He’s not wrong about the therapeutic benefits of group singing. Ditto the imperative to resist gathering publicly, or even in the homes of extended family and close friends, until this crisis is in the rear view.
Choir! Choir! Choir!, an ongoing community sing that’s attained global renown thanks to its frequent tours, charitable work, and the support of such starry personages as Patti Smith and David Byrne, has had to put the kibosh on live group events. (Check out their 2014 singalong of Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” above, for a taste of the proceedings.)
With everyone staying home, founders Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman quickly implemented a digital work around, inviting fans and first-timers alike to weekly online sing-ins.
Their next Social Distan-Sing-Along is coming up this Saturday, April 4th at 3pm EDT, featuring a campfire-themed playlist:
“The Weight”
“Blowin’ In The Wind”
“Our House”
“Leaving On A Jet Plane”
“Redemption Song”
“Talkin Bout A Revolution”
“Dust In The Wind”
“Cats In The Cradle”
“Wild World”
(Sadly, no “Titanic,” but perhaps that one’s more summer camp than campfire, and these days, it’s probably best to sidestep any number, no matter how silly, that springs from mass casualties…)
Participants are instructed to print a file of the song lyrics in advance and show up to the digital campfire (live streaming on YouTube or Facebook) with a couple of devices—enough to follow along with Adilman and Goldman, while simultaneously Zooming in any friends you’ve pre-arranged to sing with.
(With 1000s attending, one of Choir! Choir! Choir!’s usual joys—lifting one’s voice with a vast chorus of mostly strangers—is a logistical and technological impossibility.)
Participants are also encouraged to share footage of themselves singing along, using the hashtag #NeverStopSinging—though we remind our non-performance-oriented readers that this is merely a suggestion.
Choir! Choir! Choir in isolation may well attract shower Sinatras who’d never dream of opening their mouths at an in-person event.
It’s a golden opportunity for the vocally shy to become part of one of the biggest choirs in history, secure in the knowledge that the only people to hear them croaking away will be the cat, the dog, any human co-inhabitants… and, oh dear, what about neighbors in the immediate vicinity?
Don’t worry about the neighbors. In fact, prick up your ears—you may hear them singing the exact same tunes.
To get you in the mood, here are some of our favorites from Choir! Choir! Choir!’s classic playlist:
I shouldn’t have to tell you that Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, released fifty years ago this month, is a groundbreaking record. The funk-jazz-psych-rock masterpiece has been handed that award in “best of” lists for half a century. “Bitches Brew is NOT LIKE OTHER records of its time, or any other time,” Rick Frystak announced emphatically on the Amoeba Records blog last year, on the 50th anniversary of the album’s 1969 “hatching” onstage and in the studio. How could it be otherwise?
Davis “gave his band very little instruction” about what to do, bassist and Jazz Night in America host Christian McBride tells NPR’s Audie Cornish. “Miles might come in with sheet music with, like, four bars. And then you just, do what you do.”
Or as guitarist John McLaughlin remembers it, in the clip above from The Miles Davis Story, “I don’t think even Miles had a clear idea of what he wanted to do. But he was a man of such impeccable intuition that the moment that thing happened, he knew it. He said, ‘that’s it.’”
“What got recorded was the process,” says bassist Dave Holland, of figuring out, for example, how to make three keyboards at once work. Author and Miles Davis scholar Paul Tingen tones down the idea that the band made it all up on the spot. “Three of the pieces had already been broken in during live concerts,” he writes, such as the live clip of “Bitches Brew” in Copenhagen, 1969, above. And many of the musicians did get to rehearse before the studio sessions.
But during much of the album’s making, Miles “brought in these musical sketches that nobody had seen,” Davis himself says, and the band, featuring 13 musicians in total, found their way. Tingen writes:
On the third day the rhythm section consisted of as many as 11 players: three keyboardists, electric guitar, two basses, four drummers/percussionists and a bass clarinet. Miles had pulled out the stops in his search for a heavier bottom end.
The album’s heaviness, Davis’ tape echo, and McLaughlin’s squealing, distorted guitar turned off many jazzheads. “A lot of people felt that he was an artistic traitor,” McBride explains. “But I think that there were a number of college kids who were listening to progressive rock [and] soul music who absolutely loved this record.” Davis was booked to open for the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, and the Steve Miller Band. A new generation was turned on to jazz almost overnight.
After Bitches Brew, jazz kept fusing with rock instrumentation and overdrive, “from Chick Corea with Return to Forever and Wayne Shorter with Weather Report to Herbie Hancock with The Headhunters”—and, of course, McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. As Coltrane’s experimental 60s records had done, Davis’ bedrock fusion album freed rock from its formulas, giving it space to spread out and explore. Even Radiohead cited it as an influence on their groundbreaking 1997 Ok Computer. “It was building something up and watching it fall apart,” says Thom Yorke, “that’s the beauty of it.”
