Bruce Hornsby Discusses His Adventurous Compositions and Collaborations on Nakedly Examined Music

Bruce Hornsby is best known for his first album The Way It Is (1986), but has come light years since then through 18+ albums, experimenting with different styles, playing over 100 shows with the Grateful Dead, and scoring numerous projects for Spike Lee. He’s won three Grammys and recorded with music royalty including Elton John, Ornette Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, etc.

On this episode of Nakedly Examined Music, host Mark Linsenmayer and Bruce discuss “Sidelines” (feat. Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend) from ‘Flicted (2022), “My Resolve” (feat. James Mercer of The Shins) from Non-Secure Connection (2020), and a new live version of “Shadow Hand” from the 25th Anniversary Edition of Spirit Trail. End song: “Cast-Off” (feat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver) from Absolute Zero (2019). Intro: “The Way It Is” (Live from Köln, 2019). Learn more at brucehornsby.com and bruuuce.com.

Here, of course, is the original “The Way It is.” Listen to the 2019 NYC Epicenters version in full. My favorite single from that first album was “Every Little Kiss.” An early tune recently featured prominently in the second season of the TV show The Bear is “The Show Goes On.”  You may or may not recall that Bruce co-wrote Don Henley’s hit “The End of the Innocence”; watch Bruce play that live with several jazz greats. Hear the original 1998 version of “Shadow Hand.” Bruce’s 2004 “Halcyon Days” features both Sting and Eric Clapton.

The track that Bruce co-wrote for Bon Iver’s album is “U (Man Like).” Watch the video for “Days Ahead,” another single from Bruce’s newest album ‘Flicted. Here’s the video for “Sidelines.” Watch a lyric video for “Cast-Off.” Watch Bruce and James Mercer performing “My Resolve” over the Internet during the pandemic.

Watch Bruce play piano with The Grateful Dead in 1991. Listen to Other Ones (Grateful Dead after Jerry Garcia’s death) play a classic Hornsby tune, “White-Wheeled Limousine,” live in 1998. His own version of that (from 1995’s Hot House), featured Pat Metheny and Béla Fleck. Watch him live in 2012 with Bob Weir and Branford Marsalis playing his tune “Standing on the Moon.”

Listen to Bruce on The Art of Longevity podcast. Here he is on Sodajerker. Bruce’s appearance on Ezra Koenig’s Time Crisis podcast is on #126, and you may be able to hear it with an Apple Music subscription.

Photo by Kat Fisher.

Nakedly Examined Music is a podcast hosted by Mark Linsenmayer, who also hosts The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast, Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, and Philosophy vs. Improv. He releases music under the name Mark Lint.

Sydney Sweeney Is a Nun Uncovering Dark Secrets in First Trailer for Horror Flick Immaculate

Emmy Award nominee and Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney is a nun uncovering dark secrets in the first trailer for the upcoming psychological horror movie, Immaculate. Released courtesy of Neon, Immaculate is due to be released in theaters later this year, and you can check out the new trailer below.

Jake Gyllenhaal Throws Down on Prime Video in First Road House Remake Trailer

Academy Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal shows "pain don't hurt" as he fights for himself, and later for justice, in the first trailer for the highly anticipated remake of Road House. Coming courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Amazon MGM Studios, the remake will take inspiration from the beloved 80s action movie of the same name, and follows a fighter who finds himself working as a bouncer (or cooler) at a roadhouse in the Florida Keys. Soon, he discovers that not everything is as it seems and must use his particular set of skills to put things right. You can check out the new trailer for Road House above.

The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi & Beyond

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Oliver Hermanus’ latest film Living transplants the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to postwar London. Apart from its own considerable merits, it has given viewers across the world reason to revisit the 1952 original, a standout work even in a golden decade of Japanese cinema — the decade The Cinema Cartography co-creator Lewis Bond (previously featured here for other explorations of Japanese cinema and animation) explains in the video above. In the nineteen-fifties, “concentrated within a single country were some of the greatest filmmakers to ever live, simultaneously producing their greatest works. The result was a complete decentralization of classic cinema as the world was exposed to its new troupe of masters.”

After World War II, the Japanese people were “left with the reality that they were an ethnically homogeneous and culturally unified unit that did not fit in with the new, democratic world.” The American military occupation “took control of the entire Japanese film industry from 1945 until 1952,” forcibly removing any image, theme, or line of dialogue thought liable stoke recidivist popular sentiment. With not just war movies but “feudal” period pieces off the table, the only viable genre was what scholars have since labeled shomingeki, the realistic cinema of common people in ordinary situations. Even there, the censors had their scissors out: on their orders, Masahiro Makino had to eliminate a shot of the potentially nationalist symbol of Mount Fuji; Yasujirō Ozu had to cut a line from Late Spring about Tokyo being full of bomb sites.

These rules loosened toward the end of the occupation. By 1951, Kurosawa could make a daring historical picture like Rashomon, and even have it (without his consent) go on to screen at the Venice Film Festival and win a Golden Lion, then an Academy Award. The West had acquired a taste for Japanese movies, and the Japanese film industry was only too happy to cater to it. The country’s five major studios “hired the best artists of the time and gave them the financial backing and creative freedom that they needed. The result was that the studios made a lot of money, the filmmakers created an abundance of masterpieces, and the golden age of Japanese cinema meant that people filled the theaters.”

