If you’ve read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in English, it’s likely that your translation referred to the transformed Gregor Samsa as a "cockroach," "beetle," or, more generally, a "gigantic insect." These renderings of the author’s original German don’t necessarily miss the mark—Gregor scuttles, waves multiple legs about, and has some kind of an exoskeleton. His charwoman calls him a "dung beetle"… the evidence abounds. But the German words used in the first sentence of the story to describe Gregor’s new incarnation are much more mysterious, and perhaps strangely laden with metaphysical significance. Translator Susan Bernofsky writes, "both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning "monstrous" or "huge") and the noun Ungeziefer are negations—virtual nonentities—prefixed by un." Ungeziefer, a term from Middle High German, describes something like "an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice," belonging to "the class of nasty creepy-crawly things." It suggests many types of vermin—insects, yes, but also rodents. "Kafka," writes Bernofsky, "wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them." It’s likely for that very reason that Kafka prohibited images of Gregor. In a 1915 letter to his publisher, he stipulated, "the insect is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance." The slim book’s original cover, above, instead features a perfectly normal-looking man, distraught as though he might be imagining a terrible transformation, but not actually physically experiencing one. Yet it seems obvious that Kafka meant Gregor to have become some kind of insect. Kafka’s letter uses the German Insekt, and when casually referring to the story-in-progress, Kafka used the word Wanze, or "bug." Making this too clear in the prose dilutes the grotesque body horror Gregor suffers, and the story is told from his point of view—one that "mutates as the story proceeds." So writes Dutch reader Freddie Oomkins, who further observes, "at the physical level Gregor, at different points in the story, starts to talk with a squeaking, animal-like voice, loses control of his legs, hangs from the ceiling, starts to lose his eyesight, and wants to bite his sister—not really helpful in determining his taxonomy." Difficulties of translation and classification aside, Russian literary mastermind and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov decided that he knew exactly what Gregor Samsa had turned into. And, against the author’s wishes, Nabokov even drew a picture in his teaching copy of the novella. Nabokov also heavily edited his edition, as you can see in the many corrections and revisions above. In a lecture on The Metamorphosis, he concludes that Gregor is "merely a big beetle" (notice he strikes the word "gigantic" from the text above and writes at the top "just over 3 feet long"), and furthermore one who is capable of flight, which would explain how he ends up on the ceiling. All of this may seem highly disrespectful of The Metamorphosis’ author. Certainly Nabokov has never been a respecter of literary persons, referring to Faulkner’s work, for example, as "corncobby chronicles," and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a "petrified superpun." Yet in his lecture Nabokov calls Kafka "the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plastic saints in comparison with him." Though a saint he may be, Kafka is "first of all an artist," and Nabokov does not believe that "any religious implications can be read into Kafka’s genius." ("I am interested here in bugs, not humbugs," he says dismissively.) Rejecting Kafka’s tendencies toward mysticism runs against most interpretations of his fiction. One might suspect Nabokov of seeing too much of himself in the author when he compares Kafka to Flaubert and asserts, "Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author’s private sentiments." Ungeheueres Ungeziefer, however, is not a scientific term, and its Middle German literary origins—which Kafka would have been familiar with from his studies—clearly connote religious ideas of impurity and sacrifice. With due respect to Nabokov’s formidable erudition, it seems in this instance at least that Kafka fully intended imprecision, what Bernofsky calls "blurred perceptions of bewilderment," in language "carefully chosen to avoid specificity." Kafka’s art consists of this ability to exploit the ancient stratifications of language. His almost Kabbalistic treatment of signs and his aversion to graven images may consternate and bedevil translators and certain novelists, but it is also the great source of his uncanny genius. The Metamorphosis was published 100 years ago this month. You can find copies of the text in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. Related Content: The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907-1917 The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977) Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. 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If you visited The Tate Modern in recent years, perhaps you saw the large, 130-foot art installation covering a concourse wall. Created by illustrator Sara Fanelli, the "Tate Artist Timeline" provided museumgoers with a sprawling roadmap showing the major artistic movements and important artists of the 20th century, moving from Art Nouveau to more contemporary Graffiti Art. Nowadays, you can revisit Fanelli’s educational timeline by purchasing a copy in a handsome book format. You can also watch the timeline play out in the video above. To see other unique ways of visualizing the history of culture (and history itself), don’t miss the items in the "Relateds" below. via Hyperallergic Related Content: The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams The History of Philosophy Visualized 6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History, Created in 1871 5-Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History 10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5-Foot Long Infographic from 1931 4000 Years of History Displayed in a 5-Foot-Long "Histomap" (Early Infographic) From 1931 The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline 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.

Charles Darwin not only created the theory of evolution, but he apparently dabbled often in human biology and sexuality. To wit: he fathered 10 children with his cousin Emma Wedgwood, six boys and four girls. It was this boisterous brood that filled the Darwin’s house in rural Kent, England, while Charles worked in his study on the first draft of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, his groundbreaking, world-changing work. Last year we reported on the huge effort to digitize 30,000 pages of the scientist’s writing at the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History. Among Darwin’s many papers, one thing the digitizers have found, curiously enough, is artwork drawn by his children, often on pages of Darwin’s manuscripts. Darwin had no real use for the original manuscript once galley proofs came back from the publisher. So one can imagine father Charles giving his kids the only worthwhile paper in the house to draw on. It seems flippant now, but at the time, it was perfectly normal. According to the New Yorker, they’ve found 57 drawings in total, nine of them on the back of pages from Origin of Species. Only 45 manuscript pages out of 600 from that book survive, and those nine are because of his kids. You can find a whole section at the Darwin Manuscripts project website dedicated to the drawings of the Darwin kids. Researchers surmise that the majority of the art comes from three of the 10 children, Francis, George, and Horace, all of whom went into the sciences as adults. The illustrations are colorful and witty, drawn in pencil and sometimes colored in watercolor. Birds and butterflies are drawn and colored with attention to detail. Some creatures are imaginary, like the green fish with legs carrying an umbrella, and there are short stories about fairies and battles too. Overall, the drawings show a Darwin who was a family man and not a reclusive scientist. We’re just glad that the kids let dad do his work in relative silence. Related Content: The British Library Puts Online 1,200 Literary Treasures From Great Romantic & Victorian Writers What Did Charles Darwin Read? See His Handwritten Reading List & Read Books from His Library Online 19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873) 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. Charles Darwin’s Kids Draw on Surviving Manuscript Pages of On the Origin of Species 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.

