Buzz Aldrin and Thomas Dolby Geek Out and Sing “She Blinded Me With Science”

in Comedy, Music, Science | June 6th, 2013

Buzz Aldrin is maybe the coolest ex-astro­naut alive, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Sto­ry Mus­grave. Both of these guys are forg­ing ahead with life at the age when less­er humans pack it in. At 77, Mus­grave has a five-year-old son and plans to go back into space soon (as a tourist); 83-year-old Aldrin is devel­op­ing a new sci-fi series based on his 1996 nov­el Encounter with Tiber. Cool, right? Just maybe don’t ask Buzz to dance to ‘80s syn­th­pop. He does have a great sense of humor, though.

Watch Aldrin duet with Thomas Dol­by on “She Blind­ed Me With Sci­ence” above. Buzz gets to shout “Sci­ence!” and bop back and forth like your grand­fa­ther rock­ing out at your wed­ding recep­tion. It’s cute. The per­for­mance hap­pened dur­ing a day­long Smith­son­ian con­fer­ence called “The Future is Here.” Aldrin was one of the four­teen fea­tured speak­ers who deliv­ered “nar­ra­tive talks that focused on both great tri­umphs and future inno­va­tions in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Moon Dis­as­ter That Wasn’t: Nixon’s Speech In Case Apol­lo 11 Failed to Return

Live: Watch NASA’s Cov­er­age of Aster­oid As It Buzzes By Earth

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

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Neil Young Busts a Music Store for Selling a Bootleg CSNY Album (1971)

in Music | June 6th, 2013

Griz­zled grand­dad of rock Neil Young has railed against so-called “lossy” dig­i­tal formats—our cur­rent stan­dard of con­sumer audio—for at least a cou­ple of years now, promis­ing to replace Mp3s with his own high-end dig­i­tal ser­vice and play­er. He even ref­er­ences con­cerns about dig­i­tal music qual­i­ty on the alter­nate­ly cranky and wist­ful end­less jam open­ing track “Driftin’ Back,” from his most recent album, Psy­che­del­ic Pills.

His advo­ca­cy is admirable, giv­en the dis­mal sound of so much dig­i­tal music these days. I sup­pose it takes a fogey like Young—who remem­bers what records sound­ed like in the Gold­en Age of analog—to care about the decline of audio qual­i­ty. Giv­en Young’s dis­may over dis­pos­able dig­i­tal for­mats, one might assume he’d take a hard stance against one of their biggest dri­vers: music pira­cy. Instead, Young has gone on record say­ing

It does­n’t affect me because I look at the inter­net as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. […] Pira­cy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around. […] That’s the radio. If you real­ly want to hear it, let’s make it avail­able, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 per­cent of it.

This posi­tion makes a cer­tain amount of sense. Mp3s, like broad­cast audio, are cheap sim­u­lacra of mas­ter recordings—useful as pro­mo­tion­al tools. Those who care deeply about sound qual­i­ty should be will­ing to pay for it in the form of loss­less dig­i­tal audio, CD, or vinyl. Lis­ten­ers nei­ther pay for tra­di­tion­al radio nor for stolen Mp3s.

That dif­fer­ence may explain why Young expressed a very dif­fer­ent view of pira­cy forty-two years ago. Let’s drift back to 1971, when Young found boot­legged vinyl copies of Dylan and CSNY albums at a record store (above). In the first few min­utes, Young mean­ders, the cam­era fol­low­ing. But skip ahead to 3:30 and watch him dis­cov­er the bootlegs and con­front the clerk, who has no idea who he is. The clerk stam­mers and stut­ters, Neil demands answers and then dra­mat­i­cal­ly walks out with the CSNY boot­leg album, forc­ing the clerk to pull him back in and call a high­er-up. Then Neil makes a case for his musi­cal prop­er­ty. (All while The Bea­t­les’ Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour plays in the back­ground.)

