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Wednesday, May 17th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:41a | Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Support the City Threatened by Climate Change: A Poignant New Sculpture
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| 2:30p | An Animated Introduction to Samuel Beckett, Absurdist Playwright, Novelist & Poet
Though he’s best known for his spare, absurdist tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot, playwright, poet, and novelist Samuel Beckett wrote what might be his most-quoted line at the end of The Unnamable, the third book in a hypnotic trilogy that begins with Molloy and continues with Malone Dies: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” These novels, and the original Godot, were all written in French, then translated into English by Beckett himself. But Beckett was an Irish writer, who—like his contemporary, hero, countryman, and almost-father-in-law James Joyce—lived most of his life in voluntary exile. Like Joyce, Beckett wrote about Irish characters, and his “theme,” noted a 1958 New York Times reviewer of The Unnamable, “is the very Irish one in this century: the identity of opposites.” Nothing in Beckett encapsulates this idea more concisely than the seven-word concluding line of The Unnamable. It’s a sentence that sums up so much of Beckett—his elliptical aphorisms; his dry, acerbic wit; and his unwavering stare into the abyss. As one contemporary of his suggested, Beckett will remain relevant “as long as people still die.” His primary subject is indeed one of the few truly universal themes. But to only think of Beckett as morbid is not to read Beckett or see his work performed. While he can be unrelentingly grim, he is also never not in control of the dry humor of his voice. In his animated School of Life introduction to Beckett above, Alain de Botton begins with an anecdote about Beckett at a much-anticipated cricket match. Observing the perfect weather, a companion of his remarked, “This is the sort of day that would make you glad to be alive.” To which Beckett replied, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.” The story, de Botton, says, “nicely encompasses two aspects of Samuel Beckett: his famously bleak view of life, and his mordant sense of humor.” They are qualities that for Beckett have the status of philosophical principles—though the author himself had a very fraught, almost allergic, relationship to philosophy. He gave up teaching early in his career, as we learn in the video, because “he felt he could not teach to others what he did not know himself.” When a version of Waiting for Godot debuted in 1952, Beckett sent a note to be read in his place. He wrote, in part:
The necessity of pointless; the richness in the poverty of existence—stripped of its pretense and grand, self-important narratives…. These ideas arise from “the themes of failure that so dominate his work,” says de Botton. Though Beckett resisted interpretation in his own writing, he wrote an early study of Marcel Proust that interpreted the French author’s work as a philosophy of life which rests “on the making and appreciation of art.” Given that this is a School of Life video, this interpretation becomes the favored way to read Beckett. There are many others. But as the title of a 1994 Samuel Beckett reader—I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On—suggests, every approach to Beckett must somehow try to account for the stubborn intensity of his contradictions. Related Content: Hear Samuel Beckett’s Avant-Garde Radio Plays: All That Fall, Embers, and More When Samuel Beckett Drove Young André the Giant to School: A True Story The Books Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941-1956) How James Joyce’s Daughter, Lucia, Was Treated for Schizophrenia by Carl Jung Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Animated Introduction to Samuel Beckett, Absurdist Playwright, Novelist & Poet 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.  |
| 4:15p | Stephen Wolfram’s Bestseller, A New Kind of Science, Now Free to Read/Download Online  It’s been 15 years since computer scientist and physicist Stephen Wolfram published his bestselling book A New Kind of Science. And now Wolfram has put his book online. It’s available in its entirety, all 1,200 pages, including the superb graphics. Feel free to read the pages on the web. Or download them as PDFs. It’s also worth reading Wolfram’s new blog post where, in announcing the new online edition, he revisits the intellectual contributions he made with the book. The online edition of A New Kind of Science will be added to our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. 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: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online 200 Free Textbooks: A Meta Collection Download 464 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art John Grisham Is Letting You Download His New Novel as a Free eBook Stephen Wolfram’s Bestseller, A New Kind of Science, Now Free to Read/Download Online 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. |
| 5:30p | Noel Coward’s “Alice (Is At It Again)” Gets Reimagined as a Very Modern Fairy Tale: A Short Film Starring Sarah Snook
English playwright, lyricist, actor and raconteur Noel Coward (1899 –1973) is still remembered for his plays such as the wife-after-death comedy Blithe Spirit and Private Lives; his playlet Still Life, which became the classic David Lean film Brief Encounter, and his scripting and co-direction of the WW2 morale-booster In Which We Serve, also directed by Lean, for which Coward won an Honorary Academy Award. However, he’s perhaps better known now more as an image of archetypal mid-20th century Englishness, replete with dressing-gown and cigarette-holder, and the hundreds of witty songs and poems he wrote, such as Mad Dogs and Englishman and Mrs Worthington, which he performed in cabaret in his distinctively clipped English manner to much acclaim in London and, latterly, in Las Vegas. His 1946 song Alice (Is At It Again), written and then cut from his flop musical Pacific 1860, became a standard of his cabaret act and, with its suggestive lyrics, risqué subject matter and sly wit, is typical of his oeuvre. It’s thus a surprising choice perhaps by rising Australian actress Sarah Snook for the subject of her new short film Alice, co-devised with director Laura Scrivano, and the second film of The Passion, a new online series of performed poetry films coming out of Australia. The first film in the series, A Lovesong, starring Daniel Henshall (from AMC’s Turn: Washington Spies), featured T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (watch it below), so Alice is a change both in style and tone for the series, but continues the project’s experimentation in rendering poetry on film for a digital audience.
