David Bowie and Lou Reed Perform Live Together for the First and Last Time: 1972 and 1997

in Music | October 27th, 2014

I dis­cov­ered one of my favorite pieces of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia—a full page ad for the 1983 album from David Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­dust con­cert film—at a flea mar­ket. It’s a nice lit­tle piece of his­to­ry, but a lit­tle bit mis­lead­ing to con­sumers at the time, since it says, “fea­tur­ing the sin­gle ‘White Light/White Heat.’” As every­one knows, “White Light/White Heat” is not a Bowie sin­gle, but a Lou Reed song, one of his many odes to hero­in as lead singer of the Vel­vet Under­ground.

But what­ev­er the admen had in mind in pro­mot­ing this track over Bowie’s many orig­i­nal hits, the star him­self has nev­er been shy about acknowl­edg­ing his debts. When it comes to Zig­gy, “the song­writer who most influ­enced” the glam rock alien is cer­tain­ly Reed, as Bowie him­self says in this 1977 inter­view.

Today, on the one-year anniver­sary of Reed’s death, we revis­it their cre­ative and per­son­al rela­tion­ship, a mutu­al admi­ra­tion that spanned more than four decades. Not only did Bowie cov­er Reed’s songs and pro­duce his 1972 solo album Trans­former, but he wrote 1971’s “Queen Bitch” as a trib­ute to Reed and the Vel­vets. In 1997, Bowie and Reed took the stage togeth­er to per­form the song. The occa­sion was Bowie’s 50th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion at Madi­son Square Gar­den, and the all-star line­up that night includ­ed Frank Black, Dave Grohl, Son­ic Youth, Robert Smith, and Bil­ly Cor­gan (see the full setlist here). But Reed’s appear­ance was the most excit­ing, and in hind­sight, most poignant. At the top of the post, see the two old friends play “Queen Bitch,” just above, they do “White Light/White Heat,” and below, Reed’s clas­sic “Wait­ing for the Man” (they also played Reed’s 1989 “Dirty Boule­vard” togeth­er).

At the time, Bowie was at “some­what of a low point” in his career, writes Rolling Stone, though poised for a come­back with the upcom­ing sin­gle (and Trent Reznor-star­ring video) “I’m Afraid of Amer­i­cans,” which he played with Son­ic Youth that night. But the first time he and Reed shared the stage, in 1972, Bowie was rid­ing high in all his Zig­gy Star­dust glo­ry and reg­u­lar­ly cov­er­ing Vel­vet Under­ground songs on tour. That year, he brought Reed on stage in Lon­don for his “very, very first appear­ance on any stage in Eng­land.” Hear them do “White Light/White Heat” in some­what muf­fled live audio below. They also played “Wait­ing for the Man” and “Sweet Jane” togeth­er, which you can hear at the bot­tom of the post.

While Bowie seems to have tak­en every oppor­tu­ni­ty to lav­ish praise on his idol, Reed was a bit more under­stat­ed, though no less sin­cere, in his appre­ci­a­tion. In 2004, he told Rolling Stone, “We’re still friends after all these years. We go to the occa­sion­al art show and muse­um togeth­er, and I always like work­ing with him […] I saw him play here in New York on his last tour, and it was one of the great­est rock shows I’ve ever seen. At least as far as white peo­ple go. Seri­ous­ly.” Seri­ous­ly, Lou Reed, you are sore­ly missed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rock and Roll Heart, 1998 Doc­u­men­tary Retraces the Remark­able Career of Lou Reed

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

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

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Edward Snowden Explains Why He Blew the Whistle on the NSA in Video Interview with Lawrence Lessig

in Current Affairs, Law | October 27th, 2014

Most like­ly every­thing you know about Edward Snow­den’s unmask­ing of gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance pro­grams has come through an indi­rect source — mean­ing, you haven’t had the chance to learn about Snow­den’s moti­va­tions, thought process­es, goals, etc. from Snow­den him­self. Here’s a chance to change that.

