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Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 11:15a | John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963)
The Greek word poesis did not confine itself to the literary arts. Most broadly speaking, the word meant “to make”—as in, to create anything, godlike, out of the stuff of ideas. But the English word “poetry” has always retained this grander sense, one very present for poets steeped in the classics, like Percy Shelley, who famously called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” in his essay “A Defence of Poetry.” Shelley argued, “If no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.” It can feel at times, watching certain of our leaders speak, that language may be dying for “nobler purposes.” But certain poets would seek to convince us otherwise. As Walt Whitman wrote of his countrymen in an introduction to Leaves of Grass, “presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.” Whitman lived in a time that valued rhetorical skill in its leaders. So too did another of the country’s revered national poets, Robert Frost, who accepted the request of John F. Kennedy to serve as the first inaugural poet in 1961 with “his signature elegance of wit,” comments Maria Popova. Frost, 86 years old at the time, read his poem “The Gift Outright” from memory and offered Kennedy some full-throated advice on joining “poetry and power.”
Kennedy, an “arts patron in chief,” as the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed describes him, was so moved that two years later, after the poet’s death, he delivered an eloquent eulogy for Frost at Amherst College that picked up the poet’s theme, and acknowledged the power of poetry as equal to, and perhaps surpassing, that of politics. “Our national strength matters,” he began, “but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much.” That animating spirit for Kennedy was not religion, civil or supernatural, but art. Frost’s poetry, he said, “brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society.”
The tragedy of hubris and celebration of diversity, however, we can see not only in Frost, but in Shelley, Whitman, and perhaps every other great poet whose “personal vision… becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.” Kennedy’s short speech, with great clarity and concision, makes the case for using the country’s resources to “reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.” But just as importantly, he argues against any kind of state imposition on an artist’s vision: “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” You can hear Kennedy deliver the speech in the audio above, read a full transcript in English here and in 12 other languages here. In the audience at Amherst sat poet and critic Archibald MacLeish, who, in his “Ars Poetica,” had suggested that poetry should not be stripped of its sounds and images and turned into a didactic tool. Kennedy agrees. “In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology.” Yet poetry is not a luxury, but a necessity if a body politic is to flourish. “The nation which disdains the mission of art,” Kennedy warned, “invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.’” Kennedy’s is a point of view, perhaps, that might get under a lot of people’s skin. It’s worth considering, as a less optimistic critic argued at the time, whether an overabundance of didactic political statements in art may be as culturally damaging as the absence of art in politics. Or whether art like Frost‘s is ever “disinterested,” in Kennedy’s phrasing, or apolitical, or can operate independently as a check to power. Frost himself may express ambivalence in his embrace of “human tragedy.” But in his doubt he fulfills the poet’s role, entering into the kind of critical dialectic Kennedy claims for poetry and democracy. Related Content: Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963) 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.  |
| 2:35p | How the Soviets Imagined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futuristic Drawings
In one of the most impassioned and beautifully written defenses of Burkean conservatism I have ever read, the poet Wendell Berry took government projects of both the left and right to task, proclaiming in 1968 that the emergence of a massive bureaucracy was a tragic sign of the “loss of the future.” His argument is similar to one made over twenty years earlier by the Trotskyist-turned-conservative writer James Burnham, whose 1941 book The Managerial Revolution predicted “at each point,” wrote George Orwell in a thorough review, “a continuation of the thing that is happening.” A “managerial” central state, Burnham also argued, inevitably brought about a “loss of the future.”  Neither the contemplative Berry nor the incisive Burnham have been able to account for one historically inescapable fact: the periods in which 20th century societies imagined the future most vividly were those most dominated by bureaucratic, technocratic, centralized political economies. This is true under conservative governments like that of the U.S. under Eisenhower, in which huge infrastructure projects—from the highway system to hydroelectric dams— rearranged the lives of millions. And it was true under Khrushchev’s Soviet state, whose Virgin Lands campaign did the same. Indeed, mid-century Soviet “expectations were pretty similar to the futuristic predictions of Americans,” writes Matt Novak, “with a touch more Communism, of course.” Unsurprising, perhaps, given that the two nations were locked in competition over the domination of both earth and space.  Novak’s understatement is fully warranted. Although the people in images like those you see here tend to appear in more collective arrangements, their sci-fi surroundings almost mirror those in the images from the U.S. that were parodied by The Jetsons two years after this 1960 collection. These detailed scenarios come from a “retro-futuristic filmstrip, which would have been played through a Diafilm,” a kind of slide projector. It’s a vision, it just so happens, of our time, 2017, but it looks backward to get there, both in its technology and its design. The illustration above, for example, “was almost certainly inspired by the Futurama exhibit from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” (Itself built, we may note, on the shoulders of Roosevelt’s New Deal.)  You can see many more of these illustrations at Paleofuture, and at the top of the post watch a video version with “jazzy music and star wipes.” You may find these visions quaint, charming in their naiveté and inaccuracy—yet often quaintly prescient as well. Retro-futurism’s appeal to us seems to rest principally in how silly it can seem in hindsight, even when it gets things right. Perhaps it is the case that the most fully-realized, totalizing visions of tomorrow are as far-fetched as the controlling societies that produce them are unsustainable. As Bob Duggan writes at Big Think, for example, we are bound to associate the “undead art movement” of Italian Futurism with the very short-lived regime of Italian Fascism. Maybe the degree to which a government lacks a future is in inverse proportion to the intensity of its retro-futurism.  So what exactly is the relationship between state power and utopian futurism? The question invites a dissertation, and surely many have been written, as they have on the symptomology of the techno-dystopian and urban apocalyptic forms of futurism. We might begin by wondering what our actual 2017 will look like 57 years from now. What will people in 2074 make of our endless culture of revivalism, from zombie steampunk to retreads and remakes of everything from Ghost in the Shell, to The Matrix, to Star Wars? Who can say. Perhaps, for whatever sociological reason, we are suffering, as Berry put it, from a loss of the future. 
