a­zine, “pre­fig­ures dis­course-analy­sis in media stud­ies.” He direct­ed his focus to “cer­tain insid­i­ous myths… par­tic­u­lar­ly typ­i­cal of right-wing pop­ulism and of the tabloid press.” Barthes though of pop­ulist mythol­o­gy as a “meta­lan­guage” that “removes his­to­ry from lan­guage,” mak­ing “par­tic­u­lar signs appear nat­ur­al, eter­nal, absolute, or frozen” and trans­form­ing “his­to­ry into nature.” Through its nor­mal­iza­tion, we lose sight of the arti­fice of cable news, for exam­ple, and take for grant­ed its for­mat­ting as a uni­ver­sal stan­dard for high seri­ous­ness and cred­i­bil­i­ty (as in the por­ten­tous sig­ni­fi­ca­tion of “Break­ing News”), even when we know we’re being lied to.

The Al Jazeera video at the top of the post asks us to con­sid­er the “rhetor­i­cal motifs” of such media, which con­struct “the biggest myth of all: that what we are watch­ing is unmedi­at­ed real­i­ty.” The obser­va­tion may seem ele­men­tary, but Barthes sought to go fur­ther than “the pious show of unmask­ing,” as he wrote. He “would have seen,” the video’s nar­ra­tor says, “the TV screen as a cul­tur­al text, and he would have unveiled its myths,” as he did the myths prof­fered by wrestling, adver­tis­ing, pop­u­lar film and nov­els, tourism, pho­tog­ra­phy, din­ing, and oth­er seem­ing­ly mun­dane pop­u­lar phe­nom­e­na.

The video above from edu­ca­tion­al com­pa­ny Macat offers a more for­mal sum­ma­ry of Barthes’ Mytholo­gies. The French crit­ic and semi­oti­cian made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to lit­er­ary and crit­i­cal the­o­ry, demonstrating—with the wide-rang­ing wit and eru­di­tion of his human­ist coun­try­man Michel de Mon­taigne—how “dom­i­nant ide­olo­gies suc­cess­ful­ly present them­selves as sim­ply the way the world should be.” Look­ing back on his book over twen­ty years lat­er, after the events in Paris of May 1968, Barthes remarked that the need for “ide­o­log­i­cal crit­i­cism” had been “again made bru­tal­ly evi­dent.” Indeed, we have ample rea­son to think that, over six­ty years since Barthes pub­lished his clas­sic analy­sis, the need for a rig­or­ous­ly crit­i­cal view of mass media, adver­tis­ing, and polit­i­cal spec­ta­cle has become more press­ing than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Pré­pa­ra­tion du roman, in French (1978–80)

Hear the Writ­ing of French The­o­rists Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Ken­neth Gold­smith

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Edward Said’s Ground­break­ing Book Ori­en­tal­ism

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

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