Multicolored Marilyn Monroes, a can of Campbell’s soup, that silver wig, some vague but important role in the formation of the Velvet Underground — how much, apart from a scattering of cultural scraps such as these, does any of us really know about Andy Warhol, one of the definers of art in the second half of the twentieth century? Earlier this year, we featured a video from John Green and Sarah Urist Green’s The Art Assignment that made the case for Andy Warhol in three minutes. Assuming you accept its argument, where to look next to cultivate a deeper appreciation of the man who produced those Marilyns and Campbell’s soup cans, wore that silver wig, and presided over the environment in which the likes of the Velvet Underground could take shape? Alain de Botton’s School of Life, not just an institution but a prolific maker of educational videos, has doubled down on the case for Andy Warhol with a six-minute video of their own, which comes as the first in their series of short primers on figures from art and architecture. (See a complete playlist of those videos below.) "Andy Warhol was the most glamorous figure of 20th-century American art," de Botton unequivocally states, adding that his "great achievement was to develop a generous and helpful view of two major forces in modern society: commerce and celebrity." Within this framework, the lesson finds "four big ideas behind Andy Warhol’s work, which can teach us a more inspired way of looking at the world and prompt us to build a better society" — and which, in this technological age of which Warhol himself could only dream, have become more easily implementable than ever. These ideas, on which the video elaborates verbally and visually, have to do with (1) appreciating life by examining the stuff of it — such as a humble soup can — more closely, (2) improving the workings of society by distributing glamor differently, granting higher status to maids and showing the nation the President cleaning a toilet once in a while, (3) approaching business as a particularly fascinating form of art while distributing art more widely by approaching it as a business, and (4) using an open and non-vindictive personality as a kind of "brand" to unite seemingly disparate artistic and commercial ventures into a coherent whole. Will any of this get you shopping for a Marilyn print of your own? It may or may not, but you won’t come away without a bit of inspiration for how to take your own pursuits to a new, more Warholian level. Related Content: The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Minutes Watch the Uncensored Andy Warhol-Directed Video for The Cars’ Hit "Hello Again" (NSFW) Andy Warhol Shoots "Screen Tests" of Nico, Bob Dylan & Salvador Dalí Andy Warhol’s 1965 Film, Vinyl, Adapted from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986 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. The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Better World 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.

Critics did not love 2004 film The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp as dissolute 17th century poet and court favorite John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. The Guardian faulted its grim tone and historical inaccuracies and called it "grimy and pretentious." I disagree with this take, but a fondness for Rochester (and for the period in general) biases me in the movie’s favor. Additionally, as some admiring critics pointed out, dour scripting aside, the film’s depiction of 17th century London is indeed most convincing. You can almost feel the muck that clings to everything, and smell the rank stench of body odor barely covered by perfume. Writer Katherine Ashenburg has called the 17th century "probably the dirtiest century in Western history" (London didn’t clean up for another couple hundred years), and The Libertine takes pains to bring the period’s filth to vivid, stinking life. Which brings us to another authentic recreation of 17th century London, one we’ve featured here before and that you can see again at the top of the post. Designed by six plucky students from De Monfort University, the three-minute CGI tour through the city’s sooty Tudor streets before The Great Fire of 1666 resembles a video game; but it also gives us a persuasive sense of the city’s scale, layout, and, yes, it’s griminess. In our previous post, we quoted Londonist, who noted, "Although most of the buildings are conjectural, the students used a realistic street pattern [taken from historical maps] and even included the hanging signs of genuine inns and businesses." Though its unsanitary streets are empty, one can easily imagine walking them in this prize-winning animation. Less inviting, however, are those 17-century London streets at night in another, eight-minute animation below, created by another De Montfort team called Triumphant Goat. Braziers and lanterns glower in dank alleyways, a foreboding haze hangs in the night air, hand-drawn wanted posters adorn the walls, and pools of muddy water collect among rough cobblestones. Here, I can imagine Johnny Depp’s Rochester picking his way along a dusky side street, headed for some clandestine assignation with a stableboy or scullery maid. You can read about the making of this nighttime scene here, where team member James Teeple discusses the research methods and technical objectives of the project, in terms that make it sound as though this is one level of a video game, although it isn’t clear what the game is about. "We really pushed the idea of this being a Historical recreation," writes Teeple, "so that meant too much creative license was a bad thing in our eyes." Finally, in the video below, we see a brightly-lit tour of St. Paul’s Cathedral, beautifully rendered, if overall a less polished presentation than the two tours above. This animation was presumably created by De Montfort design students as well, though there’s little information on its Vimeo page. Though the city was significantly redesigned after the 1666 fire, in these first two animations especially, we get a sense of the city Samuel Johnson described seventy years after that great conflagration as a place where "malice, rapine, accident, conspire, / And now a rabble rages, now a fire." Related Content: The Curious Story of London’s First Coffeehouses (1650-1675) A Drone’s Eye View of Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok & Mexico City The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890-1920) Shows the City’s Great Landmarks Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Fly Through 17th-Century London’s Gritty Streets with Prize-Winning Animations 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.

