Creative Commons photo by Metal Chris In My Day, so much of the music we listened to seemed angrier, more raucous and unruly—more aggressive and plainly evil—than music today. Not that I have any hard evidence for these assertions; customarily none is required for an In My Day rant. But I submit to you this: all that musical rage, in my opinion, was a good thing. And it seems at least in this case, I can substantiate my opinion with science. This past summer, we reported on a study done by researchers at Humboldt State, Ohio State, UC Riverside, and UT Austin showing that kids who listened to heavy metal in the 80s were "significantly happier in their youth and better adjusted currently than either middle-aged or current college-age youth comparison groups." Despite heated debates in the 80s and 90s over objectionable lyrical content in both popular and alternative music (remember the "Cop Killer" controversy?), researchers concluded that angry rock didn’t turn people into alienated maniacs. Instead, they found, "participation in fringe style cultures may enhance identity development in troubled youth." Now, even more recent research into the effects of angry hardcore punk and metal on the psyches of young people seems to confirm these results and further suggest that aggressive music has a paradoxically calming effect. In a study titled "Extreme metal music and anger processing," University of Queensland psychologists Leah Sharman and Genevieve Dingle describe how they subjected "39 extreme music listeners aged 18-34 years of age" to "anger induction," during which time, writes Consequence of Sound, "they talked about such irritating things as relationships, money, and work." Once the test subjects were good and stressed, Sharman and Dingle had them listen either to a "random assignment" of "extreme music from their own playlist" for ten minutes or to ten minutes of silence. As university publication UQ News summarizes, "In contrast to previous studies linking loud and chaotic music to aggression and delinquency," this study "showed listeners mostly became inspired and calmed" by their metal. "The music helped them explore the full gamut of emotion they felt," says Sharman, "but also left them feeling more active and inspired." The researchers also provide a brief history of what they call "extreme music" and define it in terms of several genres and subgenres: Following the rise of punk and heavy metal, a range of new genres and subgenres surfaced. Hardcore, death metal, emotional/emotional-hardcore (emo), and screamo appeared throughout the 1980s, gradually becoming more a part of mainstream culture. Each of these genres and their subgenres are socio-politically charged and, as mentioned earlier, are characterized by heavy and powerful sounds with expressive vocals. "At the forefront of [the] controversy surrounding extreme music," they write, "is the prominence of aggressive lyrics and titles." In additional experiments, Sharman and Dingle found that "violent lyrics" did increase "participants’ state hostility," but the effect was fleeting. Against prevailing assumptions that angry-sounding, aggressive music causes or correlates with depression, violence, self-harm, substance abuse, or suicide, the Queensland researchers found exactly the opposite—that "extreme music" alleviated listeners’ "angst and aggression," made them happier, calmer, and better able to cope with the anger-inducing stressors that surround us all. via Consequence of Sound Related Content: 1980s Metalhead Kids Are All Right: New Study Suggests They Became Well-Adjusted Adults New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefit the Brain for a Lifetime The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain This is Your Brain on Jazz Improvisation: The Neuroscience of Creativity Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Punk & Heavy Metal Music Makes Listeners Happy and Calm, Not Aggressive, According to New Australian Study 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.

I think we here at Open Culture can freely own up to a deficiency in our content: despite its outsized presence in American culture, we’ve really neglected to post much about NASCAR. Luckily, film director, animator, and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam has given us reason to change our ways by shooting a short film at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway, one of the best-known venues for NASCAR races. But The Legend of Hallowdega, made to promote something called AMP Energy Juice, tells not a straight (or rather, constantly left-turning) story about racing, but adds another layer of intrigue: the paranormal. That might sound like a random conceptual mashup, but a little bit of research reveals Talladega as a regular Overlook Hotel, what with its history of mysterious compulsions, freak injuries and deaths, and unexplained acts of sabotage. (Some even chalk all this up to a curse placed on the Talladega’s valley by its original Native American inhabitants, driven out for their collaboration with Andrew Jackson.) Enter tattooed, Fu-Manchu’d, bead-festooned ghost hunter Kiyash Monsef, here to answer the question, "What is the truth? And what is truer that the truth?" — the words of the khaki-wrapped host of World of the Unexplained, the fictitious, highly sensationalistic, and not especially competent television show that frames The Legend of Hallowdega‘s story. Nothing in the first few minutes of the film gives it away as a Terry Gilliam project, but as soon as it enters Monsef’s elaborate yet makeshift, thoroughly analog lair — located underneath Talladega itself — the famously imaginative director starts making his touch apparent. We could easily dismiss David Arquette’s performance as Monsef as over-the-top, but to many of us, he surely comes off as no more unfamiliar than some of the locals providing their own testimony about the curse in the interview segments. Where has the oft-lamented "old, weird America" gone? In (the American-born but British-naturalized and thus sufficiently distanced) Terry Gilliam’s eyes, it lives on, especially in places like Talladega. Related Content: Terry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Monty Python Animations: A 1974 How-To Guide Terry Gilliam’s Lost Animations from Monty Python and the Holy Grail Are Now Online Watch Terry Gilliam’s Animated Short, The Christmas Card (1968) 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. 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. NASCAR Meets the Paranormal in Terry Gilliam’s Short Film, The Legend of Hallowdega 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.

