[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Monday, June 21st, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 7:09a | Modernizing Table-Top Role-Playing Games — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #96
What’s the current status of table-top role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons in pop culture? Thanks to D&D’s recent depiction in Stranger Things and the enormous popularity of fantasy properties like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, interest in elves and magic and such is no longer fodder for Satanic panic, but the idea of actively pretending to be a character in this genre to engage in collaborative story-telling still seems foreign to many. Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Amanda McLoughlin, the host of Join the Party, a beginner-friendly, purposefully inclusive D&D real-play podcast, to go over some D&D basics, the dynamics of playing vs. spectating (by listening to her podcast, for instance), and the racism and imperialism built into the setting (adventure = going into a foreign land to kill often intelligent creatures and take their stuff). What is it to “act out your fantasy” in this way? Some of the ways of witnessing others playing that we refer to include Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Dimension 20. The Join the Party game master Eric Silver wrote the article “Dungeons & Dragons Has an Antisemitism Problem.” You can also look at Wikipedia’s “Dungeons and Dragons in Popular Culture” entry or get a flavor of the range of options by looking at Dicebreaker’s list of “10 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games Out Right Now“, this list of “The 12 Best Actual Play Podcasts,” or this video of “Top D&D Channels that Aren’t Critical Role.” Follow Amanda’s podcast @jointhepartypod on @MultitudeShows. She also hosts the Spirits Podcast about folklore and urban legends. Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network. Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts. Modernizing Table-Top Role-Playing Games — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #96 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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.  |
| 8:03a | Igor Stravinsky Appears on American Network TV & Tells Stories About His Unconventional Musical Life (1957)
One evening in 1957, viewers all across America tuned in to see Stravinsky. The broadcast wasn’t a performance of Stravinsky’s music, although those would continue to draw television audiences well into the following decade. It was a conversation with the man himself, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, who even when he was still alive had become an institution by virtue of his industry and innovation. “For half a century, Stravinsky’s musical explorations have dominated modern music,” says the program’s narrator. “His nearly 100 works — ballets, symphonies, religious music, even jazz — have often outraged audiences at first hearing.” The famously “riotous” audience reaction to the Paris debut of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring had happened 44 years earlier, back when the Russian-born composer was rising to international fame. But by 1957 he’d been an American citizen for years, and it’s in his Hollywood home — and on the eve of his 75th birthday — that NBC’s crew shot this episode of Wisdom. Having debuted just that year, Wisdom would continue to run until 1965, broadcasting long-form interviews with figures like Marcel Duchamp, Pearl S. Buck, Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Here Stravinsky speaks with his young protégé, the American conductor Robert Craft, who asks him to remember various chapters of his long musical life, which included encounters with the likes of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Dylan Thomas, and Pablo Picasso. The story begins with Stravinsky’s first improvisations at the piano during his childhood in Russia (and his first lessons, taught by a woman of nineteen: “for me that was an old maid, but of course I was in love with this old maid”). All throughout, we see flashes of the invention-above-convention sensibility that made Stravinsky more a Homo faber, as he liked to say, than a Homo sapiens. “Who invented the scale?” he asks, rhetorically. “Somebody invented the scale. If somebody invented the scale, I can change something in the scale and invent something else.” And why is it, Craft asks, that every new work of yours arouses protests in the public? “Each time I have new problems, and this new problem requires a new approach,” Stravinsky explains, and but for the public, “the idea of a new approach, of a new problem, doesn’t come to their mind.” So you’re ahead of the public – including, implicitly, the American public viewing at home? “Inevitably.” Related Content: The Night When Charlie Parker Played for Igor Stravinsky (1951) Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944) Hear Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies & Ballets in a Complete, 32-Hour, Chronological Playlist Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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. Igor Stravinsky Appears on American Network TV & Tells Stories About His Unconventional Musical Life (1957) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 11:01a | Buddhist Monk Sings The Ramones: “Rock ’n’ Roll High School,” “Teenage Lobotomy” & “Beat on the Brat”
The Ramones restored speed and simplicity to 70s rock. It’s rare to find a Ramones tune clocking in over three minutes. The sweet spot’s closer to 2 1/2. “We play short songs and short sets for people who don’t have a lot of spare time,” original drummer Tommy Ramone remarked. It took them all of 2 minutes and 20 seconds to bomb through their single for “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” So why does Japanese Buddhist monk Kossan’s cover take more than twice that long? Because meditation is an integral part of his music video practice.