The nineteen-fifties brought worldwide acclaim to a Mount Rushmore of Japanese auteurs. Kurosawa, who revived the samurai film, “did for cinema as a whole was what most filmmakers hope, at some point, to do”: bridging “the gap between one’s artistry and mainstream appeal.” Ugetsu director Kenji Mizoguchi looked on all reality — and especially women — with a transcendental gaze. “Although not as grandiose as Kurosawa, nor as spiritual as Mizoguchi, Ozu epitomizes a sentimentality that, perhaps, has not been as well achieved by any other filmmaker to this day.” Mikio Naruse, Masaki Kobayashi, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Hiroshi Inagaki: one could enjoy a rich cinematic life with only the works of Japanese filmmakers of the fifties. It shows us “the pinnacle of what cinema can achieve, and the standard we should continue to strive for,” as Bond’s puts it in his closing line, speaking over a shot from Ikiru.

Related content:

Essential Japanese Cinema: A Journey Through 50 of Japan’s Beautiful, Often Bizarre Films

How Did Akira Kurosawa Make Such Powerful & Enduring Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cinematic Genius

The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation

How One Simple Cut Reveals the Cinematic Genius of Yasujirō Ozu

A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from Early Japanese Cinema (1926)

Wes Anderson & Yasujirō Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

A Fan-Made Film Reconstructs an Entire Tom Waits Concert from His “Glitter and Doom Tour” (2008)

Everybody who’s been to a Tom Waits concert has stories to tell about it — no few of them heard straight from the mouth of Waits himself. The official live album for his 2008 Glitter and Doom tour actually devotes its entire second disc to “a selection of the comic bromides, strange musings, and unusual facts that Tom traditionally shares with his audience during the piano set,” with topics ranging from “the ritual of insects to the last dying breath of Henry Ford.” This after a first disc crafted from musical performances recorded in ten different cities, “from Paris to Birmingham; Tulsa to Milan; and Atlanta to Dublin.”

“Tom Waits — Glitter and Doom Concert Experience,” the fan video above, pulls off a similar feat of assemblage, but with a visual component as well. Its creator describes it as “a compilation of professional footage and fan films,” using “all the released soundboard audio that had footage to accompany it to make a concert film that should make a good experience of what it would have been like being in the audience.”

The resulting hour-and-three-quarters includes a few examples of Waits’ onstage oratory, and more importantly, such beloved numbers from his songbook as “Goin’ Out West,” Chocolate Jesus,” “Hold On”, and “Innocent When You Dream” — each one as much of a narrative of deepest, darkest Americana as his non-musical monologues.

“A trip through the world of Tom Waits can be disorienting,” writes NPR’s Robin Hilton (alongside a streamable recording of Waits’ July 5, 2008 show at Atlanta’s Fox Theater). “His ramshackle story-songs, with their creaky instrumentation and dusty poetry, usually leave listeners with more questions than answers, and his persona outside of his music revolves around a playful but guarded mix of fiction and reality.” To promote the Glitter and Doom tour, out came “a taped press conference, featuring Waits seated at a table of microphones, answering questions amid bursts of flashbulbs and murmurs” — all of which was soon revealed not to be what it seemed. But as Waits’ strangely captivating career demonstrates, the ambiguity between performance and reality is where it’s at.

via MetaFilter

Related content:

Stream All of Tom Waits’ Music in a 24 Hour Playlist: The Complete Discography

An Animated Tom Waits Talks About Laughing at Funerals & the Moles Under Stonehenge (1988)

Tom Waits’ Many Appearances on David Letterman, From 1983 to 2015

The Black Rider: A Theatrical Production by Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs & Robert Wilson (1990)

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

The Tom Waits Map: A Mapping of Every Place Waits Has Sung About, From L.A. to Africa’s Jungles

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

 

Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

For a variety of reasons, science fiction has long been regarded as a mostly male-oriented realm of literature. This is evidenced, in part, by the eagerness to celebrate particular works of sci-fi written by women, like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, or Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (uneasily though it fits within the boundaries of the genre). But those who prefer the early stuff can go all the way back to the mid-seventeenth century, where they’ll find Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, readable and downloadable in all its strange glory free online.

“The Blazing World was first published in 1666 and is often considered a forerunner to both science fiction and the utopian novel genres,” writes book blogger Eric Karl Anderson. “It’s a totally bonkers story of a woman who is stolen away to the North Pole only to find herself in a strange bejeweled kingdom of which she becomes the supreme Empress. Here she consults with many different animal/insect people about philosophical, religious and scientific ideas. The second half of the book pulls off a meta-fictional trick where Cavendish (as the Duchess of Newcastle) enters the story herself to become the Empress’ scribe and close companion.”

In the video just below, Youtuber Great Books Prof frames this as not just a work of proto-science fiction, but also a pioneering use of the “multiverse” concept that has undergirded any number of twenty-first-century blockbusters.