It’s a pret­ty amaz­ing exchange that shows how invest­ed young Neil Young was in man­ag­ing the prod­ucts of his labor. He’s not so young and hun­gry now, the indus­try has under­gone some seis­mic shifts, but he’s still fight­ing for con­trol over his sound. And he has good rea­son to. Psy­che­del­ic Pills is an instant clas­sic, as endear­ing as Neil in ’71. Check him out below in a live per­for­mance that year for the BBC.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Busk­ing in Glas­gow, 1976: The Sto­ry Behind the Footage

‘The Nee­dle and the Dam­age Done’: Neil Young Plays Two Songs on The John­ny Cash Show, 1971

Free: Lis­ten to Dave Grohl’s Sound­track for New Film Cel­e­brat­ing the Days of Ana­log Record­ing

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

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The Outspoken Ayn Rand Interviewed by Mike Wallace (1959)

in Philosophy, Television | June 6th, 2013

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured Alain de Bot­ton’s tele­vi­sion broad­cast on the phi­los­o­phy of Friedrich Niet­zsche. Today, we fea­ture anoth­er, ear­li­er tele­vi­sion broad­cast on a much more recent­ly active philoso­pher: Mike Wal­lace’s 1959 inter­view of Ayn Rand, writer and founder of the school of thought known as Objec­tivism. But should we real­ly call Rand, who achieved most of her fame with nov­els like The Foun­tain­head and Atlas Shrugged, a philoso­pher? Most of us come to know her through her fic­tion, and many of us form our opin­ions of her based on the divi­sive, cap­i­tal­ism-lov­ing, reli­gion-hat­ing pub­lic per­sona she care­ful­ly craft­ed. Just as Niet­zsche had his ideas about how indi­vid­ual human beings could real­ize their poten­tial by endur­ing hard­ship, Rand has hers, all to do with using applied rea­son to pur­sue one’s own inter­ests.

Main­stream, CBS-watch­ing Amer­i­ca got quite an intro­duc­tion to this and oth­er tenets of Objec­tivism from this install­ment in what Mike Wal­lace calls a “gallery of col­or­ful peo­ple.” The inter­view­er, in the allot­ted half-hour, probes as many Ran­di­an prin­ci­ples as pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly those against altru­ism and self-sac­ri­fice. “What’s wrong with lov­ing your fel­low man?” Wal­lace asks, and Rand responds with argu­ments the likes of which view­ers may nev­er have heard before: “When you are asked to love every­body indis­crim­i­nate­ly, that is to love peo­ple with­out any stan­dard, to love them regard­less of whether they have any val­ue or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.” Does Ayn Rand still offer the brac­ing cure for a rud­der­less, mealy-mouthed Amer­i­ca which has for­got­ten what’s what? Or does her phi­los­o­phy ulti­mate­ly turn out to be too sim­ple — too sim­ple to engage with, and too sim­ple to improve our soci­ety? The debate con­tin­ues today, with no sign of res­o­lu­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand’s Phi­los­o­phy and Her Resur­gence in 2012: A Quick Primer by Stan­ford His­to­ri­an Jen­nifer Burns

Ayn Rand Talks Athe­ism with Phil Don­ahue

The Ayn Rand Guide to Romance

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

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

in Architecture, Art, Design | June 5th, 2013

UK’s Open Uni­ver­si­ty has devel­oped a fun way to mar­ket their design cours­es: a series of six short ani­ma­tions called “Design in a Nut­shell” that briefly sur­vey impor­tant move­ments in the arts and architecture—from the late-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Goth­ic Revival to late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Post­mo­d­er­mism. While the for­mer looked far into the past, seek­ing to pre­serve tra­di­tion, the lat­ter looked every­where, glee­ful­ly dis­man­tling, recy­cling, and recom­bin­ing frag­ment­ed and irrecov­er­able his­to­ries.

Between the two extremes, three inter-relat­ed post-WWI move­ments sought to make peace with the indus­tri­al present and design for a har­mo­nious future. The first one fea­tured, the Bauhaus move­ment (above)—founded in Weimar, Ger­many by Wal­ter Gropius in 1919—integrated the fine arts and indus­tri­al design into one school. Famous teach­ers includ­ed artists Paul Klee and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky. Bauhaus designs per­me­ate the larg­er move­ment known as Mod­ernism.