In the video inter­view record­ed on Octo­ber 20th at Har­vard Law School, Lawrence Lessig spent an hour talk­ing with Snow­den on a Google Hang­out. Lessig, a law pro­fes­sor with dual inter­ests in keep­ing infor­ma­tion open and lim­it­ing gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion, was a nat­ur­al choice to con­duct the inter­view. How­ev­er, I would­n’t say that he gives Snow­den a soft inter­view. He asks some good ques­tions, which gives Snow­den the chance to spell out his think­ing — to explain the prob­lem he observed while work­ing in the NSA and how he went about address­ing it.

One thing that comes across is that Snow­den has thought things through. Snow­den might not have the cre­den­tials of the Har­vard Law stu­dents in the audi­ence — he got a GED and took a few com­mu­ni­ty col­lege cours­es, after all — but you get the sense that he could teach a pret­ty good Intro­duc­tion to Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment course, if not a thought-pro­vok­ing sem­i­nar on con­sti­tu­tion­al law. Regard­less of what posi­tion you take on Snow­den, it’s worth watch­ing this inter­view before you declare final judge­ment.

via Boing­Bo­ing

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On the Importance of the Creative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Others Explain its Essential Role

in Architecture, Art, Business, Creativity, Design | October 27th, 2014

Every project starts with a brief. 

From the layman’s per­spec­tive, the project above starts with a bit of self-mythol­o­giz­ing.

Bas­sett & Part­ners, the “award-win­ning, dis­rup­tive brand and design strat­e­gy firm” and mak­er of the video above, seems not to sub­scribe to TED-Ed’s prac­tice of edu­cat­ing view­ers from the get-go.

A cou­ple of min­utes in, I hit pause in order to do a lit­tle research on the word “brief.”

I’m famil­iar with male under­pants (though tech­ni­cal­ly those are plur­al, even if the gar­ment is sin­gu­lar).

I have the aver­age movie­go­ers han­dle on the mean­ing of legal briefs.

And now I know what the not­ed archi­tects, illus­tra­tor, design­er, and ad execs are talk­ing about above! If only they’d referred to it as an ele­va­tor pitch, I’d have been on board from the start. Of course, why would they? Only those of us who want to sound all Hol­ly­wood call it that.

What­ev­er you call it, it’s a con­cise state­ment that gets right to the heart of what you—or your project—are about. No his­to­ry. No cam­paign plans or cita­tions. Just a whole lot of pas­sion and truth tight­ly packed into a small ves­sel.

Archi­tect David Rock­well defines a brief as a short-form com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool from a client.

Art Direc­tor John Jay says its pur­pose is to inspire the cre­atives…

…with­out (as per ad exec John Boil­er) dic­tat­ing cre­ative terms. Of all the inter­vie­wees, the truck­er hat­ted Boil­er exudes the schmoozi­est, most off-putting Hol­ly­wood vibe. I’d rather do lunch with Frank Gehry. Does this make me guilty of com­par­ing apples to oranges, when direc­tor (and “dis­rup­tive brand and design” strate­gist) Tom Bas­sett lev­eled the play­ing field by giv­ing them equal time?

Per­haps if Boil­er had hum­bled him­self by shar­ing an expe­ri­ence as heart­break­ing as Gehry’s ill-fat­ed Eisen­how­er Memo­r­i­al. (Skip ahead to the 16:16 mark if you want to hear how out­side opin­ion can pound con­text, research, poet­ry, and many months of thought­ful work to a heap of rub­ble.)

I love Maira Kalman, but remain unclear as to whether she’s field­ing or sub­mit­ting briefs. If the lat­ter, how do those dif­fer from book pro­pos­als?

What if the emo­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty, and enthu­si­as­tic research that went into Nike’s 1996 Olympics ads result­ed in an equal­ly fierce cam­paign to end hunger in a coun­try with no Olympic teams?

What if the clien­t’s prob­lem was can­cer? Could the brief demand a cure? That sounds sim­ple.

Let us acknowl­edge that most grand scale visions require a fleet of under­lings to come to fruition. I won­der what plumbers and elec­tri­cians would make of see­ing their con­tri­bu­tions described in such poet­ic terms.  Nev­er under­es­ti­mate the pow­er of a sound­track.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

 

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Yoga in an X‑Ray Machine

in Animation | October 27th, 2014

Cour­tesy of Hybrid Med­ical Ani­ma­tions comes a high-tech “visu­al study/exploration of the body in motion.” The goal of the ani­ma­tion was to cre­ate a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of x‑rays, while also cap­tur­ing the beau­ty of var­i­ous yoga pos­es. Looks like they hit the mark on both accounts.