The Blazing World continues to inspire: actor-director Carlson Young put out a loose cinematic adaptation just a few years ago. Cavendish herself described the book as a “hermaphroditic text,” possibly in reference to its engagement with topics then addressed almost exclusively by men. But it also occupied two categories at once in that she originally published it as a fictional section of her book Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, one of six philosophical volumes she wrote. In fact, her work qualified her as not just philosopher and novelist, but also scientist, poet, playwright, and even biographer. That last she accomplished by writing The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish, who happened to be her husband. Let her life be a lesson to those young girls who simultaneously dream of becoming a princess and a writer whose books are read for centuries: sometimes, you can have it all.

Related content:

100 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Women Writers (Read 20 for Free Online)

The First Work of Science Fiction: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Century Space Travelogue A True Story

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Every Possible Kind of Science Fiction Story: An Exhaustive List Created by Pioneering 1920s SciFi Writer Clare Winger Harris (1931)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Cardboard Bernini: An Artist Spends 4 Years Building a Giant Cardboard Fountain Inspired by the Baroque Sculptor Bernini, Only to Let It Dissolve in the Rain

From the Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini to the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s glorious public fountains have impressed visitors to Rome for centuries.

Bernini angled for immorality when carving his Baroque masterpieces from marble.

Image by Trdinfl, via Wikimedia Commons

Eternity occupied artist James Grashow’s mind, too, throughout four years of toil on his Corrugated Fountain, a masterpiece of planned obsolescence.

“All artists talk about process”, he ruminates in an outtake from Olympia Stone’s documentary, The Cardboard Bernini, “but the process that they talk about is always from beginning to finish:

Nobody really talks about full term process to the end, to the destruction, to the dissolution of a piece. Everything dissolves in an eternity. I’d like to speak to that.

He picked the right medium for such a meditation — corrugated cardboard, sourced from the Danbury Square Box Company. (The founders chose its name in 1906 to alert the local hatting industry that they did not traffic in round hat boxes.)

Grashow challenged himself to make something with cardboard and hot glue that would “outshine” Bernini before it was sacrificed to the elements:

Water and cardboard cannot exist together.  The idea of a paper fountain is impossible, an oxymoron that speaks to the human dilemma. I wanted to make something heroic in its concept and execution with full awareness of its poetic absurdity. I wanted to try to make something eternal out of cardboard… the Fountain was an irresistible project for me.

The documentary catches a mix of emotions as his meticulously constructed Baroque figures — nymphs, horses, dolphins, Poseidon — are positioned for destruction on the grounds of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

A young boy at the exhibition’s opening is untroubled by the sculpture’s impending fate:

I think it’s cool, coz it’s made out of trees and it’s returning to mush…or whatever you want to call it.

His buddy finds it hard to share his enthusiasm, gesturing helplessly toward the monumental work, his voice trailing off as he remarks, “I don’t see why you would want that to…”

An adult visitor unashamedly reveals that she had been actively rooting for rain.

When a storm does reduce the sculpture to an Ozymandian tableau a short while later, Grashow suspects the project was ultimately a self portrait, “full of bluster and bravado, hollow and melancholy at its core, doomed from the start, and searching for beauty in all of the sadness.”

Then he and a helper cart what’s left off to a waiting dumpster.

His daughter, Rabbi Zoë Klein, likens the Corrugated Fountain’s impermanence to the sand mandalas Tibetan monks spend months creating, then sweep away with little fanfare:

…the art is about just the gift of creation, that we have this ability to create, that we celebrate that, not that we can conquer time, but rather we can make the most of the time we have by making it beautiful and meaningful, living up to our potential..

Grashow speaks tenderly of the ephemeral material he uses frequently in his work:

It’s so grateful for the opportunity to become something, because it knows it’s going to be trash.

Watch The Cardboard Bernini here.

See more of James Grashow’s cardboard works here.

Related Content 

Designer Creates Origami Cardboard Tents to Shelter the Homeless from the Winter Cold

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German 1st Graders in Cute Cardboard Robot Costumes

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

Music Producer Steve Albini, Director Godfrey Reggio & Actor Fred Armisen Explain Why Creating Is Crucial to Human Existence

Imagine, if you will, an evening’s entertainment consisting of an episode of Portlandia, a spin of Nirvana’s In Utero, and a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. Perhaps these works would, at first glance, seem to have little in common. But if you end the night by watching the above episode of Big Think’s series Dispatches from the Well with Kmele Foster, their common spirit may well come into view. In it, Foster travels America in order to visit with Godfrey Reggio, Steve Albini, and Fred Armisen, widely known, respectively, as the director of Koyaanisqatsi, the producer of In Utero, and the co-creator of Portlandia. All of them have also made a great deal of other work, and none of them are about to stop now.

“When you have a mania, you can scream and go nuts, or you can write everything down,” says Reggio. “I write everything down.” The same concept arises in Foster’s conversation with Albini, who believes that “the best music is made in service of the mania of the people doing it at the moment.” As for “the people who are trying to be popular, who are trying to, like, entertain — a lot of that music is trivial.”

Foster credibly describes Albini as “a man with a code,” not least that which dictates his rejection of digital media. “I’m not making an aesthetic case for analog recording,” he says. “Analog recordings are a durable archive of our culture, and in the distant future, I want people to be able to hear what our music sounded like.”