The album’s initial rejection in jazz circles didn’t last, as anyone familiar with the music’s direction knows. Davis determined its course in the 70s (as cover artist Mati Karwein determined its look). “I’m not sure if jazz ever got unplugged,” says McBride, and influential contemporary jazz fusionists like Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, and The Comet is Coming prove his point. Fifty years ago, the ground was broken for experimental electric jazz, and musicians are still building on Miles’ Bitches Brew intuitions.
Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and the now-rampaging COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events. As the coronavirus has spread through the English-speaking world over the past month, pandemic-themed reading lists have appeared in all manner of outlets: Time, PBS, the Hollywood Reporter, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Haaretz, Vulture, Electric Literature, and others besides.
As mankind’s oldest deadly foe, disease has provided themes to literature since literature’s very invention. In the European canon, no such work is more venerable than The Decameron, written by Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio in the late 1340s and early 1350s. “His protagonists, seven women and three men, retreat to a villa outside Florence to avoid the pandemic,” writes TheGuardian’s Lois Beckett, referring to the bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century. “There, isolated for two weeks, they pass the time by telling each other stories” — and “lively, bizarre, and often very filthy stories” at that — “with a different theme for each day.”
A later outbreak of the bubonic plague in London inspired Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe to write the A Journal of the Plague Year. “Set in 1655 and published in 1722, the novel was likely based, in part, on the journals of the author’s uncle,” writes the Globe and Mail’s Alec Scott. Defoe’s diarist “speaks of bodies piling up in mass graves, of sudden deaths and unlikely recoveries from the brink, and also blames those from elsewhere for the outbreak.” A Journal of the Plague Year appears on these reading lists as often as Albert Camus’ The Plague, previously featured here on Open Culture. “Camus’ famous work about the inhabitants of an Algerian town who are stricken by the bubonic plague was published back in 1947,” writes PBS’ Courtney Vinopal, “but it has struck a chord with readers today living through the coronavirus.”
Of novels published in the past decade, none has been selected as a must-read in coronavirus quarantine as often as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. “After a swine flu pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population, a group of musicians and actors travel around newly formed settlements to keep their art alive,” says Time. “Mandel showcases the impact of the pandemic on all of their lives,” weaving together “characters’ perspectives from across the planet and over several decades to explore how humanity can fall apart and then, somehow, come back together.” Ling Ma’s darkly satirical Severancealso makes a strong showing: Electric Literature describes it as “a pandemic-zombie-dystopian-novel, but it’s also a relatable millennial coming-of-age story and an intelligent critique of exploitative capitalism, mindless consumerism, and the drudgery of bullshit jobs.”
Since a well-balanced reading diet (and those of us stuck at home for weeks on end have given much thought to balanced diets) requires both fiction and nonfiction, several of these lists also include works of scholarship, history, and journalism on the real epidemics that have inspired all this literature. Take Richard Preston’s bestsellerThe Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, which Gregory Eaves at Medium calls “a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their ‘crashes’ into the human race.” For an episode of history more comparable to the coronavirus, there’s John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, “a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Used to be that Dolly Parton was relegated to the country music community–well loved, adored, but hemmed in by her genre. Certainly Gen X’ers like myself didn’t take her too seriously, and having a theme park named after you in Tennessee? Not too cool.
Yet, as we have wandered back into the wretched, burning plains of modern life and found that, yes, Mister Rogers was a good person all along, we have also made space for Dolly Parton. She is a good person, and she is also therefore a Good Person.
Starting today, April 2, 2020, Dolly Parton will join us all in quarantine by way of the Internet to read us bedtime stories. She will be starting with The Little Engine That Could (see below), the classic tale of determination by Watty Piper. And listen, Gen X’ers, this isn’t for you! This is for your kids! (But okay yes, it’s also for you. It’s for all of you who have taken on the role of parent, teacher, entertainer, psychologist, and social worker without any increase in pay during these hard times. You just might be asleep before your kids once Dolly starts reading. I might just join you if I can find a spare blankie.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has been the force behind all this, a non-profit that promotes literacy and parent-child reading by sending a book every month to a child, from their birth till age five. It started in Parton’s home county in the mid-‘80s but now reaches 1,546,000+ children not just in the United States, but in Canada, Australia, the UK and the Republic of Ireland, according to her website.
The Little Engine That Could is a great kick off to a series of weekly bedtime stories. Do you think you can get through this? Just repeat to yourself: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Richard Feynman wasn’t just an “ordinary genius.” He was, according to mathematician Mark Kac “in his taxonomy of the two types of geniuses,” a “magician” and “a champion of scientific knowledge so effective and so beloved that he has generated an entire canon of personal mythology,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings. Many a Feynman anecdote comes from Feynman himself, who burnished his popular image with two bestselling autobiographies. His stories about his life in science are extraordinary, and true, including one he tells the first seminar he gave at Princeton in 1939, attended by Wolfgang Pauli, John von Neumann, and Albert Einstein.
