COURSEKEEPER.COMFreddie Mercury: The Untold Story of the Singer’s Journey From Zanzibar to Stardom
How to explain a performer like Freddie Mercury? First you’d have to describe, in conventional terms, the thoroughly unconventional musical persona he developed as the frontman of the glam rock band Queen. Then you’d have to explain how he got there from his birth as Farrokh Bolsara, his childhood in Zanzibar — yes, Zanzibar — and his schooling in the strict, traditional British Indian environment of St. Peter’s Boarding School. In 2000′s Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, directors Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher attempt just this, talking to those who knew Mercury well in the many ways one could know him: family members, teachers, collaborators, lovers. This in addition to dozens of brief, highly admiring comments from Mercury’s famous colleagues in both rock and flamboyance: Phil Collins, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Liza Minnelli.
By 2000, Mercury had already been dead of AIDS for nearly a decade. At the time he acquired it, the disease remained poorly understood, and anyone living as far out on the social, physical, and sexual edge as he did must have run a great risk of it. But the provocative, uncompromising Freddie Mercury of The Untold Story could never have existed without great risk, especially of the aesthetic and performative varieties. The film spends time gazing upon the drawings the young Fred Bolsara, as he was then known, made as a visual art student. Who could resist thinking of him as a kind of a visual artist all his life, one who crafted the image of Freddie Mercury, embodied this image, and ultimately became it? Only a man daring enough to create himself, after all, could possibly have been daring enough to stage the Fellini-esque birthday party we see pieces of and hear hazily remembered. Who among us feels bold enough to celebrate our own 39th with dwarfs covered in liver?
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story of the Singer’s Journey From Zanzibar to Stardom is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
Why the University System, as We Know It, Won’t Last …. and What’s Coming Next
It’s easy to sell books and other commodities on the web. It’s not easy to deliver a quality education. But two converging trends point toward a future when we will see the traditional university give way to an online alternative — something I wasn’t willing to bank on two years ago. First, Silicon Valley is finally focusing on e-learning. Udacity, Coursera, Kahn Academy, EdX — they’re all looking to lift e-learning out of a long period of stagnation. And, second, times are tough, and the traditional university system doesn’t care enough about managing costs, while wrongly assuming that it has a captive audience.
This weekend, The New York Times took a good look at the financing of a college education and highlighted a few staggering data points.
- The U.S. has racked up more than $ 1 trillion in student loans.
- Today 94 percent of students earning a bachelor’s degree take out loans — up from 45 percent in 1993.
- It’s estimated that the “average debt [per student] in 2011 was $ 23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $ 54,000 and 3 percent more than $ 100,000.”
- “Payments are being made on just 38 percent of the balance of federal student loans, down from 46 percent five years ago.”
- Finally, state funding of education is going down, and tuition is going up, which means that the figures above will just get worse.
You don’t need me to spell things out. Paying for a college education is getting unsustainable, so much so that many expect a crisis in the college loan market in the coming years. And then you consider this. Many universities seem indifferent to the difficulties students face, if they’re not intentionally exacerbating the problem. At one point in the Times article, E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, goes on record saying, “I readily admit it … I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.” Now listen to the latest episode of Planet Money, The Real Price of College (audio), which underscores a more galling fact — many colleges think that they gain a competitive advantage if they have a high sticker price. For many schools, lower tuition is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Universities can behave this way because they think they have a captive audience. Because college grads still earn considerably more than high school grads, colleges assume that students will keep enrolling. But what will happen when cash-strapped students are presented with a viable alternative? It may take 10 to 20 years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a new breed of school emerges, schools that throw away the four year model (and the humanities too) and offer students a very targeted online education in “practical” fields — from accounting to coding to nursing to law and business — at a dramatically lower cost. Here, the education cycle gets shortened to perhaps two years, and then students get credentialed (maybe by a trusted third-party provider) and go to work, only to return later in their careers to take more courses in specialized areas. This model will require the right technology platform (something that will get worked out fairly soon) and a change in the expectations of employers and society more broadly (something that will take time to develop, but less time than complacent colleges think).
The new system won’t be better than the current one in many respects. It won’t offer a rounded education. The teaching will be less personal. Long-lasting social bonds won’t be made as easily. (You’ll need to pay the big bucks at a traditional school for that. No, they won’t all go away.) And the teaching jobs created by these universities won’t be terribly fulfilling or lucrative. But the new system will offer a more focused and affordable education to students on a mass scale. And when students graduate mostly debt free, they won’t complain. Nor will they be forced to forego college altogether, as some would now advocate. There’s perhaps something inevitable about this shift. But the insouciance of administrators and faculty inhabiting the current system won’t do anything to delay it. Stick around, and you’ll probably see that I’m right. And if you think my look into the crystal ball is wrong, let me know.
In the meantime, we give you another take on how to solve our world’s educational problems — Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University:
For oodles of free courses, don’t forget to visit our collection of 450 Free Courses from Top Universities.
Why the University System, as We Know It, Won’t Last …. and What’s Coming Next is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
John Cleese Plays the Devil, Makes a Special Appeal for Hell, 1966
Hell. We tend to take it for granted. Have you ever stopped to think about the heating bills, or the stupendous overhead?