To create as persistently as these three have demands a willingness to play the long game — and to “re-perceive the normal,” as Reggio puts it while articulating the purpose of his unconventional documentary films. To his mind, it’s what we perceive least that affects us most, and if “what we do every day, without question, is who we are,” we can enrich our experience of reality by asking questions in our life and our work like, “Is it the content of your mind that determines your behavior, or is it your behavior that determines the content of your mind?” This line of inquiry will send each of us in different intellectual and aesthetic directions, impossible though it is to arrive at a final answer. And in the face of the fact that we all end up at the same place in the end, Armisen has a creative strategy: “I really celebrate death,” he explains. “I have my funeral all planned out and everything.”

Related content:

How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers & Writers Have Always Known

How TV Addles Kids’ Brains: A Short Film Directed by Godfrey Reggio (Maker of Koyaanisqatsi) & Scored by Philip Glass

Read Steve Albini’s Uncompromising Proposal to Produce Nirvana’s In Utero (1993)

Fred Armisen Teaches a Short Seminar on the History of Punk

Koyaanisqatsi at 1552% Speed

Why Man Creates: Saul Bass’ Oscar-Winning Animated Look at Creativity (1968)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Roman Author Pliny the Younger Gets Ghosted by a Friend, and Goes on a Rant: Hear It Read by Actor Rob Delaney

Pliny the Younger may be best remembered for writing the only eye-witness account of the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. It’s a memorable letter still found in modern collections of Pliny the Younger’s correspondence. There, you can also find a simple letter authored by Pliny, one that reflects not on a shattering historical event, but rather something we can all relate to: the anger the author felt upon getting ghosted by a friend. To set the scene, Pliny had invited Septicius Clarus to join him for some food, wine, and conversation. But his friend never showed up, and so Pliny fired off a snub letter, which actor and comedian Rob Delaney reads above at a Letters Live event. You can follow along with the text below:

Shame on you! You promised to come to dinner, and you never came!

I’ll take you to court, and you will pay to the last penny for my losses, and quite a sum! Ready for each of us were a lettuce, three snails, and two eggs, barley water with honey wine cooled with snow (you must add the cost of snow as well, in fact the snow in particular, as it melts in the dish). There were olives, beetroot, gourds, onions, and countless other delicacies no less elegant. You would have heard performers of comedy, or a reader, or a lyre-player, or even all three, such is my generosity!

But you preferred to dine at some nobody’s house, enjoying oysters, sow’s tripe, sea urchins, and performing-girls from Cadiz. You’ll be punished for this, I won’t say how. What boorishness was this! You begrudged perhaps yourself, and certainly me – but yes, yourself as well. What joking and laughter and learning we would have enjoyed!

You can dine in many houses on more elaborate fare, but nowhere more genially, innocently, and unguardedly. Farewell!

In the end, Pliny forgave his friend. For Pliny dedicated the first of his letter to Septicius, stating: “You have constantly urged me to collect and publish the more highly finished of the letters that I may have written. I have made such a collection… I can only hope that you will not have cause to regret the advice you gave, and that I shall not repent having followed it.” You can read the collection online here.

Related Content

The Only Written Eye-Witness Account of Pompeii’s Destruction: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Letters on the Mount Vesuvius Eruption

The Little-Known Bombing of Pompeii During World War II

What the Romans Saw When They Reached New Parts of the World: Hear First-Hand Accounts by Appian, Pliny, Tacitus & Other Ancient Historians

Stanford Continuing Studies Offering a Course on the History & Music of the Grateful Dead, Taught by David Gans: Starts on Monday, January 22

Image via Wikimedia Commons

A quick heads up: On Monday, Stanford Continuing Studies will kick off an online course called Psychedelia and Groove: The Music and Culture of the Grateful Dead. Taught by David Gans (author of Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead), the course got a nice shout out from drummer Mickey Hart on Instagram. Open to any adult, the course description reads:

The Grateful Dead’s groundbreaking fusion of music, counterculture, and community engagement forged an enduring legacy that transcends generations while shaping the evolution of music and cultural expression. Fresh off the farewell performance of Dead & Company in San Francisco in July, this course invites students to delve into the phenomenon that is the Grateful Dead through a captivating exploration of the band’s history, music, and cultural impact.

The course will start by tracing the band’s evolution, from its humble beginnings to its legendary status as one of the most influential bands in music history. We will explore the band’s formation, the early San Francisco music scene, its unique approach to touring, and the various eras of its existence. We’ll next embark on a sonic journey through the band’s diverse and ever-evolving musical catalog. Students will dissect the distinctive blend of rock, folk, blues, and improvisation that defined the Grateful Dead’s sound.

Finally, we’ll examine the band’s cultural impact on society, diving into the band’s connection to art, literature, and social change, as well as its unique fan culture and the phenomenon of the “Deadhead.” By the end of the course, students will have a well-rounded appreciation for the roots, struggles, and milestones that shaped the Grateful Dead’s trajectory, an understanding of its profound impact on music and culture, and insight into a legacy that still resonates deeply today.

Guest speakers for this course will include Steve Silberman, who was featured in the documentary Long Strange Trip and is a regular voice on the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. He is also a co-author of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads.

Again, the course starts on Monday, January 22. Tuition is $405. You can enroll here.

