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

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

Out with the Coke cans, potato chips, Twix bars and other junk foods. In with the Haruki Murakami novels. That’s what happened last year when Muzu, a publisher in Poland, created three vending machines stocked with copies of Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage and then placed them in Polish train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. It seemed like a natural thing to do, seeing that (notes the fan blog Haruki Murakami Stuff) Tsukuru Tazaki, the main character of the novel, "likes train stations and works as a train station designer for a Tokyo railway company." Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is the start of a healthy trend. via Vintage Anchor Related Content: A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Voltaire, the clearest of Enlightenment thinkers wrote those words in his 1765 essay, "Questions sur les miracles." And they resonate as much now, 250 years later, as they did then. I rarely say much about myself on the site. But I’ll just say today that I did my doctoral work on the French Revolution, spent a couple years living in Paris, and developed a deep affection for the city, as many others have. What happened tonight is heartbreaking, tragic and downright maddening. My thoughts are with all Parisians tonight, friends and strangers alike. Voltaire: "Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities" is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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

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

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

Before Friday, we had never managed to cover NASCAR, but we crossed that off the list when we featured Terry Gilliam’s mockumentary The Legend of Hallowdega. And now today we have another Open Culture first: yes, an archive of free, entertaining videos for cats and dogs. Over the past 6 years, Paul Dinning has created a YouTube channel packed with over 400 videos featuring the wildlife of Cornwall, England. And, from that footage, he has cobbled together playlists designed to delight all cats and dogs with access to the internet. And, apparently cats and dogs are watching. The first video above, called "Squirrel and Bird Fun," has clocked some 863,000 views over the past year. And the next video, "The Ultimate Videos of Birds for Cats To Watch," has 946,000 views since January. I showed the videos to my cat Cocco [sic] and, I kid you not, he was transfixed. A longer playlist of videos for cats and dogs can be viewed here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Free Entertainment for Cats and Dogs: Videos of Birds, Squirrels & Other Thrills is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Out with the Coke cans, potato chips, Twix bars and other junk foods. In with the Haruki Murakami novels. That’s what happened last year when Muzu, a publisher in Poland, created three vending machines stocked with copies of Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage and then placed them in Polish train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. It seemed like a natural thing to do, seeing that (notes the fan blog Haruki Murakami Stuff) Tsukuru Tazaki, the main character of the novel, "likes train stations and works as a train station designer for a Tokyo railway company." Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is the start of a healthy trend. via Vintage Anchor Related Content: A Dreamily Animated Introduction to Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Jazz and Baseball-Loving Postmodern Novelist Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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

View post on imgur.com A good part of my youth was spent in front of my old family hi-fi system, listening to Beatles records. This was music I knew no longer existed in the modern world—not on contemporary pop radio, and not on MTV… nowhere but on what seemed to me those ancient plastic disks. To my untrained ears, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, and especially Abbey Road sounded like they had come down from an advanced alien civilization. What I was hearing in part—especially on Abbey Road—was the perfection of the studio as an instrument, and the major influence of the last, best fifth Beatle, George Martin. Not to diminish the incredible musicianship and songwriting abilities of the Beatles themselves, but without their engineers, without Martin at the controls, and without the state-of-the-art studios—EMI, then, of course, Abbey Road—those albums would have sounded much more down to earth: still great, no doubt, but not the symphonic masterpieces they are, especially—in my opinion—Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together (though not their final release). So how did such a brilliant recording come to being? You can piece its construction together yourself by sorting through all of the stuff that didn’t make it on the record—outtakes, alternate album cover photos—as well as through interviews with Martin and the band. At the top of the post, see one of the cover photos that didn’t make the cut. A self-effacingly-named blog called Stuff Nobody Cares About has several more alternate photos from that session on August 8, 1969 (which McCartney conceptualized beforehand in a series of sketches). Before the album got its iconic look, it came together—pun intended—as iconic sound. Just above, you can hear George Martin describe the process of producing the band’s last recording, a "very happy record," he says, compared to the tense, unhappy Let it Be. Afterward, hear George, Paul, and Ringo recollect their bittersweet memories of the sessions. Near the end of the documentary clip, Paul McCartney says, "I’m really glad that most of the songs dealt with love, peace, understanding…." If that’s what "Mean Mr. Mustard" or "Maxwell’s Silver Hammer" are about, color me surprised, but I’ve never been one to get too hung up on the meanings of the Beatles songs—it’s the menagerie of sounds I love, the unusual chord changes, and the witty little narratives, touching vignettes, and almost