For some certain romantic reasons, a segment of the English-language reading population fell in love with Roberto Bolaño in the first few years of this millennium. One invariably glimpsed Bolaño’s award-winning 1998 novel The Savage Detectives on endtables and nightstands after its translation in 2007, with or without bookmarks. When 2666—the Chilean writer’s dizzyingly enormous work on the darkest of events in 1990’s Northern Mexico—appeared, it did so posthumously, further elevating Bolaño’s literary outlaw mythos. In addition to being a hard-bitten Trotskyist nomad, Bolaño—who died of liver failure in 2003—was said to have been a heroin addict and alcoholic. Neither was the case, writes Hector Tobar in the LA Times, quoting a Mexico City-based journalist on the author: "He had a super boring daily life. It was a life built around his own writing rituals and habits." For all his legendary exploits as a globetrotting journalist and poet, Bolaño also seems to have built his life around reading. "Reading," Bolaño has said, "is more important than writing." He finds much company with this statement among fellow writers. Patti Smith, for example, who urges reading "anything by Bolaño," could also "recommend a million" books to anyone who asks. A much shorter but still challenging list of hers reveals a deep and broad investment in literature. William S. Burroughs, who probably didn’t read Bolaño but worked in a similarly hallucinatory vein, taught a class on "Creative Reading" that was only secondarily a class on writing, filled with example after example from writer after treasured writer. The best writing advice writers can dispense, it seems, is this: Read. Such is the approach of Bolaño himself, in a short, pithy essay on how to write short stories. He begins in a perfunctory way, almost with a sigh: "Now that I’m forty-four years old, I’m going to offer some advice on the art of writing short stories." The advice, found in the graphic form above on The Paris Review‘s Tumblr and reprinted in a non-fiction collection titled Between Parenthesis, quickly becomes exuberantly pedantic, permeating the boundaries of its neatly ordered list form with tongue moving from cheek to cheek. Does he really mean that we should read "the notable Pseudo-Longinus" on the sublime? Or to suggest—after insistent reference to several essential Latin American writers’ writers—that "with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read"? Probably. But the gist, with more than enough sincerity, is this: Read the greats, whoever they are, and read them often. See Bolaño’s complete text here at Electric Cereal and an excerpted version below.   (1) Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies.  (2) It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time. (4) One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso. Any short-story writer who has some appreciation for these authors will never read Camilo José Cela or Francisco Umbral yet will, indeed, read Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, but in no way Cela or Umbral.  (5) I’ll repeat this once more in case it’s still not clear: don’t consider Cela or Umbral, whatsoever. (6) A short-story writer should be brave. It’s a sad fact to acknowledge, but that’s the way it is. (9) The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read.  (10) Give thought to point number 9. Think and reflect on it. You still have time. Think about number 9. To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.  (12) Read these books and also read Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, for one of the two of them is the best writer of the twentieth century. Related Content: Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag Junot Díaz’s Syllabi for His MIT Writing Classes, and the Novels on His Reading List Predict Which 21st Century Novels Will Enter the Literary Canon? And Which Overrated Ones Won’t? Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Roberto Bolaño’s 12 Tips on "the Art of Writing Short Stories" 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/roberto-bolanos-12-tips-on-the-art-of-writing-short-stories.html 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. The post Roberto Bolaño’s 12 Tips on "the Art of Writing Short Stories" appeared first on Open Culture.