via Paleofuture Related Content: Soviet Artists Envision a Communist Utopia in Outer Space Download 144 Beautiful Books of Russian Futurism: Mayakovsky, Malevich, Khlebnikov & More (1910-30) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How the Soviets Imagined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futuristic Drawings 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. |
| 5:14p | Trump Provides Another Teachable Moment: Here’s a Free Course from Yale on the American Civil War If there’s a silver lining to the Trump administration, it’s that it provides some teachable moments for historians and students. Just days after the inauguration, Trump commented at a celebration of Black History Month, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Enter the historians, who quickly reminded us that the great abolitionist, orator and writer had died back in 1895. There’s no present tense here, only past. And now there’s this: Yesterday, the president speculated in an odd interview that the Civil War could have been averted if Andrew Jackson had been there to stop it:
Historians were quick to point out that Jackson ended his presidency in 1837 and died in 1845–respectively, 24 and 16 years before the start of the Civil War. How Jackson would have handled the lead up to the Civil War is pure speculation. Just as it would be speculation to say how FDR or Truman would have dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis. David Blight, a Yale historian and expert on slavery and the Civil War, had a bit stronger reaction to Trump’s comments, telling Mother Jones:
Today, as with the past, Trump seems to be figuring out (the hard way) that one person can’t change the course of a nation by force of will–not when there are so many other forces and players that shape things. A lot of hubris and inflated rhetoric came into White House in January. Whether Trump is actually learning the physics of politics remains to be seen. But here’s one thing you don’t have to wait for. David Blight has made available a free course on the Civil War. In 27 lectures, his course “explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877,” looking at how the United States was transformed on multiple levels: racially, socially, politically, constitutionally and morally. You can access the 27 free lectures, presented in audio and video, via YouTube, iTunes, and the Yale web site (plus a syllabus). We also have it on the list of our Free History Courses, a subset of our collection 1200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Animated Map Lets You Watch the Unfolding of Every Day of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) “The Civil War and Reconstruction,” a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian Eric Foner The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle (A Free Course from Stanford) Trump Provides Another Teachable Moment: Here’s a Free Course from Yale on the American Civil War 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. |
| 6:00p | A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made
Paper, books, wooden joints, tea whisks — Japanese culture has, for seemingly all of its long recorded history, greatly esteemed the making of objects. But no one object represents the Japanese dedication to craftsmanship, and within that the eternal pursuit of approachable but never quite attainable perfection, than the sword. You can see what it takes to make a katana, the traditional Japanese sword of the kind carried by the armed military class of the samurai between roughly the 8th and 19th centuries, in the 26-minute video above, which offers a close look at each stage of the swordmaking process: the Shinto blessing of the forge, the hammering of the red-hot metal, the tempering of the freshly shaped blade, the construction of the scabbard and hilt, the final assembly, and every painstaking step in between.
Originally produced for the United Kingdom’s National Museum of Arms and Armour and Portland Art Museum’s collaborative 2013 special exhibition “Samurai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection,” the video’s wordless but certainly not silent portrayal of this ancient and continuing practice has a kind of hypnotic quality. But if you’d like a more verbal explanation to accompany your views of the making of a traditional Japanese sword, you’ll get it in the 50-minute documentary above, The Secret World of the Japanese Swordsmith, a portrait of the highly respected Yoshindo Yoshihara, one of only thirty full-time swordsmiths currently practicing in Japan. If you then feel up to a Japanese swordsmithing triple-bill, give Samurai Sword: Making of a Legend a watch as well.
This 50-minute program tells the story of the katana itself, beginning with this breathless narration: “For over one thousand years, one weapon has dominated the battlefields of Japan, a weapon so fearsome that it can split a man from throat to groin — yet it spawned an an entirely new art form and spiritual way of life. A sword so technologically perfect in structure, so beautiful in creation, that it gave rise to an aristocratic warrior creed.” It also gave rise to no small number of samurai movies, a tradition that many a cinephile among us can certainly appreciate. Though inextricably tied to a specific time and place in history, and an even more specific class that arose from the peculiar political circumstances of that time and place, the katana continues to fascinate — and in this digital, hands-free age, its makers draw a more intense kind of respect than ever. Related Content: Japanese Craftsman Spends His Life Trying to Recreate a Thousand-Year-Old Sword Female Samurai Warriors Immortalized in 19th Century Japanese Photos Watch Japanese Woodworking Masters Create Elegant & Elaborate Geometric Patterns with Wood How Japanese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bamboo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper: A Short Film Documents an 800-Year-Old Tradition Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition 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. A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made 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. |
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