shockingly apt lyrical images ("Hold you in his armchair / You can feel his disease"). But like the band themselves coming back together, the songs on Abbey Road—including that masterful closing medley—didn’t immediately fall into place; they were the product of much studio noodling and idiosyncratic Beatles brainstorming—an activity one part music hall comedy improv, one part genius happy accident, and one part good-natured family squabble. In the three clips above and below, hear the powerful Abbey Road medley come together, in fits and starts, with plenty of playful banter and off-the-cuff inspiration. Hearing the making of Abbey Road doesn’t take away from the otherworldly final product, but it does bring the exalted personalities of the band back down to earth, showing them as hardworking musicians and natural writers and comedians who just happened to have made—with no shortage of help—some of the most mind-blowing music of the 20th century. Related Content: A Short Film on the Famous Crosswalk From the Beatles’ Abbey Road Album Cover Hear the Isolated Vocal Tracks for The Beatles’ Climactic 16-Minute Medley on Abbey Road The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig Filmed in January 1969 The Beatles’ Final, "Painful" Photo Shoot: A Gallery of Bittersweet Images Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Making of The Beatles’ Abbey Road: Alternate Album Cover Photos, Recording Session Outtakes & Interviews 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 don’t know about you, but I’ve sort of always associated Charles Dickens with the kind of humorless moralism and didactic sentimentality that are hallmarks of so much Victorian literature. That’s probably because the work of Dickens contains no small amount of humorless moralism and didactic sentimentality. But it also contains much wit and absurdity, inventive characterization and rich description. While novels like the short Hard Times, published in 1854, can seem more like thinly veiled tracts of moral philosophy than fully realized fictions, others, like the strange and whimsical Pickwick Papers—Dickens’ first—work as fanciful, lighthearted satires. The big, baggy novels like Great Expectations, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities (find in our collection of Free eBooks) manage to skillfully combine these two impulses with his own twist on the gothic, such that Dickens’ work is not overwhelmed, as it might be, by sermonizing. For all of this tidy summation of that giant of Victorian letters, one adjective now comes to mind that I would never have previously thought to apply at any time to the writer of A Christmas Carol: Borgesian, as in possessed of the scholastic wit of 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’m not the first to note a resemblance, but I must say it never would have occurred to me to think of the two names in the same sentence were it not for an extra-curricular activity Dickens engaged in while outfitting his London home, Tavistock House, in 1851. Letters of Note’s sister site Lists of Note brings us the following anecdote: [Dickens] decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented. And so, on October 22nd, he wrote to a bookbinder named Thomas Robert Eeles and supplied him with the following "list of imitation book-backs" to be produced. You can see the complete—completely Borgesian—list below. Borges is of course well known for inventing titles of books that have never existed, but seem like they should, in another dimension somewhere. His invention of alternate realities, and publications, manifests in most all of his stories, as well as in oddities like the Book of Imaginary Beings. Like Borges’ made-up books, Dickens’ contain just the right mix of the self-serious and the ridiculous, so as to make them at once plausible, cryptic, exotic, and hilarious—both Pickwickian and, indeed, proto-Borgesian. History of a Short Chancery SuitCatalogue of Statues of the Duke of WellingtonFive Minutes in China. 3 vols.Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols.Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols.Mr. Green’s Overland Mail. 2 vols.Captain Cook’s Life of Savage. 2 vols.A Carpenter’s Bench of Bishops. 2 vols.Toot’s Universal Letter-Writer. 2 vols.Orson’s Art of Etiquette.Downeaster’s Complete Calculator.History of the Middling Ages. 6 vols.Jonah’s Account of the Whale.Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar.Kant’s Ancient Humbugs. 10 vols.Bowwowdom. A Poem.The Quarrelly Review. 4 vols.The Gunpowder Magazine. 4 vols.Steele. By the Author of "Ion."The Art of Cutting the Teeth.Matthew’s Nursery Songs. 2 vols.Paxton’s Bloomers. 5 vols.On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets.Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing. 3 vols.Heavyside’s Conversations with Nobody. 3 vols.Commonplace Book of the Oldest Inhabitant. 2 vols.Growler’s Gruffiology, with Appendix. 4 vols.The Books of Moses and Sons. 2 vols.Burke (of Edinburgh) on the Sublime and Beautiful. 2 vols.Teazer’s Commentaries.King Henry the Eighth’s Evidences of Christianity. 5 vols.Miss Biffin on Deportment.Morrison’s Pills Progress. 2 vols.Lady Godiva on the Horse.Munchausen’s Modern Miracles. 4 vols.Richardson’s Show of Dramatic Literature. 12 vols.Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep. As many volumes as possible. As Flavorwire reports, designer Ann Sappenfield created her own fake bookbindings with Dickens’ titles (see some at the top of the page, courtesy of the NYPL). These are part of a New York Public Library exhibit called Charles Dickens: The Key to Character that ran in 2012-13. You can read Dickens original letter to Thomas Robert Eeles in The Letters of Charles Dickens here. via Lists of Note/Flavorwire Related Content: Charles Dickens Gave His Cat "Bob" a Second Life as a Letter Opener Charles Dickens’ Hand-Edited Copy of His Classic Holiday Tale, A Christmas Carol Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christmas Carol Just as Dickens Read It Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Charles Dickens (Channeling Jorge Luis Borges) Created a Fake Library, with 37 Witty Invented Book Titles 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.