Related Content 

Stream a Massive Archive of Grateful Dead Concerts from 1965–1995

The Grateful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

How the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Monster, 600-Speaker Sound System–Changed Rock Concerts & Live Music Forever

How Loneliness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Harvard Psychiatrist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

In 1966, Paul McCartney famously sang of “all the lonely people,” wondering aloud where they come from. Nearly six decades later, their numbers seem only to have increased; as for their origin, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest Robert Waldinger has made it a longtime professional concern. “Starting in the nineteen fifties, and going all the way through to today, we know that people have been less and less invested in other people,” he says in the Big Think video above. “In some studies, as many as 60 percent of people will say that they feel lonely much of the time,” a feeling “pervasive across the world, across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics.”

“Having an extensive network of friends is no guarantee against loneliness,” writes the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place. “Nor does membership in voluntary associations, the ‘instant communities’ of our mobile society, ensure against social isolation and attendant feelings of boredom and alienation. The network of friends has no unity and no home base.” He names as a key factor the disappearance, especially in American life since World War II, of “convenient and open-ended socializing — places where individuals can go without aim or arrangement and be greeted by people who know them and know how to enjoy a little time off.”

Oldenburg’s elegy for and defense of “cafés, coffee shops, community centers, general stores, bars,” and other engines of community life, was published in 1989, well before the rise of social media — which Waldinger frames as the latest stage in a process that began with television. As more American homes acquired sets of their own, “there was a decline in investing in our communities. People went out less, they joined clubs less often. They went to houses of worship less often. They invited people over less often.” Then, “the digital revolution gave us more and more screens to look at, and software that was designed specifically to grab our attention, hold our attention, and therefore keep it away from the people we care about.”

We also know, he continues, that “people with strong social bonds are much less likely to die in any given year than people without strong social bonds.” This is a credible claim, given that he happens to direct the now 85-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development. In 2016, we featured Waldinger’s TED Talk on some of its findings here on Open Culture. Before that, we posted a PBS BrainCraft video that considers the Harvard Study of Adult Development along with other research on the contributing factors to happiness, a body of work that, taken together, points to the importance of love — which, even if it isn’t all you need, is certainly something you need. And thus one more Beatles lyric continues to resonate.

Related content:

New Animation Explains Sherry Turkle’s Theories on Why Social Media Makes Us Lonely

What Are the Keys to Happiness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Harvard Study

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Happiness Revealed by a 75-Year Harvard Study

A Guide to Happiness: Alain de Botton Shows How Six Great Philosophers Can Change Your Life

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Jewish Comedy with Daniel Lobell (“Reconquistador”) — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #165

Your hosts Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn, and Al explore the characteristics of Jewish comedy with stand-up/graphic novelist Daniel, whose film Reconquistador explores his ancestors being kicked out of Spain. What’s the connection of Jewish humor to anti-semitism?

We talk about relating as a creator to your identity, Jewish people seeing themselves in film and TV, the experience of literally seeing yourself in a film, Jewish comedy as philosophy or social commentary, and “Jewish humor” vs. humor by people who happen to be Jewish.

We touch on Mel Brooks, Larry David, Adam Sandler, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and feminist Jewish comedy shows such as Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Inside Amy Schumer.

FYI this was recorded back in early November when the Gaza war and its accompanying flurry of anti-Semitism was a bit more raw.

Follow us @DanielLobell, @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Listen to our earlier episode with Daniel about philosophy as comedy.

Hear more Pretty Much Pop, including many recent episodes that you haven’t seen on this site. Support the show and hear bonus talking for this and nearly every other episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This week our supporter-exclusive Aftertalk includes our stories of seeing elderly performers; should you run out and see so-and-so before they’re dead?

This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

Kevin Hart Leads a Skybound Heist in Thrilling Trailer for Netflix Movie Lift

Kevin Hart brought his heist movie Lift to Netflix, and despite the film receiving a fair amount of hate among critics, that hasn't stopped it soaring to the top of the platform's movie chart. Having started its limited theatrical release at the same time, it did not take long for the plane-bound action/comedy to take a nosedive in its Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score, but details revealed by Netflix have shown that this hasn't hindered the movie's viewership performance too much.

60 Free Film Noir Movies to Get You Through 2024

During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir.

If you head over to this list of Noir Films, you can find 60 films from the noir genre, including some classics by John Huston, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Ida Lupino. The list also features some cinematic legends like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and even Frank Sinatra. Hope the collection helps you put some noir entertainment into 2024!

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J.S. Bach’s Opera, “The Coffee Cantata,” Sings the Praises of the Great Stimulating Drink (1735)

From the time that a nameless genius in either Ethiopia or Yemen decided to dry, crush and strain water through a berry known for making goats nervous and jumpy, coffee has been loved and worshiped like few other beverages. Early Arab doctors proclaimed the stuff to be a miracle drug. Thoroughly caffeinated thinkers from Voltaire to Jonathan Swift to Jack Kerouac debated literature, philosophy and everything in between at coffee houses. Author Honoré Balzac even reportedly died because of excessive coffee drinking (it was either that or the syphilis.)

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was also apparently a coffee enthusiast. So much so that he wrote a composition about the beverage. Although known mostly for his liturgical music, his Coffee Cantata (AKA Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211) is a rare example of a secular work by the composer. The short comic opera was written (circa 1735) for a musical ensemble called The Collegium Musicum based in a storied Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig, Germany. The whole cantata seems very much to have been written with the local audience in mind.

Coffee Cantata is about a young vivacious woman named Aria who loves coffee. Her killjoy father is, of course, dead set against his daughter having any kind of caffeinated fun. So he tries to ban her from the drink. Aria bitterly complains:

Father sir, but do not be so harsh!
If I couldn’t, three times a day,
be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee,
in my anguish I will turn into
a shriveled-up roast goat.

Ah! How sweet coffee tastes,
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
milder than muscatel wine.
Coffee, I have to have coffee,
and, if someone wants to pamper me,
ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!

The copywriters at Starbucks marketing department couldn’t have written it any better. Eventually, daughter and father reconcile when he agrees to have a guaranteed three cups of coffee a day written into her marriage contract. You can watch it in its entirety below, or get a quick taste above. The lyrics in German and English can be read here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Related Content:

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: London’s First Cafe Creates Ad for Coffee in the 1650s

The Coffee Pot That Fueled Honoré de Balzac’s Coffee Addiction

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The Hertella Coffee Machine Mounted on a Volkswagen Dashboard (1959): The Most European Car Accessory Ever Made

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.

Can You Crack the Uncrackable Code in Kryptos, the CIA’s Work of Public Art?

It can be challenging to parse the meaning of many non-narrative artworks.

Sometimes the title will offer a clue, or the artist will shed some light in an interview.

Is it a comment on the cultural, socio-economic or political context in which it was created?

Or is the act of creating it the artist’s most salient point?

Are multiple interpretations possible?

Artist Jim Sanborn’s massive sculpture Kryptos may inspire various reactions in its viewers, but there’s definitely a single correct interpretation.

But 78-year-old Sanborn isn’t saying what…

He wants someone else to identify it.

Kryptos’ main mystery — more like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to quote Winston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped copper screen using jigsaws.

Image courtesy of the CIA

Professional cryptanalysts, hobbyists, and students have been attempting to crack the code of its 865 letters and 4 question marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The hands-on part fell well within Sanborn’s purview. But a Masters in sculpture from Pratt Institute does not automatically confer cryptography bonafides, so Sanborn enlisted Edward Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, for a crash course in late 20th-century coding systems.

Sanborn sampled various coding methods for the finished piece, wanting the act of deciphering to feel like “peeling layers off an onion.”

That onion has been partially peeled for years.

Deciphering three of its four panels is a pelt shared by computer scientist and former president of the American Cryptogram Association, James Gillogly, and CIA analyst David Stein.

Gillogly arrived at his solution in 1999, using a Pentium II.

Stein reached the same conclusion a year earlier, after chipping away at it for some 400 hours with pencil and paper, though the CIA kept his achievement on the down low until Gillogly went public with his.

The following year the National Security Agency claimed that four of their employees, working collaboratively, had reached an identical solution in 1992, a fact corroborated by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

(On a related note, I got Wordle in three this morning…)

This still leaves the 97-character phrase from the final panel up for grabs. Cracking it will be the penultimate step in solving Kryptos’ puzzle. As Sanborn told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a riddle:”

It’s mysterious. It’s going to lead to something else. It’s not going to be finished when it’s decoded.

The public is welcome to continue making educated guesses.

Sanborn has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final passage of decrypted text.

BERLIN, at positions 64 — 69 (2010)

CLOCK, at positions 70 — 74 (2014)

NORTHEAST, at position 26 — 34

Have you solved it, yet?

No?

Don’t feel bad…

Sanborn has been fielding incorrect answers daily for decades, though a rising tide of aggressive and racist messages led him to charge 50 bucks per submission, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolutely no hope of hints.

Kryptos’ most dedicated fans, like game developer /cryptologist Elonka Dunin, seen plying Sanborn with copious quantities of sushi above in Great Big Story’s video, find value in working together and, sometimes, in person.

Their dream is that Sanborn might inadvertently let slip a valuable tidbit in their presence, though that seems like a long shot.

The artist claims to have gotten very skilled at maintaining a poker face.

(Wait, does that suggest his interlocutors have been getting warmer?)

Dunin has relinquished all fantasies of solving Kryptos solo, and now works to help someone — anyone — solve it.

(Please, Lord, don’t let it be chatGPT…)

Sanford has put a contingency plan in place in case no one ever manages to get to the bottom of the Kryptos (ancient Greek for “hidden”) conundrum.

He, or representatives of his estate, will auction off the solution. He is content with letting the winning bidder decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.

“I do realize that the value of Kryptos is unknown and that perhaps this concept will bear little fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the masses of people desperate to learn the solution and factors in Sanford’s intention to donate all proceeds to climate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.

Join Elonka Dunin’s online community of Kryptos enthusiasts here.

To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two panels, followed by their solutions, with the artist’s intentional misspellings intact.

1.
Encrypted Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD

Decrypted Text
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.

2.