The ani­ma­tion above gives us the briefest gist of Mod­ernism, a sweep­ing umbrel­la term for a host of rad­i­cal ‑isms in the arts, lit­er­a­ture, design, and architecture—impressionism, cubism, fau­vism, futur­ism, bru­tal­ism, sur­re­al­ism…. Euro­pean and Amer­i­can artists turned their back on the old-world past after the mass slaugh­ter of World War One. Not all Mod­ernists found solace in the break­down of the old order. Writ­ers like T.S. Eliot found much rea­son to despair. But design­ers like Eero Saari­nen and the hus­band and wife team Charles and Ray Eames embraced indus­tri­al tech­niques and mass pro­duc­tion to cre­ate for­ward-look­ing, min­i­mal­ist fur­ni­ture and build­ings that still define the way we live now.

The episode above, “Amer­i­can Indus­tri­al Design,” describes how indus­tri­al design­ers made inno­v­a­tive use of new mate­ri­als and pro­duc­tion meth­ods to cre­ate sleek, stream­lined prod­ucts that rein­vig­o­rat­ed the Amer­i­can mar­ket in the midst of the Great Depres­sion. Design­ers like Nor­man Bel Ged­des cre­at­ed a futur­is­tic land­scape that inspired faith in tech­no­log­i­cal progress, even as much of the coun­try still lived on strug­gling farms.

Bel Ged­des’ most notable achieve­ment was his design of the “Futu­ra­ma” ride (which gave the ani­mat­ed show its name) at the 1939–40 World’s Fair. Part of the Gen­er­al Motors exhib­it, “Futu­ra­ma” whisked rid­ers past detailed minia­tures of “the world of tomor­row.” The opti­mism of some Mod­ernist design­ers would be shat­tered by the tech­no­log­i­cal hor­rors of World War Two. But for a few brief decades, the future looked entire­ly man­age­able with the right designs, tech­niques, mate­ri­als, and savvy mar­ket­ing.

You can find all six videos appear­ing in the Design in a Nut­shell series on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

Charles & Ray Eames’ Icon­ic Film Pow­ers of Ten (1977) and the Less­er-Known Pro­to­type from 1968

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

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

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Philip Roth Reads “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher & Mentor” (A Free Download Benefiting a Public Library)

in Audio Books, Life, Literature | June 5th, 2013

roth reading

Philip Roth announced his retire­ment from the writ­ing life last fall, a few months shy of his 80th birth­day. Now, on a com­put­er in his New York City apart­ment, hangs a Post-It note that reads, “The strug­gle with writ­ing is over.” There won’t be anoth­er nov­el. There won’t be a 29th.

Admir­ers of Philip Roth may have to set­tle for the occa­sion­al odd pub­li­ca­tion, like the eulo­gy Roth pub­lished in the New York Times in April, when his high school teacher and long-time friend passed away. His name was Bob Lowen­stein. He taught at Wee­quahic High School in Newark, New Jer­sey, and Roth came to know him like this:

Bob was my home­room teacher. This meant that I saw him first thing in the morn­ing, every sin­gle day of the school year. I was nev­er to take a lan­guage course with him — I had Made­moi­selle Glucks­man for French and Señori­ta Baleroso for Span­ish — but I didn’t for­get him. Who at Wee­quahic did? Con­se­quent­ly, when it came his turn to be mauled in Congress’s anti-Com­mu­nist cru­sade of the 1940s and 1950s, I fol­lowed his fate as best I could in the sto­ries that I had my par­ents clip from the Newark news­pa­pers and mail to me.

I don’t remem­ber how we came togeth­er again around 1990, about 40 years after I’d grad­u­at­ed Wee­quahic High. I was back in Amer­i­ca from hav­ing lived large­ly abroad for some 12 years, and either I wrote to him about some­thing or he wrote to me about some­thing and we met for lunch at Zel­da and his house in West Orange. In the spir­it of Bob Lowen­stein, I will put the mat­ter in plain lan­guage, direct­ly as I can: I believe we fell in love with each oth­er.