As a lover of fantasy and science fiction, but by no means a know-it-all fanboy, I know what it’s like to come to a fictional universe late. It can seem like everyone else has already read the canon, seen the movies, and memorized the genealogies, origin stories, magical arcana, number of ancient blood feuds, etc. For example, I grew up steeped in Star Trek but never watched Dr. Who. Now that British sci-fi show is seemingly everywhere, and I find myself intrigued. But who has the time to catch up on several decades of missed episodes? Some people may have felt similarly in the last few years about The Lord of the Rings, what with the number of J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations besieging theaters. If you haven’t read any of those books, Middle Earth—for all its air of medieval legend and Norse myth—can be a very confusing place. Thanks to Peter Jackson’s films, for better or worse, Tolkien’s books have even more cultural currency than they did in the 70s, when Led Zeppelin mined them for lyrical inspiration, and "Frodo lives" graffiti appeared on overpasses everywhere. This brings us to the videos we feature here. Presented in a rapid fire style like that of motormouth YA novelist and video educator John Green, "The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained" is exactly that-two very quick tours, with illustrations, through the complex mythological world of Middle Earth, the setting of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and other books you’ve maybe never heard of. These videos were made before the final installment of Jackson’s interminable Hobbit trilogy, but they cover most major developments before and after the events in short book on which he based those films. I’ll say this for the effort—Tolkien’s world is one I thought I knew, but I didn’t know it nearly as well as I thought. Like most people, frankly, I haven’t read the sourcebook of so much of that world’s genesis, The Silmarillion, which gets a survey in the first video at the top of the post. I’m much more familiar, and you may be as well—through books or films—with the mythologies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy proper, covered in the video above. If these two thorough explainers don’t satisfy your curiosity, you can likely have further questions answered at one of the videos’ sources, Ask Middle Earth, a site that solicits "any question about Middle Earth." Another source, the work of comparative mythologist Verlyn Flieger, who specializes in Tolkien, also promises to be highly illuminating. Related Content: Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings "The Tolkien Professor" Presents Three Free Courses on The Lord of the Rings 110 Drawings and Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Middle-Earth and Beyond J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a German Publisher Asking for Proof of His "Aryan Descent" (1938) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained in 10 Minutes, in Two Illustrated Videos 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 his final project in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Matan Stauber created Histography, an interactive timeline that covers 14 billion years of history. The timeline, writes Stauber, "draws historical events from Wikipedia, and it self-updates daily with new recorded events." And the interface lets users see history in smaller chunks (decades at a time) or bigger ones (millions of years at a time). To get a vague feel for how Histography works, you can watch the video above. But really the best way to experience things is to dive right in here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. via Kottke Related Content: 6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History, Created in 1871 An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline Big History: David Christian Covers 13.7 Billion Years of History in 18 Minutes Free Online History Courses An Interactive Timeline Covering 14 Billion Years of History: From The Big Bang to 2015 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.

Yesterday we featured The Seashell and the Clergyman, the first surrealist film, directed by Germaine Dulac in 1928. Given Dulac’s gender, for those playing the cinema history home game, it also counts as the first surrealist film directed by a woman. That alone would make for a sufficiently pioneering achievement for any career in film, but Dulac had already accomplished another important act of cinematic trailblazing with La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet), a short silent that also happens to hold the title of the first feminist film. Where Dulac worked from a story by Antonin Artaud in the The Seashell and the Clergyman, she works here from a story originally by Guy de Maupassant, one revolving around a wife, the titular Madame Beudet, pushed to the brink by years of life with her boorish husband. Madame Beudet at first finds some sweetness in her unenviable lot in life in the form of the rich fantasies in her head, realized onscreen with a suite of visual techniques similar to those Dulac would use to bring her audience into the romantically fraught psyche of the clergyman six years later. Eventually, though, she engineers a more permanent solution to her problems, placing a live bullet into the chamber of the revolver Monsieur Beudet uses in his constant self-pitying pantomimes of Russian roulette. And where scholars label The Seashell and the Clergyman as a work of surrealism, they label The Smiling Madame Beudet as a work of impressionism. "Throughout the picture," writes critic Nathan Southern, "Dulac uses such devices as slow motion, distortions, and superimposed images to paint Beudet’s various emotional states onscreen," an intersection of form and substance that resulted in a picture that "instantly established Dulac as a force in world cinema." Now, alongside The Seashell and the Clergyman, The Smiling Madame Beudet lays strong claim to the title of her masterwork. Dulac clearly had far better luck than the pitiable Madame Beudet who, despite her best efforts ends the film deeper in despair than she began it. As advanced an artistic sensibility as she had, the filmmaker here expresses a dictum of age-old simplicity: you can’t win ’em all. Related Content: The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928) Simone de Beauvoir Explains "Why I’m a Feminist" in a Rare TV Interview (1975) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

When writer, politician, and BBC radio and television personality Melvyn Bragg began his long-running radio program In Our Time, which brings academics together to discuss philosophy, history, science, religion, and culture, he didn’t think the show would last very long: "Six months," he told The Scotsman in 2009, "but I’ll have a go." Now, seventeen years after the show began in 1998, In Our Time is going strong, with millions of listeners from around the world who tune in on the radio, or download the In Our Time podcast. Though it’s easy to despair when faced with the onslaught of mass media devoted to triviality and sensationalism, Bragg has shown there’s still a sizable audience that cares about thoughtful engagement with matters of import, and in particular that cares about philosophy. Though the subject takes a beating these days, especially in unfavorable comparisons to the hard sciences, the concerns articulated by philosophers over the centuries still inform our views of ethics, language, politics, and human existence writ large. In Our Time’s philosophy programs follow the same format as the show’s other topics—in Bragg’s words, he gets "three absolutely top-class academics to discuss one subject and explore as deeply as time allow[s]." In this case, the "subject," is often a proper name, like Simone Weil, David Hume, Albert Camus or Socrates. The show just as often tackles philosophical movements like Skepticism, Neoplatonism, or The Frankfurt School, that aren’t associated with only one thinker; likewise, Bragg and his guests have devoted their discussions to longstanding philosophical problems, like the existence of Free Will, and historical developments, like the Continental-Analytic Split in Western philosophy. Though there is certainly no shortage of high quality resources for people who wish to learn more about philosophy—such as the many free courses, podcasts, and lectures we’ve featured on this site—few are as immediately accessible as In Our Time’s philosophy discussions. Bragg describes his preparation for each show as "swotting"—or cramming. He’s not an expert, but he’s knowledgeable enough to ask pertinent questions of his guests, who then go on to educate him, and the listeners, for the almost hour-long conversation. Hear how well the approach works in the In Our Time philosophy programs featured here. At the top, Bragg discusses the philosophy and activism of Bertrand Russell with academic philosophers A.C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, and Hilary Greaves. Below that, he talks Kierkegaard with Jonathan Ree, Clare Carlisle, and John Lippitt. Just above, hear Bragg discuss Jean-Paul Sartre with Jonathan Rée, Benedict O’Donohoe, and Christina Howells. Finally, below, hear his conversation on Karl Marx with Anthony Grayling, Francis Wheen, and Stedman Jones. These four examples are but a small sampling of the many compelling In Our Time philosophy discussions. Explore, stream, and download dozens more at the BBC Radio 4 site or hear them on