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Tuesday, November 28th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | Listen to Rolling Stone‘s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in One Streamable Playlist
Whatever value one places in “best of” or “greatest” lists, it’s hard to deny they can be virtuoso exercises in critical concision. When running through 10, 50, 100 films, albums, novels etc. one can’t wander through the wildflowers but must make sparkly, punchy statements and move on. Rolling Stone's writers have excelled at this form, and expanded the list size to 500, first releasing a book compiling their “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003 then following up the next year with the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” a special issue of the magazine with short blurbs about each selection. In 2010, the magazine updated their massive list, compiled by 162 critics, for a special digital issue, and it now lives on their site with paragraph-length blurbs intact. Each one offers a fun little nugget of fact or opinion about the chosen songs. (Tom Petty, learning that The Strokes admitted to stealing his opening riff for “American Girl,” told the magazine, “I was like, ‘Ok, good for you.’ It doesn’t bother me.”) There’s hardly room to explain the rankings or justify inclusion. We're asked to take the Rolling Stone writers' collective word for it. Maybe it's a little difficult to argue with a list this big, since it includes a bit of everything—for the possible dross, there’s a whole lot of gold. The updated list swapped in 25 new songs and added an introduction by Jay-Z: “A great song has all the key elements—melody; emotion; a strong statement that becomes part of the lexicon; and great production.” Broad enough criteria for great, but "greatest"? Put on the Spotify playlist above (or access it here) and judge for yourself whether most of those 500 songs in the updated list—472 to be exact—meet the bar. You can see the original, 2004 list, sans blurbs, at the Internet Archive. Number one, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (get it?). Number 500, Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” which, well… okay. The updated list gives us Smokey Robinson’s “Shop Around” in last place (don’t worry, Smokey fans, “The Tracks of My Tears” makes it to 50.) Still at number one, naturally, “Like a Rolling Stone." Find out which 498 songs sit in-between at the online list here. (Wikipedia has a percentage breakdown for both lists of songs by decade.) The magazine may be up for sale, its journalistic credibility in question, but for comprehensive “best of” lists that keep track of the movement of popular culture, we shouldn't count them out just yet. Related Content: 89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love: A 50th Anniversary Playlist The History of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016 A Massive 800-Track Playlist of 90s Indie & Alternative Music, in Chronological Order Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Listen to <i>Rolling Stone</i>‘s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in One Streamable Playlist 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.  |
| 3:00p | Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schnabel Films It (2006)
"Lou Reed's Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence and suicide," wrote Rolling Stone's Stephen Davis in 1973, adding that "there are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them." Could this "last shot at a once-promising career," as Davis described it, really have come from the onetime leader of as influential a band as the Velvet Underground — from the man who could, just three years earlier, have written a song like "Sweet Jane"? Yet Lou Reed survived Berlin's drubbing, and indeed spent the next forty years fulfilling his promise, to the very end drawing the occasional round of pans (most resoundingly for Lulu, his 2011 collaboration with Metallica) that verified his artistic vitality. By the 21st century, critical opinion had come around on Berlin, and in 2003 even Rolling Stone put it on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Three years later, Reed took the then-33-year-old rock-opera album on tour, playing it live with a 30-piece band and twelve choristers. Painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel designed the tour and shot a documentary of five nights of its performances in Brooklyn, releasing it in 2008 as Lou Reed Berlin. In the clip above, you can see the very last song of the show, played during the film's closing credits. It isn't "Sad Song," which draws the curtain over Berlin, but the last of a three-part encore that ends with none other than "Sweet Jane." Having first appeared on the Velvet Underground's 1970 album Loaded (#110 on the Rolling Stone list to Berlin's #344), the song became a favorite in Reed's live performances in the decades thereafter, an evocation of a particular creative era in a career that encompassed so many. "Goodbye, Lou," Davis said to Reed at the end of his Berlin review, but for that album, and even more so for the man who made it, the show had only just begun. Related Content: Martin Scorsese Captures Levon Helm and The Band Performing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz Jefferson Airplane Plays on a New York Rooftop; Jean-Luc Godard Captures It (1968) Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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. Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schnabel Films It (2006) 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. |
| 6:20p | The Robots of Your Dystopian Future Are Already Here: Two Chilling Videos Drive It All Home
A year ago, Boston Dynamics released a video showing its humanoid robot "Atlas" doing, well, rather human things--opening doors, walking through a snowy forest, hoisting cardboard boxes, and lifting itself off of the ground. Rarely has something so banal seemed so peculiar. What is "Atlas" doing these days? As shown in this newly-released video above, it's jumping to new heights, twisting in the air, and doing backflips with uncanny ease. Standing six feet tall and weighing 180 pounds, Atlas was designed to take care of mundane problems--like assisting emergency services in search and rescue operations and "operating powered equipment in environments where humans could not survive." But that's not where the applications of Atlas end. Seeing that the Pentagon has helped finance and design Atlas, you can easily see the humanoid fighting on the battlefield. Stay tuned for that clip in 2018.