Imagine if you will that it is the year 4515, and future people slowly begin excavating the musical remains of millennia past. Now add the following wrinkle to this scenario, courtesy of classics scholar Armand D’Angour: "all that survived of the Beatles songs were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi’s operas were the words and not the music." Would it be possible to recover the rhythms and melodies from these scraps? Wouldn’t this music be forever lost to history? Not necessarily, D’Angour tells us; we could "reconstruct the music, rediscover the instruments that played them, and hear the words once again in their proper setting." Given the inexact, speculative nature of much ancient history, I imagine the reconstructed Beatles might end up sounding nothing like themselves, but then again, now that scholars have begun to recover the music of ancient Greek tragedy from a few fragments of text, surely those future historians could remake "Love Me Do" Reconstructing Don Giovani might be a little trickier, and that’s often the scale academics like D’Angour are working with, since not only the love-poems of Sappho, but also "the epics of Homer" and "the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides—were all, originally, music. Dating from around 750 to 400 BC, they were composed to be sung in whole or part to the accompaniment of the lyre, reed-pipes, and percussion instruments." This much we all likely know to some extent. D’Angour goes on to describe in detail how scholars like himself use "patterns of long and short syllables" in the surviving verse to determine musical rhythm, and new revelations about ancient Greek vocal notation and tuning to reconstruct ancient melody. The earliest surviving musical document "preserves a few bars of sung music" from fifth-century tragedian Euripides’ play Orestes. A "notoriously avant-garde composer," Euripides—scholars presume—"violated the long-held norms of Greek folk-singing by neglecting word-pitch." You can see the papyrus fragment above, written around 200 BC in Egypt and called "Katolophyromai" after the first word in the "stasimon," or choral song. Above the words, notice the vocal and instrumental notation scholars have used to reconstruct the music. The lines describe Orestes’ guilt after murdering his mother: I cry, I cry, your mother’s blood that drives you mad, great happiness in mortals never lasting, but like a sail of swift ship, which a god shook up and plunged it with terrible troubles into the greedy and deadly waves of the sea. This translation comes from "Greek Reconstructionist Paganism" site Baring the Aegis, who also describe the song’s rhythm, Dochmius, and mode, Lydian, with a helpful explanation for non-specialists of what these terms mean. They also feature the live performance of the stasimon at the top of the post, just one interpretation by Spyros Giasafakis and Evi Stergiou of neofolk band Daemonia Nymphe. Below it, hear another interpretation by Petros Tabouris and Nikos Konstantinopoulos. And just below and at the bottom of the post are two more versions of the ancient song. Given Euripides’ experimentalism, we can’t expect that this reconstructed song would be representative of most ancient Greek music. "However, we can recognize that Euripides adopted another principle," setting words to falling and rising cadences according to their emotional import. As D’Angour puts it, "this was ancient Greek soundtrack music," and it was apparently so well-received that historian Plutarch tells a story about "thousands of Athenian soldiers held prisoner" in Syracuse: "those few who were able to sing Euripides’ latest songs were able to earn some food and drink." As for "the greatest of ancient poet-singers," Homer, it seems according to reconstructions by the late Professor Martin West of Oxford that Homeric tunes were "fairly monotonous," explaining perhaps why "the tradition of Homeric recitation without melody emerged from what was originally a sung composition." Related Content: Hear the "Seikilos Epitaph," the Oldest Complete Song in the World: An Inspiring Tune from 100 BC Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the "Neanderthal Flute," Dating Back Over 43,000 Years Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear the World’s Oldest Surviving Written Song (200 BC), Originally Composed by Euripides, the Ancient Greek Playwright 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.

Can you have a Halloween without Edgar Allan Poe? Sure you can — but here at Open Culture, we don’t recommend it. So that you need not go Poe-less on this, or any, Halloween night, we’ve featured not just his complete works free to download, but other material like the animated adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart" as well as animations of his other stories; Poe readings by the likes of Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, and Iggy Pop; and Orson Welles’ interpretation of his work on an Alan Parsons Project album. We also believe that you shouldn’t have to endure a Priceless Halloween — that is to say, a Halloween without Vincent Price. Though he proved his versatility in a wide variety of genres throughout his long acting career, history has remembered Price first and foremost for his work in horror, no doubt thanks in large part to his possession of a voice perfectly suited to the elegantly sinister. It also made him an ideal teller of Poe’s ingeniously macabre tales, which you can experience for yourself in the recordings we’ve posted of Price reading Poe, a playlist which also includes readings by Price’s equally versatile Basil Rathbone. Rathbone may also have got to read Poe, the work, but despite his huge number of roles on stage and screen, he never actually played Poe, the man. But Price did, in the special An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe, the closest any of us will get to an audience with the troubled, brilliant, and terrifyingly inventive writer himself. In it, Price-as-Poe takes the stage and, over the course of an hour, weaves into his performance four of his most enduring stories: "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Sphinx," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Pit and the Pendulum." Go on, join Edgar Allan Poe in his drawing room this Halloween by having Price bring him to life on your screen — it will guarantee you a memorable holiday evening. Related Content: Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe on His Birthday Watch the 1953 Animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart," Narrated by James Mason Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," Read by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee Christopher Lee (R.I.P.) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," and From "The Fall of the House of Usher" 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 James Earl Jones Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" and Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" Hear Orson Welles Read Edgar Allan Poe on a Cult Classic Album by The Alan Parsons Project Edgar Allan Poe Animated: Watch Four Animations of Classic Poe Stories The Fall of the House of Usher: Poe’s Classic Tale Turned Into 1928 Avant Garde Film, Scripted by e.e. cummings 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. Watch Vincent Price Turn Into Edgar Allan Poe & Read Four Classic Poe Stories (1970) 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 1968, Charles Manson listened to The Beatles’ White Album and came away thinking that America was on the verge of an apocalyptic race war between whites and blacks. As Manson imagined it, the race war would be triggered by a shocking, chaotic event called "Helter Skelter" — a named borrowed from a song on the White Album. And, like most megalomaniacs, Manson put himself at the center of the drama. In the summer of 1969, Manson had members of his cult commit a series of infamous murders in Southern California, hoping that African-Americans would be blamed and the race war would begin. Instead, a lengthy police investigation led to Manson’s arrest on December 2, 1969 and his conviction soon thereafter, making him then, and now, one of America’s notorious inmates. Through the 1980s, Manson, even though behind bars, remained a very public figure, giving high profile interviews to Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose, and Geraldo Rivera. But then, he began to fade from view, for whatever reasons. For the past 20 years, we haven’t heard much from him. Until this came along. Above, you can watch Leah Shore’s animation of never-before-heard phone conversations between Charles Manson and Marlin Marynick (who later published a best-selling biography called Charles Manson Now). Fittingly strange, the animation reminds us of the very odd things going on inside Manson’s mind. Off kilter as ever, he goes in all kinds of unexpected directions. via Vice Related Content: The Time Neil Young Met Charles Manson, Liked His Music, and Tried to Score Him a Record Deal Timothy Leary’s Wild Ride and the Folsom Prison Interview Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man in the World Documents the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Mountaineer A Fittingly Strange Animation of What’s Going On Inside Charles Manson’s Mind 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.