Who can call themselves fans of cyberpunk, or even modern science fiction, without having experienced William Gibson’s Neuromancer? That 1984 novel, which many see as the defining work of the sci-fi subgenre where, as Gibson himself put it, "high tech meets low life," has gone through many print runs in many languages. But you don’t need to read it to get to know its distinctive reality — its Japanese megalopolis setting of Chiba City, its characters like "console cowboy" Case and "street samurai" Molly Millions, its technologies like advanced artificial intelligence, electromagnetic pulse weapons, a virtual reality space called, yes, the Matrix. You can also hear it. Last year, we featured the out-of-circulation audiobook version of Neuromancer read by Gibson himself, and though it faithfully transmits his characteristically sawed-off writing style, some may find that form a bit lacking in drama. But as luck would have it, the BBC, home to some of the last remaining masters of the radio drama form, adapted the novel in 2002, and you can hear the resulting two-hour production on the Youtube playlist above or stream it from SFFaudio. Even Gibson purists may well come away satisfied, since its respect for the original text begins right with the classic opening line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." In any form, Neuromancer has endured for many reasons, not least that it still gets us thinking every time about the intersection between technology and humanity. It certainly gets critical theorist Fredric Jameson thinking, and you can read his thoughts in his new essay "A Global Neuromancer." He contends that, among other things, cyberspace still doesn’t exist: "It is a literary construction we tend to believe in; and, like the concept of immaterial labor, there are certainly historical reasons for its appearance at the dawn of postmodernity which greatly transcend the technological fact of computer development or the invention of the Internet." Jameson doesn’t write prose quite as easily followed as Gibson’s, but like any true classic, Neuromancer keeps inspiring not just works similar to it, but works wildly different from it as well. Note: You can download for free a professionally-read version of Neuromancer (the complete book) if you take part in one of the free trials offered by our partners Audible.com and/or Audiobooks.com. Click on the respective links to get more information. Related Content: William Gibson Reads Neuromancer, His Cyberpunk-Defining Novel (1994) Cyberpunk: 1990 Documentary Featuring William Gibson & Timothy Leary Introduces the Cyberpunk Culture Take a Road Trip with Cyberspace Visionary William Gibson, Watch No Maps for These Territories (2000) Timothy Leary Plans a Neuromancer Video Game, with Art by Keith Haring, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne William Gibson, Father of Cyberpunk, Reads New Novel in Second Life Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. William Gibson’s Seminal Cyberpunk Novel, Neuromancer, Dramatized for Radio (2002) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/william-gibsons-seminal-cyperpunk-novel-neuromancer-dramatized-for-radio-2002.html 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. The post William Gibson’s Seminal Cyberpunk Novel, Neuromancer, Dramatized for Radio (2002) appeared first on Open Culture.

I don’t think anybody really knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, "Where are you going - in the deepest sense of the word?" you can’t really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of "What else would I be doing?" Do I want to be Frank Sinatra, who’s really great, and do I want to have great retrospectives of my work? I’m not really interested in being the oldest folksinger around.  - Leonard Cohen, speaking to author Pico Iyer in April 1998   One need not have lived a rock n’ roll lifestyle to be familiar with its pleasures and pitfalls. That heady mix of drugs, sex, and public adulation isn’t sustainable. Some can’t survive it. Some retire to a more staid domestic scene while others are left chasing a spotlight that’s unlikely to favor them twice. But rarely do you find one who chooses to give it all up to become a Buddhist monk. Well, not all. As director Armelle Brusq’s 1996 documentary, above, shows, singer-songwriter—and yes—Zen monk Leonard Cohen’s routine at the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside Los Angeles extended beyond the usual mindfulness practice. His simple quarters were outfitted with a computer, printer, radio, and a Technics KN 3000 synthesizer. He sometimes doffed his robes to enter the recording studio or enjoy a bowl of soup at Canter’s Deli. Comparatively, his worldly attachments were few, divvied between the professionally necessary and the fond. Still, calling his daughter, Lorca, to pass along a veterinarian’s update, Cohen sounds every inch the doting Jewish dad. Celebrity devotion to Kabbalah or various Eastern spiritual practices often stinks of the superficial, a passing fancy that won’t last more than a year or two. Cohen’s relation to Zen Buddhism is enduring, a gift from his longtime friend and teacher, Mount Baldy’s Roshi, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, who died last year at the age of 107. One of Cohen’s responsibilities was helping Roshi with the myriad small details the elderly abbot would have had difficulty navigating on his own. Cohen seems entirely at peace in the roadie role, keeping track of luggage while on tour, and fetching cones for the entire party from a nearby ice cream truck. The poem Cohen penned in honor of Roshi’s 89th birthday is of a piece with his most enduring