In recent weeks, Roth vis­it­ed the head­quar­ters of Audible.com — also based in Newark, New Jer­sey — and record­ed an audio ver­sion of his trib­ute. You can down­load it for free at Audi­ble (or hear an excerpt below), and, for every down­load, Audi­ble will donate $1 to the Newark Pub­lic Library, cap­ping at $25,000. The down­load requires reg­is­ter­ing with Audi­ble.

Sep­a­rate­ly, if you want to down­load a nov­el by Philip Roth, you can always head over to Audible.com and reg­is­ter for a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load any audio­book for free. Then, when the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion (as I do — I love the ser­vice), or can­cel it, and still keep the audio book. And, by the way, when­ev­er some­one signs up for a free tri­al, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture. Also find more great reads in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

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Does Math Objectively Exist, or Is It a Human Creation? A New PBS Video Explores a Timeless Question

in Math, Philosophy | June 5th, 2013

In a famous scene from Boswell’s Life of Samuel John­son, the biog­ra­ph­er and his sub­ject come to dis­cuss the bizarre the­o­ries of Bish­op Berke­ley, who posit­ed that every­thing is immaterial—nothing has any real exis­tence; it’s all just ide­al con­cepts held togeth­er by the mind of God. If God should lose his mind or fall asleep or die, every­thing would fall to pieces or cease to exist. Boswell insists there’s no way to refute the idea. John­son, kick­ing a large stone with such force that his foot rebounds, cries, “I refute it thus.”

Johnson’s lit­tle demon­stra­tion doesn’t actu­al­ly refute Berkeley’s rad­i­cal ide­al­ism. It’s a conun­drum still with us, like Plato’s Euthy­phro stumper, which asks whether the rules gov­ern­ing human behav­ior exist inde­pen­dent­ly of the gods, who sim­ply enforce them, or whether the gods make the rules accord­ing to their whims. In oth­er words, is moral­i­ty objec­tive or sub­jec­tive?

A sim­i­lar prob­lem occurs when we con­sid­er the exis­tence of the rules that gov­ern phys­i­cal laws—the rules of math­e­mat­ics. Where does math come from? Does it exist inde­pen­dent­ly of human (or oth­er) minds, or is it a human cre­ation? Do we dis­cov­er math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems or do we invent them?

The ques­tion has engen­dered two posi­tions: math­e­mat­i­cal real­ism, which states that math exists whether we do or not, and that there is math out there we don’t know yet, and maybe nev­er can. This posi­tion may require a degree of faith, since, “unlike all of the oth­er sci­ences, math lacks an empir­i­cal com­po­nent.” You can’t phys­i­cal­ly observe it hap­pen­ing. Anti-real­ists, on the oth­er hand, argue that math is a lan­guage, a fic­tion, a “rig­or­ous aes­thet­ic” that allows us to mod­el reg­u­lar­i­ties in the uni­verse that don’t objec­tive­ly exist. This seems like the kind of rel­a­tivism that tends to piss off sci­en­tists. But no one can refute either idea… yet. The video above, from PBS’s Idea Chan­nel, asks us to con­sid­er the var­i­ous dimen­sions of this fas­ci­nat­ing and irre­solv­able ques­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Math in Good Will Hunt­ing is Easy: How Do You Like Them Apples?

Incred­i­ble Men­tal Math Gym­nas­tics on “Count­down”

Math Doo­dling

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

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The Philosophy of Nietzsche: An Introduction by Alain de Botton

in Philosophy | June 5th, 2013

“To those human beings who are of any con­cern to me, I wish suf­fer­ing, des­o­la­tion, sick­ness, ill treat­ment, indig­ni­ties, pro­found self-con­tempt, the tor­ture of self-mis­trust, and the wretched­ness of the van­quished.” Thus wrote for­bid­ding­ly mus­ta­chioed Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zsche, artic­u­lat­ing his coun­ter­in­tu­itive view of suf­fer­ing as some­thing desir­able. But sure­ly the Niet­zschean way could nev­er lead to an enjoy­able life? On the con­trary, explains the tele­vi­sion series Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness. “Friedrich Niet­zsche believed that all vari­eties of suf­fer­ing and fail­ure were to be wel­comed by any­one seek­ing hap­pi­ness. We should regard them as tough chal­lenges to be over­come in the same way as a climber might tack­le a moun­tain.” Thus speaks the show’s host, pop­u­lar­iz­er of philoso­phers from Socrates to Seneca, Epi­cu­rus to Schopen­hauer, Alain de Bot­ton.