“Einstein,” Feynman writes in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, “appreciated that things might be different from what his theory stated; he was very tolerant of other ideas.” The young upstart had many other ideas. As biographer James Gleick writes, Feynman was “nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty three… there may now have been no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science.” He had yet to complete his dissertation and would take a break from his doctoral studies to work on the Manhattan Project in 1941.
Then, in 1942, Feynman submitted his thesis, Principles of least action in quantum mechanics, supervised John Archibald Wheeler, with whom Feynman shares the name of an electrodynamic theorem. Published for the first time in 2005 by World Scientific, “its original motive,” notes the publisher, “was to quantize the classical action-at-a-distance electrodynamics”—partly in response to the challenges posed to his early lectures. In order to do this, says Toby, host of the video above, “he’ll need to come up with his own formulation of quantum mechanics, and he does this by first coming up with a new formulation in classical mechanics,” which he must apply to quantum mechanics. “This turns out to be a bit of a challenge.”
Feynman himself found it insurmountable. “I never solved it,” he writes in Surely You’re Joking, “a quantum theory of half-advanced, half-retarded potentials—and I worked on it for years.” But his “field-less electrodynamics” possessed a “stupendous efficiency,” argues physicist Olivier Darrigol, that “appeared like magic to most of his competitors.” The value of this early work, says Toby, lies not in its ability to solve the problems it raises, but to come up with “a new way to approach things”—a method of continual searching that served him his entire career. He may have discarded many of the ideas in the thesis, but his “magical” thinking would nonetheless lead to later massive breakthroughs like Feynman diagrams.
Why has a children’s toy become a brand attached to virtually every media type, partnering with the most ubiquitous franchises, and serving as a pastime for many adult hobbyists who will gut you if you call LEGO a “children’s toy.”
Brian Hirt (our resident AFOL, i.e. adult fan of LEGO) talks with co-hosts Erica Spyres and Mark Linsenmayer about creative play vs. following the printed directions, building purists vs. anthropomorphizers, LEGO qua corporate overlord, the LEGO films and competitive building TV show, and more.
South by Southwest, one of America’s biggest cultural events, won’t happen this year. The cause, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic, its own status as an event unprecedented in our age evidenced by the fact that South by Southwest has never in its 33-year history been canceled before. When SXSW, as it’s now known, launched in Austin, Texas back in 1987, it did so purely as a music festival; cinema came in 1994, when it became the “SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference.” Since then quite a few movies have launched from Austin into international renown, including Jeffrey Blitz’s spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War thriller The Hurt Locker, and the entire genre of “mumblecore.”
Spare a thought, then, for the filmmakers with work accepted into SXSW 2020 — or better yet, spare some time to watch their films online. While the festival’s organizers figure out whether and how to reschedule, e‑mail newsletter service Mailchimp and independent film company Oscilloscope Laboratories “have created a digital home for this incredible slate of short films, so you can watch them from wherever you are.”
That slate includes selections from subcategories such as animation, documentary, the “preview of the next filmmaking generation” offered by the work of Texas high-school filmmakers, and even the beloved “midnighters,” officially described as “bite-sized bits for all of your sex, gore, and hilarity cravings.”
One such midnighter, a piece of domestic horror by Janina Gavankar and Russo Schelling called Stucco, appears at the top of the post. You’ll find it on this Youtube playlist of short official selections from SXSW 2020, which also includes Zoe and Hanh, Kim Tran’s examination of “girls, boys, and mothers,” a “triangle of tension since… forever,” and Charlie Tyrell’s Broken Orchestra, a documentary on a Philadelphia community’s effort to breathe life into a troubled public-school music program. There isn’t much overlap between this playlist and the many shorts available to watch free on Mailchimp’s site, so if you want to discover the filmmakers you would have at Austin this year — including the makers of Grand Jury Prize winners No Crying at the Dinner Table, Regret, Just Hold On, and Wish Upon a Snowman — head over there and have your own private SXSW Film Festival.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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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Disease modeling as a science has come into its own lately, for heartbreakingly obvious reasons. What may not be so obvious to those of us who aren’t scientists is just how critical data can be in changing the course of events in an outbreak. Virus outbreaks may be “acts of God” or acts of unregulated black markets and agribusinesses, but in either case, statistical models can show, concretely, how collective human activity can save lives—and show what happens when people don’t act together.
