Thursday, July 4th, 2019

Time	Event
4:57a	A Documentary Introduction to Nick Drake, Whose Haunting & Influential Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today "All smokers will recognise the meaning of the title — it refers to five leaves left near the end of a packet of cigarette papers. It sounds poetic and so does composer, singer, and guitarist Nick Drake. His debut album for Island is interesting." There, in its entirety, is Melody Maker's review of Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, which came out fifty years ago today. Drake now stands in music history as something of a doomed romantic hero, an artist who crafted a few dozen strikingly beautiful, haunting songs and delivered them into a world in which he never felt at home. Unable to make that world appreciate his work, Drake departed from it at the early age of 26, and only decades later would Five Leaves Left and the other two albums he recorded in his lifetime find their listeners. Simplified though it is, that conception adheres to the broad contours of Drake's life. Born in Burma to an English civil engineer and the musically inclined daughter of a higher-up in the Indian Civil Service, he played in school orchestras and cover bands growing up and signed to Island Records while still a student at Cambridge. By that point, having experienced the music of predecessors like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, stints in Morocco and the south of France, and the mind-altering substances popular in the late 1960s, Drake had fashioned himself into an acoustic guitar-playing singer-songwriter who must have seemed well suited to the transatlantic folk-music boom then in effect. He certainly managed to impress Joe Boyd, the young American record producer responsible for bringing acts like Fairport Convention, John Martyn, and the Incredible String Band into the mainstream. Boyd didn't need to hear much of Drake's demo tape before he decided to produce a proper album, and in the 2014 event above he remembers the experience of bringing Drake into the studio and recording what would become Five Leaves Left. Accompanying Drake's voice and guitar with a string section, the album showcases all the qualities that set him apart from most singer-songwriters then and still do now, from his unusual compositional structures and guitar tunings to the unapologetic Englishness of his pronunciation and cadence. And unlike so many of the much bigger records that came out in 1969, it all sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday — an achievement whose techniques engineer John Wood has, for the past half-century, declined to explain. But Drake's shyness and sensitivity made him temperamentally unsuited to live performance; he struggled to promote himself, and died of an antidepressant overdose five years and two albums later. For some time thereafter it looked as if Drake's music might have died with him. But Five Leaves Left and its follow-ups remained in Island's back catalog and by the early 1980s had built up a cult following, especially among other musicians. (The Cure's Robert Smith has credited his band's name to a line from Drake's "Time Has Told Me.") The 1997 publication of Patrick Humphries' Nick Drake: The Biography opened the period of wide-ranging discovery of Nick Drake, furthered by the BBC Radio 2 documentary Fruit Tree: The Nick Drake Story, the BBC2 television documentary Nick Drake: A Stranger Among Us, the Dutch documentary A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, and the many other books about him published since. (Ten years ago, for Five Leaves Left's 40th anniversary, I myself interviewed Humphries and two other authors of books about Drake; you can download the program as an MP3 here.) In 2004 BBC2 produced a second radio documentary called Lost Boy: In Search Of Nick Drake, and to narrate it brought in a fan by the name of Brad Pitt. "I was introduced to Nick Drake's music about five years ago, and am a huge admirer of his records," the actor said at the time, and it may not be a coincidence that the year 1999 saw the highest-profile use of one of Drake's songs by far — as the soundtrack to a Volkswagen commercial. Two decades after that big break, and nearly 45 years after his death, Nick Drake is at the height of his popularity, both in terms of how many listeners claim his songs as favorites and how many current singer-songwriters claim him as an influence. Yet to this day, no other performer sounds quite like him; in all probability, none ever will. And no matter how many times one has heard it, Five Leaves Left remains more "interesting" than ever. Related Content: Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musician Featured in a 1965 Documentary Paul McCartney Breaks Down His Most Famous Songs and Answers Most-Asked Fan Questions in Two New Videos James Taylor Performs Live in 1970, Thanks to a Little Help from His Friends, The Beatles 89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love: A 50th Anniversary Playlist Joni Mitchell: Singer, Songwriter, Artist, Smoking Grandma Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram. A Documentary Introduction to Nick Drake, Whose Haunting & Influential Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today 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. (Comment on this)
8:00a	When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place Charlie Chaplin started appearing in his first films in 1914---40 films, to be precise---and, by 1915, the United States had a major case of "Chaplinitis." Chaplin mustaches were suddenly popping up everywhere--as were Chaplin imitators and Chaplin look-alike contests. A young Bob Hope apparently won one such contest in Cleveland. Chaplin Fever continued burning hot through 1921, the year when the Chaplin look-alike contest, shown above, was held outside the Liberty Theatre in Bellingham, Washington. According to legend, somewhere between 1915 and 1921, Chaplin decided to enter a Chaplin look-alike contest, and lost, badly. A short article called "How Charlie Chaplin Failed," appearing in The Straits Times of Singapore in August of 1920, read like this: Lord Desborough, presiding at a dinner of the Anglo-Saxon club told a story which will have an enduring life. It comes from Miss Mary Pickford who told it to Lady Desborough, “Charlie Chaplin was one day at a fair in the United States, where a principal attraction was a competition as to who could best imitate the Charlie Chaplin walk. The real Charlie Chaplin thought there might be a chance for him so he entered for the performance, minus his celebrated moustache and his boots. He was a frightful failure and came in twentieth. A variation on the same story appeared in a New Zealand newspaper, the Poverty Bay Herald, again in 1920. As did another story in the Australian newspaper, the Albany Advertiser, in March, 1921. A competition in Charlie Chaplin impersonations was held in California recently. There was something like 40 competitors, and Charlie Chaplin, as a joke, entered the contest under an assumed name. He impersonated his well known film self. But he did not win; he was 27th in the competition. Did Chaplin come in 20th place? 