These days, if you like a piece of music, you might well say that you’re "feeling it" — or you might have said it a decade or two ago, anyway. But deaf music-lovers (who, as one may not immediately assume, exist) do literally that, feeling the actual vibrations of the sound with not their ears, but the rest of their bodies. Not only could the deaf and blind Helen Keller, a pioneer in so many ways, enjoy music, she could do it over the radio and articulate the experience vividly. We know that thanks to a 1924 piece of correspondence posted at Letters of Note. "On the evening of February 1st, 1924, the New York Symphony Orchestra played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York," writes the site’s author Shaun Usher. "Thankfully for those who couldn’t attend, the performance was broadcast live on the radio. A couple of days later, the orchestra received a stunning letter of thanks from the unlikeliest of sources: Helen Keller." The first ecstatic paragraph of her missive, which you can read whole at the original post, runs as follows: I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s "Ninth Symphony." I do not mean to say that I "heard" the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibrations, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roll of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voice leaped up trilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth—an ocean of heavenly vibration—and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes. Keller ends the letter by emphasizing her desire to "thank Station WEAF for the joy they are broadcasting in the world," and since she first enjoyed the symphony on the radio, it makes sense, in a way, that we should enjoy her letter on the radio. Not long after Letters of Note made its post, NPR picked up on the story, and Weekend Edition‘s Scott Simon read an excerpt over a musical backdrop, which you can hear above. And if we have any deaf readers who listen to, say, NPR in Keller’s manner, let me say how curious I’d be to hear the details of that experience as well. And deaf, hearing, or otherwise, you’ll find much more of this sort of thing in Letters of Note’s immaculately designed new print collection More Letters of Note, about which you can find all the details here. It goes on sale on October 1. Related Content: Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties Helen Keller Speaks About Her Greatest Regret — Never Mastering Speech Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan Appear Together in Moving 1930 Newsreel Leonard Bernstein Conducts Beethoven’s 9th in a Classic 1979 Performance Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. "A Glorious Hour": Helen Keller Describes The Ecstasy of Feeling Beethoven’s Ninth Played on the Radio (1924) 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.

Popular music has a rich tradition of literary songwriters, including—to name but a few—Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, and even Alan Parsons, who released not one, but two concept albums based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. And then there’s the inimitable Tom Waits, who doesn’t just work in a literary vein, but is a succession of pulpy characters, each one with the ability to light up a stage. Waits proved as much in 1988 when he toured his album Big Time, as alter-ego Frank O’Brien, a character he described as "a combination of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, playing accordion—but without the wisdom they possessed." The Big Time tour, writes Dangerous Minds, was "like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Wait’s brain." In a review of the concert film of the same name, also released that year, the New York Times described Waits as a "gang of overlapping personas, a bunch of derelict philosopher-kings who rasp out romantic metaphors between wisecracks," inhabiting "a seedy urban world of pawnshops and tattoos, of cigarette butts and polyester and triple-X movies." It’s hard to know, listening to Waits in the interview above from the year of Big Time the album, tour, and film, how many of his personae emerge from the woodshed and how many spring from grizzled voices in that sideshow brain, which must sound like a cacophony of old-time waltzes and scurrilous ragtimes; boozy big-band numbers carousing in louche cabarets; pianos drunkenly falling down stairs. Waits can tell stories beautiful and terrible, in talking blues, broken ballads, and sprechgesang, rivaling the best compositions of the Delta, the beats, and sailors and hoboes. Or he can tell stories—as he does above—about moles, building under Stonehenge "the most elaborate system of mole catacombs," being rewarded for "having the courage to tunnel under great rivers," staging executions. Then he shifts the scene to New York, and a Mercedes pulls up in a puddle of blood. "I think you just write," says Waits, "and you don’t try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it." Waits gets it in vivid, surrealist images, one bizarre and sordid detail after another. To hear him speak is to hear him compose. You can read the transcript of the short interview, recorded in London by Chris Roberts, but the effect of Waits-the-performer is entirely lost. Better to hear his cracked inflection, his driest of comic timing, and watch the excellent animation of PBS’s Blank on Blank team, who have previously brought us amusing cartoon accompaniments for interviews with B.B. King, Ray Charles, the Beastie Boys, and even Fidel Castro. Tom Waits, I think, has given them their best material yet. Related Content:   Tom Waits, Playing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Classic 1978 TV Performance Tom Waits Reads Two Charles Bukowski Poems, "The Laughing Heart" and "Nirvana" Watch Tom Waits’ Classic Appearance on Australian TV, 1979 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Animated Tom Waits Talks About Laughing at Funerals & the Moles Under Stonehenge (1988) 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.