In cre­at­ing this 3D ani­ma­tion, no x‑rays were actu­al­ly used. No one was exposed to radi­a­tion in any way, shape or form. It’s all just ani­ma­tion — sophis­ti­cat­ed ani­ma­tion that some­how man­ages to show “prop­er bone den­si­ties and rep­re­sent actu­al bone mar­row inside each indi­vid­ual bone.” If you prac­tice yoga, you’ll cer­tain­ly rec­og­nize some of the pos­es in the clip.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

Watch a New Music Video Shot Entire­ly With­in an MRI Machine

What Hap­pens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitch­cock: The Neu­ro­science of Film

This is Your Brain on Sex and Reli­gion: Exper­i­ments in Neu­ro­science

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

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Stephen Colbert Reads Ray Bradbury Classic Sci-Fi Story “The Veldt”

in Literature, Sci Fi | October 27th, 2014

I rarely think back to mem­o­ries from that busy­work-inten­sive con­tain­ment unit known as Amer­i­can ele­men­tary school, but when I do, I usu­al­ly arrive at lis­ten­ing to a Ray Brad­bury sto­ry — some­thing about a far­away plan­et, some­thing about mon­soons, I can nev­er remem­ber which one — dur­ing read-aloud time. Even then, on some lev­el, I under­stood that the author of Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles (not that I yet had any idea at the time about books like Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles) wrote with the human voice in mind. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly the momen­tar­i­ly defa­mil­iar­ized voice of a teacher read­ing to a post-lunch class­room of ten-year-olds, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly the flaw­less­ly pro­nounc­ing and paus­ing, many-takes-record­ed-per-sen­tence voice of the pro­fes­sion­al audio­book nar­ra­tor (though Brad­bury’s work did pro­vide mate­r­i­al for a few pro­to-audio­books), but, per­haps, the voice of the mind. Of all Brad­bury’s tales we love to read aloud, few seem quite so effec­tive in this way as “The Veldt.”

The sto­ry first appeared, accord­ing to the web site of pub­lic radio sta­tion WNYC, in a 1950 Sat­ur­day Evening Post “with the title ‘The World the Chil­dren Made,’ which is a good descrip­tion of what goes on in this eerie tale.  It imag­ines the ‘mod­el home’ of the future, includ­ing a pro­gram­ma­ble nurs­ery that becomes the site of a pow­er strug­gle. [Fel­low spec­u­la­tive writer Neil] Gaiman says that Bradbury’s tale rais­es com­plex ques­tions: ‘Are our chil­dren our own?,’ and ‘What does tech­nol­o­gy do to them?’ ” Pub­lic Radio Inter­na­tion­al com­mis­sioned no less a speak­er than Col­bert Report and future Late Show host Stephen Col­bert — a satirist high­ly attuned to the ironies inher­ent in mankind’s visions of its own future — to read it for their “Select­ed Shorts” series, and you can hear the whole thing above.

Giv­en how much progress our pur­suit of total automa­tion and vir­tu­al stim­u­la­tion (and our par­al­lel desire to escape those con­di­tions) has made in the past 64 years, “The Veldt” has grown only more rel­e­vant. Pair it with “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Brad­bury’s oth­er famous­ly read-aloud­able sto­ry of the home of the 1950 future, for a rich­ly fun­ny and trou­bling dou­ble-fea­ture of the mind.

For anoth­er son­ic angle on the mate­r­i­al, see also our pre­vi­ous­ly-fea­tured radio adap­ta­tions of “There Will Come Soft Rains” on Dimen­son X and “The Veldt” on X Minus One — or you can hear Leonard Nimoy read both of them in the 1970s.)

