The show, spearheaded by Shakur’s estate, will start out in Los Angeles. It’s “a story about race in America using Tupac as a proxy,” one of its producers said.
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Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future on The David Letterman Show (1980)
In 1980, Newsweek published a cantankerous and sadly on-the-nose diagnosis of the United States’ “cult of ignorance” — written by one Isaac Asimov, “professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine” and “author of 212 books, most of them on various scientific subjects for the general public.” Given this intimidating biography, and the fact that Asimov believed that “hardly anyone can read” in the U.S., we might expect the science fiction legend wanted nothing to do with television. We would be wrong.
Asimov seemed to love TV. In 1987, for example, the four-time Hugo winner wrote a humorously critical takedown of ALF for TV Guide. And he was a consummate TV entertainer, making his first major TV appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1968, appearing four times on The Mike Douglas Show in the next few years, and giving his final television interviews to Dick Cavett in a two-part series in 1989. The same year he wrote about America’s cult of ignorance, he appeared on The David Letterman show to crack wise with the biggest wiseass on TV. Asimov held his own and then some.
“Asimov, sixty in this video, proves himself a natural comedian,” writes the Melville House blog; “Letterman, thirty-three, can barely keep up.” Surely Asimov’s banter had nothing to do with The David Letterman Show’s cancellation three days later. (Letterman was back on the air for eleven seasons two years later.) Their interview ranges widely from pop culture (Asimov confesses his appreciation for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back) to “the future of medicine, space exploration, hope for mankind, and much more,” Vic Sage writes at Pop Culture Retrorama.
Asimov’s dry delivery — honed during his English-and-Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn childhood — is delightful. But the writer, teacher, and scientist hasn’t only come on TV to crack jokes, promote a book, and flaunt his muttonchops. He wants to educate his fellow Americans about the state of the future. (His Newsweek bio was outdated. As Letterman says, his appearance marked the publication of his 221st book.) Like Hari Seldon, the hero of his 1951 novel Foundation, Asimov felt confident in his ability to predict the course of human progress (or regress, as the case may be).
He also felt confident answering questions about what to do with outer space, and where to “put more men,” as Letterman says. His recommendation to build “factories” may strike us as a banal forerunner of Jeff Bezos’ even more banal plans for office parks in space. Asimov boasts of the vision he had of “pocket computers” in 1950 — hardly a reality in 1980. Dave complains about how complicated computers are, and Asimov accurately predicts that as technology catches up, they will get simpler to use. “But these are little things,” he says. “I never tried to predict. I just tried to write stories to pay my way through college.” He must have paid it several times over, and he seemed to get more right than he got wrong. See more of Asimov’s predictions in the links below.
Related Content:
Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio
Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today
Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future on <I>The David Letterman Show</I> (1980) 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.
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Behold 84 Great Novels Reinterpreted as Modernist Postage Stamps
Ali Johnson and Jim Quail of Liverpool-based design studio Dorothy had a hit with their music-based graphics, which recast seminal alternative, psychedelic, electronic, and post-punk albums as oversized postage stamps.
Now, they’ve turned their attention and knack for highly condensed visual responses to the realms of literature.
Their Modern Classics collection, above, synthesizes 42 titles into something emblematic and essential.
How many have you read?
How many would you be able to identify based on image alone?
It’s easy to grasp why the horizon figures prominently in On The Road, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Road.
And understandably, the eyes have it when it comes to 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and Slaughterhouse-Five.
Elsewhere, the visual representations create connections that may take readers by surprise.
(Stay tuned for a master’s thesis that teases out thematic parallels between The Color Purple’s quilts and Holden Caulfield’s red hunting hat in The Catcher in the Rye.)
According to Johnson, she and Quail, avid readers both, fell out several times over which titles to include (and, by extension, exclude).
English teachers at middle and high school level will rejoice at the number of syllabus favorites that made the cut.
Potential stamp-themed creative assignments abound.
The conch may be an obvious choice for Lord of the Flies, but what of The Great Gatsby‘s green light?
Why not the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg?
Or one of those beautiful shirts?
Discuss!
Then make your own stamp!