work. Think Suzanne’s oranges were the only fruit? Not so: His stomach’s very happy The prunes are working well There’s no one left in heaven And there’s no one going to hell Filmmaker Brusq is chiefly concerned with documenting Cohen’s spiritual reality, but she tosses in a few treats for those hungry for pop iconography, particularly the impromptu show-and-tell at the 25-minute mark, when the crew peeks into the legend’s memorabilia-filled LA office. The soundtrack, too, is music to a Cohen fan’s ears, and lyrically inspired given the subject: Waiting for The Miracle Teachers A Thousand Kisses Deep  Democracy The Future Suzanne Dance Me to the End of Love Closing Time Never Any Good Related Content: How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life Leonard Cohen Narrates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Featuring the Dalai Lama (1994) Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musician Featured in a 1965 Documentary 200 Free Documentaries Online Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Happy 18th birthday to her favorite formerly-17-year-old playwright! Follow her @AyunHalliday A Day in the Life of Zen Monk Leonard Cohen: A 1996 Documentary 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/a-day-in-the-life-of-zen-monk-leonard-cohen.html 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. The post A Day in the Life of Zen Monk Leonard Cohen: A 1996 Documentary appeared first on Open Culture.

A quick note: The director Andrew Hutton has seemingly made available online Vincent Van Gogh: Painted With Words, his 2010 film which features Benedict Cumberbatch as Van Gogh. The film, declares Hutton’s Vimeo channel, "won a Rockie for Best Arts Documentary at the Banff World Media Festival in 2011, receiving critical acclaim for its fascinating insight into the life of the artist and its unique approach to storytelling." Vincent Van Gogh: Painted With Words will be added to our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in "Distress" Before His Conviction For "Gross Indecency" Van Gogh’s 1888 Painting, "The Night Cafe," Animated with Oculus Virtual Reality Software The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" Watch Vincent Van Gogh: Painted With Words, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch 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. The post Watch Vincent Van Gogh: Painted With Words, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch appeared first on Open Culture.

Somewhere along the line today, take a break from the festivities and remind yourself what we’re actually celebrating here in America — the signing of America’s founding document 239 years ago. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence remains perhaps the best statement of our country’s aspirations. And after the Supreme Court’s recent Obergefell v. Hodges decision, many would say that the document — proclaiming that "all men are created equal" and have inalienable rights, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" — feels more alive than it has for some time. But no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, it’s helpful to return to The Declaration and its core principles. You can read the opening lines below, and the full text here. Above, we have some very recognizable Hollywood celebs (including eight Oscar winners) reading The Declaration. (Beneath it, we’ve included a grainier version that features a nice preface by Morgan Freeman). For the sake of making this worthwhile, pretend it isn’t the infamous Mel Gibson reading the very first lines. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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. Related Content: Free Online History Courses Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy Hear Johnny Cash Deliver Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address John Wayne Recites the Pledge of Allegiance The Declaration of Independence Read by Thespians: Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Renee Zellweger & 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-declaration-of-independence-read-by-thespians-morgan-freeman-kevin-spacey-renee-zellweger-more.html 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. The post The Declaration of Independence Read by Thespians: Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Renee Zellweger & More appeared first on Open Culture.

In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939-40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted the Boston Symphony and, on one famous occasion, he decided to conduct his own arrangement of the "The Star-Spangled Banner," which he made out a "desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country." The date was January, 1944. And he was, of course, referring to America’s role in World War II. As you might expect, Stravinsky’s version on "The Star-Spangled Banner" wasn’t entirely conventional, seeing that it added a dominant seventh chord to the arrangement. And the Boston police, not exactly an organization with avant-garde sensibilities, issued Stravinsky a warning, claiming there was a law against tampering with the national anthem. (They were misreading the statute.) Grudgingly, Stravinsky pulled it from the bill. You can hear Stravinsky’s "Star-Spangled Banner" above, apparently performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The Youtube video features an apocryphal mugshot of Stravinsky. Despite the mythology created around this event, Stravinsky was never arrested. via 3QD/Timothy Judd Violin Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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.