There has rarely ever been an artist more fully in command of as many different art forms as Orson Welles during his height - the late 1930s and early 40s. He revolutionized the stage, radio and cinema before the age of 26 and became a household name in the process. Welles’s first brush with national fame came at the age of 20 when he staged an all-black production of Macbeth in Harlem. The 1936 play was groundbreaking both for its striking sets and its darling interpretation that set Shakespeare’s bloody tragic in Haiti. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this production was that it was done entirely with non-actors. Through sheer charisma and force of will, Welles coaxed and cajoled terrific performances out of day laborers and factory workers. Two years later, in 1938, Welles ended up on the cover of TIME Magazine for his staging of Julius Caesar. He set the play in contemporary fascist Italy. It was a bold choice that turned a 340 year-old play into a work of great political urgency. That same year, Welles also managed to freak out the nation with his brilliant, wildly irresponsible adaptation of War of the Worlds. Welles staged the beloved sci-fi novel as if it were a news report. The broadcast captured the drama and terror of an emerging calamity all too well; it caused a public panic. Now you can listen to that infamous radio play along with 61 hours of other radio plays, all created by Welles for his 1930s radio show, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Spotify playlist, embedded below, includes A Christmas Carol, Heart of Darkness and even a rehearsal for Julius Caesar. Check it out. And if you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Or if Spotify isn’t your thing, you can listen to another big collection of Welles’s radio dramas below at archive.org. Start streaming that collection here: The notoriety of Welles’ radio work landed him one of the most generous movie contracts in Hollywood studio history. This is doubly impressive because, at this stage in his life, Welles had no idea how to actually make a film. The resulting movie was a barbed, thinly veiled film à clef of one of the most powerful men in America - William Randolph Hearst. This proved to be a terrible career move; Hearst’s wrath derailed Welles’s career for years but it did produce a pretty good movie - Citizen Kane. Via Criterion Related Content: Young Orson Welles Directs "Voodoo Macbeth," the First Shakespeare Production With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936 Orson Welles’ Iconic War of the WorldsBroadcast (1938) Listen to Eight Interviews of Orson Welles by Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (1969-1972) Watch Orson Welles’ The Stranger Free Online, Where 1940s Film Noir Meets Real Horrors of WWII The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Surrealist First Film (1934) Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was His Major "Gift" to Citizen Kane 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. Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & 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.