Out with the Coke cans, potato chips, Twix bars and other junk foods. In with the Haruki Murakami novels. That’s what happened last year when Muzu, a publisher in Poland, created three vending machines stocked with copies of Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage and then placed them in Polish train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. It seemed like a natural thing to do, seeing that (notes the fan blog Haruki Murakami Stuff) Tsukuru Tazaki, the main character of the novel, "likes train stations and works as a train station designer for a Tokyo railway company." Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is the start of a healthy trend. via Vintage Anchor Related Content: A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines 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.

Voltaire, the clearest of Enlightenment thinkers wrote those words in his 1765 essay, "Questions sur les miracles." And they resonate as much now, 250 years later, as they did then. I rarely say much about myself on the site. But I’ll just say today that I did my doctoral work on the French Revolution, spent a couple years living in Paris, and developed a deep affection for the city, as many others have. What happened tonight is heartbreaking, tragic and downright maddening. My thoughts are with all Parisians tonight, friends and strangers alike. Voltaire: "Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities" 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.

left: Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid. right: Arthur Coulet, d’après Johannes Vermeer It has been suggested plausibly that Vermeer’s kitchen maid is making bread porridge, which puts stale bread—there is an unusual amount of bread on the table—to good use by combining it with milk and a few other ingredients to make a filling mash or meal.  - Walter Liedtke, Department of European Paintings,  The Metropolitan Museum of Art It’s a matter for conjecture. Perhaps Vermeer wanted to title his painting The Bread Porridge Maid, but caved to market research suggesting that Milkmaid would better appeal to what Liedtke calls "male viewer’s amorous musings." Recently, graphic artist Arthur Coulet made bread a focal point in Vermeer’s Milkmaid and other iconic works, ironically by Photoshopping it out. His online Gluten Free Museum is a nod to détournement, manipulations of existing works born of Letterist International and the Situationists. Gone are the crusty loaves, fields golden with wheat, and anything containing grains that could cause discomfort to those afflicted by gluten intolerance or celiac disease. Even the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic gets the digital heave ho…with nothing to harvest, what’s the point? Pieter Bruegel’s the Harvesters gets the most radical redo. Cezanne’s Still Life with Bread and Eggs is now just Eggs… …and Salvador Dali’s Eucharistic Still Life has been reduced to mere fishes. By contrast, the picnickers in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe probably don’t even notice the omission. See more, including work by Jean-François Millet, Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Jeff Koons in Coulet’s Gluten Free Museum. A quick image search using the phrase "bread painting" suggests that much work remains to be done. via So Bad So Good Related Content: Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists What Happens When a Cheap Ikea Print Gets Presented as Fine Art in a Museum Salvador Dalí’s Melting Clocks Painted on a Latte Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is playing in New York City through November 20. Follow her @AyunHalliday Masterpieces of Western Art with All Gluten Products Removed: See Works by Dalí, Cézanne, Van Gogh & Others 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.