27th place? Did he enter a contest at all? It's fun to imagine that he did. But, a century later, many consider the story the stuff of urban legend. When one researcher asked the Association Chaplin to weigh in, they apparently had this to say: "This anecdote told by Lord Desborough, whoever he may have been, was quite widely reported in the British press at the time. There are no other references to such a competition in any other press clipping albums that I have seen so I can only assume that this is the source of that rumour, urban myth, whatever it is. However, it may be true." I'd like to believe it is. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016. Related Content: The Charlie Chaplin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Photos & Documents from the Life of the Iconic Film Star 65 Free Charlie Chaplin Films Online Charlie Chaplin Gets Strapped into a Dystopian “Rube Goldberg Machine,” a Frightful Commentary on Modern Capitalism Charlie Chaplin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Modern Times (1936) When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place 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. (Comment on this)
11:00a	Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944) In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939-40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted the Boston Symphony and, on one famous occasion, he decided to conduct his own arrangement of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he made out a “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” The date was January, 1944. And he was, of course, referring to America's role in World War II. As you might expect, Stravinsky's version on “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn't entirely conventional, seeing that it added a dominant seventh chord to the arrangement. And the Boston police, not exactly an organization with avant-garde sensibilities, issued Stravinsky a warning, claiming there was a law against tampering with the national anthem. (They were misreading the statute.) Grudgingly, Stravinsky pulled it from the bill. You can hear Stravinsky's “Star-Spangled Banner” above, apparently performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The Youtube video features an apocryphal mugshot of Stravinsky. Despite the mythology created around this event, Stravinsky was never arrested. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.  Related Content: The Night When Charlie Parker Played for Igor Stravinsky (1951) Hear The Rite of Spring Conducted by Igor Stravinsky Himself: A Vintage Recording from 1929 Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visualized in a Computer Animation for Its 100th Anniversary Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravinsky Conduct The Firebird, the Ballet Masterpiece That First Made Him Famous (1965) Hear 46 Versions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Minutes: A Classic Mashup Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944) 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. (Comment on this)
5:53p	How Intellectual Humility Can Boost Our Curiosity & Ability to Learn: Read the Findings of a New Study Photo via Wikimedia Commons When I think about the times I definitely knew what I was talking about, versus the times I kinda, sorta, might have, maybe did… well…. Let’s just say that wisdom doesn’t always come with age, but hindsight certainly does. We may cringe when we remember the moments we were overconfident, out of our depth, etcetera, and so forth—when we lacked the critical capacity known as intellectual humility. It’s a quality that can save us a lot of shame, for sure, if we’re the type of people capable of feeling that emotion. But there’s more to knowing what you don’t know than avoiding regret, as important a consideration as that may be. Without intellectual humility, we can’t acquire new knowledge. Still, though we might find “open minded” listed on many an online dating profile, being flexible in one’s thinking and willing to say “I don’t know” are also socially stigmatized, says Pepperdine University professor of psychology Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso: When it comes to beliefs, people tend to appreciate others being open-minded, yet they may also view people who are unsure about their beliefs as weak or they may view those who change their viewpoint as unstable or manipulative. These social perceptions might make people afraid to admit the fallibility in their thinking. They may believe they should be confident in their viewpoints, which can lead people to be afraid to change their minds. Fundamentalist religion and polarized political battle-royales played out in social media stoke the fires of this tendency day in and out, creating a veritable conflagration of willful ignorance. Krumrei-Mancuso and her colleagues set out to investigate the opposite, “accepting one’s intellectual fallibility in an open and level-headed way,” writes Peter Dockrill at Science Alert. Their findings were somewhat similar to those popularized by the Dunning-Krueger Effect. In one finding, for example, the researchers discovered that “intellectually humble people underestimated their cognitive ability,” perhaps not working up to their full potential. The intellectually overconfident, as we might expect, overestimated their abilities. On the whole, however, the conclusions tend to be quite positive. In a series of five studies, which surveyed 1,200 individuals, the authors found that the intellectually humble are far more motivated to learn for its own sake, more likely to enjoy challenging cognitive tasks, more willing to consider different perspectives and alternative evidence, and less threatened by awareness of their own limitations. The Harvard Business Review points out the Pepperdine studies’ importance in defining the fuzzy concept of open-mindedness, with a fourfold measure to assess individuals' intellectual humility: Having respect for other viewpoints Not being intellectually overconfident Separating one’s ego from one’s intellect Willingness to revise one’s own viewpoint Becoming intellectually humble can take us into some uncomfortable territory, places where we don’t know what to say or do when everyone around us seem so certain. But it can also give us the push we need to actually learn the things we might have kinda, sorta pretended to understand. Read Pepperdine's study, “Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge” at The Journal of Positive Psychology. Related Content: Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”) Research Finds That Intellectual Humility Can Make Us Better Thinkers & People; Good Thing There’s a Free Course on Intellectual Humility How to Argue With Kindness and Care: 4 Rules from Philosopher Daniel Dennett 24 Common Cognitive Biases: A Visual List of the Psychological Systems Errors That Keep Us From Thinking Rationally Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Intellectual Humility Can Boost Our Curiosity & Ability to Learn: Read the Findings of a New Study 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. (Comment on this)

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