Grab a cup of coffee, put on your thinking cap, and start working through this newly-released video from Minute Physics, which explains why guitars, violins and other instruments can be tuned to a tee. But when it comes to pianos, it’s an entirely differently story, a mathematical impossibility. Pianos are slightly but necessarily out of tune. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. You can find some Free Online Math Courses here. Why You Can Never Tune a Piano 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.

Image by Alan Light released under Creative Commons license. When he passed away in 2012, science fiction master Ray Bradbury left us with a number of instantly quotable lines. There are aphorisms like "You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." There are more humorous, but no less memorable lines he delivers in his advice to writers, such as, "writing is not a serious business… I want you to envy me my joy." A seemingly endless source of wisdom and enthusiasm, Bradbury’s creative forces seemed in no danger of waning in his later years as he gave impassioned talks and interviews well into his 70s and 80 and his work received renewed appreciation. As one writer declared in 2001, "Ray Bradbury is on fire!" Of course Bradbury’s been hot since the fifties. That headline alludes to his classic 1953 novel of futuristic book-burning, Fahrenheit 451, which you’ve likely read if you’ve read any Bradbury at all. Or perhaps you’re familiar with Bradbury’s non-sci-fi novel of childhood lost, Dandelion Wine? Both are excellent books well-deserving of the awards and praise heaped upon them. But if they’re all you know of Ray Bradbury, you’re seriously missing out. Bradbury began his career as a writer of short sci-fi and horror stories that excel in their richness of language and careful plotting. So imaginative is his work that it warranted adaptation into a star-studded television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater. And before that vehicle brought Bradbury’s brilliance into people’s homes, many of those same stories appeared in radio plays produced by shows like NBC’s Dimension X and X Minus One. From the latter program, at the top, we bring you Mars is Heaven!, a disturbing 1948 tale of interstellar deception. "When the first space rocket lands on Mars," begins the announcer, "what will we find? Only the ruins of a dead, deserted planet, or will there be life?" Pertinent questions indeed. Bradbury speculated for decades about the meaning of Mars. "The Martian Chronicles," adapted above by Dimension X, used a story about colonization of the planet as an allegory for humanity’s avarice and folly. Hear many more Dimension X radio plays from The Martian Chronicles collection here, and also the story, "There Will Come Soft Rains." The year after 1950’s The Martian Chronicles came 1951’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of shorts that included the tragic, lost-in-space tale "Kaleidoscope," dramatized above by Mind Webs, a series from Madison, Wisconsin that ran from the 70s through the mid-90s. Though produced well after the golden age of radio drama, the series nonetheless managed to perfectly capture the engrossing sound of that specialized form—with ominous music, and a baritone-voiced narrator with some serious voice-acting chops. While regional productions like Mind Webs have kept the radio drama fires burning in the U.S., the BBC has continued to produce high-quality radio adaptations on a larger scale. In 1991, they took on eight stories from another fifties Bradbury collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun. The two hour production dramatized the title story and the tales "Hail and Farewell," "The Flying Machine," "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," "A Sound of Thunder," "The Murderer," "The April Witch," and "The Foghorn." You can hear them just above. Or stream and download the complete audio at the Internet Archive. Related Content: 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free X Minus One: More Classic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury & Dick Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) Hear Radio Dramas of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy & 7 Classic Asimov Stories Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Ray Bradbury’s Beloved Sci-Fi Stories as Classic Radio Dramas 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.