Youtube here. And if any these conversations whet your appetite for more, then head over to our expansive archive of Free Philosophy Courses, and Free Philosophy eBooks. Related Content: Learn The History of Philosophy in 197 Podcasts (With More to Come) Download 100 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life Take First-Class Philosophy Courses Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Get to Know Socrates, Camus, Kierkegaard & Other Great Philosophers with the BBC’s Intelligent Radio Show, In Our Time 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 highlighted the comic art of Montreal-based Julian Peters before on Open Culture. He’s the man who undertook a 24-page illustrated adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and then also delivered a manga version of W. B. Yeats’ "When You Are Old," recreating the style of Japanese romance comics to a T. While studying in a Masters program early examples of literary graphic novels, Peters is also turning into a fine illustrator of poetry whether classic (Rimbaud, Keats) or contemporary (teaming up with John Philip Johnson on an upcoming book of illustrated poems, one of which you can find here.) This adaptation (above) of Edgar Allan Poe’s "Annabel Lee" dates from 2011. Poe’s work gives illustrators narrative aplenty, but it also gives them repetition and ellipses. In his rendition, Peters gives us two pre-teen sweethearts similar to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, and when Annabel Lee dies from "the wind that came out of the cloud by night," we get a full panel of Annabel’s final healthy moments. Wind is everywhere to be found in the comic, forming white caps on the ocean, and blowing Annabel’s pigtails when we first see her. Scholars tend to agree that "Annabel Lee" was based on Poe’s first cousin and teen bride Virginia Clemm, whom he married when she was 13 (and Poe was 27), but who passed away from tuberculosis at 24 years of age. The image of the beautiful corpse continues through his work from "The Raven" to "Ligeia". You can find the first few panels of Peters’ adaptation above. Read the rest here. Related content: Classics Stories by Edgar Allan Poe Narrated by James Mason in a 1953 Oscar-Nominated Animation & 1958 Decca Album Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land Watch the 1953 Animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart," Narrated by James Mason 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. A Comic Book Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem, Annabel Lee is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

A few years ago, I watched and enjoyed My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old abstract painter who became a brief art-world sensation, her canvases (which towered over the tiny artist) at one point selling for thousands of dollars apiece. Olmstead raised the bar high indeed for all subsequent preschool-aged art celebrities, but the world of unlikely painters in general has a fuller, stranger history. Witness, for instance, Congo the Chimp, the London Zoo’s artistic sensation of the 1950s, a noted animal artist who sold work to such noted non-animal artists as Picasso, Miró, and Dalí, the last of whom made a comparison with one of the best-known abstract painters of the day: "The hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!" Congo, who began his art career the moment he happened to pick up a pencil, went on, writes the Telegraph‘s Nigel Reynolds, to become "a television celebrity in the late 1950s as the star of Zootime, an animal programme presented from the London Zoo by Desmond Morris, the zoologist and anthropologist. He became even more of a cause célèbre when the Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted a large exhibition of his work in 1957. Critics had a field day and debate about the meaning of art raged furiously." You can see Morris, a surrealist painter himself, in addition to his zoological, anthropological, and televisual work, interacting with Congo in the 1950s and reflecting on the place of the chimpanzee artist in his own career in the clip at the top of the post. The newsreel below covers an exhibition called The Young Idea, which featured paintings not just from Congo but from such Marla Olmstead predecessors as three-year-old Timothy Vaughn and eighteen-month-old Graham Phillips. One of Congo’s paintings appears above. And so to the obvious question: But Is It Art? And assuming it is, writes John Valentine in The Philosopher, "what then follows from such a classification? What sort of difference does it or should it make in the way we approach and appreciate chimpanzee paintings? If they are art, what sort of critical or interpretive discourse about them should we engage in? Do we simply appreciate the lines, colours, and forms of Congo’s paintings and stop at that? Does it make any difference that the paintings were done by a member of a different species? Should species differences make any difference in artistic value?" It may not, at least commercially speaking: Congo may have had his moment six decades ago, but don’t think that means his work will come cheap; back in 2005, some of his paintings went up on the auction block and fetched more than $25,620. Related Content: Iconic Artists at Work: Watch Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet and More The Jane Goodall Online Archive   Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Meet Congo the Chimp, London’s Sensational 1950s Abstract Painter 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 week we featured a list of 100 novels all kids should read before graduating from high school. Chosen by 500 English teachers from all over Britain, the list happens to have a lot of overlap with many others like it. Invariably, these kinds of young adult reading lists include Ray Bradbury’s novel of dystopian censorship and anti-intellectualism, Fahrenheit 451.  