After every terrible tragedy in the West, we expect celebrities to weigh in. And they do, with comments insightful and heartfelt, appalling and boorish, perfunctory and banal. Often, the larger the public profile, the more self-serving the soundbite. One take in particular has provoked sneers and ridicule: Bono—who paid respects with his band at music venue Le Bataclan—told an interviewer, "this is the first direct hit on music we’ve had in this so-called War on Terror." Twitterati, the Commentariat, and, well, folks, did not take kindly to the statement, with many pointing out an earlier "hit on music" in February and accusing U2’s frontman of making the monstrous attacks on the Paris music venue about himself. One can understand the sentiment, without excusing the verbiage. Le Bataclan—scene of what has rightly been called a "bloodbath"—has occupied a significant place in pop music history since it started booking rock bands in the 1970s; and it has hosted famous musicians and singers—like Edith Piaf—since its opening in 1864. It does not minimize the tremendous pain of the horrific murder of 89 Eagles of Death Metal fans this past Friday to say that the assault has also deeply disturbed musicians and music fans worldwide. Grief leads us to remembrance, and we can memorialize le Bataclan (named after the French operetta Ba-ta-clan) for its long history before last Friday’s horror. One of the most historic concerts there occurred in 1972, when John Cale reunited with his former Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and Nico for acoustic renditions of "Heroin," "The Black Angel’s Death Song," and "Femme Fatale." We covered that concert in a previous post. See it again at the top of this one. The following year, a band at the height of its career—or the first phase of it anyway—graced le Bataclan’s stage before going on to blow minds at London’s Shepperton Studios. Just above, see the Peter Gabriel-fronted Genesis play "The Musical Box," "Supper’s Ready," "Return of the Giant Hogweed," and "The Knife." Too many others to name have played le Bataclan through the years—from Prince (who jammed out Zeppelin’s "Whole Lotta Love") to Oasis. Perhaps one of the most moving performances the venue hosted came from Jeff Buckley in 1995, whose concert there was released as a live album the following year. Buckley sang his medley of Edith Piaf’s "Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin/Hymne A L’Amour" (above)—in hindsight an especially poignant rendition two years before his untimely death. "By the time Buckley switches over to French," writes Allmusic, "the crowd erupts at the end of every phrase, catching him off guard with their enthusiasm." He ended the show with the nearly 10-minute version of Leonard Cohen’s "Hallelujah" below, a song he became known for and that serves as well as any other as a tribute to le Bataclan in these dark days of mourning, war, and retribution. "Love is not a victory march," sings Buckley, his voice cracking, "It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah." Related Content: Watch Genesis (from the Peter Gabriel Era) Perform in a Glorious, 1973 Restored Concert Film Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico Reunite, Play Acoustic Velvet Underground Songs on French TV, 1972 Édith Piaf’s Moving Performance of ‘La Vie en Rose’ on French TV, 1954 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Three Historic Performances at Paris’ Le Bataclan: The Velvet Underground (1972), Genesis with Peter Gabriel (1973) & Jeff Buckley (1995) 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.

It takes no great research pains to find out that Woody Allen loves jazz. He scores most of his movies with the music, never failing to include it at least under their signature simple black-and-white opening titles. He has worked jazz as a theme into some of the films themselves, most notably Sweet and Lowdown, the story of a dissolute 1930s jazz guitarist who heads for Hollywood. He plays the clarinet himself, touring with his jazz band as seen in the documentary Wild Man Blues. He makes no secret of his admiration for fellow clarinetist (and also saxophonist) Sidney Bechet, after whom he named one of his daughters. Allen has publicly discussed a dream project called American Blues, a movie about the very beginning of jazz in New Orleans seen through the careers of Bechet and Louis Armstrong. He acknowledges that a story of that scale would require a far larger budget than the more modest films he makes just about every year, and so, in light of the unlikelihood of his commanding that budget, he has evidently contented himself with infusing the work that does come out with as much jazz as possible. You can hear almost two and a half hours of it in the Youtube playlist at the top of this post, which includes cuts from not just Bechet and Armstrong but from Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Django Reinhardt, Glenn Miller, Lester Young, Jelly Roll Morton, and many other respected players from prewar and wartime America. You can find a list of the songs featured in the jazz playlist, complete with timestamps, in the blurb beneath this YouTube clip. Even apart from what film scholars would call the non-diegetic jazz in Allen’s pictures (i.e., the jazz we hear on the score, but the characters themselves presumably don’t) he also includes some diegetic jazz, as in the ending of Stardust Memories, when Allen’s character puts on a Louis Armstrong record. And isn’t now just the right time to revisit the sequence from Midnight in Paris just above, a montage celebrating life in the City of Lights set to Sidney Bechet’s "Si tu vois ma mère"? After that, have a look at the clip below, in which the man himself plays with the Woody Allen and Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band at New York’s Cafe Carlyle — where you can catch them every Monday night through December 14th. Related Content: Woody Allen Tells a Classic Joke About Hemingway, Fitzgerald & Gertrude Stein in 1965: A Precursor to Midnight in Paris Woody Allen Lists the Greatest Films of All Time: Includes Classics by Bergman, Truffaut & Fellini Watch an Exuberant, Young Woody Allen Do Live Stand Up on British TV (1965) Watch a 44-Minute Supercut of Every Woody Allen Stammer, From Every Woody Allen Film Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz 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 2.5-Hours of Great Jazz Songs Featured in Woody Allen Films: Sidney Bechet in Midnight in Paris, Louis Armstrong in Stardust Memories & More 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.