Encrypted Text
VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQJNCE
GGWHKK?DQMCPFQZDQMMIAGPFXHQRLG
TIMVMZJANQLVKQEDAGDVFRPJUNGEUNA
QZGZLECGYUXUEENJTBJLBQCRTBJDFHRR
YIZETKZEMVDUFKSJHKFWHKUWQLSZFTI
HHDDDUVH?DWKBFUFPWNTDFIYCUQZERE
EVLDKFEZMOQQJLTTUGSYQPFEUNLAVIDX
FLGGTEZ?FKZBSFDQVGOGIPUFXHHDRKF
FHQNTGPUAECNUVPDJMQCLQUMUNEDFQ
ELZZVRRGKFFVOEEXBDMVPNFQXEZLGRE
DNQFMPNZGLFLPMRJQYALMGNUVPDXVKP
DQUMEBEDMHDAFMJGZNUPLGEWJLLAETG

Decrypted Text
It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west ID by rows

View step by step solutions for the first three of Kryptos’ encrypted panels here.

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

Coursera Extends Deal: Get $200 Off of Coursera Plus & Gain Unlimited Access to Courses & Certificates (Until February 1)

Here’s some news that you can use…

Coursera has announced that it’s extending (until February 1) a special deal that will let you get a $200 discount on its annual subscription plan called “Coursera Plus.” Normally priced at $399, Coursera Plus (now available for $199) gives you access to 90% of Coursera’s courses, Guided Projects, Specializations, and Professional Certificates, all of which are taught by top instructors from leading universities and companies (e.g. Yale, Duke, Google, Facebook, and more). The $199 annual fee–which translates roughly to 55 cents per day–could be a good investment for anyone interested in learning new subjects and skills in 2024, or earning certificates that can be added to your resume. Just as Netflix’s streaming service gives you access to unlimited movies, Coursera Plus gives you access to unlimited courses and certificates. It’s basically an all-you-can-eat deal.

You can try out Coursera Plus for 14 days, and if it doesn’t work for you, you can get your money back. Explore the offer here. And, remember, it expires on February 1, 2024.

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

How George Washington Became President of the United States: It Was Weirder Than You Think

After serving two terms as the first President of the United States of America, George Washington refused to continue on to a third. We now see this action as beginning the tradition of peaceful relinquishment of power that has continued more or less ever since (interrupted, as in recent years, by the occasional troubled transition). At the time, not everyone expected Washington to step down, history having mostly offered examples of rulers who hung on until the bitter end. But the new republic’s creation of not just rules but customs resulted in a variety of unusual political events; even Washington’s election was “weirder than you think.”

So declares history Youtuber Premodernist in the video above, an explanation of the very first United States presidential election in 1789. “There were no official candidates. There was no campaigning for the office. There were no political parties, no nominating conventions, no primary elections. The entire election season was very short, and the major issue of this election was the Constitution itself.” It also took place after thirteen president-free years, the U.S. having been not a single country but “a collection of thirteen separate colonies,” each tied more closely to Britain than to the others; there hadn’t even been a federal government per se.

The U.S. Constitution changed that. Drafted in 1787, it proposed the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, whose names every American who’s taken a citizenship exam (and every immigrant who’s taken the citizen test) remembers. Setting up those branches in reality would prove no easy task: how, to name just one practical question, would the executive — the president — actually be chosen? Congress, the legislative branch, could theoretically do it, but that would violate the now practically sacred principle of the separation of powers. The voters could also elect the president directly, but the framers rejected that option as both impractical and unwise.

Enter “the famous electoral college,” a body of specialized voters chosen by the individual states in any manner they please. Having rejected the Constitution itself, North Carolina and Rhode Island didn’t participate in the 1789 election. Each of the other states chose their electors in its own way (exemplifying the political laboratory of American federalism as originally conceived), though it didn’t go smoothly in every case: the widespread division between federalists and anti-federalists was pronounced enough in New York to create a deadlock that prevented the state from choosing any electors at all. The electors that did make it cast two votes each, with the first-place candidate becoming President and the second-place candidate becoming Vice President.

That last proved to be a “bad system,” whose mechanics encouraged a great deal of scheming, intrigue, and strategic voting (even by the subsequently established standards of American politics). Only with the ratification of the twelfth amendment, in 1804, could electors separately designate their choice of President and Vice President. In 1789, of course, “Washington easily got all 69 electoral votes,” and went on reluctantly to prevail again in the next presidential election, which more recently became the subject of its own Premodernist video. Both of them merit a watch in this particular moment, as the run-up to the U.S. contest of 2024 gets into full swing. This election cycle certainly won’t be as short as 1789, but it may well be as weird.

Related content:

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Why Perpetual Motion Machines Never Work, Despite Centuries of Experiments

According to the laws of physics — at least in simplified form — an object in motion will stay in motion, at least if no other forces act on it. That’s all well and good in the realm of theory, but here in the complex reality of Earth, there always seems to be one force or another getting in the way. Not that this has ever completely shut down mankind’s desire to build a perpetual-motion machine. According to Google Arts & Culture, that quest dates at least as far back as seventh-century India, where “the mathematician Brahmagupta, who wanted to represent the cyclical and eternal motion of the heavens, designed an overbalanced wheel whose rotation was powered by the flow of mercury inside its hollow spokes.”

More widely known is the successor design by Brahmagupta’s twelfth-century countryman and colleague Bhāskara, who “altered the wheel design by giving the hollow spokes a curved shape, producing an asymmetrical course in constant imbalance.” Despite this rendition’s memorable elegance, it does not, like the earlier overbalanced wheel, actually keep on turning forever. To blame are the very same laws of physics that have dogged the subsequent 900 or so years of attempts to build perpetual-motion machines, which you can see briefly explained in the TED-Ed video above.