Photo by Sebastiaan term Burg via Wikimedia Commons At the lower of range of hearing, it’s said humans can detect sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called "infrasound," the world of elephant and mole hearing. But the truth is most of us can’t actually hear frequencies below the 40-60 Hz range. Instead, we feel these sounds in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?). In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, "thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number." And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, "there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve." Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. "Music in diverse cultures is composed this way," says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, "from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin." Trainor and her colleagues have recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting that perceptions of time are much more acute at lower registers, while our ability to distinguish changes in pitch gets much better in the upper ranges, which is why, writes Nature, "saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register," and why bassists tend to play fewer notes. (These findings seem consistent with the physics of sound waves.) To reach their conclusions, Trainer and her team "played people high and low pitched notes at the same time." Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalogram that measured brain activity in response to the sounds. The psychologists "found that the brain was better at detecting when the lower tone occurred 50 MS too soon compared to when the higher tone occurred 50 MS too soon." The study’s title perfectly summarizes the team’s findings: "Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms." In other words, "there is a psychological basis," says Trainor, "for why we create music the way we do. Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments." University of Vienna cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch has pronounced Trainor and her co-authors’ study a "plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception." He also adds, writes Nature: For louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that "they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance." Painfully awkward revelers at weddings, on cruise ships, at high school reunions—they just can’t help it. Maybe even this dancing owl can’t help it. Some of us keep time better than others, but most of us feel and respond physically to low-frequency rhythms. Bass instruments don’t only keep time; they also play a key role in a song’s harmonic and melodic structure. In 1880, an academic music textbook informed its readers that "the bass part… is, in fact, the foundation upon which the melody rests and without which there could be no melody." As true as this was at the time—-when acoustic precursors to electric bass, synthesizers, and sub-bass amplification provided the low end—it’s just as true now. And bass parts often define the root note of a chord, regardless of what other instruments are doing. As a bass player, notes Sting, "you control the harmony," as well as anchoring the melody. It seems the importance of rhythm players, though overlooked in much popular appreciation of music, cannot be overstated. Related Content: How Drums & Bass Make the Song: Isolated Tracks from Led Zeppelin, Rush, The Pixies, The Beatles to Royal Blood Hear Isolated Tracks From Five Great Rock Bassists: McCartney, Sting, Deacon, Jones & Lee The Story of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music History in 8 Minutes 7 Female Bass Players Who Helped Shape Modern Music: Kim Gordon, Tina Weymouth, Kim Deal & More The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness     The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. 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"How did this even get on the air?" Both the die-hard fans and bewildered haters asked that question about Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surreal television drama that famously aired on ABC primetime in 1990 and 1991. That such an unconventional vision — and one realized, at least throughout the first season, with such thorough commitment — ever made it to the mainstream airwaves now seems like a historical achievement in and of itself. So how, given the stultifying rigors of the entertainment industry, did Lynch and Frost actually sell this package of cryptic dreams, backward speech, small-town savagery, a murdered homecoming queen, and damn fine cherry pie? First, Lynch drew a map. Knowing that no TV executive would understand Twin Peaks without understanding Twin Peaks, the fictional Washington town which gives the story its setting and title, he drew what you see above. Nigel Holmes included it in his out-of-print Pictorial Maps, commenting that "the peaks of the title, and the town they name, are clearly visible as white-topped mountains rising out of the modeled landscape. By creating a sense of place, Lynch made the town all the more believable. A straightforward map would have been dull by comparison and might have suggested that there was something intrinsically interesting about the geography of the place. What was much more important to convey was the mood of the story, and it’s nicely captured in Lynch’s quirky drawing." The book also includes a quote from Lynch himself, on the utility of the map: "We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story." As any Twin Peaks fan will notice, the map identifies a host of locations referenced in the show, such as White Tail and Blue Pine mountains (the peaks themselves), Ghostwood National Forest, and Lucky Highway 21. But "can you locate Sparkwood and 21, One-Eyed Jack’s and The Great Northern?" asks fan site Welcome to Twin Peaks. And if the much-discussed 21st-century Twin Peaks revival comes to fruition, will it dust off this trusty reference document and revive the askew but deep sense of place we (or at least some us) savored the first time around? Related Content: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recreated in an Adorable Paper Animation Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans Elementary School Students Perform in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks 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. David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC) 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.

Aspiring painters, take note. As of today, you can watch Season 1 of The Joy of Painting, the PBS show hosted by painter Bob Ross. The educational show first hit the airwaves in January, 1983, and ran through May, 1994. In each 30-minute episode, Bob would complete a painting, while explaining in a soothing, hushed voice various techniques for creating landscape oil paintings. You can watch Episode 1 of Season 1 above. Here Bob "introduces us to his ‘Almighty’ assortment of tools and colors, tells us that anyone can paint, and creates a landscape of a forest path just after a rain shower." Below, you can watch a playlist of 13 episodes. For some reason, the playlist starts with Episode 2, then flips back to Episode 1, and, from there, things unfold sequentially, straight through to Episode 13. #Free Art Education. Enjoy. 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. via Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting Is Now Free Online: Watch Season 1 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 via Blackwell’s Rare Books Back in April, we highlighted for you a trove of 110 illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien, offering a rare glimpse of the author’s artistic talents. Tolkien didn’t just like to write books, as we saw. He also liked to draw illustrations for these books, which helped him to conceptualize the fantasy worlds he was creating. Just this month, Houghton Mifflin released a new book called The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, which brings together more than 180 drawings, inscriptions, maps, and plans-all drawn by Tolkien as part of his worldbuilding creative process. Most were never published until now. And then we get this: a newly-discovered map annotated by Tolkien. Found in a copy of The Lord of the Rings that originally belonged to Pauline Baynes (the artist who illustrated Tolkien’s novels in print), the map intriguingly connects Tolkien’s fantasy world to real places on our globe. According to The Guardian, annotations on the map (click here to view the materials in a larger format) suggests that "Hobbiton is on the same latitude as Oxford [where Tolkien taught], and implies that the Italian city of Ravenna could be the inspiration behind the fictional city of Minas Tirith." Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem also get listed as reference points. Discovered by Blackwell’s Rare Books, the rare map will be put on the market for an asking price of £60,000. You can learn more about this map, considered "perhaps the finest piece of Tolkien ephemera to emerge in the last 20 years," over at The Guardian. Related Content: 110 Drawings and Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Middle-Earth and Beyond Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the RingsTrilogy The Only Drawing from Maurice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illustrate The Hobbit Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Soviet-Era Illustrations Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976) Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings 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.