Students are far less likely to be conversant in the 42 earlier works comprising Dorothy’s literary Classics stamps, though musical and movie adaptations of Little Women, Dracula, and Les Miserables should provide a toehold.
Our ignorance is such, we may need to reread Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jane Eyre … or at least Google the significance of a spoon and all those orange and red triangles.
(Back in our pre-digital youth, Cliff’s Notes were the preferred Philistine option…)
Dorothy’s stamp prints of Classics and Modern Classics are available for purchase on their website.
Related Content:
Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimagined as Vintage Book Covers
157 Animated Minimalist Mid-Century Book Covers
Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primaologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Hear Brian Eno’s Contribution to the Soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
Though released just a few weeks ago, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune seems already to have garnered more critical acclaim than David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of the same material. This comparison is, of course, unfair: Lynch was working under different conditions in a different time, not to mention with a markedly different cinematic sensibility. And in fact, Lynch’s version of the ambitious, saga-launching novel by Frank Herbert does have its fans, or at least viewers willing to praise certain of its aspects. Lovers of 1980s music, for example, value its score composed by the virtuosic rock band Toto — with the exception, that is, of a track from Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois.
Brian Eno in particular is credited with popularizing ambient music, and “Prophecy Theme,” heard on the Dune soundtrack album as well as in the film itself, conjures up an atmosphere as effectively as any other piece of his work in the genre. “David flew me to Los Angeles to see Dune,” Eno recalls in a New York Times interview about his recently released compilation Brian Eno (Film Music, 1976-2020), which includes the track.
“It wasn’t finished then. And I don’t know whether his intention or his hope was that I would do the whole soundtrack, but I didn’t want to, anyway. It was a huge project, and I just didn’t feel like doing it. But I did feel like making one piece for it, so that’s what I did.”
Dune was indeed a formidable undertaking, and one that ultimately proved too big for Lynch. Some fans would argue, even after the successful first installment from Villeneuve, that it’s too big for any filmmaker. But the world Herbert created, one both sweeping and uncommonly detailed, has inspired many a creator to produce impressive work for projects both realized and unrealized. Perhaps it counts as a missed opportunity that the latest Dune film, with its apparent clean-slate approach to previous attempts at adaptation, didn’t commission a score from Eno, whose signature sonic textures could nicely have complimented Villeneuve’s instinct for the sublime. But then, a studio can’t go far wrong with Hans Zimmer either.
Related Content:
Hear Hans Zimmer’s Experimental Score for the New Dune Film
Brian Eno Once Composed Music for Windows 95; Now He Lets You Create Music with an iPad App
The Glossary Universal Studios Gave Out to the First Audiences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Comparison of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune
Brian Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Soundtracks
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.
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Stylistic Collisions
In 2014, Glastonbury Festival took the decision to ban the sale of First Nation headdresses – following in the footsteps of several Canadian festivals that had already done so. It was a move that many felt was long overdue. Imitations of the headdresses had, along with Hunter wellies and glitter, become an omnipresent feature of festival style in the past decade. But, whilst a fun game of dress up for some, for those of indigenous heritage it was a deeply offensive act of cultural appropriation.
Examining such issues is Global Wardrobe – The Worldwide Fashion Connection, a new exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands. It explores the cross-cultural influences and complex power dynamics at play in the evolution of dress with reference to the museum’s West European fashion collection. The show is broken up into three phases – Imitation, Inspiration and Innovation – as it moves chronologically through the 18th and 19th centuries, and the 20th century to the present day. Amongst other key issues, visitors are confronted with the colonial roots of appropriation today.
In the 18th century, wealthy men wore colourful housecoats based on Japanese kimono design but crafted using textiles from India, whilst both sexes wore turbans, shawls and other forms of so-called “oriental dress” to signify their “free-spirits” and Bohemian taste. “In neither case was there much regard for the original function or meaning of the fabric or the symbolism that these fashions encapsulated,” write the curators. The Roaring Twenties saw West European women donning embroidered Chinese jackets as evening wear; the hippie style in the 1960s and 1970s incorporated clothes from Afghanistan. In the 1990s and noughties, catwalk shows featured saris, fake dreadlocks, “tribal” motifs and religious iconography.