Some of the read­ings list­ed above appear in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

X Minus One: More Clas­sic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Stephen Hawking Starts Posting on Facebook: Join His Quest to Explain What Makes the Universe Exist

in Astronomy, Physics | October 26th, 2014

hawking on fb

I have no idea whether there’s intel­li­gent life out there in the uni­verse. But we can at least con­firm that there’s a lit­tle intel­li­gent life on Face­book, see­ing that Stephen Hawk­ing, the world’s best known the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, began post­ing there yes­ter­day. His first sta­tus update reads:

I have always won­dered what makes the uni­verse exist. Time and space may for­ev­er be a mys­tery, but that has not stopped my pur­suit. Our con­nec­tions to one anoth­er have grown infi­nite­ly and now that I have the chance, I’m eager to share this jour­ney with you. Be curi­ous, I know I will for­ev­er be.

Wel­come, and thank you for vis­it­ing my Face­book Page. ‑SH

Join his offi­cial Face­book page here. And find/like the offi­cial Open Cul­ture page here, where we make it easy to share our dai­ly cul­tur­al posts with your fam­i­ly and friends.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

A Brief His­to­ry of Time: Errol Morris’s Film of Stephen Hawk­ing

Stephen Hawking’s Uni­verse: A Visu­al­iza­tion in Stars and Sound

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es

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Get the New 7‑Minute Workout on Your Mobile Device: A Free App from The New York Times

in Sports | October 26th, 2014

wellworkout_promoapp-videoSixteenByNine600

The New York Times writes: “Ever since [we] pub­lished the Sci­en­tif­ic 7‑Minute Work­out in May last year, read­ers have been writ­ing and tweet­ing their requests for an updat­ed, more advanced ver­sion. For them, the work­out became too easy or hum­drum, as tends to hap­pen when exer­cis­es are repeat­ed with­out vari­a­tion. So here it is: a new, more tech­ni­cal­ly demand­ing reg­i­men, one that requires a cou­ple of dumb­bells but still takes only sev­en min­utes.”

Accord­ing to the Times, these short, intense, effi­cient work­outs strength­en mus­cle groups through­out the upper body, low­er body and tor­so. And they may well “pro­duce greater gains than an hour or more of gen­tler exer­cise.” So if you don’t have a lot of free time.…

The Times has notably made the work­out avail­able as a free web app that you can access on your phone, tablet or oth­er mobile devices. The app “offers a step-by-step guide to both 7‑minute work­outs [the old and new ones], offer­ing ani­mat­ed illus­tra­tions of the exer­cis­es, as well as a timer and audio cues to help you get the most out of your sev­en min­utes.” Click here to access it.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

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Young Stanley Kubrick’s Noirish Pictures of Chicago, 1949

in Film, History, Photography | October 25th, 2014

Men, probably commuters, walking along a platform next to a train

When Stan­ley Kubrick was a mere high school stu­dent in April 1945, just after FDR died, he snapped a pic­ture of a news ven­dor framed on either side by posters announc­ing the president’s death. He was so excit­ed by the pic­ture that he skipped school to devel­op it and then marched right into the office of Look mag­a­zine. Pho­to edi­tor Helen O’Brian offered to buy the pho­to for $25. Dis­play­ing his trade­mark cock­i­ness, Kubrick told her that he want­ed to see what price he could get from The New York Dai­ly News. They only offered $10, so Kubrick went with Look. With­in a few months, at the age of 17, Kubrick became a staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the pub­li­ca­tion.

Below you can see some pho­tographs that Kubrick took in 1949 while on assign­ment in Chica­go. Using the same noirish high-con­trast, low-light look that marked his first three movies, he doc­u­ment­ed all dif­fer­ent stra­ta of soci­ety from floor traders, to lin­gerie mod­els, to meat pack­ers to impov­er­ished African-Amer­i­can fam­i­lies. Click  on the images to view them in a larg­er for­mat. Find a more exten­sive gallery of images here. To take a clos­er look at Kubrick­’s pho­tog­ra­phy, see the 2018 Taschen book Stan­ley Kubrick Pho­tographs: Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens and also Stan­ley Kubrick: Dra­ma & Shad­ows.