View image | gettyimages.com Stephen King has given writers a lot to think about these past few years in his numerous interviews and in his statement of craft, On Writing. He deems one of his most salient pieces of advice on writing so important that he repeats it twice in his Top 20 Rules for Writers: writers, he says, "learn best by reading a lot…. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write." To help his readers discover the right tools, King attached a list of 96 books at the end of On Writing, of which he said, "In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote…. a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work." King’s original list of 96 books for aspiring writers generated a fair amount of comment on Aerogramme Writer’s Studio, who brought it to our attention last year. Later, the same web site brought us another list of 82 books, which King published in the 10th anniversary edition of On Writing. With King’s second list, as with the first, you’ll find that best-selling genre writers sit comfortably next to lit-class staples. In this list, the spectrum of accessibility is a little narrower. We have fewer classic writers like Dickens or Conrad and fewer commercial novelists like Nelson DeMille. Instead the list is mostly twentieth century literary fiction by mostly living contemporaries, with little genre fiction save perhaps sci-fi/fantasy writer Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, thriller author Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, hugely popular mystery writer Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Patrick O’Brian’s adventure series. Below, we’ve excerpted a list of 15 books King recommends—books, he says, "which entertained and taught me." Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake Robert Bolaño, 2666 Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Neil Gaiman, American Gods Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke Sue Monk Kid, The Secret Life of Bees Elmore Leonard, Up in Honey’s Room Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes Philip Roth, American Pastoral Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children Donna Tartt, The Little Friend Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace  King almost shrugs in his short introduction, writing, "you could do worse." I expect many readers of this post might have suggestions for how they think you could also do better, especially given the five years that have passed since this list’s compilation and some of the blind spots that seem to persist in King’s reading habits. I doubt he would object much to any of us adding to, or subtracting from, his lists—or ignoring them altogether. It seems clear he thinks that like him, we should read what we like, as long as we’re always reading something. See the full list of 82 titles here. Related Content: Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers 7 Free Stephen King Stories: Presented in Text, Audio, Web Comic & a Graphic Novel Video Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stephen King Creates a List of 82 Books for Aspiring Writers (to Supplement an Earlier List of 96 Recommend Books) 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.

Two years ago, a series of animated science videos began to pop up on a Vimeo account called HarvardX Neuroscience. As its name suggests, it’s coming out of Harvard University, and, with the help of animators, they originally created a series of scientific shorts pitched between the layman and the serious scientist. In the last month, however, they’ve stepped further into the arts realm with a mini-series of animations (five and counting as of this writing) that look to poetry to explain what science renders dry and academic. The new video series features "representations of perception and sensation" as realized through the poems of Walt Whitman, America’s great transcendentalist poet, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams (whose own reading is used as the audio for a video). Opening all the senses to the wonders of the world is "the origin of all poems" according to Whitman, and this curation focuses on smell, taste, sight, touch, and sound to prove his point. The readers you hear in this videos, collectively entitled Poetry of Perception, include poet/artist Peter Blegvad, Anna Martine, Harvard’s own Sarah Jessop, and artist/animator Nak Yong Choi. And the animations are brought to you by Sophie Koko Gate, Hannah Jacobs, Lily Fang, Isaac Holland, Brian Smee, all who bring a tactile, mutable quality to these short poems. There will be another three videos in the series, so please bookmark the Vimeo account. Related Content: Walt Whitman’s Poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider" Brought to Life in Three Animations William Carlos Williams Reads His Poetry (1954) Marilyn Monroe Reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1952) The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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. Watch "The Poetry of Perception": Harvard Animates Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams 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.

A couple days ago, we featured some intriguing clips from the new animated Edgar Allan Poe film, Extraordinary Tales. Directed by animator Raul Garcia, the film draws on the voice talents of several classic horror actors and directors, including the late Christopher Lee, Roger Corman, and—in an archival reading of Poe’s "The Tell Tale Heart"—the legendary Bela Lugosi. You can hear his reading above, a recording that seems to date from 1946. The Hungarian actor, who struggled to find work late in his career, and wrestled with a morphine addiction, likely "recorded it for his agent," writes Ronald L. Smith, "who would have been deputized to make copies and send them out to anyone interested in booking Bela’s solo stage act (which included an enactment of the Poe tale)." All of the great horror stars of the early twentieth century cut their teeth on Poe, and performed his macabre stories throughout their careers. Lugosi was no exception. After his typecasting as an exotic villain in the stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the late 20s, then in Tod Browning’s famous 1931 film, Lugosi would remark, "I am definitely typed, doomed to be an exponent of evil." He appeared the following year as the mad scientist in Universal’s adaptation of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (watch here). Then, in 1935, Lugosi played yet another crazed doctor, who is obsessed with all things Poe, in The Raven (view here), a film that also features Universal’s other major horror star of the time, Boris Karloff. The two had teamed up the year previous in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poe adaptation, The Black Cat, a huge hit for Universal, in which Lugosi plays yet another evil doctor. After Lugosi’s successes with Poe-inspired films in the thirties, his career precipitously declined, and by the forties, when he made the "Tell Tale Heart" recording at the top of the post, he’d been reduced to playing parodies of his Dracula character, notably in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Lugosi attempted to bank on earlier successes with Poe, or Poe-like, characters. Before Ed Wood found and resurrected him in now-classic fifties B-movies like Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and—posthumously—Plan 9 from Outer Space, Lugosi made one final appearance onscreen in a Poe adaptation. Click here and see him in an adaptation of "The Cask of Amontillado," an episode from television series Suspense. Set in Italy during World War II, this version of "Amontillado" casts Lugosi as Nazi officer "General Fortunato," whom one fan describes as a "ruthless, amoral roué, with equally ruthless storm troopers at his beck and call." It’s not Lugosi’s greatest performance, but it’s "Bela doing his 1949 best," and an important entry in his catalog of Poe performances, if only because it’s the last of them. Happy Halloween! Related Content: New Film Extraordinary Tales Animates Edgar Poe Stories, with Narrations by Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Lee & More Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Classic Horror Story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955 Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space: "The Worst Movie Ever Made," "The Ultimate Cult Flick," or Both? Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell Tale Heart" Read by the Great Bela Lugosi (1946) 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.

Next time I make it to Oslo, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design ranks high on my to-do list. The next time I make it to Oslo will also count as the first time I make it to Oslo, since the tendency of the city itself to rank high on the world’s-most-expensive places lists (and at the very top of some of those lists) has thus far scared me off of booking a flight there. But if you can handle Oslo’s formidable cost of living, the National Museum’s branches only charge you the equivalent of five bucks or so for admission. And now they’ve offered an even cheaper alternative: 30,000 works of art from their collection, viewable online for free. If it all seems overwhelming, you can view the National Museum’s digital collection in sections of highlights: one of pre-1945 works, one of post-1945 works, and one of Edvard Munch. While few of us could confidently call ourselves experts in Norwegian art, all of us know the work of Munch — or at least we know a work of Munch, 1893’s The Scream (Skrik), whose black-garbed central figure, clutching his gaunt features twisted into an expression of pure agony, has gone on to inspire countless homages, parodies, and ironic greeting cards. But Munch, whose career lasted well over half a century and involved printmaking as well as painting, didn’t become Norway’s best-known artist on the strength of The Scream alone. The National Museum’s digital collection offers perhaps your best opportunity to begin to get a sense of the scope of Munch’s art. There you can take an up-close look at (and even download) such pieces as the less agonized Melancholy (Melankoli), painted one year before The Scream; 1901’s The Girls on the Bridge, a more placid treatment of a similar setting; and even, so you can get to know the artist better still, Munch’s 1895 self-portrait with a cigarette. He may not exactly look happy in it, but at least he hasn’t become a visual shorthand for all-consuming pain like the poor fellow he painted on the bridge. (If you want my guess as to what made the subject of The Scream so unhappy, I’d say he just finished looking into average Oslo rents.) A big thanks to Joakim for making us aware of this collection. If any other readers know of great resources we can feature on the site, please send us a tip here. Related Content: Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting The Scream Animated to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Primal Music The Guggenheim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Modern Art from 575 Artists Download 35,000 Works of Art from the National Gallery, Including Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt & More Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! Download 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty 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. 30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Other Artists Put Online by Norway’s National Museum of Art 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.