As the Grateful Dead gets ready to play its final show tonight, Playing for Change has released a lovely video featuring an international cast of musicians — some well-known, some not — playing "Ripple" (studio version here), a tune from the great 1970 album American Beauty. The new clip features appearances by Bill Kreutzmann, Jimmy Buffett, David Crosby, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Enjoy…. h/t @stevesilberman Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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. The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-grateful-deads-ripple-played-by-musicians-around-the-world.html 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. The post The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World appeared first on Open Culture.

Just about twenty years ago, on July 9, 1995, the Grateful Dead played their last show with Jerry Garcia. Neither the fans, nor the band knew this would be so, but anyone paying attention could have seen it coming. Garcia’s cocaine and heroin use had long dominated his life; despite interventions by his bandmates, a few stints in rehab, a diabetic coma, and the death of keyboardist Brent Mydland, the singer and guitarist continued to relapse. Exactly one month after that final concert, he died of a heart attack. And what a poignant show it was. (See the tour poster above, hear the entire set below, and see a setlist here), opening with the band’s comeback hit "Touch of Grey" and closing with a fireworks display set to Hendrix’s "Star Spangled Banner." Garcia sounds frail, his voice a bit thin and ragged, and the lyrics—penned by Robert Hunter—strike a painfully ironic note: "I will get by… I will survive." Just last night, twenty years after that moment, fans once again said goodbye to the Dead, as they played their last of three final concerts without Jerry at Chicago’s Soldier’s Field, the same venue where Garcia last sang "Touch of Grey"‘s fateful words. The Grateful Dead’s official output may have been uneven at times, marred by excess and tragedy, but the band’s words remained consistently inspired and inspiring, each song a poetic vignette filled with oblique references and witty, heartfelt turns of phrase. We mostly have Robert Hunter to thank for those hundreds of memorable verses. An accomplished poet and translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Hunter served, writes Rolling Stone, as the band’s "primary in-house poet." In a rare and moving interview with the magazine, the reclusive writer muses on his former role, and hedges on the meaning of his songs: "I’m open to questions about interpretation, but I generally skate around my answers because I don’t want to put those songs in a box." Hunter’s reluctance to interpret his lyrics hasn’t stopped fans and scholars of the Dead from doing so. There have been university exhibits and academic conferences devoted to the Grateful Dead. And true students of the band can study the many literary references and allusions in their songwriting with The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an online project begun in 1995 by UC Santa Cruz Research Associate David Dodd, and turned into a book in 2005. The extensive hypertext version of the project includes editorial footnotes explaining each song’s references, with sources. Also included in these glosses are "notes from readers," who weigh in with their own speculations and scholarly addenda. If you have any doubt about just how steeped in poetic history the pre-eminent hippie band’s catalog is, see for example the annotated "Terrapin Station," a song that reaches back to Homer and alludes to Lewis Carroll, William Blake, Plato, and T.S. Eliot. Or, so, at least, say Dodd and his readers, though some of their interpretations may seem a bit tenuous. Hunter himself told Rolling Stone, "people think I have a lot more intention at what I do because it sounds very focused and intentional. Sometimes I just write the next line that occurs to me, and then I stand back and look at it and say, ‘This looks like it works.'" But just because a poet isn’t consciously quoting Homer doesn’t mean he isn’t, especially a poet as densely allusive as Robert Hunter. Take, for example, "Uncle John’s Band," which contains the line "Ain’t no time to hate." One reader, Aaron Bibb, points us toward these lines of Emily Dickinson: I had no time to Hate— Because The Grave would hinder Me— And Life was not so Ample I Could finish—Enmity— Woven throughout the song are references to American poetry and folk music—from Robert Frost’s "Fire and Ice," to the Gadsden Flag, to an Appalachian rag. Another of the band’s most popular songs, "Friend of the Devil," cribs its title and chorus from American folk singer Bill Morrissey’s song "Car and Driver"—and also references Don McLean’s "American Pie." Drawing as much on