“Ideas for perpetual-motion machines all violate one or more fundamental laws of thermodynamics, the branch of physics that describes the relationship between different forms of energy,” says the narrator. The first law holds that “energy can’t be created or destroyed; you can’t get out more energy than you put in.” That alone would put an end to hopes for a “free” energy source of this kind. But even machines that just keep moving by themselves — much less useful, of course, but still scientifically earth-shattering — would eventually “have to create some extra energy to nudge the system past its stopping point, breaking the first law of thermodynamics.”

Whenever machines seem to overcome this problem, “in reality, they invariably turn out to be drawing energy from some external source.” (Nineteenth-century America seems to have offered endless opportunities for engineering charlatanism of this kind, whose perpetrators made a habit of skipping town whenever their trickery was revealed, some obtaining patents and profits all the while). But even if the first law of thermodynamics didn’t apply, there would remain the matter of the second, which dictates that “energy tends to spread out through processes like friction,” thus “reducing the energy available to move the system itself, until the machine inevitably stopped.” Hence the abandonment of interest in perpetual motion by such scientific minds as Galileo and Leonardo — who must also have understood that mankind would never fully relinquish the dream.

Related content:

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How the Brilliant Colors of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made with Alchemy

A Complete Digitization of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, the Largest Existing Collection of His Drawings & Writings

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Pixies Perform a Hypnotic Version of “Gouge Away” at the BBC

In 2018, the Pixies performed live for BBC Radio 6 Music, playing some new songs (“In the Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain”) and old classics (“Here Comes Your Man”). In that latter category, you’ll find a recording of “Gouge Away,” which I keep coming back to again, and yet again. About the video, one YouTuber had this to say: “This production is just badass. The bass, the drums, everything. This specific recording is a masterpiece. To see it taped is a revelation.” That kind of sums it up. Time to share it with you…

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Chris Jericho Invites Us Into the AEW in The Death Tour Trailer

This year’s Slamdance Film Festival in Utah will host the world premiere of The Death Tour, a behind the scenes insight into the “one-of-a-kind wrestling trip,” produced by wrestling legend, AWE superstar and occasional actor Chris Jericho. The first trailer for the film, offers just a glimpse at the brutal conditions undertaken by those who participate in the event – and that is before the wrestlers even get into the ring. Check out a first look at The Death Tour below:

Kevin Hart Leads a Skybound Heist in Thrilling Trailer for Netflix Movie Lift

Kevin Hart has brought his heist movie Lift to Netflix, but it has not gone down quite in the way he hoped. Having started its limited theatrical release at the same time, it did not take long for the plane-bound action/comedy to take a nosedive in its Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score.

AI “Completes” Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting and Controversy Erupts

The story behind this painting is so sad! 😢
Now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish! ❤️ https://t.co/RuASoTfFdk pic.twitter.com/uAwM6SBUGW

— Donnel (@DonnelVillager) December 31, 2023

The celebrity graffiti artist Keith Haring died in 1990, at the age of 31, no doubt having completed only a fraction of the artwork he would have produced in a life a few decades longer. Upon first seeing his Unfinished Painting of 1989, one might assume that his early death is what stopped him from finishing it. In fact, painting only about a quarter of the canvas was his deliberate choice, intended to make a visual commentary on the AIDS epidemic that had claimed so many lives, and, not long thereafter, would claim his own. Presumably, it never occurred to anyone to “finish” Unfinished Painting — not before the age of artificial intelligence, anyway.

“Last summer, artist Brooke Peachley … posted a photo of the work on X” — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — “alongside a prompt asking others to respond with a visual art piece ‘that never fails to destroy [them] every time they see it,’ ” write Elaine Velie and Rhea Nayyar at Hyperallergic. “Over six months later, another user responded to the original post with a generative AI image that ‘completed’ Haring’s purposely half-painted work, writing, ‘now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish!’ ”

One might, perhaps, sense a joking tone in that post, though the many incensed commenters it continues to draw seem not to take it that way. “The post swiftly caught the ire of the X community, with users describing the action as ‘disrespectful,’ ‘disgusting,’ and a ‘desecration,’ ” says Artnet News. “Some praised the powers of A.I. for ‘showing us a world without AIDS,’ while others deemed the tweet excellent ‘bait’ on an Elon Musk-led online platform that newly rewards outrage with engagement.” As often these days — and very often when it comes to applications of artificial intelligence in popular culture — the reactions to the thing are more compelling than the thing itself.

“The A.I.-generated image doesn’t appear to be faithful to Haring’s style, which often included images of human figures,” writes Julia Binswanger at Smithsonian.com. “These kinds of figures are visible in Haring’s original piece, but the image generator wasn’t able to replicate them.” The algorithmically filled-in Unfinished Painting may be without aesthetic or intellectual interest in itself, but consider how many viewers have only learned of the original work because of it. Nevertheless, stunts like this (or like zooming out the Mona Lisa) ultimately amount to distractions from whatever artistic potential these technologies may actually hold. A.I. will come into its own not by generating images that Haring or any other artist could have created, but images that no human being has yet imagined.

Related content:

Demystifying the Activist Graffiti Art of Keith Haring: A Video Essay

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.