Frida Kahlo’s legacy is definitely informed by her careful husbandry of own image. She understood its currency, and how to leverage it. Even when caught out of uniform or having a seemingly unaware laugh, she stayed true to what in modern parlance would be called her brand. So it is with gallery owner Julien Levy’s 1938 (technically not-safe-for-work) photographs of the artist, taken the year before he hosted her first solo show, an event that caused Time magazine to rhapsodize that "the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s…wife, Frida Kahlo." Rivera’s wife was also Levy’s lover, as these artfully posed, semi-clad photos suggest. They show a less public side of Kahlo, to be sure, but one that’s in keeping with the face she presented to the world. Frankly, the revelation of her partially loosed hair seems more intimate than her dishabille. Click here to see the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of Levy’s Kahlo portraits, both with and without rebozo. To learn a little more about Julien Levy ("a gallery owner who committed his charisma, connections, and personal resources to establishing photography’s importance in the field of modern art") and the collection bequeathed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, click here. Related Content: 1933 Article on Frida Kahlo: "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art" Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938 Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday The Artist as Artist’s Model: Au Naturel Portraits of Frida Kahlo Taken by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938) 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.

Herk Harvey had a successful career as a director and producer of educational and industrial movies in Lawrence, Kansas, but he longed for something more. After all, fellow Kansas filmmaker Robert Altman had made the leap from industrial flicks to Hollywood, so why couldn’t he? The resulting movie, Carnival of Souls (1962), became a cult classic influencing the likes of George Romero, James Wan and David Lynch. Mary (played by Candace Hilligoss, the only trained actor in the cast) mysteriously surfaces after an ill-fated drag race sends her car off a bridge and into a deep river. Unmoored and unable to remember what happened, she flees her hometown and ends up in Salt Lake City where she takes a gig as a church organist. She tries to make a life there but is plagued by an otherworldly stranger with a paper white mask of evil (played by Harvey himself.) Now in the public domain, Carnival is a slow burn of dread that relies on few cheap jumps and little gore. Instead, Harvey creates a sparse world of alienation and creeping hysteria like an Edward Hopper painting gone psychotic. Harvey’s inspirations were clearly more art house than Hammer horror. Echoes of F. W. Murnau, Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau abound. Yet the curiously somnambulate acting exhibited by most of the cast along with the movie’s freaky organ soundtrack gives the film the vibe of a particularly nightmarish Ed Wood movie. Carnival made a modest showing on the drive-in circuit when it came out but it didn’t become a cult classic until later in the 60s when it started playing on late-night TV. Harvey, however, never made another feature. You can watch the complete movie above, or find it in our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space: "The Worst Movie Ever Made," "The Ultimate Cult Flick," or Both? The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: See the Restored Version of the 1920 Horror Classic with Its Original Color Tinting Time Out London Presents The 100 Best Horror Films: Start by Watching Four Horror Classics Free Online Martin Scorsese Names the 11 Scariest Horror Films: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Tourneur & More Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Watch the Cult Classic Horror Film Carnival of Souls (1962) 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.