Which brings us to our next video. The new short film, "Slaughterbots," comes from the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and it follows this plot:
According to UC Berkeley AI expert Stuart Russell, "Slaughterbots" looks like science fiction. But it's not. "It shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technologies that we already have.” It is "simply an integration of existing capabilities... In fact, it is easier to achieve than self-driving cars, which require far higher standards of performance.” Recently shown at the United Nations' Convention on Conventional Weapons, "Slaughterbots" comes on the heels of an open letter signed by 116 robotics and AI scientists (including Tesla’s Elon Musk), urging the UN to ban the development and use of killer robots. It reads:
If we already have military drones taking out enemies across the world (in places like Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan), the mental leap to deploying Slaughterbots doesn't seem too great. Do you trust our leaders to make finer distinctions and keep a lid on Pandora's Box? Or could you see them tearing Pandora's Box open like a gift on Christmas day? Yeah, me too. The robots of your dystopian future are now here. 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: Artificial Intelligence: A Free Online Course from MIT The Robots of Your Dystopian Future Are Already Here: Two Chilling Videos Drive It All Home 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. |
| 8:00p | George Orwell Predicted Cameras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Never Imagined We’d Gladly Buy and Install Them Ourselves
Normalization—the mainstreaming of people and ideas previously banished from public life for good reason—has become the operative description of a massive societal shift toward something awful. Whether it’s puff pieces on neo-Nazis in major national newspapers or elected leaders who are also documented sexual predators, a good deal of work goes into making the previously unthinkable seem mundane or appealing. I try not to imagine too often where these things might lead, but one previously unthinkable scenario, the openly public mass surveillance apparatus of George Orwell’s 1984 has pretty much arrived, and has been thoroughly normalized and become both mundane and appealing. Networked cameras and microphones are installed throughout millions of homes, and millions of us carry them with us wherever we go. The twist is that we are the ones who installed them. As comic Keith Lowell Jensen remarked on Twitter a few years ago, “What Orwell failed to predict is that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.” By appealing to our basic human need for connection, to vanity, the desire for recognition, and the seemingly instinctual drive for convenience, technology companies have persuaded millions of people to actively surveille themselves and each other. They incessantly gather our data, as Tim Wu shows in The Attention Merchants, and as a byproduct have provided access to our private spaces to government agents and who-knows-who-else. Computers, smartphones, and "smart" devices can nearly all be hacked or commandeered. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper reported as much last year, telling the U.S. Senate that intelligence agencies might make extended use of consumer devices for government surveillance. Webcams and “other internet-connected cameras,” writes Eric Limer at Popular Mechanics, “such as security cams and high-tech baby monitors, are… notoriously insecure.” James Comey and Mark Zuckerberg both cover the cameras on their computers with tape. The problem is far from limited to cameras. “Any device that can respond to voice commands is, by its very nature, listening to you all the time.” Although we are assured that those devices only hear certain trigger words “the microphone is definitely on regardless” and “the extent to which this sort of audio is saved or shared is unclear.” (Recordings on an Amazon Echo are pending use as evidence in a murder trial in Arkansas.) Devices like headphones have even been turned into microphones, Limer notes, which means that speakers could be as well, and "Lipreading software is only getting more and more impressive." I type these words on a Siri-enabled Mac, an iPad lies nearby and an iPhone in my pocket… I won’t deny the appeal—or, for many, the necessity of connectivity. The always-on variety, with multiple devices responsible for controlling greater aspects of our lives may not be justifiable. Nonetheless, 2017 could “finally be the year of the smart home.” Sales of the iPhone X may not meet Apple’s expectations. But that could have more to do with price or poor reviews than with the creepy new facial recognition technology—a feature likely to remain part of later designs, and one that makes users much less likely to cover or otherwise disable their cameras.
The thing is, we mostly know this, at least abstractly. Bland bulleted how-to guides make the problem seem so ordinary that it begins not to seem like a serious problem at all. As an indication of how mundane insecure networked technology has become in the consumer market, major publications routinely run articles offering helpful tips on how “stop your smart gadgets from ‘spying’ on you” and “how to keep your smart TV from spying on you.” Your TV may be watching you. Your smartphone may be watching you. Your refrigerator may be watching you. Your thermostat is most definitely watching you. Yes, the situation isn't strictly Orwellian: Oceana's constantly surveilled citizens did not comparison shop, purchase, and customize their own devices voluntarily. (It's not strictly Foucauldian either, but has its close resemblances.) Yet in proper Orwellian doublespeak, "spying" might have a very flexible definition depending on who is on the other end. We might stop "spying" by enabling or disabling certain features, but we might not stop "spying," if you know what I mean. So who is watching? CIA documents released by a certain unsavory organization show that the Agency might be, as the BBC segment at the top reports. As might any number of other interested parties from data-hoarding corporate bots to tech-savvy voyeurs looking to get off on your candid moments. We might assume that someone could have access at any time, even if we use the privacy controls. That so many people have become dependent on their devices, and will increasingly become so in the future, makes the question of what to do about it a trickier proposition. Related Content: The Existentialism Files: How the FBI Targeted Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assassination Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness George Orwell Predicted Cameras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Never Imagined We’d Gladly Buy and Install Them Ourselves 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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