Earlier this month, we featured Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play Salome as illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in 1894. Though Beardsley’s short life and career would end a scant four years later at the age of 25, the illustrator still had more than enough time to develop a clear and bold, yet elaborate and even decadent style, still immediately recognizable and deeply influential today. He also managed to visualize an impressively wide range of material, one that includes — in the very same year — the transgressively witty writing of Oscar Wilde as well as the groundbreakingly macabre writings of Edgar Allan Poe. "Aubrey Beardsley’s four Poe illustrations were commissioned by Herbert S. Stone and Company, Chicago, in 1894 as embellishment for a multi-volume collection of the author’s works," writes artist and designer John Coulthart. "The Black Cat (above) is justifiably the most reproduced of these." The Literary Archive blog argues that "what Beardsley’s illustrations do tell us of is that Poe’s stories are not static, but living works that each new generation gets to experience in [its] own way," and that they "give us a glimpse into a slight decadence and gothic-ness still preferred in horror at the time (a giant orangutan envelopes the girl in his arms—King Kong anyone?)" They also remind us that "our taste for creepiness, for hearing tales about the darker side of human life, hasn’t changed appreciably in over 150 years." If the American author and the English illustrator would seem to make for odd literary and artistic bedfellows, well, therein lies the appeal: when one strong creative sensibility comes up against another, things can well go off in the kind of richly bizarre directions you see hinted at in the images here. If you’d like to own a piece of this odd chapter in the history of illustrated texts, keep your eye on Sotheby’s — you’ll only have to come up with between 4,000 and 6,000 pounds. via The Paris Review Related Content: Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in a Striking Modern Aesthetic (1894) Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" (1884) 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (1894) 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.

According to Ruth Graham in Slate, Banned Books Week is a "crock," an unnecessary public   indulgence since "there is basically no such thing as a ‘banned book’ in the United States in 2015." And though the awareness-raising week’s sponsor, the American Library Association, has shifted its focus to book censorship in classrooms, most of the challenges posed to books in schools are silly and easily dismissed. Yet, some other cases, like that of Persepolis—Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir of her Iranian childhood during the revolution—are not. The book was pulled from Chicago Public School classrooms (but not from libraries) in 2013. Even now, teachers who wish to use the book in classes must complete "supplemental training." The ostensibly objectionable content in the book is no more graphic than that in most history textbooks, and it’s easy to make the case that Persepolis and other challenged memoirs and novels that offer perspectives from other countries, cultures, or political points of view have inherent educational value. One might be tempted to think that school officials pulled the book for other reasons. Perhaps we need Banned Books Week after all. Another, perhaps fuzzier, case of a "banned" book—or poem—from this year involves a high school teacher’s firing over his classroom reading of Allen Ginsberg’s pornographic poem "Please Master." The case of "Please Master" should put us in mind of a once banned book written by Ginsberg: epic Beat jeremiad "Howl." When the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, attempted to import British copies of the poem in 1957, the books were seized by customs, then he and his business partner were arrested and put on trial for obscenity. After writers and academics testified to the poem’s cultural value, the judge vindicated Ferlinghetti, and "Howl." But the trial demonstrated at the time that the government reserved the right to seize books, stop their publication and sale, and keep material from the reading public if it so chose. As with this year’s dust-up over "Please Master," the agents who confiscated "Howl" supposedly objected to the sexual content of Ginsberg’s poem (and likely the homosexual content especially). But that reasoning could also have been cover for other objections to the poem’s political content. "Howl," after all, was very subversive in its day, and in a way served as a kind of manifesto against the status quo. It had a "cataclysmic impact," writes Fred Kaplan, "not just on the literary world but on the broader society and culture." We’ve featured various readings of "Howl" in the past, and if you’ve somehow missed hearing those, never heard the poem read at all, or never read the poem yourself, then consider during this Banned Books Week taking the time to read it and hear it read—by the poet himself. You can hear the first recorded reading by Ginsberg, in 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. You can hear another impassioned Ginsberg reading from 1959. And above, hear Ginsberg read the poem in 1956, in San Francisco, where it was first published and where it stood trial. You can also hear Ginsberg fan James Franco—who played the poet in a film called Howl—read the poem over a visually striking animation of its vivid imagery. And if Ginsberg isn’t your thing, consider checking out the ALA’s list of challenged or banned books for 2014-2015. (I could certainly recommend Persepolis.) While prohibiting books from the classroom may seem a far cry from government censorship, Banned Books Week reminds us that many people still find certain kinds of books deeply threatening, and should push us to ask why that is. Related Content: High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explicit Poem "Please Master" and Loses His Job The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading "Howl" (1956) Allen Ginsberg Reads His Famously Censored Beat Poem, Howl (1959) James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’ Find great poems in our collection, 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness It’s Banned Books Week: Listen to Allen Ginsberg Read His Famously Banned Poem, "Howl," in San Francisco, 1956 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.