Niet­zsche per­haps put more com­pelling­ly than any writer before or since the notion of “no pain, no gain.” De Bot­ton, a phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­ast eager to look for the­o­ry in prac­tice, vis­its a ded­i­cat­ed, sac­ri­fice-mak­ing dancer from the Eng­lish Nation­al Bal­let, the com­bi­na­tion of whose acquired phys­i­cal grace and painful his­to­ry of toe­nail bruis­es make the argu­ment in a vis­cer­al way.

He then chats with a drinks dis­trib­u­tor fresh off the fail­ure of his first busi­ness ven­ture and already work­ing hard on his sec­ond. Accord­ing to our host, Niet­zsche “did­n’t think that hav­ing failed was, in itself, enough. All lives have fail­ures in them. What makes some lives ful­filled as well is the man­ner in which fail­ure has been met.” Or, in the sim­pler words of the dis­trib­u­tor him­self, “How would you be able to judge your suc­cess if you haven’t failed?”

Although this broad­cast works as an intro­duc­tion, we don’t rec­om­mend you lim­it your learn­ing about a philoso­pher with a volu­mi­nous body of writ­ten work to videos alone. In our col­lec­tion of free eBooks, you can down­load eight of Niet­zsche’s vol­umes in a vari­ety of for­mats: Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Homer and Clas­si­cal Philol­o­gy, Human, All Too Human, The Anti Christ, The Case Against Wag­n­er, The Gay Sci­ence, and Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.

You can watch more episodes in Alain de Bot­ton’s series, A Guide to Hap­pi­ness here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

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

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Watch Idem Paris, David Lynch’s Short Film on the Art of Making Lithographs

in Art, Film | June 4th, 2013

Locat­ed in the Mont­par­nasse sec­tion of Paris, the Idem stu­dio was orig­i­nal­ly built by the print­er Emile Dufrenoy in 1880, as a space to house his lith­o­graph­ic press­es. Mov­ing into the next cen­tu­ry, var­i­ous own­ers pre­served the art of lith­o­g­ra­phy, pro­duc­ing lith­o­graphs by the likes of Matisse, Picas­so, Miro, Braque, Cha­gall, Léger, Cocteau, and oth­ers. Today, the tra­di­tion con­tin­ues. And, amaz­ing­ly, the ate­lier still uses 19th cen­tu­ry flatbed machines, pow­ered by a gas steam boil­er, to keep the tra­di­tion of lith­o­g­ra­phy alive. While on a recent trip to Paris, the sur­re­al­ist film­mak­er David Lynch paid a vis­it to Idem and fell in love with what he saw, so much so that he pro­duced a short doc­u­men­tary high­light­ing Idem’s artis­tic process. As a pref­ace to the film, Lynch wrote on the Idem web site:

Hervé Chandès from the Fon­da­tion Carti­er brought me over to Idem and intro­duced me to Patrice For­est. I see this incred­i­ble place, and I get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work there. And this was like a dream! It just opened up this brand-new world of the lith­o­g­ra­phy and the mag­ic of lith­o­g­ra­phy, the mag­ic of the stones. And it was a great, great thing! This thing of lith­o­g­ra­phy, this chan­nel of lith­o­g­ra­phy opened up and a bunch of ideas came flow­ing out and it led to about a hun­dred lith­o­graphs. I will say that Idem print­ing stu­dio has a unique, very spe­cial mood, and it is so con­ducive to cre­at­ing. Patrice has the great­est atti­tude for all the artists and he cre­ates this space of free­dom and this joy of cre­at­ing. It’s so beau­ti­ful! And I think the place is very important—in oth­er wors, the same stone could be moved to anoth­er place, and I think that the work that comes out would be dif­fer­ent. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of the stone, the place, the peo­ple, this mood, and out comes these cer­tain ideas.

