[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Manuscripts Now Digitized & Put Online, Revealing the Beat Poet’s Creative Process
Somehow you have to imagine that, from its very opening — "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix" — Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" simply emerged fully formed and launched itself permanently into American culture. But deep down we all know that no work, poetic or otherwise, actually does that, no matter how widely read it becomes, no matter how vividly it captures a time and a place, no matter how many generations look to it as an example. Ginsberg had to work on "Howl," and now, thanks to Stanford Libraries, we have an up-close way to see some of that work in progress. "From its first public reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955 to the notorious obscenity trial that followed in the wake of its first publication in 1956," writes Stanford Curator for American and British Literature Rebecca Wingfield, "the poem is indelibly tied to the Beat Generation and their critique of the staid morals and customs of Eisenhower-era America." Before all that, it began with a seven-page first draft written in Ginsberg's North Beach apartment, gained a second section before that now-legendary Six Gallery reading, and finally, after Ginsberg tried out different compositional techniques and followed different suggestions in search of a way to capture America as he saw it, evolved into a long poem comprising three sections and a footnote, published alongside other works by City Lights Books as the paperback that made him famous. "The 'Howl' manuscripts and typescripts in the Allen Ginsberg Papers," which you can view online at Stanford Libraries, "document the formal development of the poem, tracing Ginsberg’s experiments with different structures and wording in each of the poem’s sections." These pre-"Howl" "Howl"s, manuscripts and typescripts both, retain the corrections and annotations that reveal details about Ginsberg's distinctive creative process. But given the most well-known aspect of the poem's construction, that each line lasts as long as exactly one breath, a full understanding can only come from hearing it as well as reading it. You can hear Ginsberg's earliest recorded performance of the poem, at Portland's Reed College (alma mater of Ginsberg's Beat colleague Gary Snyder) in 1956, at the top of the post, and a later reading on record here. (The text of the completed poem can be viewed here.) Look and listen closely, and you'll find that a cri de coeur, especially as Ginsberg cried it, demands deliberate craftsmanship. See the Howl manuscripts online here. Related Content: The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading “Howl” (1956) Allen Ginsberg Reads His Famously Censored Beat Poem, "Howl" (1959) James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’ Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats” Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burlington Snow” (1986) 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. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Manuscripts Now Digitized & Put Online, Revealing the Beat Poet’s Creative Process 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.  |
| 11:00a | Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writing Essays, Books & Songs, to Performing Surgery and Driving Trucks  We know they’re coming. The robots. To take our jobs. While humans turn on each other, find scapegoats, try to bring back the past, and ignore the future, machine intelligences replace us as quickly as their designers get them out of beta testing. We can’t exactly blame the robots. They don’t have any say in the matter. Not yet, anyway. But it’s a fait accompli say the experts. “The promise,” writes MIT Technology Review, “is that intelligence machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far.” The question, then, is not if, but “when will artificial intelligence exceed human performance?” And some answers come from a paper called, appropriately, “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts.” In this study, Katja Grace of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and several of her colleagues “surveyed the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence by asking them when they think intelligent machines will better humans in a wide range of tasks.”
You can see many of the answers plotted on the chart above. Grace and her co-authors asked 1,634 experts, and found that they “believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years.” That means all jobs: not only driving trucks, delivering by drone, running cash registers, gas stations, phone support, weather forecasts, investment banking, etc, but also performing surgery, which may happen in less than 40 years, and writing New York Times bestsellers, which may happen by 2049. That’s right, AI may perform our cultural and intellectual labor, making art and films, writing books and essays, and creating music. Or so the experts say. Already a Japanese AI program has written a short novel, and almost won a literary prize for it. And the first milestone on the chart has already been reached; last year, Google’s AI AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster of Go, the ancient Chinese game “that’s exponentially more complex than chess,” as Cade Metz writes at Wired. (Humane video game design, on the other hand, may have a ways to go yet.)
