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Tuesday, February 12th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Becoming: A Short Timelapse Film Shows a Single Cell Morphing Into a Complete, Complex Living Organism
From Jan van IJken comes "Becoming," a short timelapse film that documents "the miraculous genesis of animal life." He writes:
"Becoming" has been "selected at more than 20 international film festivals and won the award for Best short documentary at Innsbruck Nature Film Festival 2018, Austria." Enjoy. 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 Map of Biology: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Biology Fit Together Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky Becoming: A Short Timelapse Film Shows a Single Cell Morphing Into a Complete, Complex Living Organism 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 | Why Should We Read Flannery O’Connor? An Animated Video Makes the Case
Why did Flannery O’Connor write? To convert us? The devout Catholic was not immune to a certain apologetic impulse, or a sense of her own purpose as a vessel for divine truth. Or did she, like Greek tragedians, write to inspire pity and terror? “I don’t have any pretensions,” she once demurred, “to being an Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience.” In any case, what drove her may be a less interesting question than what should drive us to read her. O’Connor wrote, as most great writers do, because she was compelled to write. What we gain as readers is the deeply unsettling, but also deeply pleasurable experience of recognizing our own flawed humanity in her violent, manipulative characters, none of whom, somehow, are ever beyond redemption. O’Connor’s authorial voice does not judge or condemn but exposes to light the flaws even, or especially, her most respectable characters would rather hide from themselves and others.  By use of what she called “a reasonable use of the unreasonable” she shows murder, contempt, and deception as shockingly ordinary states of affairs, belying the polite fictions of civility and social niceness. Perhaps no setting could better illuminate the contrasts than the piously violent segregated mid-century American South. O’Connor’s “mastery of the grotesque,” notes the TED-Ed video above by Iseult Gillespie, “and her explorations of the insularity and superstitions of the South led her to be classified as a ‘Southern Gothic’ writer.” The label may fit superficially, but “her work pushed beyond the purely ridiculous and frightening characteristics associated with the genre to reveal the variety and nuance of human character.” O’Connor herself suggested that what set her apart were “the assumptions… of the central Christian mysteries.” Though we need not read her work this way, she grants, there is “none other by which it could have been written.” We might say that her committed belief in the idea of universal human depravity gave her unique insight into the total meaninglessness of class and race distinctions. Few writers have taken the idea as seriously, or approached it with more wicked playfulness. Why did she write? One reason is she “took pleasure in challenging her readers,” as the video explains. But it was pleasure that she chiefly desired to share. We can vivisect her stories, carve them up and seal them in jars labeled with politics and theologies. Yet “properly, you analyze to enjoy,” she wrote. "It's equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment.” Lovers of O’Connor know the answer to the question of why we should read her. Because they take as much pleasure in reading her stories as she did in writing them. Discover this enjoyment on your own. Hear Studs Terkel read her story "Revelation," hear Estelle Parsons read "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and hear O'Connor herself read that 1959 classic of her Southern grotesque style, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Related Content: Hear a Rare Recording of Flannery O’Connor Reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959) Flannery O’Connor Renders Her Verdict on Ayn Rand’s Fiction: It’s As “Low As You Can Get” Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942-1945 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Why Should We Read Flannery O’Connor? An Animated Video Makes the Case 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 | Michel Foucault Offers a Clear Introduction to His Philosophical Project (1966)
Theorist Michel Foucault first “rose to prominence,” notes Aeon, “as existentialism fell out of favor among French intellectuals.” His first major work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, proposed a new methodology based on the “disappearance of Man” as a metaphysical category. The ahistorical assumptions that had plagued philosophy made us too comfortable, he thought, with historical systems that imprisoned us. “I would like to consider our own culture,” he says in the 1966 interview with Pierre Dumayet above, “to be something as foreign to us.” The kind of estrangement Foucault induced in his ethnologies, genealogies, and histories of Western modernity opened a space for critiques of knowledge itself as a “foreign phenomenon,” he says. Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish examine systems—the asylum, the medical profession, the sciences, and prisons—and allow us to see how ideologies are produced by instrumental uses of language and technology. Foucault shifted his focus in the last period of his career, after a 1975 LSD trip and subsequent experiences in Berkeley changed his outlook. Yet he continued, in his monumental, unfinished, multi-volume History of Sexuality to demonstrate how modes of philosophical and scientific discourse gave rise to cultural phenomena we take for granted as natural states. Foucault was a critic of the way the psychiatry and medicine pathologized human behavior and created systems of exclusion and correction. In his final work, he examined the classical history of ethical discipline and self-improvement. We might recognize the remnants of this history in our contemporary culture when he writes, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 3, that “improvement, the perfection of the soul that one seeks in philosophy…. Increasingly assumes a medical coloration.” Foucault described the ways in which pleasure and desire were highly circumscribed by utilitarian systems of control and self-control. It’s hard to say how much of this early interview the later Foucault would have endorsed, but it’s yet another example of how lucid and perceptive he was as a thinker, despite an undeserved reputation for difficulty and obscurity. He admits, however, the inherent difficulty of his project: the self-reflective critique of a modern European intellectual, through the very categories of thought that make up the European intellectual tradition. But “after all,” he says, “how can we know ourselves if not with our own knowledge?” The endeavor requires a “complete twisting of our reason on itself.” Few thinkers have been able to make such moves with as much clarity and scholarly rigor as Foucault. via Aeon Related Content: Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983 Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self (UC Berkeley, 1980-1983) An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power” Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Michel Foucault Offers a Clear Introduction to His Philosophical Project (1966) 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. |
| 7:00p | How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant
Few albums of the late 1970s and early 1980s have held up as well as those by Talking Heads, but what to call the music recorded on them? Rock? Pop? New Wave? In the difficulty to pin it down lies its enduring appeal, and that difficulty didn't come about by accident: impatient with musical categorizations and expectations, frontman David Byrne and the rest of the band kept pushing themselves into new territories even after they'd begun to find success. When they set out to create their fourth album, 1980's Remain in Light, "they were looking to change the way they made songs." Instead of leaving the writing to Byrne, "the band wanted a more democratic process. And so they tried something they never had before."
So says the Polyphonic video above on how the band wrote "Once in a Lifetime," surely the most beloved song on Remain in Light and quite possibly the most beloved in Talking Heads' entire catalog. "Inspired by Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, the instrumentalists in the band recorded a number of jams," such as the proto-"Once in a Lifetime" outtake "Right Start" (which itself followed on "I Zimbra" from Talking Heads' previous album, Fear of Music). When bassist Tina Weymouth came up with a striking bass line, the band "took that lick and extrapolated it, slowly building a piece around it. After weeks of jamming, David Byrne and producer Brian Eno came in to the studio to start adding arrangements and lyrics to the music pieces."
Eno counted the rhythm of the song differently than everyone else did, resulting in a distinctive layering of different grooves all at once. On top of this came the lyrics, which Byrne developed as he "sat down and listened to televangelist sermons, pulling phrases from them and crafting them into lyrics." Put together, "the song creates a trancelike state, capturing the manic monotony of middle-class existence" with both its captivatingly repetitive music (played by the band members acting as "human samplers") and its words, as Byrne himself interprets them, "about the unconscious, about how we operate half-awake on autopilot."
Like so many hits of the 1980s, "Once in a Lifetime" launched into the zeitgeist from the platform of MTV — a network that didn't even exist when the song came out. "Made on a shoestring budget, the video for 'Once in a Lifetime' is one of the most memorable of its time." Co-directed by Toni Basil (of "Mickey" fame), it "played with bluescreen technology, composing multiple David Byrnes on top of a white background or images of religious ceremony." Byrne and Basil "pored over film of preachers, people in trances, religious sects, and much, much more. Some of these were put in the background, but more importantly, they were used as the basis for Byrne's dancing." When the content-hungry MTV launched six months after "Once in a Lifetime" came out, the video went right into heavy rotation. 37 years later, we can look back at both it and the song as "the walking embodiment of all that the Talking Heads were: it's cutting-edge, it's strange, and it's utterly brilliant." Related Content: How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short Documentary The Genius of Tina Weymouth: Breaking Down the Style of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club’s Basslines Hear the Earliest Known Talking Heads Recordings (1975) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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. How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant 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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