Sarah, who won critical acclaim for her genderswitching role in the 2015 science-fiction thriller Predestination, found the Coward text in a bookshop in San Francisco, while sourcing a text for her film for the series. Says Sarah:
Alice is the second film of The Passion series, in which actors select a text which has a personal significance for them or strikes a particular chord, and then work closely in collaboration with director Laura Scrivano to develop it as a new performance piece for film. A third film is currently in development. More information about the series can be found at this website. Dan Prichard is an online film and webseries producer, based in Sydney, whose work explores identity, place, and the space between film and performance in the digital arena. Visit his website and follow him on twitter @georgekaplan81 Noel Coward’s “Alice (Is At It Again)” Gets Reimagined as a Very Modern Fairy Tale: A Short Film Starring Sarah Snook 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. |
| 7:15p | Hear 2,000 Recordings of the Most Essential Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Education
If you were to ask me “What is jazz?” I wouldn’t presume to know the answer, and I’m not sure any single composition exists to which one could point to as an ideal type. Maybe the only thing I’m certain of when it comes to jazz is—to quote Wallace Stevens—“it must change.” Of course, there’s an incredibly rich history of jazz, broadly known, especially to those who have seen Ken Burns’ expansive documentary. I’d also recommend the excellent jazz writing of Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, or Philip Larkin. For the young, we might consult Langston Hughes’ illustrated jazz history. And maybe everyone should read Charles Mingus’ Grammy-nominated essay “What is a Jazz Composer?” in which the contrarian genius writes, “each jazz musician is supposed to be a composer. Whether he is or not, I don’t know.” Mingus the iconoclast argued for tearing up the text even as he sought a classical pedigree for jazz. His wish was partly granted by the influence of jazz on composers like Leonard Bernstein, who sought to answer the question “What is Jazz?” in a 1956 spoken-word LP. The tension between jazz as a compositional or wholly improvisational art seems to resound throughout the form, in all of its many guises and variations. But one thing I think every jazz musician knows is this: Standards, a common compendium of songs in the tradition. You’ve got to know the rulebook (or the fakebook, at the least), before you can throw it out the window. Even some of the most innovative jazz artists who more or less invented their own scales, modes, and harmonies—like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman—either studied at conservatory or paid their dues as sidemen playing other people’s songs. Jazz—Coleman once told Jacques Derrida—is “a conversation with sounds.” Its underlying grammar comes from the Standards. Until fairly recently, the only way one could get a proper education in the standards was on the job. Critic, jazz historian, and pianist Ted Gioia writes as much in his comprehensive 2012 reference, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire. Gioia’s “education in this music was happenstance and hard earned.” He writes, “aspiring musicians today can hardly imagine how opaque the art form was just a few decades ago—no school I attended had a jazz program or even offered a single course on jazz.” How times have changed. These days, if you can get in, you can take graduate-level classes taught by the greats, such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter at UCLA. Hundreds more less-famous jazz musician professors stand at the ready in music departments worldwide or at the renowned Berklee College of Music. But for those autodidacts out there, Gioia—who has served on the faculty at Stanford University and been called “one of the outstanding music historians in America”—offers an exceptional guide to the Standards, one we can not only read, but also, thanks to Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel, listen to, in the Spotify playlist above. (If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.) In a companion essay, Higgins describes the process of compiling “as many of the performances [Gioia] recommended” in his commentary on 250 jazz standards. Gioia names over 2,000 different performances of those 250 standards, and the playlist contains nearly all of them. You’ll find, for example, “several different recordings of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ by the composer (including one with John Coltrane), as well as versions by Sonny Rollins, Art Tatum, McCoy Tyner, Abdullah Ibrahim and Buddy Tate, and Chris Potter.” While the playlist is “not a complete reflection of Gioia’s recommendations,” given that certain artists’ work cannot be streamed, “there’s a lot of music here”—a whole lot—“spanning a century.” The experience of listening to this incredible library will not be complete without some context. Gioia’s book contains a “short historical and musical essay” on each of the 250 songs and he isn’t shy about offering incisive critical commentary. Other than going to music school or joining a touring band, I can’t think of a better way to learn the Standards. Related Content: Hear What is Jazz?: Leonard Bernstein’s Introduction to the Great American Art Form (1956) Langston Hughes Presents the History of Jazz in an Illustrated Children’s Book (1955) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. Hear 2,000 Recordings of the Most Essential Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Education 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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