Why, I’ve always wondered, should this novel be pitched almost exclusively at teenagers, so much so that it seems like one of those books many of us read in high school, then never read again, even if we are fans of Bradbury’s work? http://traffic.libsyn.com/repspodcast/048_REPS_Podcast.mp3 A strange disconnect emerges when we look at the history of Bradbury’s novel as a teaching tool. Although most high school students are presented with freethinking as an ideal, and given cautionary tales of its suppression, their own educations are just as often highly circumscribed by adults who fret about the effects of various bad influences. As Villanova University journal Compass notes, in a perverse irony, Fahrenheit 451’s publisher Ballantine "released an expurgated version of the novel to be used in high schools" in 1967; "Such words as ‘hell,’ ‘damn’ and ‘abortion’ were eliminated." The expurgations went unnoticed because readers did not compare this version to the original. The copyright page did not indicate any edits. The expurgated version ran for ten printings. At the same time, the authentic "adult" version was sold outside of high schools to the world at large. In 1973, after six years of publishing both editions, the publisher decided to publish only the censored work, so from 1973 to 1979 only that version was sold. Bradbury himself did not become aware of the censored version until 1979, whereafter he demanded that it be withdrawn and wrote a forceful afterward to the restored, 1980 printing. Whether, as a student, you read the bowdlerized or the "adult" version of Bradbury’s novel, perhaps it’s time to revisit Fahrenheit 451, particularly now that freedoms of thought, belief, and expression have again come under intense scrutiny. And in addition to re-reading Bradbury’s novel, you can listen to the 1971 radio play above. Produced in Vancouver by the CBC (and re-broadcast in recent years by the Radio Enthusiasts of Puget Sound podcast), the abridged, one-hour adaptation by necessity changes the source material, though for dramatic purposes, not to expressly soften the message. Ray Bradbury’s reputation may have been tamed over the decades. He became late in life an avuncular sci-fi master, primarily known as a writer of books for high school students. But at one time, his work—and science fiction in general—were so subversive that the FBI kept close tabs on them. If you like the Fahrenheit 451 adaptation, you can hear many more Bradbury stories adapted into classic radio plays at our previous post. Also note: Tim Robbins has narrated a new, unabridged audio version of Fahrenheit 451. It’s available via Audible.com. You can get it for free with Audible’s 30-day free trial. Get more details on that here. via SFF Related Content: Who Was Afraid of Ray Bradbury & Science Fiction? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959) Sci-Fi Legend Ray Bradbury Creates a Visionary Plan to Redesign Los Angeles Ray Bradbury: "The Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do." "Books Teach Us That" 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Ray Bradbury’s Classic Sci-Fi Story Fahrenheit 451 as a Radio Drama 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 if you don’t know the myth by name, you know the story. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, King of Corinth, was punished "for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action for eternity." In modern times, this story inspired Albert Camus to write "The Myth of Sisyphus," an essay where he famously introduced his concept of the "absurd" and identified Sisyphus as the absurd hero. And it provided the creative material for a breathtakingly good animation created by Marcell Jankovics in 1974. The film, notes the annotation that accompanies the animation on Youtube, is "presented in a single, unbroken shot, consisting of a dynamic line drawing of Sisyphus, the stone, and the mountainside." Fittingly, Jankovics’ little masterpiece was nominated for the Best Animated Short Film at the 48th Academy Awards. Enjoy watching it above. Related Content: Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vases Come to Life with 21st Century Animation What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’ Discover the "Brazen Bull," the Ancient Greek Torture Machine That Doubled as a Musical Instrument The Absurd Philosophy of Albert Camus Presented in a Short Animated Film by Alain De Botton The Myth of Sisyphus Wonderfully Animated in an Oscar-Nominated Short Film (1974) 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 recently read Merry White’s Coffee Life in Japan, a history of the west’s favorite beverage in the Land of the Rising Sun. As with so many cultural imports, the Japanese first entertained a fascination with coffee, then got more serious about drinking it, then made an official place for it in their society, then got even more serious