Men work­ing the floor at the Chica­go Board of Trade

Men working the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade

Lin­gerie mod­el, wear­ing a gir­dle and strap­less bra, smok­ing in an office; in the back­ground a woman sits at a desk

Lingerie model, wearing a girdle and strapless bra, smoking in an office; in the background a woman sits at a desk

Butch­er hold­ing slab of beef in a meat lock­er

Butcher holding slab of beef in a meat locker

African Amer­i­can moth­er and her four chil­dren in their ten­e­ment apart­ment

African American mother and her four children in their tenement apartment

Over­head view of the “L” ele­vat­ed rail­way

Overhead view of the "L" elevated railway in Chicago, Illinois

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize?

in English Language, Literature | October 24th, 2014

beowulf original
I was as sur­prised as most peo­ple are when I first heard the ancient lan­guage known as Old Eng­lish. It’s noth­ing like Shake­speare, nor even Chaucer, who wrote in a late Mid­dle Eng­lish that sounds strange enough to mod­ern ears. Old Eng­lish, the Eng­lish of Beowulf, is almost a for­eign tongue; close kin to Ger­man, with Latin, Norse, and Celtic influ­ence.

As you can hear in the Beowulf read­ing above from The Tele­graph, it’s a thick, con­so­nant-rich lan­guage that may put you in mind of J.R.R. Tolkien’s elvish. The lan­guage arrived in Briton—previously inhab­it­ed by Celtic speakers—sometime in the fifth cen­tu­ry, though whether the Anglo-Sax­on inva­sion was a hos­tile takeover by Ger­man­ic mer­ce­nar­ies or a slow pop­u­la­tion drift that intro­duced a new eth­nic­i­ty is a mat­ter of some dis­pute. Nev­er­the­less it’s obvi­ous from the read­ing above—and from texts in the lan­guage like this online edi­tion of Beowulf in its orig­i­nal tongue—that we would no more be able to speak to the Anglo-Sax­ons than we would to the Picts and Scots they con­quered.

So how is it that both the lan­guage we speak and its dis­tant ances­tor can both be called “Eng­lish”? Well, that is what its speak­ers called it. As the author of this excel­lent Old Eng­lish intro­duc­to­ry text­book writes, speak­ers of “Old Eng­lish,” “Mid­dle Eng­lish,” and “Mod­ern Eng­lish” are “them­selves mod­ern”; They “would have said, if asked, that the lan­guage they spoke was Eng­lish.” The changes in the lan­guage “took place grad­u­al­ly, over the cen­turies, and there nev­er was a time when peo­ple per­ceived their lan­guage as hav­ing bro­ken rad­i­cal­ly with the lan­guage spo­ken a gen­er­a­tion before.” And while “rel­a­tive­ly few Mod­ern Eng­lish words come from Old Eng­lish […] the words that do sur­vive are some of the most com­mon in the lan­guage, includ­ing almost all the ‘gram­mar words’ (arti­cles, pro­nouns, prepo­si­tions) and a great many words for every­day con­cepts.” You may notice a few of those dis­tant lin­guis­tic ances­tors in the Beowulf pas­sage accom­pa­ny­ing the read­ing above.

Beowulf is, of course, the old­est epic poem in Eng­lish, writ­ten some­time between the 8th and ear­ly 11th cen­tu­ry. It draws, how­ev­er, not from British sources but from Dan­ish myth, and is in fact set in Scan­di­navia. The title char­ac­ter, a hero of the Geats—or ancient Swedes—travels to Den­mark to offer his ser­vices to the king and defeat the mon­ster Gren­del (and his moth­er). The prod­uct of a war­rior cul­ture, the poem shares much in com­mon with the epics of Homer with its code of hon­or and praise of fight­ing prowess. And here see vocal­ist, harpist, and medieval schol­ar Ben­jamin Bag­by per­form the open­ing lines of the poem as its con­tem­po­rary audi­ence would have expe­ri­enced it—intoned by a bard with an Anglo-Sax­on harp. The mod­ern Eng­lish sub­ti­tles are a boon, but close your eyes for a moment and just lis­ten to the speech—see if you can pick out any words you rec­og­nize. Then, per­haps, you may wish to turn to Ford­ham University’s online trans­la­tion and find out what all that big talk in the pro­logue is about.

And for a very short course on the his­to­ry of Eng­lish, see this con­cise page and this ten-minute ani­mat­ed video from Open Uni­ver­si­ty.