On May 27, 1956, millions of Americans tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show, expecting the usual variety of comedians, talents and musical guests. What they weren’t prepared for was a short animated film that Sullivan introduced thusly: Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers — I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated — but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called "A Short Vision" in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner. And with that, he screened the horrific bit of animation you can watch above. At the height of the atomic age, this film was a short sharp shock. Its vision of a nuclear holocaust is told in the style of a fable or storybook, with both animals and humans witnessing their last moments on earth, and ending with the extinguishing of a tiny flame. The mostly static art work is all the more effective when faces melt into skulls. Many children didn’t leave the room of course, and the website Conelrad has a wonderful in-depth history of that night and collected memories from people who were traumatized by the short as a child. One child’s hair-or rather a small section of his hair-turned white from fright. It was as formative a moment as The Day After would be to children of the ‘80s. The papers the next day reported on the short in salacious detail ("Shock Wave From A-Bomb Film Rocks Nation’s TV Audience") and Sullivan not only defended his decision, but showed the film again on June 10. The film was created by married couple Peter and Joan Foldes, and shot for little money in their kitchen on a makeshift animation table. Peter was a Hungarian immigrant who had studied at the Slade School of Art and the Courtlaud Institute and apprenticed with John Halas where he learned animation. (Halas is best known for the animated feature version of Orwell’s Animal Farm.) A Short Vision would go on in September of that year to win best experimental film at the 17th Venice Film Festival. (Peter Foldes would later make another disturbing and award-winning short called Hunger.) Once so shocking, A Short Vision fell out of circulation. But a generation grew up remembering that they had seen something horrific on television that night (in black and white, not the color version above.) For a time, it was hard to find a mention of the film on IMDB and a damaged educational print was one of the few copies circulating around. Fortunately the British Film Institute has made a pristine copy available of this important Cold War document. What we want to know is this: Did Steven Spielberg see this movie that Sunday night in 1956? He would have been 10 years old. A Short Vision will be added to the Animation section of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via A Wasted Life Related content: Dick Van Dyke, Paul Lynde & the Original Cast of Bye Bye Birdie Appear on The Ed Sullivan Show (1961) Animated Films Made During the Cold War Explain Why America is Exceptionally Exceptional Dizzy Gillespie Worries About Nuclear & Environmental Disaster in Vintage Animated Films Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. The Night Ed Sullivan Scared a Nation with the Apocalyptic Animated Short, A Short Vision (1956) 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.

If you were to ask me in my callow years as a young art student to name my favorite painter, I would have answered without a moment’s hesitation: Wassily Kandinsky. His theoretical bent, his mysticism, his seemingly near total creative independence…. There were times when Kandinsky the thinker, writer, and teacher appealed to me even more than Kandinsky the painter. This may go a ways toward explaining why I left art school after my first year to pursue writing and teaching. But nowadays, having seen a tiny bit more of the world and its bountiful artistic treasures, I might pause for just a moment if asked about my favorite painter… then I’d answer: Wassily Kandinsky. If you want to see the pioneering abstract expressionist’s art in the United States, your best bet is to get yourself to New York’s famed Guggenheim, which has a veritable treasure chest of Kandinsky’s work that documents his transition from paintings and woodcuts inspired by Russian folk art and French fauvism to completely non-representational canvases made entirely of intersecting lines, shapes, and colors—his own private symbology. But if you can’t make it to New York, then just head on over to the Guggenheim’s online collection, where the museum has digitized "nearly 1600 artworks by more than 575 artists." This is the most sweeping move toward greater accessibility since the private collection went public in 1937. You’ll find early representational Kandinskys; transitional Kandinskys like Sketch for Composition II from 1909-10 (top)—with still recognizable favorite motifs of his, like the horse and rider embedded in them; and you’ll find much more abstract Kandinskys like 1913’s Light Picture, above, showing his move even farther away from Matisse and Russian folks and closer to an inimitable individual aesthetic like that of Joan Miró or Paul Klee. Speaking of Klee, another of my favorites, you’ll also find the sketch above, from 1895, before he began his formal training in Munich. It’s a far cry from his mature style—a primitive minimalism that drew inspiration from children’s art. If you know anyone who looks at abstract art and says, "I could do that," show them the drawing above and ask if they could do this. Painters like Kandinsky and Klee, who worked and exhibited together, first learned to render in more rigorously formal styles before they broke every rule and made their own. It’s a necessary part of the discipline of art. Of the three artists I’ve mentioned thus far, it is perhaps Miró who moved farthest away from any semblance of classical training. In works like Personage (above), the Spanish surrealist achieved his "assassination of painting" and the realist bourgeois values he detested in European art. Piet Mondrian, another artist who completely radicalized painting, did so by moving in the opposite direction, towards a formalism so exacting as to be almost chilling. But like all modern artists, Mondrian learned the classical rules before he tore them up for good, as evidenced by his drawing below, Chrysanthemum, from 1908-09. Of course you won’t only find artists from the early twentieth century in the Guggenheim’s online collection. This just happens to be one of my favorite periods, and the Guggenheim is most famous for its modernist collection. But you’ll also find work from more contemporary provocateurs like Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei, as well as from early nineteenth century proto-impressionists like Camille Pissarro. (See Pissarro’s 1867 The Hermitage at Pontoise below.)  And if you find yourself wanting more context, the Guggenheim has made it easy to give yourself a thorough education in modern art. As we’ve noted before, between 2012 and 2014, the museum placed over 100 art catalogues online, including a collection called "The Syllabus," featuring books by the museum’s first curator. Looking for a way of understanding that weird phenomenon known as modern art? Look no further, the Guggenheim’s got you covered. Related Content: The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! Download 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online Download 448 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Guggenheim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Modern Art from 575 Artists 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.