You can find the short film, Idem Paris, list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 525 Free Movies Online. You can also find a primer explain­ing the basics of lith­o­g­ra­phy here.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

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Watch Animations of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Stories “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”

in Animation, Film, Literature | June 4th, 2013

Long before Oscar Wilde became a lit­er­ary celebri­ty for his most famous work—The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray and plays like Salome and The Impor­tance of Being Earnest—he was a bit of a real­i­ty star. Wilde trav­eled the UK and the Unit­ed States (as por­trayed by Stephen Fry here) as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar phi­los­o­phy of “aes­theti­cism,” an urbane nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry move­ment against Vic­to­ri­an prud­ery and the dry moral cal­cu­lus of util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its asso­ci­a­tions with indus­tri­al cul­ture. Aes­thetes such as Wilde sought to ele­vate good taste and the pur­suit of beau­ty alone as a guid­ing prin­ci­ple of art and life. Wilde expressed the ideas in sev­er­al well-known epi­grams, such as the wry­ly redun­dant, “In all unim­por­tant mat­ters, style, not sin­cer­i­ty, is the essen­tial. In all impor­tant mat­ters, style, not sin­cer­i­ty, is the essen­tial.”

Wilde was ridiculed for the many of the same rea­sons he was feted—his flam­boy­ant pub­lic per­sona and devo­tion to aes­theti­cism, which satirists car­i­ca­tured as a kind of deca­dent navel-gaz­ing. But care­ful read­ers of Wilde’s diverse canon of poet­ry, prose, and dra­ma will know of his crit­i­cal looks at solip­sism and super­fi­cial­i­ty. Some of his best works as a moral­ist are his children’s sto­ries, such as the 1888 book of fairy sto­ries The Hap­py Prince and Oth­er Tales. In the title sto­ry, a prince is trans­formed into a glit­ter­ing stat­ue on a pedestal high above a city, where res­i­dents look up to him as an exam­ple of human per­fec­tion. But the prince, we learn, spends his time weep­ing in com­pas­sion for the pover­ty and suf­fer­ing he sees below him. Made in 1974 by Cana­di­an com­pa­ny Pot­ter­ton Pro­duc­tions, and fea­tur­ing the voic­es of Christo­pher Plum­mer and Gly­nis Johns, the ani­mat­ed short film above is a faith­ful ren­der­ing of Wilde’s sto­ry. You can find it added to our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online, under Ani­ma­tion.

In 1971, Pot­ter­ton pro­duced an ear­li­er ani­mat­ed short film based on anoth­er sto­ry from the Hap­py Prince col­lec­tion. A Chris­t­ian alle­go­ry, The Self­ish Giant (above) tells the tale of a cranky giant who walls off his gar­den to keep chil­dren out. The plight of one lit­tle boy changes the giant’s dis­po­si­tion. The film was nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar for best ani­mat­ed short in 1972. Pot­ter­ton also pro­duced a short film of Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s “The Lit­tle Mer­maid,” and stu­dio head Ger­ald Pot­ter­ton would go on in 1981 to direct the cult ston­er film Heavy Met­al. An inter­est­ing irony of the Wilde ani­ma­tions above: both films, and a third called The Remark­able Rock­et, were co-pro­duced with Reader’s Digest, the mag­a­zine that rep­re­sents the hard-head­ed prac­ti­cal­i­ty and sen­ti­men­tal, sex­u­al­ly repres­sive Vic­to­ri­an val­ues (in Amer­i­can dress) that Wilde dis­dained.