The image above comes from the sole sur­viv­ing medieval man­u­script of Beowulf, which now resides at the British Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf

Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 Trans­la­tion of Beowulf Before It’s Final­ly Pub­lished Next Month

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

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

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Isaac Asimov Explains the Origins of Good Ideas & Creativity in Never-Before-Published Essay

in Creativity, Sci Fi | October 24th, 2014

Isaac_Asimov_on_Throne

“Isaac Asi­mov on Throne” by Rowe­na Mor­rill via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Where do ideas come from? The ques­tion has always had the poten­tial to plague any­one try­ing to do any­thing worth­while at any time in human his­to­ry. But Isaac Asi­mov, the mas­sive­ly pro­lif­ic and even more mas­sive­ly influ­en­tial writer of sci­ence fic­tion and sci­ence fact, had an answer. He even, in one 1959 essay, laid out a method, though we, the gen­er­al pub­lic, haven’t had the chance to read it until now. The MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review has just pub­lished his essay on cre­ativ­i­ty in full, while pro­vid­ing a few con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing remarks from the author’s friend Arthur Ober­may­er, a sci­en­tist who invit­ed Asi­mov on board an “out of the box” mis­sile-defense research project at an MIT spin­off called Allied Research Asso­ciates.

“He expressed his will­ing­ness and came to a few meet­ings,” remem­bers Ober­may­er, but “he even­tu­al­ly decid­ed not to con­tin­ue, because he did not want to have access to any secret clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion; it would lim­it his free­dom of expres­sion. Before he left, how­ev­er, he wrote this essay on cre­ativ­i­ty as his sin­gle for­mal input.” When Ober­may­er found it among his old files, he “rec­og­nized that its con­tents are as broad­ly rel­e­vant today as when [Asi­mov] wrote it” in 1959, describ­ing as they do “not only the cre­ative process and the nature of cre­ative peo­ple but also the kind of envi­ron­ment that pro­motes cre­ativ­i­ty.” Whether you write sci-fi nov­els or do mil­i­tary research, make a web series, or work on cur­ing Ebo­la, you can put Asi­mov’s meth­ods to use.

Asi­mov first inves­ti­gates the ori­gin of ideas by look­ing to The Ori­gin of Species. Or rather, he looks to what you find with­in it, “the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion by nat­ur­al selec­tion, inde­pen­dent­ly cre­at­ed by Charles Dar­win and Alfred Wal­lace,” two men who “both trav­eled to far places, observ­ing strange species of plants and ani­mals and the man­ner in which they var­ied from place to place,” both “keen­ly inter­est­ed in find­ing an expla­na­tion for this,” and both of whom “failed until each hap­pened to read Malthus’s ‘Essay on Pop­u­la­tion.’ ” He finds that “what is need­ed is not only peo­ple with a good back­ground in a par­tic­u­lar field, but also peo­ple capa­ble of mak­ing a con­nec­tion between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordi­nar­i­ly seem con­nect­ed.” Evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry seems obvi­ous only in ret­ro­spect, he con­tin­ues, as

The his­to­ry of human thought would make it seem that there is dif­fi­cul­ty in think­ing of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Mak­ing the cross-con­nec­tion requires a cer­tain dar­ing. It must, for any cross-con­nec­tion that does not require dar­ing is per­formed at once by many and devel­ops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corol­lary of an old idea.”

It is only after­ward that a new idea seems rea­son­able. To begin with, it usu­al­ly seems unrea­son­able. It seems the height of unrea­son to sup­pose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them mov­ing, and so on.

A per­son will­ing to fly in the face of rea­son, author­i­ty, and com­mon sense must be a per­son of con­sid­er­able self-assur­ance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccen­tric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A per­son eccen­tric in one respect is often eccen­tric in oth­ers.

Con­se­quent­ly, the per­son who is most like­ly to get new ideas is a per­son of good back­ground in the field of inter­est and one who is uncon­ven­tion­al in his habits. (To be a crack­pot is not, how­ev­er, enough in itself.)

Once you have the peo­ple you want, the next ques­tion is: Do you want to bring them togeth­er so that they may dis­cuss the prob­lem mutu­al­ly, or should you inform each of the prob­lem and allow them to work in iso­la­tion?