But in recent years the tide has turned, with a growing recognition of the creative and cultural legacies of marginalised cultures. A new generation of young fashion designers like Lisa Konno, Rich Mnisi and Karim Adducci – featured in the exhibition – are embracing their own heritage. But their work doesn’t mark an end to the conversation about appropriation, as the curators at Kunstmuseum Den Haag note. “Their heritage is no longer glossed over in order to satisfy the ‘western gaze’, but used to emphasise uniqueness,” they write. “Will this be the new form of cultural appreciation? It certainly raises new questions over issues like who is ‘allowed’ to design or quote something, and who is then ‘allowed’ to wear it.”
Global Wardrobe runs from 9 October 2021 to 16 January 2022. Find out more here.
Words: Rachel Segal Hamilton
Image Credits:
1. Lisa Konno, BABA, a multi-disciplinary project, 2019. Courtesy Lisa Konno. Photo: Laila Cohen.
2. Karim Adduchi, She Knows Why the Caged Bird Sings collection, 2016. Courtesy Karim Adduchi.
3. Rich Mnisi, Xibelani skirt with 5 km wool, based on the Tsonga culture, made in South Africa, Hiya Kaya ’21 collection, 2021. Courtesy Rich Mnisi. Photo: Zander Opperman.
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Monday, November 1, 2021
The 10 Paradoxical Traits of Creative People, According to Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (RIP)
Despite decades of research, scientists still know little about the source of creativity. Nonetheless, humans continue to create things. Or, at least, we continue to be fascinated by creativity; now more than ever, it seems. There may be as many best-selling books on creativity as there are on dieting or relationships. The current focus on creativity isn’t always a net positive. Anyone who does creative work may be labeled a “Creative” (used as a noun) at some point in their career. The term lumps all working artists together, as though their work were interchangeable deliverables measured in billable hours. The word suggests that those who don’t work as “Creatives” have no business in the area of creativity. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it:
Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet…. Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.
Csikszentmihalyi, who passed away this month, deplored the instrumentalization of creativity. He wrote, Austin Kleon notes, “about the joys of being an amateur” — which, in its literal sense, means being a devoted lover. Like Carl Jung, Csikszentmihalyi believed that creation proceeds, in a sense, from falling in love with an activity and losing ourselves in a state beyond our preoccupations with self, others, or the past and future. He called this state “flow” and wrote a national bestseller about it while founding the discipline of positive psychology and co-directing the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University .
You can see an animated summary of Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience above (including a pronunciation of Csikszentmihalyi’s name). Creativity should not only refer to skills we sell to our employers. It is the practice of doing things that make us happy, not the things that make us money, whether or not those two things are the same. This is a subject close to Austin Kleon’s heart. The writer and designer has been offering tips for training and honing creativity for years, in books like Show Your Work, a guide “not just for ‘creatives’!” but for anyone who wants to create. Like Csikszentmihalyi, he refutes the idea that there’s such a thing as a “creative type.”
Instead, in his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Csikszentmihalyi notes that people who spend their time creating exhibit a list of 10 “paradoxical traits.”
- Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
- Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
- Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
- Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.
- Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted.
- Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
- Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
- Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
- Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
- Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
We may well be reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,” and perhaps it is to Whitman we should turn to resolve the paradox. Creativity involves the willingness and courage to become “large,” the poet wrote, to get weird and messy and “contain multitudes.” Maybe the best way to become a more creative person, to lose oneself fully in the act of making, is to heed Bertrand Russell’s guidance for facing death:
[M]ake your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea…
This eloquent passage — Csikszentmihalyi might have agreed — expresses the very essence of creative “flow.”
via Austin Kleon
Related Content:
Slavoj Žižek: What Fullfils You Creatively Isn’t What Makes You Happy
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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Watch the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” Music Video Re-Enacted by Robots
When Microsoft released Windows 95, they didn’t skimp on the publicity. Their promotional campaign for the operating system even included television spots soundtracked with the Rolling Stones’ hit “Start Me Up.” The lyrics of its chorus neatly suited the product, which came with a re-engineered interface featuring a then-novel feature called the Start menu. Though hardly new even then, the song did also carry faint associations with innovation, having originally been released on August 14, 1981, just two weeks after the launch of a cable channel called MTV. Its music video thus received a great deal of airplay, proving to the public that the Stones could stay on the cutting edge.