about not just drinking it but artisanally preparing and serving it, winding up with an originally foreign but now unmistakably Japanese suite of products and associated experiences. Having spent a fair bit of time in Japanese cafés myself, I can tell you that the country has some damn fine coffee. But what about its cherry pie? Only one man could take that case: FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, the main character of David Lynch’s groundbreakingly strange ABC television drama Twin Peaks. A great many Japanese people love coffee, but no small number also love David Lynch. And so, when the opportunity arose to take simultaneous advantage of local enthusiasm for beverage and filmmaker alike, Georgia Coffee seized it, working in the robust tradition of Japanese advertisements starring American celebrities to reunite members of Twin Peaks‘ cast, reconstruct the fictional town of Twin Peaks itself, and have Lynch direct a new mini-mini-mini-season of the show, each episode a forty-second Georgia Coffee commercial. The first episode, "Mystery of G," finds Cooper in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, enlisted in the search for a missing Japanese woman named Asami. He and Asami’s husband examine the first piece of evidence: an origami crane with a G on it. The second, "Lost," introduces two more inscrutable artifacts: a photo of Asami beside a rare roadster, and a mounted deer’s head. The latter leads him to Big Ed’s Gas Farm, where in the third episode, "Cherry Pie," he spots the car and, on its passenger seat, a mysterious wedge of red billiard balls (which, of course, reminds him of his favorite dessert). The fourth, "The Rescue," closes the case in the woods, where Cooper finds Asami, trapped and backwards-talking, in — where else? — the red-curtained room of the extra-dimensional Black Lodge. Every step of the solution to this mystery requires a cup of Georgia Coffee — or, rather, a can of Georgia Coffee, Georgia being one of the best-known varieties of that vending machine-ready category of beverage. The west may never have gone in for canned coffee, but Japan drinks it in enormous quantities. What better way to advertise a Japanese interpretation of coffee in the early 1990s, then, than with a Japanese interpretation of Twin Peaks? Alas, the higher-ups at Georgia Coffee didn’t ultimately think that way, giving the axe to the planned second series of Twin Peaks commercials. Maybe that’s for the best since, as for the actual taste of Georgia Coffee — well, I’ve had damn finer. Related Content: Japanese Movie Posters of 10 David Lynch Films Coffee is for People, Not Robots: The New Ad for David Lynch’s Line of Organic Coffee David Lynch’s Unlikely Commercial for a Home Pregnancy Test (1997) David Lynch’s Perfume Ads Based on the Works of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald & D.H. Lawrence Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. David Lynch Directs a Mini-Season of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials 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.

Friedrich Nietzsche first introduced the concept of the Übermensch — often translated in English as "The Superman" — in his influential philosophical work, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), writing: I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?… Lo, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth! I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them! Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth! As Eva Cybulska observes in an article on Philosophy Now, Nietzsche never quite spelled out what he meant by Übermensch/The Superman, leaving it to later interpreters to fill in the blanks. She notes: "RJ Hollingdale (in Nietzsche) saw in Übermensch a man who had organised the chaos within; [Walter] Kaufmann (Nietzsche) a symbol of a man that created his own values, and Carl Jung (Zarathustra’s Seminars) a new ‘God’. For Heidegger it represented humanity that surpassed itself, whilst for the Nazis it became an emblem of the master race." You can now add to the list of interpretations another by Alain de Botton’s School of Life. In a newly-released animated video, de Botton treats The Superman as the incarnation of human perfection. Embodying characteristics possessed by Goethe, Montaigne, Voltaire and Napoleon (people who came closest to achieving perfection in Nietzsche’s mind), the Übermenschen/Supermen will live by their own values (Pagan in nature); delight in their superiority and take pity on the weak; perhaps hurt people in the name of achieving great things; accept that suffering can be a necessary evil; use culture to raise the mentality of the society around them; and beyond. Whether you see The Superman differently is another question. You can download Thus Spake Zarathustra from our Digital Nietzsche collection and come up with your own take. And, tangentially, you can watch The Original 1940s Superman Cartoon Free Online. Related Content: Download 100 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life Free Online Philosophy Courses 135 Free Philosophy eBooks The Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche: 43 Original Tracks How Martin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Nietzsche to Overturn Segregation in America Nietzsche’s Concept of Superman Explained with Monty Python-Style 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.