The essay puts forth an argu­ment for iso­la­tion (“Cre­ation is embar­rass­ing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hun­dred, ten thou­sand fool­ish ones, which you nat­u­ral­ly do not care to dis­play”) and a set of best prac­tices for group idea gen­er­a­tion, as imple­mentable in the Allied Research Asso­ciates of the 1950s as in any orga­ni­za­tion today. If you can’t trust Asi­mov on this sub­ject, I don’t know who you can trust, but con­sid­er sup­ple­ment­ing this new­found essay with Ze Frank’s the­mat­i­cal­ly relat­ed video “Brain Crack” (lin­guis­ti­cal­ly NSFW, though you can watch the PG ver­sion instead), which deals, in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty, with the ques­tion of where ideas come from:

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Louis CK Crashes Zach Galifianakis & Brad Pitt’s Very Awkward Interview

in Comedy, Film | October 23rd, 2014

Appar­ent­ly, the bad part about scor­ing an inter­view with the Pres­i­dent is it kind of makes you blasé for sit­ting down with any­body else. Not that Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis of Between Two Ferns deserved his tete-a-tete with Oba­ma, or for that mat­ter Bart Pit … Bradley Pitts … Brad Pitt, star of 2013’s 12 Years a Salve (sic).

(The Onion’s fic­tion­al “Out­side Scoop” enter­tain­ment colum­nist, Jack­ie Har­vey, has noth­ing on the almost-as-fic­tion­al Gal­i­fi­anakis when it comes to mur­der­ing names)

Yes, this inter­view­er is pet­ty, com­bat­ive, and utter­ly lack­ing in grace, but his inter­vie­wee, the celebri­ty who turns stone-faced and sullen almost imme­di­ate­ly is no prize either.

Everyone’s mis­er­able, even come­di­an Louis CK, whom Gal­i­fi­anakis sum­mons with a few bars of his pop­u­lar sitcom’s theme song. Moods seem on the verge of lift­ing when Gal­i­fi­anakis brings up Pitts’ star­ring role in “Ben­jamin But­tons,” but it doesn’t last. Inevitably, there are ref­er­ences to Pitt’s famous wife, as well as his ex, an ear­li­er Between Two Ferns guest. (She’s no Tila Tequi­la…)

This is a dif­fer­ent dynam­ic than the one Borat shared with cer­tain incred­u­lous, intel­li­gent sub­jects. It’s a giv­en that Pitt’s in on the joke. And it would seem that both gen­tle­men have some­thing they’d like to get across regard­ing the dirty busi­ness of celebri­ty inter­views.

Jour­nal­ist Jan­ice Turn­er, took a sim­i­lar posi­tion when she wrote of her night­mar­ish 2013 inter­view with actor Rhys Ifans for the Lon­don Times:

The game is you lis­ten polite­ly while they plug their film, bang on about their ‘method’, the bril­liance of their co-stars and direc­tors etc. Then in return you hope they will offer up — with­out you hav­ing to prod and pester like some celebri­ty stalk­er — the tini­est nugget of anec­dote, a shard of light upon their real selves.

Because they hate the game too, and par­tic­u­lar­ly since it is main­ly con­duct­ed in hotel suites, you feel as if you’re engaged in an odd form of pros­ti­tu­tion, one where it remains unclear who is the hook­er and who the john.

Her per­spec­tive brings a cer­tain puri­ty to the Gal­i­fi­anakis-Pitt Ferns stand-off. Cer­tain­ly, nei­ther of them is play­ing the game.

If you want to learn how to con­duct a hor­ri­ble inter­view, watch Gal­i­fi­anakis.

If you want tips on how to make it worse, watch Pitt.

And if you want to be a movie star, seek ways to laugh at your­self with­out break­ing char­ac­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Awkward/NSFW Inter­view with Nir­vana Pro­duc­er Steve Albi­ni (Plus B‑52 Front­man Fred Schnei­der)

Hear Bob Dylan’s Unedit­ed & Bewil­der­ing Inter­view With Nat Hentoff for Play­boy Mag­a­zine (1965)

The Sur­re­al Short Films of Louis C.K., 1993–1999

Watch Frank Zap­pa Play Michael Nesmith on The Mon­kees (1967)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the cre­ator of The Mermaid’s Legs, a trau­ma-filled Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen reboot play­ing this week in NYC. See it! And fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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