Kossan, aka Kazutaka Yamada, plays drums, piano, and sanshin, and introduces a Tibetan singing bowl into his Ramones tributes. His cover of 1976’s “Beat on the Brat” runs a whopping nine minutes and 15 seconds — a mindful approach to punk, and vice versa. By comparison, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s accordion-enhanced cover hews far closer to the original adding just six seconds to the Ramones’ 2:30 time frame.
Kossan cut most of the meditation from “Teenage Lobotomy,” his earliest Ramones cover. We’re glad he committed to preserving this element in subsequent uploads, including his takes on Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” It furthers his mission as a zazen teacher, and patient viewers will be rewarded with his bright smile in the final seconds as he resumes his discourse with the larger world.
You can hear Kossan play sanshin and more of his Western rock covers on his YouTube channel. Related Content: A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation Buddhist Monk Covers Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” Then Breaks Into Meditation How Tibetan Monks Use Meditation to Raise Their Peripheral Body Temperature 16-17 Degrees Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Buddhist Monk Sings The Ramones: “Rock ’n’ Roll High School,” “Teenage Lobotomy” & “Beat on the Brat” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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. |
| 2:06p | Discover Ikaria, the Greek Island With the Oldest Life Expectancy in the World
Boilerplate human interest stories about the habits of particularly spry centenarians just don’t cut it anymore. Living a long, healthy, and happy life, we know, involves more than making the right individual choices. It means living in societies that make good choices readily available and support the individuals making them. Nutrition research has borne this out — just scan the latest popular food book titles for the word “Mediterranean,” for example, or input the same search term in an academic database, and you’ll pull up hundreds of results. Even fad diets have shifted from promoting individual celebrities to celebrating whole regions. Scientists have identified a handful of places around the world, in fact, where diet and other ordinary lifestyle and social factors have led to the outcomes governments spend billions trying, and failing, to achieve. One of these regions is — yes — squarely in the Mediterranean, the Greek island of Ikaria, “named one of the healthiest places on earth,” writes Greek City Times, “a spot of exceptional longevity. Here, there are more healthy people over 90 than any other place on the planet.” Ikaria is just one of five so-called “Blue Zones” — which also include Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, Nicoya, Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, California — where inhabitants regularly live healthy lives into their 90s and beyond. In the Vice video above, you can meet some of the residents of Ikaria, where 1 in 3 people live past 90, and learn about some of the factors that contribute to long life in blue zones, and in Ikaria in particular. Great weather doesn’t hurt. Most important, however, is local, fresh food, and lots of it. “The most important thing is the food,” says an Ikarian cook as she prepares a batch of fresh-caught fish. “Because you live with it. You eat the right way, everything works the right way.” This is a much better way of saying “you are what you eat.” As Max Fisher points out in a bulleted list of the Greek Island’s “secrets to long life,” things “working the right way” plays a huge role in longevity. Not only do older people in Ikaria walk everywhere and continue working into their elderly years – happily but not under duress – they also report very healthy sex lives, part of a network of habits that socially reinforce each other, Fisher writes. Hear Ikarian residents above contrast their lives on the island with their lives in fast-paced modern cities where they traded health and wellbeing for more money. Read Fisher’s full list (excerpted below) at The Washington Post.
Related Content: 10 Longevity Tips from Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, Japan’s 105-Year-Old Longevity Expert How to Live to Be 100 and Beyond: 9 Diet & Lifestyle Tips Book Readers Live Longer Lives, According to New Study from Yale University Life Lessons From 100-Year-Olds: Timeless Advice in a Short Film Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Discover Ikaria, the Greek Island With the Oldest Life Expectancy in the World is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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 |
2021/06/21 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |