Arts and Culture

When we throw our clothes away in the West, they don’t all go to a thrift store or to a recycling center or a local landfill. Instead, every year 100,000 tons of clothes make their way across the ocean to India. In this awareness raising short doc from UK-based filmmaker Meghna Gupta , we see the end point of these bales and bales of Western fashion, and the women and men who turn our waste back into thread. The thread then begins its own journey, inevitably winding back up as cheap imported clothes. And the cycle begins again. Gupta lets the women speak for themselves, in particular Reshma, a young mother and wife who works in one such recycling center in Panipat, North India. We see her daily life as well as the process turning our castoffs into thread. Upon entering the country, the clothes are cut so they can’t be re-sold. Then women like Reshma remove buttons, zippers, and any other non-cloth component. Far, far away from even a passing encounter with a Westerner (apart fr...

Like some rock stars of his generation, David Bowie had a literary cast of mind; unlike most of those colleagues, he also made his association with books explicit. (Not for nothing did he appear on that READ poster .) Whenever this subject arises, it's tempting to bring up the story of how The Man Who Fell to Earth director Nicolas Roeg poked fun at the extreme number of books with which Bowie surrounded himself during the time he was acting in that film, as we did when we posted about the David Bowie book club . Launched by Bowie's son, the filmmaker Duncan Jones, that project was meant to read through Bowie's own list of top 100 books, previously featured here on Open Culture . Now, thanks to the work of music journalist John O'Connell, Bowie's love of books has a book of its own . Published in the UK as  Bowie's Books and in the US as Bowie's Bookshelf , O'Connell's essay collection takes the 100 books the man who was Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin...

When I think of the medieval tavern, I see grim footage from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and grimy drinking scenes from Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings . While only the first of these uses an ostensibly historical setting, the imagery of them all is what we think of when we think of taverns. Huge casks in the corners, great, indestructible wooden tables and wooden mugs, signs with pictures instead of words; drunken singing and the occasional axe fight. The crudely animated Simple History video above confirms these impressions, describing the taverns, inns, and ale houses that were ancestors of the modern pub as “places of drinking, gambling, violence, and criminal activity.” Art history and scholarship further confirm our impression of taverns as rough-hewn, rowdy houses where brawls frequently broke out and all sorts of shady business transacted. Ale houses had an “ale stake or ale pole” that could be raised to show they had a brew ready to serve. Taverns had a p...

FYI on a new digitization project: "Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music was active from 1971–1990 and independently published by its editors. As with many independent print publications of that era, this has meant that, for readers and researchers operating in a contemporary digital landscape, the richness of its resource has been all but inaccessible. In recognition of this situation, in the years 2016–2019, the entire journal was digitised and made available over the course of a three-year research project.." " Contact ’s basic intentions – as set out fully in the first issue, dated Spring 1971 – were to promote informed discussion of 20th-century music in general and the music of our own time in particular. Among the original concerns of the founders of the magazine were that popular musics, jazz and contemporary folk music should play a part in our scheme. In the earlier days, especially, we continually sought for good writing in these fields, as well as c...

How does a movie become a "classic"? Explanations, never less than utterly subjective, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would submit that classic-film status, as traditionally understood, requires that all elements of the production work in at least near-perfect harmony: the cinematography, the casting, the editing, the design, the setting, the score. Outside first-year film studies seminars and deliberately contrarian culture columns, the label of classic, once attained, goes practically undisputed. Even those who actively dislike Stanley Kubrick's  2001: A Space Odyssey , for instance, would surely agree that its every last audiovisual nuance serves its distinctive, bold vision — especially that opening use of "Thus Spake Zarathustra." But Kubrick didn't always intend to use that piece, nor the other orchestral works we've come to closely associate with mankind's ventures into realms beyond Earth and struggles with intelligence ...

Maybe it’s just me, but it sometimes feels like guitar music is on the wane. Sure, there are plenty of guitar bands out there, guitar sales seem to hold steady, but the synthesizer, midi controller, and digital audio workstation have become the dominant instruments of popular music. Then again, it’s short-sighted to count the guitar out just yet, given the 500-year longevity of its design. In the 17th century, the Lute Society of Dartmouth notes, the guitar was “cultivated by players and composers within the courts of princes and kings.” The Baroque guitar was very much like the modern six string (or, as often these days, seven and eight string) that we know today, “aside from a difference of tuning,” writes luthier Clive Titmuss . Where “the modern guitar is a baritone/tenor… the baroque is an alto instrument, about the size of a viola.” The differences in size and pitch change the sustain and articulation. The Baroque guitar's tonal characteristics are much more ...

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_017_10-11-19.mp3 In an age where the average person can't name a living academic philosopher, it's been claimed that the social role of an individual orating to the masses and getting them to think about fundamental questions is actually not performed by academics at all, and certainly not by politicians and religious figures who need to keep on message in one way or other, but by stand-up comedians. This is the premise of the Modern Day Philosophers podcast , where comedian Daniel Lobell i nterviews some of our best known and loved comics. However, as Daniel has discovered in the course of that show , only some comedians are trying to express original views on the world. Many are just trying to tell good jokes. So do the routines of those more idea-based comedians count as philosophy?  Or does telling the whole truth (instead of a funny one-side or exaggerated take on truth) rule out being ...