For example, epidemiologists and biostatisticians have shown in detail how social distancing led to a “decline in the proportion of influenza deaths,” one study concludes, during the 1918 flu pandemic. The same researchers also saw evidence in their models that showed “public risk perception could be lowered” when these practices worked effectively, leading people think they could resume business as usual. But “less social distancing could eventually induce another epidemic wave.”
To say that it’s a challenge to stay inside and wait out COVID-19 indefinitely may be a gross understatement, but hunkering down may save our lives. No one can say what will happen, but as for how and why it happens, well, “that is math, not prophecy,” writes Harry Stevens at The Washington Post. “The virus can be slowed,” if people continue “avoiding public spaces and generally limiting their movement.” Let’s take a look at how with the model above. We must note that the video above does not model COVID-19 specifically, but a offers a detailed look at how a hypothetical epidemic spreads.
Created by YouTuber 3Blue1Brown, the modeling in the top video draws from a variety of sources, including Stevens’ interactive models of a hypothetical disease he calls “simulitis.” Another simulator whose work contributed to the video, Kevin Simler, has also explained the spread of disease with interactive models that enable us to visualize difficult-to-grasp epidemiological concepts, since “exponential growth is really, really hard for our human brains to understand” in the abstract, says YouTube physics explainer Minute Physics in the short, animated video above.
Deaths multiply faster than the media can report, and whatever totals we come across are hopelessly outdated by the time we read them, an emotional and intellectual barrage. So how can we know if we’re “winning or losing” (to use the not-particularly-helpful war metaphor) the COVID-19 fight? Here too, the current data on its previous progress in other countries can help plot the course of the disease in the U.S. and elsewhere, and allow scientists and policy-makers to make reasonable inferences about how to stop exponential growth.
But none of these models show the kind of granularity that doctors, nurses, and public health professionals must deal with in a real pandemic. “Simulitis is not covid-19, and these simulations vastly oversimplify the complexity of real life,” Stevens admits. Super-complicating risk factors like age, race, disability, and access to insurance and resources aren’t represented here. And there may be no way to model whatever the government is doing.
But the data models show us what has worked and what hasn’t, both in the past and in the recent present, and they have become very accessible thanks to the internet (and open source journals on platforms like PLOS). For a longer, in-depth explanation of the current pandemic’s exponential spread, see the lecture by epidemiologist Nicholas Jewell above from the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI).
It may not sway people who actively ignore math, but disease modeling can guide the merely uninformed to a much better understanding of what’s happening, and better decisions about how to respond under the circumstances.
Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight,” the Band’s most beloved song, has the quality of Dylan’s impressionistic narratives. Elliptical vignettes that seem to make very little sense at first listen, with a chorus that cuts right to the heart of the human predicament. “Robertson admits in his autobiography,” notes Patrick Doyle at Rolling Stone, “that he struggled to articulate to producer John Simon what the song was even about.” An artist needn’t understand a creation for it to resonate with listeners.
A read of the “The Weight”’s lyrics make its poignant themes evident—each stanza introduces characters who illustrate some sorrow or small kindness. The chorus offers what so many people seem to crave these days: a promise of rest from ceaseless toil, freedom from constant transactions, a community that shoulders everyone’s burdens…. “It’s almost like it’s good medicine,” Robertson told Doyle, “and it’s so suitable right now.” He refers specifically to the song’s revival in a dominant musical form of our isolation days—the online sing-along.
Though its lyrics aren’t nearly as easy to remember as, say, “Lean on Me,” Robertson’s classic, especially the big harmonies of its chorus (which everyone knows by heart), is ideal for big ensembles like the globe-spanning collection assembled by Playing for Change, “a group dedicated to ‘opening up how people see the world through the lens of music and art.” The group’s producers, Doyle writes, “recently spent two years filming artists around the world, from Japan to Bahrain to Los Angeles, performing the song,” with Ringo Starr on drums and Robertson on rhythm guitar. They began on the 50th anniversary of the song’s release.
The performances they captured are flawless, and mixed together seamlessly. If you want to know how this was achieved, watch the short behind the scenes video above with producer Sebastian Robertson, who happens to be Robbie’s son. He starts by praising the stellar contributions of Larkin Poe, two sisters whose rootsy country rock updates the Allman Brothers for the 21st century. But there are no slouches in the bunch (don’t be intimated out of your own group sing-alongs by the talent on display here). The song resonates in a way that connects, as “The Weight”’s chorus connects its non-sequitur stanzas, many disparate stories and voices.
Robertson was thrilled with the final product. “There’s a guy on a sitar!” he enthuses. “There’s a guy playing an oud, one of my favorite instruments.” The song suggests there’s “something spiritual, magical, unsuspecting” that can come from times of darkness, and that we’d all feel a whole lot better if we learned to take care of each other. The Playing for Change version “screams of unity,” he says, “and I hope it spreads.”
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