If you can’t get enough of Wilde’s mov­ing fairy tales, you won’t want to miss Stephen Fry read­ing “The Hap­py Prince” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Oscar Wilde Offers Prac­ti­cal Advice on the Writ­ing Life in a New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Let­ter from 1890

Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Sec­tion of The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol (1897)

“Jer­sey Shore” in the Style of Oscar Wilde

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

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Free: The Great Gatsby & Other Major Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald

in Literature | June 3rd, 2013

In some pop­u­lar imag­in­ings, F. Scott Fitzger­ald becomes so asso­ci­at­ed with the jazz age friv­o­li­ty he keen­ly observed, and the social climb­ing of his best-known char­ac­ter, that much of his pre- and post-Gats­by writ­ing gets occlud­ed. While Fitzger­ald may have been an alco­holic spend­thrift who pre­ferred the fin­er things and those who wore them, he was also a very dis­ci­plined and seri­ous writer, espe­cial­ly of short sto­ries, which were his sole source of income through­out much of the ‘20s. Fitzgerald’s des­per­ate­ly pro­lif­ic out­put in the form means that there are a few hasti­ly-com­posed pieces, some light­weight, whim­si­cal fan­tasies, but all of the work is beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten and a joy to read.

The fan­tasies (which include the now-famous “The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton”) reveal quite a bit about Fitzgerald’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with arti­fice. He was a very well-read, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly deep, thinker who approached lit­er­a­ture through fairy tales—Orientalist fables, adven­ture sto­ries, Edmund Spencer’s allegories—and his ear­ly sto­ries mix a boy­ish imag­i­na­tion with the feigned world­li­ness of a Prince­ton under­grad­u­ate. The most sub­stan­tial of those ear­ly sto­ries “May Day,” almost a novel­la, opens in a post-World War One New York City described as a fairy king­dom in the throes of mar­ket-mad­ness:

So gai­ly and nois­i­ly were the peace and pros­per­i­ty impend­ing hymned by the scribes and poets of the con­quer­ing peo­ple that more and more spenders had gath­ered from the provinces to drink the wine of excite­ment, and faster and faster did the mer­chants dis­pose of their trin­kets and slip­pers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trin­kets and more slip­pers in order that they might give in barter what was demand­ed of them. Some even of them flung up their hands help­less­ly, shout­ing:

“Alas! I have no more slip­pers! and alas! I have no more trin­kets! May heav­en help me for I know not what I shall do!”

This excerpt from the open­ing sec­tion of “May Day” reads like Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen, but with the sly satir­i­cal under­tone of one of Oscar Wilde’s children’s sto­ries. The sto­ry then shifts to a real­ist mode, intro­duc­ing the famil­iar Fitzger­ald themes of extrav­a­gant wealth and privilege—and their pre­car­i­ous nature. Some of the char­ac­ters embody­ing these traits, a group of Yale grad­u­ates, soon show the moral fail­ings exem­pli­fied by Gats­by’s Buchanans: cal­lous indif­fer­ence to the needs of oth­ers and vain self-regard.

The main plot of “May Day” goes to a very dark place, deal­ing with the kind of upper-class despair Bret Eas­t­on Ellis trades in, with a doomed main char­ac­ter quite obvi­ous­ly a stand-in for Fitzger­ald him­self. A some­what clum­sy sub­plot reach­es at times for a com­ic foil but also sounds a grim note. The story—with its almost vicious depic­tion of class division—is a minor work with major ambi­tion and a com­plex inter­weav­ing of Fitzgerald’s major themes.

“May Day”—first pub­lished in The Smart Set mag­a­zine in 1920 and lat­er appear­ing in the col­lec­tion Tales of the Jazz Age—draws from events of the Cleve­land May Day riots of 1919 and some New York expe­ri­ences in Fitzgerald’s life. Once asked, how­ev­er, if the sto­ry was auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, the author replied, “there are no good biogra­phies of nov­el­ists because they are so many peo­ple.”

You can encounter all of the var­i­ous peo­ple Fitzger­ald car­ried with­in him in the sto­ries and nov­els we’ve gath­ered in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. (Find them below.) And to learn more about Fitzger­ald, in rela­tion to two oth­er 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can mas­ters, you might want to check out Wai Chee Dimock’s Open Yale online course, “Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er,” avail­able on YouTube and iTunes. It oth­er­wise appears in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Cours­es Online.

eBooks

Audio

  • Flap­pers and Philoso­phers
  • The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton
  • Tales of the Jazz Age
  • The Great Gats­by
  • This Side of Par­adise

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fitzger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