By the 1980s, relevance was by no means guaranteed to any band formed in the 1960s. More than proven though the point may be today, the Michael Lindsay-Hogg-directed music video for “Start Me Up” demonstrated that even a group of rockers in or near their forties could perform with the same uncontainable vitality they always had.
Even now, forty years after that, the group’s surviving members show no inclination to retire, and the highest technology has only just begun to catch up to them. I refer, of course, to Spot, the model of robot dog previously seen here on Open Culture moonwalking and twerking to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” In the years since then, it seems he’s learned to move like Jagger — as well as Richards, Wyman, Wood, and Watts.
In “Spot Me Up,” four Spot models together replicate about a minute of the “Start Me Up” video. That each robot really does seem to convey traces of the personality of its particular Stone — even the one tasked with replicating a glance from the late Charlie Watts, a force of subtlety behind the drum kit for more than half a century — speaks to the engineering skill marshaled by Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff where Spot was invented. Not everyone has warmed to the lifelike movements of their robots, a lineup that also includes the formidable humanoid Atlas. But dance videos like these serve as a form of public relations for its products, which were designed for not the stage but factories, mines, and power plants — places where they can do what any fan of the Stones in the 80s would surely call the dirty work.
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Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German First Graders in Adorable Cardboard Robot Outfits
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.
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The Stunning Grandeur of Soviet-Era Metros
Between 2014 and 2020, Frank Herfort visited more than 770 metro stations in 19 cities, creating a remarkable archive of architectural and artistic splendor.
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Hear Hans Zimmer’s Experimental Score for the New Dune Film
If you have not yet seen the first installment of Denis Villeneuve’s reimagining of Dune, you will find no spoilers here, though if you’ve read Frank Herbert’s cult classic novel and/or seen David Lynch’s film adaptation (or even the forgettable TV miniseries from 20 years ago), you are familiar with the story. You can, however, hear Hans Zimmer’s complete soundtrack above. If you love it, and if film critic Mick LaSalle is right, you’re in for a treat: “If you like the music here, you’ll probably like the movie,” LaSalle writes in a San Francisco Chronicle review. “If you hate it, you can’t possibly enjoy Dune.”
The film’s music is relentless and creates a “sense of something strange and unfamiliar,” making sure “we never forget we’re watching an entirely alien universe.” Veteran blockbuster composer Hans Zimmer created this sonic atmosphere with studio effects and nontraditional instrumentation, though one familiar element remains, as he tells Indiewire:
I kept thinking, wherever you are in the future, the instruments will change due to technology, and we could be far more experimental, but the one thing that remains is the human voice, which there is a lot of.
Those voices include that of singer Lisa Gerrard, formerly of Dead Can Dance, who “came up with this language that is all her own. It could be from the future, it could be from a different world.”
Zimmer’s approach almost mirrors that of his first big break, the score for 1988’s Rain Man, of which he said in 2008, “The Raymond character doesn’t actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don’t we just invent our own world music for a world that doesn’t really exist?” Villeneuve’s Dune gives us an entire interplanetary civilization for which to invent music that didn’t exist before. “I felt like there was a freedom to get away from a Western Orchestra,” Zimmer told The New York Times, in a major understatement.
One piece of music, played as the Atreides family arrives on Arrakis, involved 30 bagpipers, recorded together in Edinburgh while socially distanced. “Along with synthesizers,” writes The New York Times‘ Darryn King, “you can hear scraping metal, Indian bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, a juddering drum phrase that Zimmer calls an ‘anti-groove,’ seismic rumbles of distorted guitar” and “a war for that is actually a cello.” The result “might be one of Zimmer’s most unorthodox and most provocative” pieces of work, and a far cry from the music that accompanied David Lynch’s beautiful failure of a film in 1984.