Before Friday, we had never managed to cover NASCAR, but we crossed that off the list when we featured Terry Gilliam’s mockumentary The Legend of Hallowdega. And now today we have another Open Culture first: yes, an archive of free, entertaining videos for cats and dogs. Over the past 6 years, Paul Dinning has created a YouTube channel packed with over 400 videos featuring the wildlife of Cornwall, England. And, from that footage, he has cobbled together playlists designed to delight all cats and dogs with access to the internet. And, apparently cats and dogs are watching. The first video above, called "Squirrel and Bird Fun," has clocked some 863,000 views over the past year. And the next video, "The Ultimate Videos of Birds for Cats To Watch," has 946,000 views since January. I showed the videos to my cat Cocco [sic] and, I kid you not, he was transfixed. A longer playlist of videos for cats and dogs can be viewed here. 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. Free Entertainment for Cats and Dogs: Videos of Birds, Squirrels & Other Thrills 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.

Out with the Coke cans, potato chips, Twix bars and other junk foods. In with the Haruki Murakami novels. That’s what happened last year when Muzu, a publisher in Poland, created three vending machines stocked with copies of Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage and then placed them in Polish train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. It seemed like a natural thing to do, seeing that (notes the fan blog Haruki Murakami Stuff) Tsukuru Tazaki, the main character of the novel, "likes train stations and works as a train station designer for a Tokyo railway company." Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is the start of a healthy trend. via Vintage Anchor Related Content: A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines 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.

When the subject of early surrealist film arises, most of us think of Salvador Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and not without good cause: even 86 years after its release, its nightmare images of piano-dragging and eyeball-slicing still lurk in our collective cinematic consciousness. But we can’t call it the very first surrealist film since, 87 years ago, French critic and filmmaker Germaine Dulac, in collaboration with no less an avant-garde luminary than Antonin Artaud, put out La Coquille et le clergyman, better know internationally as The Seashell and the Clergyman, which you can watch free above. Un Chien Andalou met with a pleased reception, to Buñuel’s delight and Dalí’s disappointment. Dulac and Artaud’s project provoked a different reaction. "Advertised as ‘a dream on the screen,'" writes Senses of Cinema’s Maryann de Julio, "The Seashell and Clergyman’s premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on February 9, 1928 incited a small riot, and critical response to the film has ranged from the misinformed - some American prints spliced the reels in the wrong order - to the rapturous - acclaimed as the first example of a Surrealist film." The film takes place in the consciousness of the titular clergyman, a lusty priest who thinks all manner of impure thoughts about a general’s wife. In another Senses of Cinema article on Artaud’s film theory, Lee Jamieson writes that, in putting this troubled consciousness on film, it "penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted," resulting in "a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically,’ truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious." It capitalizes, in other words, upon the now well-known principle that what is seen cannot be unseen. But it also pushed cinema ahead in a way that Buñuel and Dali could run with the following year. De Julio’s article quotes Artaud’s own description of the challenge he saw the form as facing, and the one which The Seashell and the Clergyman attempts, in its way, to address: it could either become "pure or absolute cinema" or "this sort of hybrid visual art that persists in translating into images, more or less apt, psychological situations that would be perfectly at home on stage or in the pages of a book, but not on the screen." He saw neither of these as "likely the true one," and many filmmakers even today (David Lynch stands as a guiding light among those now living) continue the search for how best to tell stories on film in a manner suited to the advantages of film. Even overshadowed by Un Chien Andalou, The Seashell and the Clergyman remains a popular silent film to re-score today, and you can watch the movie with a few different soundtracks online: from dark ambient artist Roto Visage, from musique concrète composer Delia Derbyshire (see right above), from large-scale experimental band Sons of Noel and Adrian, and many more besides. The Seashell and the Clergyman has been added to our collection of Silent Films, a subset of our meta list 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Hear Antonin Artaud’s Censored, Never-Aired Radio Play: To Have Done With The Judgment of God (1947) Restored Version of Un Chien Andalou: Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Surreal Film (1929) The 10 Favorite Films of Avant-Garde Surrealist Filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Including His Own Collaboration with Salvador Dalí) The Great Train Robbery: Where Westerns Began A Trip to the Moon: Where Sci Fi Movies Began Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities and culture. 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 First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928) 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.