It may well be that the major pivot points of history are only visible to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deafening sirens of violent upheaval—the exact years future generations will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we look back, certain years stand out above all others, those that historians use as arrestingly singular book titles: 1066: The Year of Conquest, 1492: The Year the World Began, 1776. The first such year in the 20th century gets a particularly grim subtitle in historian Paul Ham’s 1914: The Year the World Ended. It sounds like hyperbolic marketing, but that apocalyptic description of the effects of World War I comes from some of the most eloquent voices of the age, whether those of American expatriates like Gertrude Stein or T.S. Eliot, or of European soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. In France, the horrors of the war prompted its survivors to remember the years before it as La Belle Epoque, a phrase—wrote the BBC’s Hugh Schofield in centenary essay "La Belle Eqoque: Paris 1914,"—that appeared "much later in the century, when people who’d lived their gilded youths in the pre-war years started looking back and reminiscing." We’re used to seeing the period of 1914 in grainy, dreary black-and-white, and to seeing nostalgic celebrations of La Belle Epoque represented graphically by the lively full-color posters and advertisements one finds in décor stores. But thanks to the full color photos you see here, unearthed a few years ago by Retronaut, we can see photographs of World War I-era Paris in full and vibrant color—images of the city one-hundred years ago almost just as Parisians saw it at the time. Icons like the Moulin Rouge come to life in bright daylight, above, and lighting up the night, below. Early cinema Aubert Palace, below, in the Grands Boulevards, shimmers beautifully, as does the art-deco lighting of the Eiffel Tower, further down. Below, hot air balloons hover in the enormous Grand Palais, and further down, a photograph of Notre Dame on a hazy day almost looks like a watercolor. The photographs were made, writes Messy N Chic, "using Autochrome Lumière technology between 1914 and 1918 [a technique developed in 1903 by the Lumière brothers, credited as the first filmmakers]…. [T]here are around 72,000 Autochromes from the time period of places all over the world, including Paris in its true colors." Not all of the photographs are of famous architectural monuments or nightlife destinations. Very many show ordinary street scenes, like those above, one depicting a number of bored French soldiers, presumably awaiting deployment. The Paris of 1914 was a European capital in major transition, in more ways than one. "Modernity was the moving spirit," writes Schofield; "It was the time of the machine. The city’s last horse-drawn omnibus made its way from Saint-Sulpice to La Villette in January 1913." Schofield also points out that, like Gilded Age New York, "the public image of Paris was the creation of romantic capitalists. The reality for many was much more wretched… there were entire families living on the street, and decrepit, overcrowded housing with non-existent sanitation." Modernity was leaving many behind, class conflict loomed in France as it erupted in Russia, even as the global catastrophe of World War threatened French elites and proletariat alike, who both served and who both died at very high rates. You can see many more of these astonishingly beautiful full-color photographs of 1914 Paris—at the end of La Belle Epoque—at Flavorwire, Vintage Everyday, Faded & Blurred, and Messy N Chic. Related Content: Impressionist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915 Rare Film of Sculptor Auguste Rodin Working at His Studio in Paris (1915) Paris Through Pentax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Different Lens The First Color Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, and Other Amazing Color Photos of Czarist Russia (1908) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Beautiful, Color Photographs of Paris Taken 100 Years Ago—at the Beginning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque 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.

Disco’s been dead for decades, yet disco bashing never seems to go out of style. The sleazy fashions, the soulless music, the lumpenproletariat streaming ‘cross bridge and tunnel to shake their sweaty, polyester-clad booties like cut rate Travoltas… it’s over, and yet it isn’t. But even the most savagely anti-disco rocker should allow that its lead practitioners were possessed of a certain glamour and grace, their highly refined dance moves executed with the precision of Fred Astaire. It’s a point a German film buff known on YouTube as "et7waage1" drives home by setting a mix of screen siren Rita Hayworth’s most memorable dance scenes from the ‘40s and ‘50s to one of disco’s best known anthems, ’ "Stayin’ Alive." It’s easy to imagine Rita and any of her co-stars (including Astaire) would have parted the crowds at Brooklyn’s legendary 2001 Odyssey, the scene of Saturday Night Fever’s famous lighted Plexiglass floor. Her celebrated stems are well suited to the demands of disco, even when her twirly skirt is traded in for pjs and fuzzy slippers or a dowdy turn-of-the-century swimming costume. Here, for comparison’s sake are the stars of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gomey, cutting the rug, urm, flashing floor in 1977 to the Bee Gees’ much more sedate "More Than a Woman." Hayworth films featured in the disco-scored revamp are: "Down to Earth": 0:00 / 1:03 / 2:46 / 4:20 "You’ll Never Get Rich": 0:14 / 0:24 / 0:28 / 0:46 / 2:35 / 3:16 / 3:49 "Tonight and Every Night": 0:20 / 1:11 / 1:22 / 1:36 / 1:54 / 1:55 "Cover Girl": 0:34 / 0:38 / 1:13 / 1:48 / 2:13 / 3:07 / 3:29 / 3:31 / 3:54 / 4:06 / 4:31 "You Were Never Lovelier": 0:50 / 2:20 / 2:42 / 3:00 / 4:10 / 4:38 "Gilda": 1:17 / 2:04 "Miss Sadie Thompson": 1:38 / 1:46 / 4:28 "My Gal Sal": 1:42 / 3:23 / 3:35 "Pal Joey": 2:00 / 3:20 / 3:41 "Affair in Trinidad": 2:05 / 2:52 / 3:04 Related Content: Disco Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees "Stayin’ Alive" The Origins of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk: Vintage Footage of Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More James Brown Gives You Dancing Lessons: From The Funky Chicken to The Boogaloo Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday Rita Hayworth, 1940s Hollywood Icon, Dances Disco to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup 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.