How does "non-musician" musician, former Roxy Music member, Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay producer, and visual artist Brian Eno define art itself? "Everything that you don’t have to do." He has expanded eloquently on that simple but highly clarifying notion in speech and writing many times over the past couple of decades, and this past Sunday he made it the intellectual centerpiece of the fifth annual John Peel Lecture, a series named for the influential BBC DJ and whose past speakers have included Pete Townshend, Billy Bragg, Charlotte Church, and Iggy Pop. You can hear Eno’s introduction to his talk at the top of the post, stream the talk itself within the next 25 days at the BBC’s site, and read a transcript here. All of the John Peel Lecturers so far have discussed the relationship between music and wider human culture, and Eno has plenty of stories to tell about his own career in both music and the wider cultural realm: the importance of his time in art school, how he fell into performing with Roxy Music, how a relaxation of the band’s "strict non-drug" policy resulted in one "hilariously chaotic" performance, and how John Peel himself premiered his first album with Robert Fripp on the radio — by accidentally playing it backward. All this will inspire even the most Eno-familiar fan to revisit the man’s catalog of recorded works, which you can easily do with the Spotify playlist "Touched by the Hand of Eno," featuring "150 tracks handpicked from 150 albums/EPs/singles that credit Eno as composer, instrumentalist, vocalist, mixing engineer, or producer, sorted in chronological order." (If you need to download Spotify’s free software, you’ll find it here.) The playlist includes cuts from Eno’s own albums, of course, but also those of Roxy Music, Genesis, Ultravox, David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, Depeche Mode, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, and many more. And after you’ve virtually flipped through these selections from Eno’s body of work, you can watch Eno flip through physical selections from Peel’s library of records just above. Sure, you don’t have to do any of this — if anyone can explain to you why you should, Eno can. Related Content: Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s "Oblique Strategies" Revisit the Radio Sessions and Record Collection of Groundbreaking BBC DJ John Peel Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World Listen to "Brian Eno Day," a 12-Hour Radio Show Spent With Eno & His Music (Recorded in 1988) When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal Prof. Iggy Pop Delivers the BBC’s 2014 John Peel Lecture on "Free Music in a Capitalist Society" Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Hear 150 Tracks Highlighting Brian Eno’s Career as a Musician, Composer & Producer & Stream His 2015 John Peel Lecture 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.

In 1969, the BBC’s James Mossman conducted an extensive interview with Vladimir Nabokov, which was first published in a magazine called The Listener, and later in a book entitled Strong Opinions. Some of Mossman’s questions were serious: "You’ve said that you’ve explored time’s prison and have found no way out. Are you still exploring…? Some were lighter: "Why do you live in hotels?" (Answer here.) And still other questions fell somewhere in between, like: "If you ruled any modern industrial state absolutely, what would you abolish?" It turns out that loud noises, muzak, bidets, and insecticides made the great novelist and lepidopterist’s list. Which raises the question, if allowed to play benevolent dictator for a day, what would you obliterate? Me? I’d probably start with almost anything likely to appear in today’s Billboard Top 5 — dreck that’s not too far from muzak. via Biblioklept Related Content: Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis As Benevolent Dictator, Vladimir Nabokov Would Abolish Muzak & Bidets: What Would Make Your List? 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.