John Cleese plays a cash-strapped Prince of Darkness in this classic sketch from The Frost Report, the show that launched Cleese as a television star in Britain. He was 26 years old at the time. The program was hosted by David Frost, who is perhaps best known for his 1977 interviews of Richard Nixon. There were four other future Monty Python comedians on the writing staff of The Frost Report–Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Eric Idle–but only Cleese was a cast member. The show was broadcast in 1966 and 1967, with each weekly episode centered around a particular theme, like love, leisure, class and authority. The “Souls in Torment Appeal” is from a March 24, 1966 program about sin. It’s a funny sketch.
Related Content:
John Cleese, Monty Python Icon, on How to Be Creative
Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches
Monty Python’s Away From it All: A Twisted Travelogue with John Cleese
John Cleese Plays the Devil, Makes a Special Appeal for Hell, 1966 is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
James Joyce Manuscripts Online, Free Courtesy of The National Library of Ireland
Soon, the National Library of Ireland will re-scan, re-organize, and fully contextualize its online collection of James Joyce manuscripts. But the die-hard Joyce enthusiasts among us probably found this out in April, when what the NLI calls “The Joyce Papers, c. 1903-1928” first became available. They would have had to do some clicking to get there, though, since the collection debuted and remains buried several layers deep in the site, enjoying what the restaurant industry calls a “soft opening,” before its more user-friendly “grand opening” in the near future. But when you’ve got the chance to read millions of euros’ worth of writing in Joyce’s own hand — drafts of Ulysses, proofs of Finnegans Wake, notes dating back to his university days — why dawdle?
The collection awaits a detailed guide, offering at the moment only a list of manuscripts labeled 36,639/1 through 36,639/19. But you can get a sense of what’s in there from assistant keeper Peter Kenny’s summary at the top of the page. Terence Killeen in the Irish Times draws special attention to document 36,639/2/A, a journal or “commonplace book, which Joyce used for an unusual variety of purposes: as an account book, as a repository of various passages and poems from his reading that struck him (Ben Jonson is a particular favourite); reading lists; thoughts and reflections on aesthetics; remarks on friends (JF Byrne, for instance); and, eventually, notes for Dubliners and for the figure of Stephen Dedalus as he emerged in the later fiction (some of the notes even look forward to Ulysses).” As if that weren’t enough, he also recommends the next document down, a “subject notebook” for Ulysses including “notes on the Irish,” “the Clerkenwell bombing of 1867, “the Celtic view of hell by a German professor,” and “the Jews and theosophy.” And if actually deciphering Joyce’s own hand proves too daunting a task, well, you can always wait for the transcriptions.
Related content:
James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake
Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: The Film
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
James Joyce Manuscripts Online, Free Courtesy of The National Library of Ireland is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
What Happens When a Terry Gross/Fresh Air Interview Ends: A Comic Look
If you’re a regular reader of Open Culture, and if you live in the United States, then chances are you listen to Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interviews on NPR, at least occasionally. There’s also a good chance that you’ve wondered, at some point during the past 30 years, what the host looks like and what goes on behind the scenes. Now you can find out … sort of.
Above, we’re featuring a new video by comedian Mike Birbiglia, which gives you a funny and entirely fictional look at what happens when a Fresh Air interview draws to a close. The video was originally produced for the “This American Life” live show, which was broadcast to 500 movie theaters on Thursday night. If you’re a casual or dedicated listener to Fresh Air, it’s good for a laugh. And if you’ve never listened to the show before, you can get acquainted by listening to Terry’s actual interview of Birbiglia in October 2010. Catch it right here, or listen below.
via AllThingsD
Related Content:
Ira Glass on the Art of Storytelling
What Happens When a Terry Gross/Fresh Air Interview Ends: A Comic Look is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
The Original Episode of Dark Shadows, the 1960s TV Series That Inspired Tim Burton’s New Film
Note: The video will start once you click it!
For millions of American kids growing up in the late 1960s, it was a thrill to run home from school and flip on the TV in time to hear the creepy theremin music at the beginning of Dark Shadows. A soap opera with a vampire! There was something strangely subversive about it. As a headline writer for The New York Times recently put it, Barnabas Collins (the undead star of the show) was “The Vampire Who Came Out in the Afternoon.”
Tim Burton was one of those kids who ran home to watch the show. “I should probably have been doing homework or playing sports after school instead of watching ‘Dark Shadows,’” Burton told Terrence Rafferty for the Times article. “But seeing that show every afternoon, at home, in Burbank, it just doesn’t get much weirder than that.”
It might get just a little weirder tonight, with the American opening of Burton’s campy new film adaptation of Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins. The movie has been getting positive reviews. Manohla Dargis in The New York Times calls it “Mr. Burton’s most pleasurable film in years.” To help get you in the spirit, so to speak–and to add perspective–we’re taking you back to the very first episode of the original series (above) from June, 1966. Alas, Barnabas Collins didn’t make his appearance until episode number 211, a year later. The actor who played Collins, Jonathan Frid, died last month at the age of 87. He makes a cameo appearance in Burton’s movie. For a preview of the film, see below. You can purchase the complete Dark Shadows TV series on DVD here, which comes in a nice package of 131 discs.
Related Content:
Vincent: Tim Burton’s Early Animated Film
Frankenweenie: Tim Burton Turns Frankenstein Tale into Disney Kids Film (1984)
Tim Burton’s The World of Stainboy: Watch the Complete Animated Series
The Original Episode of Dark Shadows, the 1960s TV Series That Inspired Tim Burton’s New Film is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
Recent Comments