However you feel about Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen reforming recently under the band’s name with American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert on vocals, the band has stated on several occasions that they never intended to replace Freddie Mercury. "[Lambert] interprets the songs the way he interprets them which is wonderful," May has remarked, "We wanted him to be himself." Fair enough. But even if Queen had wanted to replace Mercury after his death from AIDS complications in 1991, the task would have proved impossible. No one sounds like Freddie Mercury, no one commands a stage like he did, and no one writes like him either, with his unique mix of raunchy, funny, quirky, candid, and deeply heartfelt lyricism. "Mother Love," the last song Mercury recorded—at the band’s Montreux studio—contains some of the most painful of Mercury’s lyrics, an expression of his desire "for peace before I die." In what we can’t help but hear in hindsight as a direct reference to his illness, Mercury sings, "My body’s aching, but I can’t sleep… I’m coming home to my sweet / Mother love." The inherent pathos of "Mother Love," pervades the posthumously-released 1995 album Made in Heaven, but the song that most seemed to define Freddie Mercury immediately after his death is also a rumination on mortality. Shot through with nostalgia, remorse, and expressions of the brevity of life, "These Are the Days of Our Lives"—from Innuendo, the last album the band released during Mercury’s lifetime—laments, "you can’t turn back the clock, you can turn back the tide." Longing for childhood lost, Mercury sings, "the rest of my life’s been just a show." Maybe so, but what a show it was, even in the band’s final video, above, shot in black-and-white to hide Mercury’s frail condition. At the top of the post, you can see behind-the-scenes footage of Mercury from the "These Are the Days of Our Lives" video shoot, discovered, writes The Independent, "during a five-year trawl through the Queen archives by Rhys Thomas, the comedy actor," who co-produced the BBC Two documentary, Queen: Days of Our Lives. "The footage of Freddie in his final video," says Thomas, "is shocking. He is so frail, he needs two hands to hold a champagne glass. But he knows he is being filmed and wants to show people what he was going through." Brian May remembers Mercury spending "hours and hours in make-up sorting himself out so it’d be OK. He actually says a kind of goodbye in the video." A consummate performer to the end, Mercury was determined to work until he couldn’t, recording new material until days before his death. In the full-color film from the "These Are the Days of Our Lives" shoot, we see him studying and critiquing footage of himself, fully engaged in the creation of what he likely knew would be his final performance. He had certainly come a long way from the shy schoolboy he was before Queen brought him international celebrity and acclaim. In the poignant video above, we see what is likely the first footage of the young man then known as Freddie Bulsara. The film shows Mercury in 1964—the year his family migrated to England from Zanzibar—with school mates at Isleworth Polytechnic (new West Thames College). It would be another six years before Mercury would meet May and Taylor and form the band that defined the rest of the days of his life. Related Content: Freddie Mercury, Live Aid (1985) Queen Documentary Pays Tribute to the Rock Band That Conquered the World The Making of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit "Under Pressure": Demos, Studio Sessions & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Freddie Mercury’s Final Video Performance 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.

Hearing someone discuss the nature of art can easily grow tiresome — indeed, it has, as a subject, become something of a shorthand for the tiresome. But Marcel Duchamp, the French painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, and chess enthusiast, could do it right. He did it by getting straight to the point, a succinctness most famously demonstrated in Fountain, the simple, everyday porcelain urinal he signed and submitted as a work of art for display. The fact that the art world soon put Fountain (and its similar, mass-produced descendants) quite literally on a pedestal makes an observation about art more cleanly than thousands of words on the role of the artist in modern society ever could. But where-whether you paint on a canvas, chisel into a block of stone, or make a purchase at the plumbing store down the street-does this impulse to make art come from? Do artists consciously create their work, acting out creative decisions made within, or do they merely give form to artistic impulses received from… elsewhere? And what do we talk about when we talk about the work of art the artist ultimately produces? Duchamp, concise as ever, addressed the issue in 1957 when he gave the eight-minute lecture "The Creative Act" which you can hear above (or on the full Surrealism Reviewed album available on Spotify below). He identifies one important part of the process as what he calls the "art coefficient." "In the creative act," Duchamp says, "the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of." This gap between what the artist "intended to realize and did realize," Duchamp calls the art coefficient, "an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed." But none of it matters, in Duchamp’s thinking, unless someone else actually thinks about the work of art. "No work of art — no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians — is a great work until posterity says so," writes the Paris Review‘s Rebecca Bates in a post on the lecture (and a "sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs" recently made out of it). She quotes Duchamp in a 1964 interview with Calvin Tomkins: "The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word in it." According to Duchamp’s perceptions, we, as posterity, as the onlookers, have the last word on all work, even Duchamp’s own. So go ahead and yammer a bit about the nature of art; doing so not only keeps the art alive, but made it art in the first place. Related Content: Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer Anémic Cinéma: Marcel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926) When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal 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 Marcel Duchamp Read "The Creative Act," A Short Lecture on What Makes Great Art, Great 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.