Zimmer claims never to have seen Lynch’s film nor heard the soundtrack by soft-rock superstars Toto, unwilling to compromise the Dune he’d been imagining since he first read the book. “I’ve been thinking about Dune for nearly 50 years,” he says. Lynch has been trying to forget his film for almost as long. The dense, complicated mess of an adaptation so confused film execs and test audiences that the studio added introductory exposition, above, and handed out glossaries to audiences at the first screenings (though not, presumably, flashlights).
The choice of superstars Toto, of “Africa” fame, brought audiences of Lynch’s film a “luxuriant and peculiar soundtrack,” supplemented by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and a composition by Brian Eno. But it also integrated familiar 80’s rock touches (as in “Desert Theme,” above), giving the alien world Lynch imagined both a familiar sonic texture and a dated sound. Thirty-seven years later, science fiction films need no such comforting apparatus to make them palatable. As both Villeneuve and Zimmer realized in their work on Dune, a film about a totally unfamiliar future civilization — even one filled with humans who look like us — can look and sound as strange as technology and imagination will allow.
Related Content:
The Glossary Universal Studios Gave Out to the First Audiences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
The Dune Graphic Novel: Experience Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Never Seen It Before
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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Climate Action
COP26 is now underway in Glasgow. The 2021 United Nations climate change conference sees world leaders arriving in Scotland for 12 days of talks. It’s a pivotal moment in the fight against environmental crisis – “the greatest risk facing us all.” To mark this occasion, we collate five features from previous issues of Aesthetica, each demonstrating connections between art and the natural world. These artists make the impact of human activity visible: interrogating rising sea levels, depleting ocean life and pollution.
Tackling Crisis through Design
Installations that clear the air, light waves that reflect upon rising sea levels, a net that cleans up space junk: this is the work of Daan Roosegaarde. “I’m on a mission for clean air, clean atmosphere and creativity,” he says, building a world of possibilities where solar-powered stones or smart coatings illuminate bike paths and highways, ancient algae light up streets, smog becomes jewellery and space debris turns into fireworks. Seeking to reverse humankind’s destructive tendencies by rendering the otherwise intangible forces of nature visible, this citizen-artist manages to invite contemplation as well as call for action.
Click here to read the full feature
Photography and the Environment
“Humanity and nature are intimately interconnected,” says Italian-Senegalese photographer Maïmouna Guerresi (b. 1951). “It makes sense that the fate of our planet is influenced by the actions of individual people. The desertification of the environment corresponds to our spiritual desertification, just as interior pollution is reproduced on the outside – on the planet.” Guerresi is speaking about the series Beyond the Border: A Journey to Touba, one of 12 shortlisted for the 2020 Leica Oskar Barnack Award. What’s most striking about the award is the fact that it celebrates work focused on the environment – and always has.
Click here to read the full feature
Protecting Ocean Health
If the oceans die, so too does humanity. Our time on Earth would be over. Even so, there are more threats to marine and coastal health than at any other time in history. The pioneering biologist and explorer, Sylvia Earle, put it succinctly: “No ocean, no life. No blue, no green. No ocean, no us.” The seas are a vital part of the global ecosystem. Parley for the Oceans is a non-profit organisation takes charge of ocean health through major collaborations with artists and designers, promoting plastic-free lifestyles.
Click here to read the full feature
Picturing Human Impact
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian artist known for large-format photographs that depict the effects of industry on the landscape. His images of salt pans, quarries, mines and oil fields investigate humanity’s indelible, irrevocable and deeply complex influence on the Earth. “I’ve always been concerned with showing how we affect the Earth in a big way. To this end, I seek out and photograph large-scale systems that leave lasting marks… We hope to bring our audience to an awareness of the normally unseen result of civilisation’s cumulative impact upon the planet. We feel that by describing the problem vividly, by being revelatory and not accusatory, we can help spur a broader conversation about viable solutions.”
Click here to read the full feature
Visualising Climate Data
“Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, with a range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released this vital information in a report released in 2018. Google Arts & Culture Lab, in collaboration with the United Nations, commissions online artworks that respond to and interpret climate data. Fabian Oefner’s immersive work, Timelines, maps out ever-shrinking glaciers, taking data from the last 140 years.
Click here to read the full feature
COP26 runs until 12 November. Find out more here.
The post Climate Action appeared first on Aesthetica Magazine.
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