Friday, March 10th, 2017

Time	Event
9:00a	Take an Infectious, Life-Affirming Flamenco Dance Class, Watch the Oscar-Winning Documentary FLAMENCO AT 5:15 FLAMENCO AT 5:15, the Academy Award-winning short documentary, above, is a welcome antidote to the depressing specter of youthful bodies in a chronic state of computer-related postural collapse. Director Cynthia Scott’s thirty-minute vignette cannot help but show off the beautiful, highly trained physiques of the young dancers delving into the art of flamenco at Canada’s National Ballet School. She also captures the lasting beauty of their instructor, Susana Audeoud, then in her late 60s. Her posture erect, her eyes shining brightly in a face weathered by experience and time, Audeleoud shares one of flamenco’s great secrets—that its practioners, unlike their counterparts in the ballet, can continue dancing until they die. (Audleoud herself passed away on the first day of 2010, at the age of 93.) Flamenco is an incredibly exacting art, but Audeloud and her husband, composer Antonio Robledo, showed themselves to be warm and good humored teachers. All of us could benefit from following Audeloud’s instructions to her barefoot pupils at the 1:10 mark. Forgo your meditation app for a day and give it a try. Or join the students in Robledo’s joyful group clapping exercise at the 8:00 mark. According to Audeloud, flamenco dancers only dance when it’s necessary… I know that most of us are utterly without training, but it appears that we have entered a period of extreme necessity. So put on your shoes, stomp your feet, and clap as if no one is watching. You can find FLAMENCO AT 5:15 listed in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via Aeon Related Content: The Graceful Movements of Kung Fu & Modern Dance Revealed in Stunning Motion Visualizations 1944 Instructional Video Teaches You the Lindy Hop, the Dance That Originated in 1920’s Harlem Ballrooms Statistics Explained Through Modern Dance: A New Way of Teaching a Tough Subject Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker whose new play. Zamboni Godot, is now playing in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Take an Infectious, Life-Affirming Flamenco Dance Class, Watch the Oscar-Winning Documentary FLAMENCO AT 5:15 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
12:31p	Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” a Call for Americans to Take Action Say, for example, that a gang of obscenely rich mercenaries with questionable ties and histories had taken power with the intent to destroy institutions so they could loot the country, further impoverish and disempower the citizenry, and prosecute, imprison, and demonize dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities. Such a scenario would cry out, one might think, for civil action on a never-before-seen scale. Millions, one might imagine, would either storm the castle or refuse to obey the commands of their new rulers. We might describe this situation as a topsy-turvy turn of events, should, say, such an awful thing come to pass. Topsy-turvy is exactly the phrase Howard Zinn used in his characterization of the U.S. during the Vietnam War, when he saw a situation like the one above, one that had also obtained, he said, in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. “I start,” he said, opening a debate, in 1970, at Johns Hopkins University with philosopher Charles Frankel on the question of civil disobedience, from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. And with this preamble, which you can hear read by Matt Damon in the video above, the historian and activist began to make his case that civil disobedience “is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience.” We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people. But “America is different” than other world empires, says Zinn, anticipating the usual claims of exceptionalism. No, he says, it isn’t. “It is not that special. It really isn’t.” Later in his speech, Zinn calls the “voting process” a “sham.” Totalitarian states love voting. You get people to the polls and they register their approval. I know there is a difference—they have one party and we have two parties. We have one more party than they have, you see. What is called for, he argued, is not a return to the past nor a rejiggering of the political machinery, but a political consciousness that recognizes common struggles across borders: People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing. Damon’s reading took place during the 2012 performance in Voices of a People’s History, a now-yearly event that since 2003 has dramatized “the extraordinary history of ordinary people who built the movements that made the United States what it is today, ending slavery and Jim Crow, protesting war and the genocide of Native Americans, creating unions and the eight hour work day, advancing women’s rights and gay liberation, and struggling to right wrongs of the day.” The words of Howard Zinn feature prominently in all these events, and “The Problem is Civil Obedience”—which was published as an essay two years after the 1970 debate—has proven a popular choice. In 2004 at the second Voices of a People’s History, Wallace Shawn (above) read the text, and Zinn himself was in attendance. Shawn is best known for his comic turns in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre, and Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, and he can’t help but bring his wry humor to the reading simply by sounding like himself. In another reading of Zinn’s speech, Grey’s Anatomy actor and outspoken activist Jesse Williams takes on the text, introduced by a recording of the 2004 introduction to Shawn’s reading. These three different readings from three very different actors and personalities all have one thing in common: their audiences all seem to recognize the situation Zinn described in 1970 as entirely relevant to their own in 2004, 2012, 2014, and… perhaps, also in 2017. Read Zinn’s full remarks here and see new performances from this year’s Voices of a People’s History at their website. You can find Zinn’s essay published in the collection: The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. Related Content: Hear 21 Hours of Lectures & Talks by Howard Zinn, Author of the Bestselling A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn’s “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire”: An Illustrated Video Narrated by Viggo Mortensen Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” a Call for Americans to Take Action is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Memoranda: Haruki Murakami’s World Recreated as a Classic Adventure Video Game Haruki Murakami has a special way of inspiring his fans. I write these very words, in fact, from a coffee shop in Seoul not just stocked with his books and the music referenced in them but named after the jazz bar he ran in Tokyo in the 1970s before becoming a writer. But each fan builds their own kind of monument to the author of Norwegian Wood, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and other novels with a sensibility all their own. The Murakami-heads (or perhaps Harukists) at Vancouver-based studio Bit Byterz have chosen to pay elaborate tribute to Murakami by recreating his uncanny world with an adventure game called Memoranda. You may remember this project from when we featured its Kickstarter drive back in 2015. Bit Byterz ended up raising about $20,000, enabling them to release Memoranda this year. You can buy it on Steam, or first view the launch trailer above and get a sense of what The Verge’s Andrew Webster describes as a game “inspired in large part by Murakami’s stories” which “centers on a young woman in a vaguely European town who has lost her memory — she doesn’t even remember her name. (The title, Memoranda, refers to the sticky notes she uses to remind herself of important things.)” While not a direct adaptation of any one work of Murakami’s in particular, its locations, its characters, and above all its atmosphere come drawn from the same — to use a highly appropriate metaphor — well. “I started with one of his short stories, and gradually added characters from other short stories,” lead developer Sahand Saedi told Waypoint’s John Robertson. “I tried to bring over the surreal atmosphere, as well as the lonely and strange characters from the stories, and hope that the gamer will feel like they are living in one of these stories while playing.” Robertson describes Memoranda as “an adventure game in the most traditional sense, in terms of interaction and pacing. While it might be taking an enlightened path to adapting one medium into another, it follows well-trodden game design routes, and sticks to established rules. You click on items or pick them up, observe them or interact with them, saving key examples to your inventory for later use in puzzles that are often abstract in their construction.” And so Memoranda at once pays homage to the distinctive reality — or rather unreality — of Murakami’s fiction and to the distinctive gaming experience of point-and-click adventure games, the genre that first took shape on home computers in the 1980s and produced the likes of Maniac Mansion, the King’s Quest series (not to mention all of Sierra On-Line’s other Quests), the Monkey Island series, and Myst. More recently it has undergone something of a renaissance thanks to crowdfunding services like Kickstarter, ever since respected point-and-click adventure game designer Tim Schafer raised $3.45 million to fund 2015’s Broken Age. Bit Byterz may have had only a small fraction of that budget to work with, but they know, as every avid Murakami reader knows, that mere money can’t buy uncanniness. Related Content: In Search of Haruki Murakami: A Documentary Introduction to Japan’s Great Postmodernist Novelist An Introduction to the World of Haruki Murakami Through Documentaries, Stories, Animation, Music Playlists & More New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haruki Murakami Stories Is Coming Your Way: Help Kickstart It Read 5 Stories By Haruki Murakami Free Online (For a Limited Time) A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Memoranda: Haruki Murakami’s World Recreated as a Classic Adventure Video Game is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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