What kind of delusional self-aggrandizer, called to testify before a United States Senate Subcommittee, uses it as an opportunity to quote the lyrics of a song he’s written… in their entirety!? Sounds like the work of a certain rapper/prospective political candidate or perhaps some daffy buffoon as brought to life by Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell. Only children’s television host Fred Rogers could pull such a stunt and emerge unscathed, nay, even more beloved, as he does above in documentary footage from 1969. Mister Rogers’ impulse to recite What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel to then-chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Senator John Pastore, was ultimately an act of service to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its child viewers. Newly elected President Richard Nixon opposed public television, believing that its liberal bent could only undermine his administration. Determined to strike first, he proposed cuts equal to half its $20 million annual operating budget, a measure that would have seriously hobbled the fledgling institution. Mr. Rogers appeared before the Committee armed with a "philosophical statement" that he refrained from reading aloud, not wishing to monopolize ten minutes of the Committee’s time. Instead, he sought Pastore’s promise that he would give it a close read later, speaking so slowly and with such little outward guile, that the tough nut Senator was moved to crack, "Would it make you happy if you did read it?" Rather than taking the bait, Rogers touched on the ways his show’s budget had grown thanks to the public broadcasting model. He also hipped Pastore to the qualitative difference between frenetic kiddie cartoons and the vastly more thoughtful and emotionally healthy content of programming such as his. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was a place where such topics as haircuts, sibling relationships, and angry feelings could be discussed in depth. Rogers’ emotional intelligence seems to hypnotize Pastore, whose challenging front was soon dropped in favor of a more respectful line of questioning. By the end of Rogers’ heartfelt, non-musical rendition of What Do You Do… (it’s much peppier in the original), Pastore has goosebumps, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has its 2 mil’ back in the bag. What do you do with the mad that you feel When you feel so mad you could bite? When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong… And nothing you do seems very right? What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag? Or see how fast you go? It’s great to be able to stop When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong, And be able to do something else instead And think this song: I can stop when I want to Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time. And what a good feeling to feel like this And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there’s something deep inside That helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a woman And a boy can be someday a man. Related Content: Mr. Rogers Introduces Kids to Experimental Electronic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson (1968) Mr. Rogers Takes Breakdancing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985) Puppet Making with Jim Henson: A Priceless Primer from 1969 Ayun Halliday’s new play, Fawnbook, debuts as part of the Bad Theater Festival in NYC tomorrow night. Follow her @AyunHalliday Mr. Rogers Goes to Congress and Saves PBS: Heartwarming Video from 1969 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 literature, graphic descriptions of menace and dismemberment by monsters are as old as Beowulf and much, much older still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th century novel The Castle of Otranto inspired the gothic romance novel that horror-qua-horror came into fashion. Without Walpole, and better-known gothic innovators like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, we’d likely never have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King. But nowadays when we think of horror, we usually think of film—and all of its various contemporary subgenres, including creepy psychological twists on good-old-fashion monster movies, like The Babadook. But from whence came the horror film? Was it 1931, a banner horror year in which audiences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula? Certainly classic films by masters of the genre, but they did not originate the horror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s terrifying silent Nosferatu from 1922 (and the real life horror of its deceased director’s missing head). And what about German expressionism? "A case can be made," argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari "was the first true horror film"—a "subjective psychological fantasy" in which "unspeakable horror becomes possible." Perhaps. But even before Weine’s still-effectively-disorienting cinematic work disturbed audiences worldwide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 version of The Golem, a character, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopian, that served as "one of the most significant ancestors to the cinematic Frankenstein of James Whale and Boris Karloff." Even earlier, in 1910, Thomas Edison produced an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s monster story. So how far back do we have to go to find the first horror movie? Almost as far back as the very origins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French special-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Diable (The Manor of the Devil). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fantasy A Trip to the Moon—and for the tribute paid to him in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his innovative methods to tell a story, writes Maurice Babbis at Emerson University journal Latent Image, of "a large bat that flies into a room and transforms into Mephistopheles. He then stands over a cauldron and conjures up a girl along with some phantoms and skeletons and witches, but then one of them pulls out a crucifix and the demon disappears." Not much of a story, granted, and it’s not particularly scary, but it is an excellent example of a technique Méliès supposedly discovered that very year. According to Earlycinema.com, In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene - objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects. Thus was born The Manor of the Devil, technically the first horror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers. Le Manoir du Diable has been added to our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Martin Scorsese Names the 11 Scariest Horror Films: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Tourneur & More Watch 8 Classic Cult Films for Free: Night of the Living Dead, Plan 9 from Outer Space & More Time Out London Presents The 100 Best Horror Films: Start by Watching Four Horror Classics Free Online Watch 10 Classic German Expressionist Films: From Fritz Lang’s M to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The First Horror Film, George Méliès’ The Manor of the Devil (1896) 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 is one of the most famous experiments in all of science history, but there’s significant doubt about whether it actually took place. Did Galileo drop objects of differing mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 1589 to demonstrate the theories proposed in his unpublished text De motu ("Of Motion")? Rice University’s Galileo Project notes that scholars have long thought Galileo’s references to experiments he conducted "were only rhetorical devices." As PBS’s NOVA writes, "it’s the kind of story that’s easy to imagine, easy to remember, but whether he ever performed the experiment at the tower is debatable." That’s not to say Galileo didn’t test any of his ideas while he taught at the University of Pisa during 1589 and 1592, only that his most famous theory about the effects of gravity on free-falling objects rests mainly on a conceptual thought experiment. In fact, it would have been impossible for Galileo to fully demonstrate his theory because of the effects of air resistance. Subtract the atmosphere, however, and we can easily confirm Galileo’s hypothesis that any two objects, regardless of weight, shape, or material of composition, will fall at exactly the same rate when dropped. One of the most memorable times this experiment did take place was not in Italy or anywhere else on earth, but on the Moon, when astronaut David Scott, commander of the Apollo 15 mission, dropped a geologic hammer and a falcon’s feather at the same time in 1971 (above). As cool as Commander Scott’s experiment is, it’s still not as dramatic as the version of the experiment at the top of the post, conducted at NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio in the world’s largest vacuum chamber. A great deal of the drama comes courtesy of physicist Brian Cox, who presents the experiment for BBC Two’s Human Universe, explaining the history and construction of the vacuum chamber, which simulates the conditions of outer space. Then we’ve got the multiple camera angles and dramatic music… typical TV show stuff, effective nonetheless at setting us up for the big drop. Even though we "know how the experiment will end," points out io9, and may have seen it performed before—on the Moon even—this demonstration is something special. First, we get an anticlimactic drop of the objects—a bowling ball and a feather—while the chamber is still full of air. As expected, the ball plummets, the feathers gently drift. Then, in a sequence right out of a sci-fi film, engineers seal off the enormous chamber, and the three-hour removal of air is telescoped into a few second montage of pushings of buttons and mumblings into intercoms. What happens next will… well, you know the clickbait verbiage. But it certainly surprises Cox and a roomful of NASA engineers. Cox goes on to explain, using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that the reason the objects fall at the same rate is "because they’re not falling; they’re standing still." The science may be common knowledge, but seeing it in action is indeed pretty mind blowing. Related Content:   An Animated History of Physics Introduces the Discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell & Einstein Galileo’s Moon Drawings, the First Realistic Depictions of the Moon in History (1609-1610) Bohemian Gravity: String Theory Explored With an A Cappella Version of Bohemian Rhapsody Free Online Physics Courses Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness See Galileo’s Famous Gravity Experiment Performed in the World’s Largest Vacuum Chamber, and on the Moon 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.

No matter how casual a relationship you’ve had with 20th-century American poetry, you’ve heard the name Sylvia Plath. Maybe you’ve already dared to experience her dark but compelling literary world, or maybe you just know a few of the basic elements of her life and career: her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, her famously harrowing poetry collection Ariel, her stormy marriage to British poet laureate Ted Hughes, her death by her own hand at the age of thirty. But what better day than today, the 83rd anniversary of Plath’s birth, to get better acquainted with her work? And what better way than to hear that work read in Plath’s own voice? Sure, you could just pick up one of the many yellowed mass-market paperback copies of Ariel you see on bookshelves all across America and plunge in, but you might first consider turning to our archives, which contain a 2013 post in which we featured Plath reading fifteen poems that would appear in the Ariel collection that, published two years after her death ("left sitting on the kitchen table to be found along with her body," noted Josh Jones), would raise her poetic reputation to new heights. You can hear the first part of these readings, recorded in 1962, at the top of this post, and the rest at this original post. We might feel lucky that, in her short life, she left even those performances for posterity, but there’s more: last year, we featured Sylvia Plath reading her poetry, the 1977 record released by pioneering pre-audiobook label Caedmon which contains 23 poems Plath committed to tape as early as 1959. Find all of the readings here. If these two audio collections give you a taste for the poet biographer Carl Rollyson called "the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature," have a listen to Credo Records’ album Sylvia Plath, which offers some material you’ll have heard alongside some you won’t have. Having listened to all this, you’ll hardly associate the adjective "celebratory" with Plath’s work — but that doesn’t mean that, on what would have been her 83rd birthday, poetry-lovers can’t celebrate it. Related Content: Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fifteen Poems From Her Final Collection, Ariel, in 1962 Recording The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revisit Her Sketches, Self-Portraits, Drawings & Illustrated Letters Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poetry: 23 Poems from the Last 6 Years of Her Life Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years 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 Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Compelling Poems on What Would Be Her 83rd Birthday 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.

We all know that toys come alive at night, but what about mid-century vintage paperback covers, such as you might find in the psychology or philosophy sections of a dimly-lit used bookstore? Watching 55 minimalist covers from graphic and motion designer Henning M. Lederer’s 2200 title-strong collection begin to spin, drift, and seethe in the short animation above, I got the impression that they were the ones dictating the terms. Or perhaps Lederer is the vessel through which the intentions of the original designers—Rudolph de Harak and John + Mary Condon to name a few—flow. Covers is not an act of reimagination or crowd-pleasing irreverence, but rather one logical motion, elegantly applied. Habitués of used bookstores may find their usual browsing habits slightly altered by the hypnotic results. Lederer makes no bones about judging books by their covers. Strong graphics, not content, are the primary determining factor as to which titles he acquires. The stately geometrics set in motion here are relics from another age, but the uncluttered abstracts so favored by 60s era publishers are not the only genre to catch his eye. Shame Drifter, Dusky Desire, and Sinsurance are some of the decidedly non-minimalist titles spicing up his collection’s online gallery. After all of those arrows, angles, and spheres, Lederer might have craved animating something with a bit more…personality. Related Content: Free Online Philosophy Courses Artist Animates Famous Book Covers in an Elegant, Understated Way Illustrations for a Chinese Lord of the Rings in a Stunning "Glass Painting Style" Lolita Book Covers: 100+ Designs From 37 Countries (Plus Nabokov’s Favorite Design) 83 Years of Great Gatsby Book Cover Designs: A Photo Gallery 135 Free Philosophy eBooks Free Online Psychology Courses Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her post-digital, pre apocalyptic dark comedy, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday 55 Covers of Vintage Philosophy, Psychology & Science Books Come to Life in a Short Animation 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.

Only three days remain until Halloween, the evening on which everyone loves a scary movie. If you watch one yourself this Halloween, why settle for a scary movie when you could watch the world’s scariest movie? Or rather, when you could watch what resulted when one of the most visionary auteurs in cinema history put his mind to crafting the world’s scariest movie: The Shining. Whether or not you think it holds that particular title, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation — or, more accurately, total cinematic re-envisioning — of Stephen King’s novel has, since its initial release in 1980, transcended the realm of the "scary movie" and taken a place in the zeitgeist as something more complex, more iconic, and more persistently haunting. Undead twin girls wanting to play, blood flowing from elevators, a manuscript consisting of a single phrase ceaselessly repeated, "REDRUM" scrawled on a door, a dog-costumed Jazz Age decadent, Jack Nicholson wielding an axe: how did Kubrick and company manage to lodge so permanently into our subconscious these deeply troubling images? Gary Leva’s half-hour documentary View from the Overlook: Crafting the Shining tries to answer that question, bringing in a group of interviewees including Kubrick’s biographers, his colleagues in filmmaking like Sydney Pollack and William Friedkin, and his collaborators like The Shining‘s executive producer Jan Harlan, production designer Roy Walker, and screenwriter Diane Johnson. (Jack Nicholson also makes an insightful and non-scary — or at least less scary — appearance as himself.) View from the Overlook reveals that the visceral impact of The Shining, a formless unease that transforms into sharp-edged horror as the film goes on, came as a result of (and this will surprise no fan of Kubrick’s) hard, deliberate work, from the dismantling and rebuilding of King’s original story, to the construction of the Overlook Hotel out of a mixture of real locations and elaborate sets modeled on real locations, to the use of new kinds of camera rigs (camera operator Garrett Brown having invented the Steadicam, a device this production more than put through its paces), and Kubrick’s infamous, actor-breaking take after take after take. I didn’t know about any of this, of course, when I first saw The Shining, popping in a VHS copy late at night during a junior-high Halloween party. But now I won’t forget it — or anything else about this (quite possibly) scariest movie ever made. View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via Devour Related Content: The Making of The Shining The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining Saul Bass’ Rejected Poster Concepts for The Shining (and His Pretty Excellent Signature) The Hedge Maze from The Shining Gets Recreated by Mythbuster’s Adam Savage Room 237: New Documentary Explores Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Those It Obsesses Download & Play The Shining Board Game 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. Free Documentary View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining Looks at How Kubrick Made "the World’s Scariest Movie" 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.