Kye Smith, a drummer based in Newcastle, Australia, recently hauled his drum kit to a nearby rooftop (an homage to The Beatles’ 1969 rooftop gig?) and started banging out a pretty wonderful tribute to Ringo Starr, playing drum parts from 71 Beatles songs in 5 quick minutes. Smith moves chronologically, playing the songs in the order they were released (not recorded). We start in 1962, move through 1969, and even momentarily visit 1995. On his Facebook page, Smith had this to say: Way before I found out about punk rock or even knew what a snare drum was I spent my childhood playing vinyl records at my grandparents place spinning artists such as Slim Dusty, ELVIS PRESLEY and The Beatles. This chronology called for some special treatment and got me out of the studio and onto the rooftop of The Great Northern Hotel - Newcastle, Australia for a pretty stunning view of Newcastle, New South Wales in the background. Thanks to everyone at The Great Northern for letting me make some noise up there and to Eluminate for helping me shoot it and lug heaps of gear up 7 storeys of stairs! Below the jump, you can find the list of songs that appear in the video, complete with corresponding time stamps. And keep in mind that Smith, as he mentions on Youtube, is "available for studio and live work and will be opening up some slots for drum lessons shortly." Contact him here. PS: If you can name one of the drum parts that was originally played by Paul McCartney, you get bonus points. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter 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. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. (1962) 0:06 - Love Me Do 0:09 - P.S. I Love You (1963) 0:13 - Please Please Me 0:17 - I Saw Her Standing There 0:20 - Do You Want to Know a Secret? 0:22 - From Me to You 0:24 - Thank You Girl 0:27 - She Loves You 0:30 - All My Loving 0:33 - I Want to Hold Your Hand (1964) 0:36 - Can’t Buy Me Love 0:40 - A Hard Day’s Night 0:43 - I Should Have Known Better 0:46 - If I Fell 0:52 - I’m Happy Just to Dance With You 0:55 - And I Love Her 0:59 - I’ll Cry Instead 1:01 - You Can’t Do That 1:04 - I Feel Fine 1:07 - She’s a Woman 1:10 - Eight Days a Week 1:13 - I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party (1965) 1:18 - Ticket to Ride 1:22 - Yes it Is 1:29 - Help! 1:33 - Yesterday 1:41 - Day Tripper 1:45 - We Can Work it Out 1:47 - Drive My Car 1:51 - Norwegian Wood 1:55 - Nowhere Man 2:01 - Michelle 2:03 - What Goes On 2:08 - Girl 2:10 - In My Life (1966) 2:14 - Paperback Writer 2:18 - Rain 2:22 - Taxman 2:24 - Eleanor Rigby 2:29 - Yellow Submarine 2:33 - Good Day Sunshine 2:37 - Got to Get You Into My Life (1967) 2:41 - Strawberry Fields Forever 2:47 - Penny Lane 2:51 - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 2:56 - With a Little Help From My Friends 2:58 - Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds 3:05 - A Day in the Life 3:11 - All You Need is Love 3:15 - Baby You’re a Rich Man 3:20 - Hello Goodbye 3:23 - I Am the Walrus (1968) 3:24 - Lady Madonna 3:29 - Hey Jude 3:34 - Revolution 3:39 - Back in the U.S.S.R. 3:41 - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da 3:46 - While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1969) 3:50 - Get Back 3:54 - Don’t Let Me Down 3:58 - The Ballad of John and Yoko 4:02 - Come Together 4:07 - Something 4:12 - Octopus’s Garden 4:15 - Here Come’s the Sun 4:19 - The End (1970) 4:24 - Let it Be 4:32 - You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) 4:37 - For You Blue 4:39 - The Long and Winding Road (1995) 4:50 - Free as a Bird Musician Plays Signature Drum Parts of 71 Beatles Songs in 5 Minutes: A Whirlwind Tribute 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.

"One of the first video recordings of a David Lynch interview dates from 1979," writes The New Yorker‘s Dennis Lim. "The twenty-minute black-and-white segment was produced for a television course at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted in the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the locations that constituted the barren wasteland of his first feature, Eraserhead (1977)." And it is Eraserhead these UCLA students, in what Lim calls "the moment of Lynch’s first brush with cult fame," want to know about, putting a variety of questions to the young filmmaker, and putting his ability to answer them concretely to the test. You may well learn more about Eraserhead in the theater-lobby audience responses collected for the video, wherein the viewers — viewers, remember, from a now hard-to-imagine time when the name David Lynch carried no meaning at all — exiting a screening express reactions ranging from great pleasure (some of them boast of having seen it as many as eight times already) to predictable bewilderment ("I’ve gotta think about it for a while") and even more predictable distaste: "The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen." "It’s terrible. I didn’t like it." "Some inane, bizarre person with a disturbed mind wrote that film." But does the man standing there submitting to a student interview in the middle of an oil field seem so bizarre, so disturbed? Some of Lynch’s answers, as when he describes Eraserhead as "not like thrown-together abstract" but "meant-to-be-that-way abstract," may strike you as inane at first, but certainly nothing he says crosses the line from inanity to insanity. In the almost 40 years since the film’s first showing, Eraserhead has grown more artistically divisive even as its fan base spans a wider and wider range of generations and nationalities. Both its promoters and its detractors may sometimes wonder if even Lynch himself understands it, but to my mind, this early interview hints that he does. He made what he calls "an open-feeling film," a fount of an infinitude of interpretations, and for that reason an enduring work of art. And he meant it to be that way. Related Content: The Paintings of Filmmaker/Visual Artist David Lynch David Lynch’s Unlikely Commercial for a Home Pregnancy Test (1997) David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Surrealist Video What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Camera and 52 Seconds of Film 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 Young David Lynch Talks About Eraserhead in One of His First Recorded Interviews (1979) 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.