F. Scott Fitzger­ald in Drag (1916)

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

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

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Listen as Albert Einstein Calls for Peace and Social Justice in 1945

in History, Life, Physics | June 3rd, 2013

einstein justice

Here is a rare record­ing of Albert Ein­stein read­ing his speech on the imme­di­ate after­math of World War II, “The War is Won, But the Peace is Not”:

The speech was deliv­ered on Decem­ber 10, 1945, at the Fifth Nobel Anniver­sary Din­ner at the Hotel Astor in New York. Only four months ear­li­er, the Unit­ed States had dropped atom­ic bombs on civil­ian pop­u­la­tions in the Japan­ese cities of Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki. Ein­stein did­n’t work on the atom­ic bomb, but in 1939 he had signed a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt urg­ing him to pro­cure ura­ni­um and accel­er­ate nuclear research. In his speech, Ein­stein draws a com­par­i­son between con­tem­po­rary physi­cists and the founder of the Nobel Prize, who invent­ed dyna­mite.

Physi­cists find them­selves in a posi­tion not unlike that of Alfred Nobel him­self. Alfred Nobel invent­ed the most pow­er­ful explo­sive ever known up to his time, a means of destruc­tion par excel­lence. In order to atone for this, in order to relieve his human con­science, he insti­tut­ed his awards for the pro­mo­tion of peace and for achieve­ments of peace. Today, the physi­cists who par­tic­i­pat­ed in forg­ing the most for­mi­da­ble and dan­ger­ous weapon of all times are harassed by an equal feel­ing of respon­si­bil­i­ty, not to say guilt. And we can­not desist from warn­ing, and warn­ing again, we can­not and should not slack­en in our efforts to make the nations of the world, and espe­cial­ly their gov­ern­ments, aware of the unspeak­able dis­as­ter they are cer­tain to pro­voke unless they change their atti­tude toward each oth­er and toward the task of shap­ing the future.

But Ein­stein says he is trou­bled by what he sees in the months fol­low­ing World War II.

The war is won, but the peace is not. The great pow­ers, unit­ed in fight­ing, are now divid­ed over the peace set­tle­ments. The world was promised free­dom from fear, but in fact fear has increased tremen­dous­ly since the ter­mi­na­tion of the war. The world was promised free­dom from want, but large parts of the world are faced with star­va­tion while oth­ers are liv­ing in abun­dance. The nations were promised lib­er­a­tion and jus­tice. But we have wit­nessed, and are wit­ness­ing even now, the sad spec­ta­cle of “lib­er­at­ing” armies fir­ing into pop­u­la­tions who want their inde­pen­dence and social equal­i­ty, and sup­port­ing in those coun­tries, by force of arms, such par­ties and per­son­al­i­ties as appear to be most suit­ed to serve vest­ed inter­ests. Ter­ri­to­r­i­al ques­tions and argu­ments of pow­er, obso­lete though they are, still pre­vail over the essen­tial demands of com­mon wel­fare and jus­tice.

Ein­stein then goes on to talk about a spe­cif­ic case: the plight of his own peo­ple, the Euro­pean Jews.

While in Europe ter­ri­to­ries are being dis­trib­uted with­out any qualms about the wish­es of the peo­ple con­cerned, the remain­ders of Euro­pean Jew­ry, one-fifth of its pre­war pop­u­la­tion, are again denied access to their haven in Pales­tine and left to hunger and cold and per­sist­ing hos­til­i­ty. There is no coun­try, even today, that would be will­ing or able to offer them a place where they could live in peace and secu­ri­ty. And the fact that many of them are still kept in the degrad­ing con­di­tions of con­cen­tra­tion camps by the Allies gives suf­fi­cient evi­dence of the shame­ful­ness and hope­less­ness of the sit­u­a­tion.

Ein­stein con­cludes by call­ing for “a rad­i­cal change in our whole atti­tude, in the entire polit­i­cal con­cept.” With­out doing so, he says, “human civ­i­liza­tion will be doomed.”

Note: The full text of “The War is Won, But the Peace is Not” is avail­able in the Ein­stein antholo­gies Out of My Lat­er Years and Ideas and Opin­ions.

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