Perhaps these feats partly explain why, as Grace and the other researchers found, Asian respondents expected the rise of the machines “much sooner than North America.” Other cultural reasons surely abound—likely those same quirks that make Americans embrace creationism, climate-denial, and fearful conspiracy theories and nostalgia by the tens of millions. The future may be frightening, but we should have seen this coming. Sci-fi visionaries have warned us for decades to prepare for our technology to overtake us. In the 1960s Alan Watts foresaw the future of automation and the almost pathological fixation we would develop for “job creation” as more and more necessary tasks fell to the robots and human labor became increasingly superfluous. (Hear him make his prediction above.) Like many a technologist and futurist today, Watts advocated for Universal Basic Income, a way of ensuring that all of us have the means to survive while we use our newly acquired free time to consciously shape the world the machines have learned to maintain for us. What may have seemed like a Utopian idea then (though it almost became policy under Nixon), may become a necessity as AI changes the world, writes MIT, “at breakneck speed.” via Big Think/MIT Technology Review Related Content: Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Income Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More Artificial Intelligence Program Tries to Write a Beatles Song: Listen to “Daddy’s Car” Artificial Intelligence: A Free Online Course from MIT Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writing Essays, Books & Songs, to Performing Surgery and Driving Trucks 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. |
| 2:30p | Pakistani Musicians Play an Enchanting Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five”
How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and originally performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. Before he died in 2012, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard. Once you watch the performance above, you’ll know why. According to The Guardian, The Sachal Studios Orchestra was created by Izzat Majeed, a philanthropist based in London. When Pakistan fell under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq during the 1980s, Pakistan’s classical music scene fell on hard times. Many musicians were forced into professions they had never imagined — selling clothes, electrical parts, vegetables, etc. Whatever was necessary to get by. Today, many of these musicians have come together in a 60-person orchestra that plays in a state-of-the-art studio, designed partly by Abbey Road sound engineers. You can purchase their album, Sachal Jazz: Interpretations of Jazz Standards & Bossa Nova, on Amazon and iTunes. It includes versions of “Take Five” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” For good measure, we've added Sachal's take on "Eleanor Rigby," something George Harrison would surely have loved.
Note: A version of this post first appeared on our site back in 2013. But as enchanting as it is, it seemed worth bringing back. Hope you agree. 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: Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Performed on a Gayageum, a Traditional Korean Instrument Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Performed on Traditional Chinese Instruments An Uplifting Musical Surprise for Dave Brubeck in Moscow (1997) Ultra Orthodox Rabbis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem Pakistani Musicians Play an Enchanting Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five” 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. |
| 5:00p | Everything You Need to Know About Modern Russian Art in 25 Minutes: A Visual Introduction to Futurism, Socialist Realism & More
Few things fascinated me as a child more than Russia. I wasn’t alone in this. Everyone experienced it. And it wasn’t only the Soviet Union---though it played the bogeyman in Cold War films, loomed over history textbooks, and seemed to exist in a forbidden parallel universe in Reagan’s America. But what came before it was equally outsized and tragic: the Romanovs, Rasputin, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible.... Russia’s modern history came into focus through its novelists—the intricate social distinctions and complicated family dynamics, the palace intrigues, the gallows humor, discontent, and resignation of ordinary Russians…. After 40 years of uneasy détente with the world’s other superpower, Americans found the pieces of their view of Russia falling into place almost imperceptibly. But nothing—I repeat, nothing—prepared The West for Russian modernism. It drove the CIA to such distraction that they secretly funneled money to jazz artists and Abstract Expressionists to fight a culture war. It made no sense to us. “This is completely ridiculous!” says Brian Cox above, expressing a sentiment shared by many when they encounter Russian Formalism, or Suprematism, or Futurism, and other avant-gardisms. Cox, narrating the “Quickest History of 20th Century Art in Russia,” does an excellent job of conveying the shock, excitement, and bewilderment we feel when we encounter Malevich and Mayakovsky, the startling folk Neoclassicism of Russian Art Nouveau—where the film begins—the Conceptualists of the Thaw, and the outrageous performance artists of the post-Soviet era. None of this, to quote Tristan Tzara, is art made to “cajole the nice nice bourgeois”—with the ironic exception of Socialist Realism, which outlawed the Russian avant-garde and said “look, everything we have is so grand, abundant! We have everything aplenty!” Socialist Realism resembles nothing so much as American magazine advertising of the Life magazine and Norman Rockwell eras, a reminder of one way the two belligerent empires came to increasingly resemble each other over time. “Socialist Realism,” says Cox, “is almost a caricature, only with incredible pathos.” It is “the first tendency to rule out criticism completely.” It absorbed critique and turned it into celebration and denunciation, both of them noble acts of State. Where American didactic art sold hundreds of products and a handful of ideological poses, the Soviet variety sold one thing: the Party. This does not, however, mean that Socialist Realism is “bad”—not entirely. It is, instead, like so much modern Russian Art to non-Russian eyes… uncanny. The 25-minute “Quickest History of 20th Century Art in Russia” comes from a series of “Crash Courses” from Arzamas Academy that includes “Ancient Rome in 20 minutes” and “Ancient Greece in 18 minutes.” All of them feature the wry, mellifluous voice of Cox, and I highly recommend them all. Related Content: How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War Download 144 Beautiful Books of Russian Futurism: Mayakovsky, Malevich, Khlebnikov & More (1910-30) The History of Russia in 70,000 Photos: New Photo Archive Presents Russian History from 1860 to 1999 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Everything You Need to Know About Modern Russian Art in 25 Minutes: A Visual Introduction to Futurism, Socialist Realism & More 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. |
| << Previous Day |
2017/06/07 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |