Does any couple loom larger in the world of twentieth-century American art than Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe? Not if you believe the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. If you go there, you’ll find "thousands of letters and hundreds of photographs in addition to a collection of literary manuscripts, scrapbooks, ephemera, fine art, and realia, primarily dating between 1880 and 1980, which document the lives and careers of the photographer/publisher/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe." But you can even view some of its material here on the internet, including photos by and of "Stieglitz and his circle of artists and writers" and "a variety of paintings and drawings, letters and ephemera, and medals and awards." The online archive does, of course, contain some paintings from O’Keeffe, such as House I Live in 1937 at the top of the post or, more in line with her famously floral focus, Pink Roses just below. But you’ll also find behind-the-work personal artifacts like the 1929 image of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe together at Lake George, New York just above. You can browse through all the material available with this list, or you can filter it down to the items pertaining specifically to O’Keeffe or those pertaining specifically to Stieglitz, though in life the two had an "instant mental and physical attraction" that kept them on some level inseparable during the course of their forty-year relationship. They even enjoyed a kind of artistic togetherness during the long-distance stretches of that relationship, when O’Keeffe "discovered her love for the landscape of the American Southwest and spent increasing amounts of time living and working there." And while many of us already know about her favorite subjects and the ways in which she realized them on canvas, fewer of us know about the efforts Stieglitz took to make photography into not just a legitimate but respected art form. To get a sense of what that took, start with Stieglitz’s autochromes (below), some of the earliest ventures made by an American artist into the realm of color photography. Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, each in there own medium, made us see things differently. How many art-world power couples can say the same? Related Content: The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye, a Revealing Look at "The Father of Modern Photography" Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933) Whitney Museum Puts Online 21,000 Works of American Art, By 3,000 Artists 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. Browse Paintings, Photos, Papers & More in the Archive of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, America’s Original Art Power Couple is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you’re near Pasadena, California, stop by the Flower Pepper Gallery and see Facade, the new exhibition featuring the work of visual artist Randy Hage. For decades now, Hage has been fascinated by the beauty of aging structures in New York City. This led him, beginning in the late 1990s, to start photographing aging storefronts in the city, "with their hand painted signs, layers of architecture, wonderful patinas and intriguing history." Later, he decided to preserve their memory in miniaturized, hyper-realistic sculptures (like the ones now on display in Pasadena through November 18th). In the video above, see just how perfectly Hage manages to recreate New York storefronts in miniature. Here’s another famous-but-now-defunct facade you might recognize: Miniature sculpture of CBGB. Real structure was located at 315 Bowery, LES, NYC. Shown lighted. Piece measures 19″ x 17″ x 7″. Follow me on FB for event info. If you have friends who might be interested in seeing my work, please pass this on. Many thanks! #cbgb #omfug #bowery #scalemodel #Randyhage #disappearingNY #façade #flowerpeppergallery #graffiti #graffitinyc #miniature #miniatureart #nyc #newyork #nycdecay #nycstorefront #nycstorefronts #newyorkstorefront #newyorkinspiredart #oldNYC #storefront #vintagenewyork A photo posted by Randy Hage (@rhageart) on Oct 5, 2015 at 8:19am PDT To take a closer look at his work, visit Hage’s Instagram page where you will see mini sculptures of fading New York institutions like Katz’s Deli, CBGB, McSorley’s Old Ale House, Vesuvio Bakery, and more. via SuperSonic Art/BoingBoing 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. Amazing Miniature Sculptures of New York City Landmarks: CBGB, Katz’s Deli, Vesuvio Bakery & 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.

We have become quite used to pronouncements of doom, from scientists predicting the sixth mass extinction due to the measurable effects of climate change, and from religionists declaring the apocalypse due to a surfeit of sin. It’s almost impossible to imagine these two groups of people agreeing on anything other than the ominous portent of their respective messages. But in the early days of the scientific revolution—the days of Shakespeare contemporary Francis Bacon, and later 17th century Descartes—it was not at all unusual to find both kinds of reasoning, or unreasoning, in the same person, along with beliefs in magic, divination, astrology, etc. Yet even in this maelstrom of heterodox thought and practices, Sir Isaac Newton stood out as a particularly odd co-existence of esoteric biblical prophecy, occult beliefs, and a rigid, formal mathematics that not only adhered to the inductive scientific method, but also expanded its potential by applying general axioms to specific cases. Yet many of Newton’s general principles would seem totally inimical to the naturalism of most physicists today. As he was formulating the principles of gravity and three laws of motion, for example, Newton also sought the legendary Philosopher’s Stone and attempted to turn metal to gold. Moreover, the devoutly religious Newton wrote theological treatises interpreting Biblical prophecies and predicting the end of the world. The date he arrived at? 2060. Newton seems, writes science blog Another Pale Blue Dot, "as confident of his predictions in this realm as he was in the rational world of science." In a 1704 letter exhibited at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, above, Newton describes his "recconing": So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner. Newton further demonstrates his confidence in the next sentence, writing that his intent, "though not to assert" an answer, should in any event "put a stop the rash conjectures of fancifull men who are frequently predicting the time of the end." Indeed. So how did he arrive at this number? Newton applied a rigorous method, that is to be sure. If you have the patience for exhaustive description of how he worked out his prediction using the Book of Daniel, you may read one here by historian of science Stephen Snobelen, who also points out how widespread the interest in Newton’s odd beliefs has become, reaching across every continent, though scholars have known about this side of the Enlightenment giant for a long time. Snobelen appears in the BBC documentary Newton: The Dark Heretic (above), which has further brought the public a wealth of scholarly detail about Newton’s alchemy and prophecy. For a sense of the exacting, yet completely bizarre flavor of Newton’s prophetic calculations, see another Newton letter at the of the post, transcribed below. Prop. 1. The 2300 prophetick days did not commence before the rise of the little horn of the He Goat. 2 Those day [sic] did not commence a[f]ter the destruction of Jerusalem & ye Temple by the Romans A.[D.] 70. 3 The time times & half a time did not commence before the year 800 in wch the Popes supremacy commenced 4 They did not commence after the re[ig]ne of Gregory the 7th. 1084 5 The 1290 days did not commence b[e]fore the year 842. 6 They did not commence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 1084 7 The diffence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the seven weeks. Therefore the 2300 years do not end before ye year 2132 nor after 2370. The time times & half time do n[o]t end before 2060 nor after [2344] The 1290 days do not begin [this should read: end] before 2090 [Newton might mean: 2132] nor after 1374 [sic; Newton probably means 2374] The editorial insertions are Professor Snobelen’s, who thinks the letter dates "from after 1705," and that "the shaky handwriting suggests a date of composition late in Newton’s life." Whatever the exact date, we see him much less certain here; Newton pushes around some other dates—2344, 2090 (or 2132), 2374. All of them seem arbitrary, but "given the nice roundness of the number," writes Motherboard, "and the fact that it appears in more than one letter," 2060 has become his most memorable dating for the apocalypse. It’s important to note that Newton didn’t believe the world would "end" in the sense of cease to exist or burn up in holy flames. His end times philosophy resembles that of a surprising number of current day evangelicals: Christ would return and reign for a millennium, the Jewish diaspora would return to Israel and would, he wrote, set up "a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom." We hear such statements often from televangelists, school boards, governors, and presidential candidates. As many people have argued, despite Newton’s conception of his scientific work as a bulwark against other theologies, it ultimately became a foundation for Deism and Naturalism, and has allowed scientists to make accurate predictions for hundreds of years. 20th century physics may have shown us a much more radically unstable universe than Newton ever imagined, but his theories are, as Isaac Asimov would put it, "not so much wrong as incomplete," and still essential to our understanding of certain fundamental phenomena. But as fascinating and curious as Newton’s other interests may be, there’s no more reason to credit his prophetic calculations than those of the Millerites, Harold Camping, or any other apocalyptic doomsday sect. Related Content: Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Staggering Genius of Isaac Newton Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662) Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicts the World Will End in 2060 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 admit it now, I was once an avid listener of the soothing new age music of Enya. At the time, in my musical circles, this was not cool, and at the time I cared about such things. So Enya was my guilty secret. I didn’t need to work that hard to hide my affection. I only listened to Enya at night, as I lay in bed alone and drifted off. I used my Enya cassette tapes (yes tapes), you see, to put myself to sleep. I’ve had other sleep favorites. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach… interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach by synthesizer wizard Wendy Carlos…. It may seem disparaging to say that a certain composer’s music lulls one to sleep, but I think it’s just the opposite. So does composer and musician Max Richter, who has created an eight-hour piece called "Sleep" that is "meant to be slept through," says Richter. (There’s also a one hour version that’s more readily available for purchase.) Its gentle waves of strings, voice, piano, and synths are like a musical Lethe one floats on into oblivion. Richter has performed the piece with other musicians, just recently overnight on a September 27th BBC Radio 3 broadcast, "the longest live broadcast," writes The New Yorker, "of a single piece of music in the station’s history." The small audience in attendance mostly stayed awake. One member reportedly hallucinated. The composition consists of thirty-one themed movements (Hear "Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)" above). Lovers of modern minimalist composers like Philip Glass and William Basinski will notice similar uses of drone notes and repetition in "Sleep." You may even hear a touch of Enya…. Richter’s is the perfect music to accompany me into dreamland; even those movements that include a vocalist use the voice as a wordless, ethereal instrument, as so many ambient musicians do. I’ve come across more than a few favorite ambient and minimalist composers late at night, when Spotify begins recommending sleep playlists. "Sleep," it turns out, "is one of Spotify’s most popular categories," according to Billboard. However, the "world’s favorite choice when choosing music to unwind" may surprise you: red-headed English singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran. I’m not personally a fan of his music, but even if I were, I can’t imagine listening to it as I settle down to sleep. Nonetheless, millions of people stream Sheeran’s songs on repeat at bedtime, along with other pop artists like Ellie Goulding, John Legend, Sam Smith, and Rihanna. To each their own, I guess. Hear a playlist of the most-streamed "sleep" music on Spotify above. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) If none of these tunes do it for you, consider giving iTunes’ 27th most popular podcast, Sleep With Me, a chance. Or, let us know in the comments below what music, if any, helps calm your nerves and soothe your tired brain as you climb into bed after a long day. Related Content: Stream 58 Hours of Free Classical Music Selected to Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax Music That Helps You Write: A Free Spotify Playlist of Your Selections Free Audio: Go the F-k to Sleep Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Music That Helps You Sleep: Minimalist Composer Max Richter, Pop Phenom Ed Sheeran & Your Favorites 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.

For all the neon-Ferrari-and-raw-silk garishness the show now seems to embody, Miami Vice (1984-1990) paid uncommon attention to cultural detail. Music, for instance, didn’t get thrown onto its soundtrack, but carefully selected to reflect both the mid-80s zeitgeist and the aesthetic of a particular episode. Any time you tuned in, you could hear the likes of Devo, Phil Collins, The Tubes, Depeche Mode, or the Alan Parsons project behind the action. Sometimes you could also see musicians onscreen, involved in the action, albeit musicians of a somewhat different kind: the innovative experimental composer and rocker Frank Zappa, for instance, once appeared as "weasel dust" dealer Mario Fuente. That happened on "Payback," the nineteenth episode of Miami Vice‘s second season which aired on March 14, 1986, a clip of which you can watch at the top of the post. (Naturally, the scene takes place on a boat staffed with armed thugs and bikini girls.) If, after the cliffhanger it ends on, you simply must see the whole thing, you may be able to watch the full episode on Hulu, though unfortunately Hulu only permits those in the United States to view it. (Apologies in advance to those who are geo-blocked.) The same goes for November 8, 1985’s "Junk Love," another episode from the same season with no less distinguished a musician guest star than Miles Davis. "The idea is that Crockett and Tubbs arrest the owner of a whorehouse," writes Dangerous Minds’ Martin Schneider, "a dude named ‘Ivory Jones’ — played by Miles." And while "most of Davis’ dialogue is semi-incomprehensible… you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the genius behind Bitches Brew croak, ‘Watch that big cabin cruiser, he has a thing about them.'" We’ve embedded the entirety of "Junk Love" on Hulu just below, which, since "Ivory is a scumbag but collaborating with the local constabulary," offers "plenty of scenes of him hanging out with Crockett and Tubbs." Add to this Leonard Cohen’s 1986 role as malevolent French secret service agent Francois Zolan, and you realize that Miami Vice has turned out to cater straight to culturally omnivorous 21st century viewers: those who can appreciate Songs of Love and Hate as well as a neon Ferrari, Freak Out! as much as raw silk, and Devo as much as Davis. You can view more complete episodes of Miami Vice on Hulu here. via Dangerous Minds Related Content: Watch Frank Zappa Play Michael Nesmith on The Monkees (1967) The Paintings of Miles Davis Frank Zappa Debates Censorship on CNN’s Crossfire (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. When Frank Zappa & Miles Davis Played a Drug Dealer and a Pimp on Miami Vice 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.

From Alain de Botton’ School of Life comes the latest in a series of animated introductions to influential literary figures. Previous installments gave us a look at the life and work of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. This one takes us inside the literary world of Jane Austen. And, as always, de Botton puts an accent on how reading literature can change your life. "Jane Austen’s novels are so readable and so interesting…" notes The School of Life Youtube channel," because she wasn’t an ordinary kind of novelist: she wanted her work to help us to be better and wiser people. Her novels [available on this list] had a philosophy of personal development at their heart." The video above expands on that idea. Enjoy. Related Content: An Introduction to the Literary Philosophy of Marcel Proust, Presented in a Monty Python-Style Animation An Animated Introduction to Virginia Woolf Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Abandoned Manuscript, The Watsons Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Download the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books An Animated Introduction to Jane Austen 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.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and as the group has always been upfront about shamelessly milking their fans for cash, there’s a new version of the Blu-Ray out, and a new print touring the world. John Cleese and Eric Idle are currently also on an American tour, sharing the stage as a duo for the first time. Michael Palin has a book tour for the third volume of his diaries. Terry Jones is still working on movies and plugging charities on his Twitter stream. Terry Gilliam has an autobiography coming out this month. And Graham Chapman, despite his beautiful plumage, is still dead. However, the Pythons are giving a few things away and one of them is the above compilation of unused animations by Gilliam from the Holy Grail. They can be found on the new Blu-Ray, but the group’s official Youtube channel is sharing them-—first with Gilliam’s commentary, then with sound effects—for free. These animations are links between the skits that make up Holy Grail, and include dragons, giants, and a very large snail. Gilliam took a lot of the illustrations that he didn’t do himself from a book on illuminated manuscripts, and, seeing them all together in one go, one can imagine an alternative universe where the animator makes an entire movie this way. (On the commentary track, he half-jokingly describes himself as "the man who could have gone on to become a great animator but was forced into live action film.") As per Python, a lot of the commentary track berates the viewer for throwing money away on a redundant version of what the consumer probably owns, and how Gilliam isn’t getting paid enough to do this. (Cue some coinage sound effects and Gilliam gets back on mic.) If this kind of archiving is going on, it would be interesting to know the status of Gilliam’s other animations for both Python and the various shows he did in the years running up to it. There are indeed some interesting early works out there that need a facelift. As for Gilliam and the Holy Grail, he says he doesn’t watch it: I’m glad it makes a lot of money and keeps me in the style I’ve grown accustomed to. But watch it again? Why? We’ve got lives to lead. via Digg Related content: Terry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Monty Python Animations: A 1974 How-To Guide Monty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imagined as an Epic, Mainstream Hollywood Film Watch Terry Gilliam’s Animated Short, The Christmas Card (1968) John Cleese’s Eulogy for Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’ Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Terry Gilliam’s Lost Animations from Monty Python and the Holy Grail Are Now Online 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.

Last year we drew your attention to the video above from Munich-based singer Anna-Maria Hefele in which she gives us a stunning demonstration of polyphonic overtone singing. It’s a technique common to Tuva, Inuit, and Xhosa cultures but largely unfamiliar to us in Western music. Many readers pointed out that Hefele’s fine example of her technique did not in fact show us how to do it, only that it could be done in a variety of different, all equally impressive, ways. Well, today, we bring you a series of lessons Hefele has posted as a response to her first video’s popularity. In each of these videos, she offers detailed instructions on how to harness the power of your voice to sing two notes at once. Before beginning Hefele’s course, you may wish to get a more theoretical overview of how polyphonic singing works. For that purpose, the video above gives us a visual representation of the overtones in Hefele’s voice. As she demonstrates via spectrogram, her normal singing voice contains several tones at once already, which we typically hear as only one note. Similarly, ethnomusicologist and student of throat singing Mark van Tongeren explains at Smithsonian Folkways, "everyone continuously when you’re speaking [or singing] produces a whole spectrum of sound." The throat singing method involves altering the voice to enhance overtones. Hefele uses some slightly different techniques to "filter," as she puts it, specific tones in her voice. The first introduction to the overtone filtering technique comes to us in Lesson 1 above. Hefele demonstrates how to move from tone to tone by gradually transitioning to different vowel sounds. She also teases the second and third lessons, below, which show how to amplify specific tones once you have isolated them. Hefele is a personable and engaging instructor—she would, I imagine, make an excellent language teacher as well—and her cheeky presentation takes us into the shower with her in Lesson 2, the best place, unsurprisingly, to practice your polyphonic overtone singing. You can continue learning how to filter, amplify, and modulate your voice to produce polyphonic overtones in lessons 3 through 6 below. And to hear how Hefele uses her vocal techniques in beautifully haunting, almost otherworldly music, make sure to watch this solo performance from 2012 or hear this Hildegard von Bingen choral composition adapted to Hefele’s polyphonic solo voice. Lesson 3 Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 H/T Natalie in the UK Related Content: Watch Stephen Sondheim Teach a Kid How to Sing "Send In the Clowns" Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization Dutchman Masters the Art of Singing Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven" Backwards Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Singer Anna-Maria Hefele Presents a 6-Part Lesson on How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Polyphonic Overtone Singing) 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.

Even those of us who know nothing else of Maurice Sendak’s work know Where the Wild Things Are, almost always because we read and found ourselves captivated by it in our own childhoods — if, of course, our childhoods happened in 1963 or later. Though that year saw the publication of that best-known of Sendak’s many works as an illustrator and writer — and indeed, quite possibly the best-known children’s book of the twentieth century, illustrated or written by anyone — the world got something else intriguing from Sendak at the same time: an illustrated edition of Leo Tolstoy’s 1852 autobiographical novel Nikolenka’s Childhood. At Brainpickings, Maria Popova writes of the struggle Sendak, then a young and insecure artist at the beginning of his career, endured to complete this lesser-known project: "His youthful insecurity, however, presents a beautiful parallel to the coming-of-age themes Tolstoy explores. The illustrations, presented here from a surviving copy of the 1963 gem, are as tender and soulful as young Sendak’s spirit." Here we’ve selected a few of the images that Popova gathered from this out-of-print book; to see more, do have a look at her original post. Later in life Sendak explained his anxiety about accompanying the words of the man who wrote War and Peace: "You can’t illustrate Tolstoy. You’re competing with the greatest illustrator in the world. Pictures bring him down and just limp along." At Letters of Note, you can read the words of encouragement written to the young Sendak by his editor Ursula Nordstrom, who acknowledged that, "sure, Tolstoy and Melville have a lot of furniture in their books and they also know a lot of facts, but that isn’t the only sort of genius, you know that. Yes, Tolstoy is wonderful (his publisher asked me for a quote) but you can express as much emotion and ‘cohesion and purpose’ in some of your drawings as there is in War and Peace. I mean that." Again, find more of Sendak’s illustrations of Tolstoy’s Nikolenka’s Childhood at BrainPickings. Used copies can be found on AbeBooks. Related Content: Maurice Sendak Sent Beautifully Illustrated Letters to Fans — So Beautiful a Kid Ate One Maurice Sendak’s Bawdy Illustrations For Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities The Only Drawing from Maurice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illustrate The Hobbit Maurice Sendak’s Emotional Last Interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Animated by Christoph Niemann An Animated Christmas Fable by Maurice Sendak (1977) 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. Maurice Sendak Illustrates Tolstoy in 1963 (with a Little Help from His Editor) 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.

Once upon a time, avant-garde composers, surrealist painters, and Gonzo journalists made guest appearances on the most mainstream American game shows. It doesn’t happen much anymore. We’ve shown you John Cage perform on I’ve Got a Secret in 1960; Salvador Dalí do his Dalí schtick on What’s My Line in 1952; and a young Frank Zappa turn a bicycle into a musical instrument on The Steve Allen Show in ’63. Now we can add to the list a young Hunter S. Thompson making an appearance on To Tell the Truth, one of the longest-running TV game shows in American history. The episode (above) aired on February 20, 1967, the year after Thompson published his first major book of journalism, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. (See him get confronted by the Angels here.) If you’re not familiar with the show, To Tell the Truth works like this: The show features a panel of four celebrities whose object is the correct identification of a described contestant who has an unusual occupation or experience. This central character is accompanied by two impostors who pretend to be the central character; together, the three persons are said to belong to a "team of challengers." The celebrity panelists question the three contestants; the impostors are allowed to lie but the central character is sworn "to tell the truth". After questioning, the panel attempts to identify which of the three challengers is telling the truth and is thus the central character. Given the whole premise of the show, Thompson, only 30 years old, was still an unrecognizable face on America’s cultural scene. But, with the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas just around the corner, all of that was about to change. via @WFMU Related Content: Hunter S. Thompson Gets Confronted by The Hell’s Angels Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life Read 10 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965-2005) Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards A Young Hunter S. Thompson Appears on the Classic TV Game Show, To Tell the Truth (1967) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you read Open Culture even casually, you know we love Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and videos that make us see film in a new way. It only makes sense, then, that we’d jump right on Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe’s The Red Drum Getaway, which mashes Hitchcock and Kubrick up into a four-minute shot of distilled cinematic collision. "Jimmy was having a rather beautiful day," reads the video’s preparatory description, "until he bumped into Jack and things got weird." "Jimmy" refers, of course, to Jimmy Stewart as seen in the work of Alfred Hitchcock. "Jack" refers to Jack Nicholson seen in the work of Stanley Kubrick — which, of course, means Jack Nicholson of The Shining. Strange enough, you might think, that those two would ever encounter each other, but what might happen if the gang of droogs from A Clockwork Orange also turned up? Or if poor mild-mannered Jimmy found himself at the aristocratic, NSFW fetish party from Eyes Wide Shut? When an auteur successfully taps into our subconscious minds, as Hitchcock and Kubrick so often did, we describe their work, in a complimentary sense, as "dreamlike." But art that feels like a dream can also feed material to our nightmares, and as The Red Drum Getaway more closely intertwines these two disparate cinematic worlds as it goes, it begins to resemble the most harrowing filmic freakouts any of us have ever endured. It makes a perfect setting for Jack, who, as we know, has already gone insane due to his own alcoholism and the goading of the spirits who haunt the Overlook Hotel. And as for Jimmy, surely Vertigo put him through enough of the surreal to prepare him for the psychedelic end of 2001. Related Content: The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebowski? Dark Side of the Rainbow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wizard of Oz in One of the Earliest Mash-Ups Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Creative Mashup of Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant’s Psycho Films Discover the Life & Work of Stanley Kubrick in a Sweeping Three-Hour Video Essay Alfred Hitchcock’s Seven-Minute Editing Master Class Salvador Dalí Creates a Dream Sequence for Spellbound, Hitchcock’s Psychoanalytic Thriller 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 Worlds of Hitchcock & Kubrick Collide in a Surreal Mashup, The Red Drum Getaway is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you’ve ever had difficulty pronouncing the word Yoknapatawpha—the fictional Mississippi county where William Faulkner set his best-known fiction—you can take instruction from the author himself. During his time as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Faulkner gave students a brief lesson on his pronunciation of the Chickasaw-derived word, which, as he says, sounds like it’s spelled. If you’ve ever had difficulty getting around in Yoknapatawpha—getting the lay of the land, as it were—Faulkner has stepped in again to help his readers. He drew several maps of varying levels of detail that show Yoknapatawpha, its county seat of Jefferson in the center, and various key characters’ plantations, crossroads, camps, stores, houses, etc. from the fifteen novels and story cycles set in the author’s native Mississippi. Perhaps the most reproduced of Faulkner’s maps, above, comes from 1946’s The Portable Faulkner and was drawn by the author at the request of editor Malcolm Cowley. We see named on the map the locations of settings in The Unvanquished, Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, Light in August, and the stories "A Rose for Emily" and "Old Man," among others. This map, dated 1945, had an important predecessor, however: the map below, the final page in Faulkner’s epic tragedy Absalom, Absalom! Most readers of that novel, myself included, have thought of Quentin Compson’s deeply conflicted, repeated assertions that he doesn’t hate the South as the novel’s conclusion. It’s a passionate speech as memorable, and as final, as Molly Bloom’s silent "Yes" at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Not so, writes Faulkner scholar Robert Hamblin, the novel actually ends after Quentin, and after the appendix’s chronology and genealogy; the novel truly ends with the map. What Hamblin wants us to acknowledge is that the map creates more ambiguity than it resolves. The map, he says "is more than a graphic representation of an actual place"—or in this case, a fictional place based on an actual place—"it is simultaneously a metaphor." While it further attempts to situate the novel in history, giving Yoknapatawpha the tangibility of Thomas Hardy’s fictional Wessex or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the map also elevates the county to a mythic dimension, like "Bullfinch’s maps depicting the settings of the Greek and Roman myths and the wanderings of Ulysses, Sir Thomas More’s map of Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s maps of the travels of Lemuel Gulliver." The Portable Faulkner map at the top of the post appears "in a style unlike Faulkner’s" and was "much reduced for publication in first and subsequent printings," A Companion to William Faulkner tells us. The Absalom map, on the other hand, appeared in a first, limited-edition of the novel in 1936, hand-drawn and lettered in red and black ink, a color-coding feature common to "Faulkner’s many hand-made books." Click the image, then click it again to zoom in and read the details. You’ll notice a number of odd things. For one, Faulkner gives equal attention to naming locations and describing events that occurred in other Yoknapatawpha novels, mainly murders, deaths, and various crimes and hardships. For another, his neat capital lettering reproduces the letter "N" backwards several times, but just as many times he writes it normally, occasionally doing both in the same word or name—a stylistic quirk that is not reproduced in The Portable Faulkner map. Finally, in contrast to the map at the top, which Faulkner gives his name to as one who "surveyed & mapped" the territory," in the Absalom map, he lists himself—beneath the town and county names, square mileage, and population count by race—as "sole owner & proprietor." Against Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum, Tokizane Sanae insists that at least when it comes to literary maps, "Map is Territory… proof of newly conquered ownership of a land"—the territory of a deed. Suitably, Faulkner ends a novel obsessed with ownership and property with a statement of ownership and property—over his entire fictional universe. In an ironic exaggeration of the power of surveyors, cartographers, architects, and their landowning employers, the map "spatializes and visualizes the concept of a mythical soil and the power of this God." In that sense, it forces us to view all of the Mississippi novels not as historical fiction, but as episodes in a great religious mythology, with the same depth and resonance as ancient scripture or political allegory. If we wish to see Faulkner’s map this way—a zoom out into an aerial shot at the end of an epic picture—then we’re unlikely to find it of much use as a guide to the plain-faced logistics of his fiction. It’s unclear to me that Faulkner intended it that way, as much as it’s unclear that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land serve any purpose except to distract and confuse readers. But of course readers have been using those footnotes, and Faulkner’s map, as guidelines to their respective texts for decades anyway, noting inconsistencies and finding meaningful correspondences where they can. One interesting example of such a use of Faulkner’s mapmaking comes to us from the site of a comprehensive University of Virginia Faulkner course that covers a bulk of the Yoknapatawpha books. The project, "Mapping Faulkner," begins with a considerably sparser Yoknapatawpha map, one probably made "late in his life" and which "seems unfinished," lacking most of the place names and descriptions, and certainly the assertive signature. With overlaid blue lettering, the site does what the Absalom map does not—gives each novel, or 9 of them anyway, its own map, with discrete boundaries between events, characters, and time periods. If Faulkner wanted us to see the books as manifestations of a singular consciousness, all radiating from a single source of wisdom, this project isolates each novel, and its themes. In the map of Sanctuary, above, only locations from that novel appear. On the page itself, a click on the circular markings under each locale brings up a window with annotations and page references. The apparatus might at first appear to be a useful guide through the notoriously difficult novels, provided Faulkner meant the locations to actually correspond to the text in this way. But what are we to do with this visual information? Lacking any legend, we can’t use the map to judge scale and distance. And by removing all of the other events occurring in the vicinity in the span of around a hundred years or so, the maps denude the novels of their greater context, the purpose to which their "owner & proprietor" devoted them at the end of Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s maps, as works of art in their own right, extend "the tragic view of life and history that the Sutpen narrative has already conveyed" in Absalom, Absalom!, writes Hamblin: "Through the handwritten entries that Faulkner made," in that map, the most complete drawn in the author’s own hand, "the landscape of Yoknapatawpha is presented primarily as a setting for grief, villainy, and death." View more maps by Faulkner here. Related Content: The Art of William Faulkner: Drawings from 1916-1925 Revel in The William Faulkner Audio Archive on the Author’s 118th Birthday William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. 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The tiny, Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has a unique national aspiration that sets it apart from its neighbors, China and India. (And certainly the United States too.) Rather than increasing its gross national product, Bhutan has instead made it a goal to increase the Gross National Happiness of its citizens. There’s wealth in health, not just money, the Bhutanese have argued. And since the 197os, the country has taken a holistic approach to development, trying to increase the spiritual, physical, and environmental health of its people. And guess what? The strategy is paying off. A 2006 global survey conducted by Business Week found that Bhutan is the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest country in the world. It’s perhaps only a nation devoted to happiness that could throw its support behind this — postage stamps that double as playable vinyl records. Created by an American entrepreneur Burt Todd in the early 70s, at the request of the Bhutanese royal family, the "talking stamps" shown above could be stuck on a letter and then later played on a turntable. According to Todd’s 2006 obituary in The New York Times, one stamp "played the Bhutanese national anthem," and another delivered "a very concise history of Bhutan." Thanks to WFMU, our favorite independent free form radio station, you can hear clips of talking stamps above and below. Don’t you feel happier already? via The Reply All Podcast 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. Related Content: How to Clean Your Vinyl Records with Wood Glue Soviet Hipsters Bootlegged Western Pop Music on Discarded X-Rays: Hear Original Audio Samples How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956 Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable Vinyl Records 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 a frustrating day spent dealing with a tenacious ghost in my two-year-old laptop, I’d much rather visit the dreary bemusement park, Dismaland, than that soulless, slick-surfaced "genius" bar. It just feels more real, somehow. Sadly for those of us in gloomy, defeatist moods, Dismaland, the artist Banksy’s high concept, multiple acre installation, was never intended to be a permanent fixture. It went the way of Cinderella’s coach earlier this fall, but not before photographer Jamie Brightmore managed to squeeze in amongst the great throngs of British curiosity seekers, camera in hand. The weather was dreary for his three visits, and a security guard denuded him of his tripod, but he still managed to capture the dystopian scene on behalf of armchair travelers everywhere. A catalogue of horrors awaits you above in Dismaland: The Official Unofficial Film. He also paid close attention to the sound design of the apocalyptic getaway, understanding the audio component to such grim exhibits as Relentless Paparazzi and the horrifying merry-wheel, Corporate Scandal. The artist, a true Dismateer, shares more about his time at the least happy place on earth here. Related Content: Banksy Creates a Tiny Replica of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens Patti Smith Presents Top Webby Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mocking Video Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday Watch Dismaland — The Official Unofficial Film, A Cinematic Journey Through Banksy’s Apocalyptic Theme Park 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.

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki detests being referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney. The great animator and storyteller admires the gorgeous animation of classic Disney films, but finds them lacking in emotional complexity, the element he prizes above all else. Miyazaki’s films are celebrated for their mystical, supernatural elements, but they take shape around the human characters inhabiting them. Plot comes later, after he has figured out the desires driving his people. "Keep it simple," he counsels in Lewis Bond’s short documentary The Essence of Humanity above. An interesting piece of advice, given that a hallmark of his 40-year career is his insistence on creating realistic three-dimensional characters, warts and all. American animators are also taught to simplify. They should all be able to sum up the essence of their proposed features by filling in the blank of the phrase "I want _____," presumably because such concision is a necessary element of a successful elevator pitch. As Bond points out, Western animated features often end with a convenient deus ex machina, freeing the characters up for a crowd pleasing dance party as the credits roll. Miyazaki doesn’t cotton to the idea of tidy, unearned endings, nor does he feel bound to grant his characters their wants, preferring instead to give them what they need. Spiritual growth is superior to wish fulfillment here. Such growth rarely happens without time for reflection, and Miyazaki films are notable for the number of non-verbal scenes wherein characters perform small, everyday actions, a number of which can be sampled in Bond’s documentary. The beautifully-rendered weather and settings have provided clues as to the characters’ development, ever since the lovely scene of cloud shadows skimming across a field in his first feature, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro. via Devour Related Content: Watch Hayao Miyazaki Animate the Final Shot of His Final Feature Film, The Wind Rises Watch Sherlock Hound: Hayao Miyazaki’s Animated, Steampunk Take on Sherlock Holmes Hayao Miyazaki’s Masterpieces Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke Imagined as 8-Bit Video Games French Student Sets Internet on Fire with Animation Inspired by Moebius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyazaki Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City next month. Follow her @AyunHalliday The Essence of Hayao Miyazaki Films: A Short Documentary About the Humanity at the Heart of His 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.

Despite its ancient origins, The Odyssey is an epic for modernity. The Greek poem gives us the hero as a homesick wanderer and uprooted seeker, an exile or a refugee, sustained by his cunning; he even comes across, writes scholar Deirdre McClosky, as "a crafty merchant type," while also representing "three pagan virtues—temperance, justice, and prudence." He’s a complicated hero, that is to say—most unlike Achilles, his antithesis in the prior epic The Iliad, the "foundational text," says Simon Goldhill, "of Western culture." Goldhill, a Cambridge classics professor, introduces an undertaking itself admirably epic: a reading of The Iliad featuring "sixty-six artists, 18,225 lines of text" and—on the day it took place, August 14th of this year—an "audience of more than 50,000 people across the world, watching online or in person at the Almeida and the British Museum." Now you can watch all 68 sections of the marathon event at the Almeida’s website until September 21, 2016. (Access the videos on pages One, Two, and Three.) Just above, see a short video that documents the making of this historic reading. Goldhill goes on to say that the epic poem, "puts in place most of the great themes of Western literature, from power to adultery." In a way, it’s fitting that it be a huge communal event: If The Odyssey is novelistic in many ways, as James Joyce’s Ulysses seems to have definitively shown, The Iliad is like a blockbuster comic book film. Achilles, writes McClosky, "is what the Vikings called a berserker"—his motive force, over and above companionship or love—is kleos: fame and glory. The one question that drives the "whole of The Iliad," says Goldsmith, is "the question of what is worth dying for. For Achilles, the answer is simple." Undoubtedly we admire Achilles even as we cringe at his fury, and we celebrate all sorts of people who run headlong into what seems like certain death. But we also find figures who embody his violence and certainty disturbing, to say the least, both on and off the battlefield. Though crafty Odysseus temporarily stays Achilles’ rage, the warrior eventually kills so many Trojans that a river turns against him, and his abuse of Hector’s body makes for stomach-turning reading—or listening as the case may be. Pragmatic Odysseus may have given us the modern hero, and anti-hero, but power and glory-mad strongmen like Agamemnon and Achilles may be even more with us these days, and The Iliad is still an essential part of the architecture of Western grand narrative traditions. After Goldhill’s introduction, see "greatest stage actor of his generation" Simon Russell Beale pick up the text, then younger actors Pippa Bennett-Warner and Mariah Gale, followed by gruff Brian Cox. (Find the readings on this page.) Few of the readers are as famous as Scottish film and stage star Cox, but nearly all are British theater-trained actors who deliver stirring, often thrilling, readings of the Robert Fagles translation. See the remaining 63 readings at the Almeida Theatre’s website here. h/t @EWyres Related Content: Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: Free AudioBooks & eBooks An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch All 18,225 Lines of The Iliad Read by 66 Actors in a Marathon Event For an Audience of 50,000 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

View post on imgur.com In an alternate universe version of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Eddie Murphy, not Samuel L. Jackson, might have played Jules, the bible-spouting hit man. His partner-in-crime, Vincent Vega, might have been played by Gary Oldman, not John Travolta. And the role of Mia, played memorably by Uma Thurman in black bangs, could have been played by Debra Winger or perhaps Phoebe Cates. Documents about the movie recently surfaced on Reddit, offering a fascinating glimpse into the early creative discussions for the hugely influential movie. In Tarantino’s wish list, which you can see above, he states that he wrote the roles of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, the would-be Bonnie and Clyde of the family dining restaurant circuit, with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in mind. They, of course, were ultimately cast but Tarantino was willing to entertain Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette. One wonders how Depp’s otherworldly weirdness would have translated as a low level street tough. On the other hand, Tarantino’s first choice for Lance, Vincent Vega’s bathrobe-sporting drug dealer, was none other than John Cusack. That would have been amazing. Many of the studio’s approved casting choices for the movie, seen here in a fax also appearing in the same Reddit post, are much stranger. Eddie Murphy was tapped as a possible Jules. Miramax liked Nicolas Cage or Johnny Depp (really?) for Butch, the samurai-sword wielding boxer. Bruce Willis, who played the role, wasn’t even on the original list. And mob clean-up man The Wolf, played with an off-kilter decorousness by Harvey Keitel, could have gone to Warren Beatty or Danny DeVito. Strangely, the studio didn’t think Johnny Depp would have been right for the role. Related Content: Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Living Dead, Halloween & More Quentin Tarantino Lists the 12 Greatest Films of All Time: From Taxi Driver to The Bad News Bears Quentin Tarantino’s Handwritten List of the 11 "Greatest Movies" 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. Quentin Tarantino’s Original Wish List for the Cast of Pulp Fiction 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’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to "Try Our Classic Oatmeal" — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City. Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. "There is a theory," says Kaku in the Big Think video above,"that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced." But wait! "Is it ever possible on any scale," he then tantalizingly asks, "to perhaps flip between different universes?" And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a "multiverse" in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: "If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency." And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once. Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist "no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes," when "we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them." It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that "déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations," you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while. Related Content: Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in "A Computer-Programmed Reality" Free Online Physics Courses Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything Michio Kaku: We’re Born Scientists But Switch to Investment Banking (and More Culture Around the Web) Michio Kaku Schools a Moon Landing-Conspiracy Believer on His Science Fantastic Podcast 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. What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Wonders If It’s Triggered by Parallel Universes 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.

Do you consider yourself well-educated? Cultured, even? By whose standards? We may superficially assume these terms name immutable qualities, but they are in any analysis dependent on where and when we happen to be situated in history. The most sophisticated of Medieval doctors—a title then closer to the European "docent" than our general use of Dr.—would appear profoundly ignorant to us; and we, with our painfully inadequate grasp of church Latin, Aristotelianism, and arcane theological arguments, would appear profoundly ignorant to him. What does it mean to be cultured? Is it the acquisition of mostly useless cultural capital for its own sake, or of a set of codes that helps us navigate the world successfully? In an attempt to address these fraught questions, Ashley Montagu, a student of hugely influential German-born anthropologist Franz Boas, wrote The Cultured Man in 1958. Rebecca Onion at Slate describes the book as containing "quizzes for 50 categories of knowledge in the arts and sciences, with 30 questions each." In the page above, we have the first 22 questions of Montagu’s "Art" quiz (with the answers here). You’ll probably notice right away that while most of the questions have definite, unambiguous answers, others like "Define art," seem patently unanswerable in all but the most general and unsatisfactory ways. Montagu defines art in one succinct sentence: "Art is the making or doing of things that have form and beauty"—which strikes me as anemic, though functional enough. Montagu intended his book to test not only knowledge of cultural facts, but also of "attitudes": a person "considered ‘cultured,’" writes Onion, "would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings, which would necessarily come about after contact with culture." Many administrators of "culture"—curators, art historians, literature professors, etc—would agree with the premise: ideally, the more cultural knowledge we acquire, the more empathy and understanding of other peoples and cultures we should manifest. Whether this routinely occurs in practice is another matter. For Montagu, Onion remarks, a "cultured man" is "curious, unprejudiced, rational, and ethical." Given Montagu’s enlightened philosophical bent, we can charitably ascribe language in his book that itself seems prejudiced to our viewing this artifact from a distance of almost seventy years in the future. We might also find that many of his questions push us to examine our 21st century biases more carefully. His approach may remind us of frivolous internet diversions or the standardized tests we’ve grown to think of as the precise opposite of lively, critically-engaged educational tools. Yet Montagu intended his quizzes to be "both dynamic and constructive," to alert readers to areas of ignorance and encourage them to fill gaps in their cultural knowledge. Many of his answers offer references for further study. "No one grows who stands still," he wrote. To see more of Montagu’s quiz questions—such as those above from the "Culture History" category (get the answers here)—and find out how you stack up against the cultured elite of the 50s, head over to Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate. Related Content:   Watch Harvard Students Fail the Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote in 1964 Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921) Take the 146-Question Knowledge Test Thomas Edison Gave to Prospective Employees (1921) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Cultured Are You? Test Your Knowledge With Cultural Quizzes from 1958 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.

You may remember that we featured Wireless Philosophy, an open access philosophy project created by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got started. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keeping in with its mission of producing free, informative and entertaining animated videos meant to introduce a host of philosophical issues. Our own Josh Jones called it "a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions" in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Question coastline than ever before. There are currently 105 Wiphi videos in total. At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cognitive biases, which add up to a surprisingly thorough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our thinking askew, from the "alief" (an automatic or habitual mental attitude, as opposed to a deliberate belief) to reference dependence and loss aversion to what we might perhaps describe as a meta-bias amusingly called the GI Joe fallacy (the tendency for our biases to stick around even when we should know better). Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as examined by Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Both of those playlists do come with a certain practicality, at least by philosophical standards: who, after all doesn’t want to think more correctly (or at least less incorrectly), and who doesn’t want to live the good life (or at least a better life than they live now)? But the harder core of casual philosophy enthusiasts — always a demanding group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or historical philosophical topics, such as the seven-part playlist on classical theism above. Dig deeper into their Youtube channel and you’ll find more simple but not simplistic lessons on the philosophy of mathematics, language, ancient China, and much more. The list of university stakeholders in Wireless Philosophy nowadays includes, we should note, Duke, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and U. Toronto, in addition to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from other universities have contributed to the video collection. For example, Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans) created the videos on Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Also find complete courses taught by Surprenant on our list of Free Online Philosophy Courses, a subset of our list, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: Introducing Wireless Philosophy: An Open Access Philosophy Project Created by Yale and MIT The Partially Examined Life: A Philosophy Podcast Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007 Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher Download 90 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life Take First-Class Philosophy Lectures Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts 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. 105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & 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.

Image via Wikimedia Commons Everyone in the spotlight has at least one damning incident to live down, and sometimes a whole damning period. There’s David Bowie’s brief fascism controversy, for example, or Eric Clapton’s more substantive, and much more disturbing, far-right political views, which he broadcast from the stage in 1976, then repeated to the magazines shortly after. Clapton’s racist invective and support for Enoch Powell and the National Front was particularly appalling given that he rode in on the shoulders of blues artists and scored a huge hit just two years earlier with his version of Bob Marley’s "I Shot the Sheriff." As photographer Red Saunders would write in a published letter to Clapton after the guitar god’s bizarre onstage rant: "Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist." At least for a time, Clapton fell decidedly on the wrong side of a dichotomy Eric Lott called "Love and Theft."  One might make similar accusations against punk troubadour Elvis Costello, who took his look from Buddy Holly, his name from The King, and has also drawn heavily from black music for the better part of thirty years. And Costello once had his own brief racist outburst in 1979 during a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio, dropping a couple n-bombs in reference to James Brown and Ray Charles, and getting a beating from one of Stephen Stills’ backing singers. Costello maintained the outrage was a deliberately nasty way to troll the hated old guard Stills represented, but he thereafter received death threats and continued his tour under armed guard. Ironically, the previous year he had appeared with The Clash and reggae bands Misty in Roots and Aswad at a festival concert in London sponsored by Rock Against Racism, who formed in response to Enoch Powell, the National Front, and Clapton—and whose American chapter picketed Costello after the Ohio brawl. Costello addresses the incident in his new memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, writing "whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight. Surely this was all understood. Didn’t they know the love I had for James Brown and Ray Charles, whose record of ‘The Danger Zone’ I preferred to watching men walk on the moon?" (He’s made several other comments over the years, and even Ray Charles weighed in afterwards with something of a forgiving statement.) Stephen Deusner at Vulture writes, "you somehow never doubt the sincerity of that love, just as you don’t doubt that Costello could be a raving bastard when he’s drunk." Unlike so many other examples of the genre, Unfaithful Music doesn’t peddle contrition or controversy for their own sake. On the contrary, The Quietus calls the book "without doubt, one of the greatest self-penned appraisals of a popular entertainer’s life and work." That greatness, Deusner argues, comes in large part from Costello’s "nerdishly prodigious" knowledge of, and love for—mostly American—music: "There are nearly 400 songs Costello name-checks as influences within the pages of Unfaithful Music, and hundreds more he refers to in passing." These include songs from James Brown and Ray Charles, and also Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Doc Watson, The Drifters, his namesake Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, huge helpings of The Beatles, Burt Bacharach… even CSNY’s "Ohio." Based on Costello’s encyclopedic devotion to country, pop, R&B, punk, reggae, and nearly every other genre under the sun, Vulture compiled the 300-song Spotify playlist above, "by no means complete," writes Deusner, "due in large part to Spotify’s scarcity of Beatles, Bacharach, and Neil Young albums." (If you need Spotify’s software, download it for free here.) The playlist serves as an audio accompaniment to Costello’s almost 700-page reminiscence; taken together, both explain how "the angry young man of the late 70s," with a "reputation as one of the smartest and bristliest figures in the London punk scene" became "a revered troubadour craftsman playing the White House, jamming with various Beatles, and composing ballet scores." Just above, you can hear Costello himself read a brief excerpt from the book, a story about hanging out with David Bowie. The Quietus has another exclusive extract from Unfaithful Music. (Note that you can download the entire book, narrated by Costello himself, for free if you join Audible.com’s Free Trial program.) And if you need to hear more about what he now calls that "f***** stupid" fracas in ’79, see him talk about his angry young man persona and tell other "war stories" of his life in music in an interview with ?uestlove. Of his fierce devotion to so much of the music above, Costello tells The Roots’ drummer, "English musicians have such this weird outside love for American music, particularly rhythm and blues as we grew up to know it, that we sort of felt we had possession of it in some weird way." via Vulture Related Content: Elvis Costello Sings "Penny Lane" for Sir Paul Radio David Byrne: Stream Free Music Playlists Created Every Month by the Frontman of Talking Heads A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear a Playlist of 300 Songs That Influenced Elvis Costello, Drawn From His New Memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Image by amoebafinger on Flickr Commons. When the American Film Institute set up its conservatory for Advanced Film Studies in 1969, its first round of students included Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, Paul Schrader, and the Master of Absurd himself, David Lynch. (Now that’s a class reunion worth going to!) Now some 40 years on, the Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, is accepting applications for its David Lynch MA in Film program. Lynch has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for as long as he’s been a filmmaker, and in interviews and in books like Catching the Big Fish, he espouses the wonders of meditation for creativity. (See him talk more about that here.) Students enrolled in the David Lynch Film program will follow Lynch’s example by combining meditation with filmmaking. You might not create the next Eraserhead (Lynch’s AFI project that turned into his career-defining debut), but, according to Lynch, students are promised to discover the ability to dive within—to transcend and experience that unbounded ocean of pure consciousness which is unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, power, and peace. Before one gets too excited and thinks that the director himself will be teaching every class and that you’ll get to hang out with him during office hours, that’s not the way the program works. Classes are taught by director/cinematographer Michael W. Barnard (and once the head of the Maharishi’s film department), screenwriter Dorothy Rompalske, and David Lynch Foundation Television founder Amine Kouider. Guest speakers have included Jim Carrey, Peter Farrelly, script doctor Dara Marks, Twin Peaks alum Duwayne Dunham, and many other Hollywood insiders. However, students do get a field trip to Los Angeles to meet Lynch and spend time with the filmmaker. The aspiring filmmakers should consider themselves lucky, seeing that the director is busy working on Twin Peaks’ new season and apparently writing an autobiography. There are two scholarships up for grabs for applicants who have a film or script to submit, but the deadline is fast approaching on Nov. 1. via Criterion Related Content: David Lynch Explains Where His Ideas Come From Patti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Creative Inspiration David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation David Lynch Talks Meditation with Paul McCartney 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. Apply to the New David Lynch Masters in Film Program, Where You’ll Meditate & Create 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.

Those who watch and dislike Chantal Akerman’s best-known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, often complain that "nothing happens" in it. But in my experience of introducing it — nay, evangelizing for it — to friends, it usually only takes a solid viewing or two of that 1975 three-hour-and-twenty-minute tale of a Belgian single mother’s days and nights spent cooking (a short clip of which you can see above), cleaning, and possibly engaging in prostitution to feel — or at least in the immediate aftermath of viewing, feel — that in no movie but Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles does anything truly happen. Every other movie plays, by comparison, as if on fast-forward, or like a set of filmed Cliff’s Notes. Clearly, Akerman saw, and realized, a wider storytelling potential in cinema than do most filmmakers. So much worse the loss, then, when she died earlier this month, leaving behind a filmography consisting of not just her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, which she directed at just 25 years of age, but a variety of feature films and shorts made between 1968 and this year. As a tribute, the cinephile-beloved home video company The Criterion Collection has, for a very limited time, made all of their Akerman films free to view on Hulu (unfortunately, for viewers in certain territories only), including 1978’s Les rendezvous d’Anna, embedded just above, 1972’s Hotel Monterey and La chambre, 1975’s Je tu il elle, 1976’s News from Home… http://media.blubrry.com/criterioncast/p/criterioncast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CC_Episode_107_Jeanne_Dielman.mp3 … and of course, Jeanne Dielman. If you plan to enjoy a free Akerman marathon on Hulu thanks to Criteron, you’d better do it soon, since they’ll only remain free to view through the next day. And do invite all your most cinematically adventurous friends to join your side, as with most auteur films, the interest that doesn’t lie in watching them lies in arguing about their merits afterward. You can hear one such fun conversation on a 2011 episode of The Criterioncast, a podcast dedicated to films released by the Criterion Collection, just above. It actually features yours truly as the special guest, discussing Jeanne Dielman with the regular panelists. Do you side with the likes of an Akerman partisan like me, or does your opinion most closely resemble one of the others who doesn’t take quite such a rich experience from their every viewing? Today, you can find out where you stand on this and other of Akerman’s fascinating works for free. And you can always find many more free films in our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: An Ambitious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Filmmakers 120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection What Films Should Get Into The Criterion Collection? Video Series "Three Reasons" Makes the Case 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 Today: Watch Online the Pioneering Films of the Late Chantal Akerman 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’ve all been to a museum with that friend or family member who just doesn’t "get" modern art and suggests it’s all a con. Conceptual art? Abstract expressionism? What is that?! Impressionism? Who wants blurry, poorly drawn paintings?! Arrgh! Hey, maybe some of us are that friend or family member. Maybe our complaints are even more specific—maybe some of us are members of a "cultural justice" movement called "Renoir Sucks at Painting." Maybe we show up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with signs parodying the cartoonishly terrible Westboro Baptist Church ("God Hates Renoir") and demanding, with as much force as one can with a parody sign, that the Renoirs be removed from the company of worthier objets d’art. One critical difference between the typical art hater and the Renoir Sucks crew: the latter do not object to Pierre-Auguste Renoir because his work is too hard to "get," but because it’s too easy. Renoir, they say, painted "treacle" and "deformed pink fuzzy women." As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker, "Renoir’s winsome subjects and effulgent hues jump in your lap like a friendly puppy." Renoir is so far from avant-garde that Schjeldahl can peg his "exaggerated blush and sweetness" as an example of the "popular appeal" that "advanced the bourgeois cultural revolution that was Impressionism." Ouch. This kind of assessment gets no help from the painter’s great-great granddaughter, Genevieve, who responds to critics by quoting sales figures: "It is safe to say," she writes, "that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting." By this measure, Thomas Kinkade and Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel were also artistic geniuses. The charges of "aesthetic terrorism" against Renoir come right out of the iconoclasm that functions in the art world as both meaningful dissent and successful gimmick (cf. Marcel Duchamp, or Ai Weiwei’s controversial, gallery-filling attacks on revered cultural artifacts.) But perhaps the honest question remains: does Renoir Suck at Painting? Let us reserve judgment and take a look at another side of Renoir, a rarely seen excursion into book illustration—specifically the four illustrations he made for an 1878 edition of Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir ("The Dram Shop"). Described by the Art Institute of Chicago as "grittily realistic," Zola’s naturalist depiction of what he called "the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas" provoked many of its readers, who regarded the book as "an unforgivable lapse of taste on the part of its author." It showed Parisians "an aspect of current life that most found frightening and repulsive." Nonetheless, the novel became a popular success. The four black-and-white engravings here—made from Renoir’s original drawings—are the impressionist’s contribution to Zola’s illlustrated novel. The choice of Renoir as one of several artists for this edition seems an odd one. (Zola, a friend of the painter’s, approached him personally.) Then, as now, Renoir had a reputation for sunny optimism: "he always looks on the bright side," remarked one contemporary. Renoir’s "preference for creating images of beauty," writes The Art Institute of Chicago, "made the illustration of the particularly seedy passages of the novel problematic, and some of the resulting drawings lack conviction." Instead of succumbing to the novel’s grim tone, Renoir’s original renderings, like the "loose wash drawing" in "warm, brown ink" at the top of the post, "gently subverted the dark undertones of Zola’s text." Below the original drawing, see the engraving that appeared in the book. Book blog Adventures in the Print Trade concedes the plates "are of varying quality" and singles out the illustration just above as the most successful one, since "the subject-matter is perfect for Renoir, and the whole scene is brimming with life." As you can see from the two images at the top of the post, the translation from Renoir’s drawings to the final book engravings leave many of his figures blurred and obscured, and introduce a dark heaviness to work undertaken with a much softer, lighter touch. Do these illustrations add anything to our understanding of whether Renoir Sucks at Painting? Who can say. It’s true that here, as in many of his well-known paintings, "the compositions tend to be slack," as Schjeldahl writes. Nonetheless, the Art Institute of Chicago audaciously judges the brown ink wash drawing at the top of the post "one of the most important drawings the artist produced during the years of high Impressionism." They only add to my appreciation of Renoir, who does not, I think, suck. Even if his work can be, as Schjeldahl says, "high glucose," I would argue that his sweetness and light provide just the right approach to Zola, whose novels, like those of other naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Hardy, contain much more than a hint of sentimentality. Related Content: Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915) Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Maligned Impressionist Painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir Illustrates Emile Zola’s Gritty Novel L’Assommoir (1878) 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.