Edgar Allan Poe created a body of work that will seemingly never go out of style, especially around Halloween time. Not only do his stories and poems still inspire dread in the 21st century, but so also do the many hundreds of Poe retellings and adaptations created in the 166 years since the author’s mysterious death. But, we might ask, after so many film adaptations from so many classic horror actors and directors, whether we need yet another one? You’ll have to make up your own mind, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll watch the trailer above for Lion King and Aladdin animator Raul Garcia’s Poe anthology Extraordinary Tales and answer "Yes!" and "More please!" And you can see more, in the clips below from Garcia’s incredible-looking film, hitting theaters on October 23rd. One reason the new treatment of the five stories Garcia animates seems to work so well is that they draw on the talents of actors and directors who have previously delivered classic Poe retellings. For example, "The Fall of the House of Usher," above, is narrated by the late, great Christopher Lee, who joins horror legend Vincent Price as one of the greatest readers of Poe’s "The Raven." The voice-over is Lee’s last role, and it’s hard to think of a more fitting final act for the venerable horror maven. (Lee was also at the time recording "a heavy-metal-rock-opera based on Charlemagne’s life"—one of many metal albums he recorded.) Garcia has created a unique look for each featurette. For "Usher," he tells Carlos Aguilar at Indiewire, "the idea was for the characters to look as if they were carved out of wood, like if they were figures that belonged to Czech animator Jirí Trnka." Just hearing Lee above intone the phrase "an unexpected sense of insufferable gloom" is enough to convince me I need to see the rest of this film. Just above, we have a clip from a much less famous Poe story, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a chilling detective tale about a man mesmerized in articulo mortis—at the moment of death. Narrated by English actor Julian Sands, who has made his own appearances in several horror films, the animation style comes directly out of classic E.C. horror comics like Tales From the Crypt, which drew many an idea from Poe, basing one story "The Living Death!" on "M. Valdemar." The "mauve, yellow and mossy green comic-book panels," writes a New York Times review, "prove that you don’t need fancy technology to achieve a third dimension." You’ll notice the unmistakable visage of Vincent Price in the character of the mesmerist, and you’ll likely know of Price’s own turn as Poe himself in An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. Price also starred in Roger Corman’s many Poe adaptations—beginning with House of Usher—and Garcia has tapped the legendary Corman’s voice for Extraordinary Tales, as well as contemporary horror director extraordinaire Guillermo Del Toro. And if this weren’t horror royalty enough, Garcia’s animated take on "The Tell-Tale Heart" features none other than Bela Lugosi, in an archival reading of the story the Dracula actor made sometime before his death in 1956. Read more about how Garcia found the Lugosi audio and conceived of Extraordinary Tales in his interview here. Related Content: Watch Vincent Price Turn Into Edgar Allan Poe & Read Four Classic Poe Stories (1970) Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books Classics Stories by Edgar Allan Poe Narrated by James Mason in a 1953 Oscar-Nominated Animation & 1958 Decca Album The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise 166 Years Ago Today Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness New Film Extraordinary Tales Animates Edgar Poe Stories, with Narrations by Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Lee & 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.

Has the endless distraction of modern life destroyed our ability to sit with the symphonies of Beethoven and Bach? Do we no longer have the attention span to read novels? These are the kinds of questions scholar Alan Jacobs asks in books like The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and they’re questions he admits—on his blog Text Patterns—may obtain different answers depending on the age of whom you ask. In a post from this past August, Jacobs wrote of his need to counteract social media with "the more peaceable and orderly music of Bach and Mozart and Handel," and pondered the emotional resilience of younger people exposed pretty much daily to videos of real-life violence online. "It occurs to me," he concludes, "maybe Twitter—maybe social media more generally—really is a young person’s thing after all. Intrinsically, not just accidentally." I admit, Jacobs’ post resonated with me because of the difficulty I sometimes have as I get older in disconnecting from the constant stream of horror and triviality on social media—and of getting lost in a good book or a moving piece of music after witnessing spectacle after spectacle online. Perhaps it is a function of age, as Jacobs surmises, and the young are better equipped to bounce right back. Or perhaps our daily exposure to endless conflict has all of our nervous systems frayed raw, leaving us unable to appreciate the "countervailing forces" of music and literature that demands sustained attention. The Spotify Classical Playlist blog seems to suggest as much in quoting Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s claim, "people whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." Substitute "Twitter tsunami" and "24-hour cable news" for "music in trains, airports, lifts" and the point may apply to our current cultural condition. So you may think of the Spotify Classical Playlists of all of Beethoven and all of Bach featured here as exercises in increasing your mental stamina, or as therapeutic "coping mechanisms" as Jacobs writes, to keep "emotional balance." You may think of them as ways to connect fully with composers who lived in a world very different from ours, one that moved much more slowly and demanded much less of our overtaxed senses. Or you can choose not to apply any kind of framework, and simply revel in the fact that thanks to the internet—be it overall a scourge or a boon to human life—you can now enjoy all of the works of Beethoven and Bach, each in chronological order; 250 hours of enthralling classical music, for free. So enjoy. And learn more about how these playlists were compiled at the the Spotify Classical blog. And if you need Spotify software, get it here. Related Content: Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist All of Bach Is Putting Videos of 1,080 Bach Performances Online Download the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free https://www.spotify.com/download 1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stream the Complete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music 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 could watch Bill Murray in pretty much any film. And, for that matter, any animation too. So let’s queue up the brand new animated video from Blank on Blank, and watch Murray riff on the pros and cons of being rich & famous. Pro: You get to buy your mother a nice new car. Con: When her car breaks down, she doesn’t just get the car towed. She whips out your Amex card and buys the tow truck too. And so it goes. The interview from this Blank on Blank episode was recorded in 1988 by writer T.J. English, while writing a profile on Bill Murray for Irish America magazine. Find more Blank on Blank animations listed in the Relateds below. Related Content: Joni Mitchell Talks About Life as a Reluctant Star in a New Animated Interview New Animation: Hunter S. Thompson Talks with Studs Terkel About the Hell’s Angels & The Outlaw Life B.B. King Explains in an Animated Video Whether You Need to Endure Hardship to Play the Blues An Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of Fame 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.

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.