the Western literary canon as on the American songbook, Hunter’s writing situates the Dead’s Americana in a tradition stretching over centuries and continents, giving their music depth and complexity few other rock bands can claim. The online annotated Grateful Dead also includes "Thematic Essays," a bibliography and "bibliography of songbooks," films and videos, and discographies for the band and each core member. There may be no more exhaustive a reference for the band’s output contained all in one place, though readers of this post may know of comparable guides in the vast sea of Grateful Dead commentary and compendiums online, in print, and on tape. The band may have played its last show twenty years ago, and again just last night without its beloved leader, but the proliferating, serious study of their songcraft and lyrical genius shows us that they will, indeed, survive. Related Content: The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World 10,173 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive The Grateful Dead’s "Ultimate Bootleg" Now Online & Added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Every Grateful Dead Song Annotated in Hypertext: Web Project Reveals the Deep Literary Foundations of the Dead’s Lyrics 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/every-grateful-dead-annotated-in-hypertext.html 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. The post Every Grateful Dead Song Annotated in Hypertext: Web Project Reveals the Deep Literary Foundations of the Dead’s Lyrics appeared first on Open Culture.

Do you still need a working knowledge of the ideas of Michel Foucault to hold your own on the cocktail party circuit? Probably not, but the ideas themselves, should you bring them up there, remain as fascinating as ever. But how, apart from entering (or re-entering) grad school, to get started learning about them? Just look above: Alain de Botton’s School of Life has produced a handy eight-minute primer on the life and thought of the controversial "20th-century French philosopher and historian who spent his career forensically criticizing the power of the modern bourgeois capitalist state." Perhaps that sounds like a parody of the activity of a French philosopher, but if you watch, you’ll find highlighted elements of Foucault’s grand intellectual project still relevant to us today. "His goal was nothing less than to figure out how power worked," as de Botton puts it, "and then to change it in the direction of a Marxist-anarchist utopia." Even if you have no interest in Marxist-anarchist utopias, you’ll find much to think about in Foucault’s criticisms, summed up in the video, of institutions of power having to do with medicine, mental health, criminal justice, and sexuality — under which we all, in some form or another, still live today. Once the School of Life has got you briefed on this wealthy altar boy (!) turned widely-polarizing, sexually avant-garde intellectual, you can get into more depth on Foucault right here on Open Culture. We’ve got his UC Berkeley lectures (in English) on "Truth and Subjectivity" and "The Culture of the Self,;" an interview with him long thought lost; a 40-minute documentary on him, and the TIME article and fanzine that got his name spreading around America. You’ll find that, though Foucault himself passed away more than thirty years ago, his observations of modern society still have an impact — and they’ll surely raise an eyebrow or two at the next office party. Related Content: Michel Foucault - Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Documentary Explores the Theorist’s Controversial Life and Philosophy The 1981 TIME Magazine Profile That Introduced Michel Foucault to America Hear Michel Foucault Deliver His Lecture on "Truth and Subjectivity" at UC Berkeley, In English (1980) Hear Michel Foucault’s Lecture "The Culture of the Self," Presented in English at UC Berkeley (1983) Watch a "Lost Interview" With Michel Foucault: Missing for 30 Years But Now Recovered Read Chez Foucault, the 1978 Fanzine That Introduced Students to the Radical French Philosopher Alain de Botton’s School of Life Presents Animated Introductions to Heidegger, The Stoics & Epicurus Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Looking to expand your capacity for art appreciation, without spending much in the way of time or money? You could play Masterpiece, or check some Sister Wendy out of the library… Or you could watch conservator Michael Gallagher tenderly ministering to 17th-century painter Charles Le Brun‘s Everhard Jabach and His Family, above. Long considered lost, the life-size family portrait of the artist’s friend, a leading banker and art collector, was in sorry shape when the Metropolitan Museum acquired it from a private collection earlier last year. Gallagher worked for ten months to counteract the various indignities it had suffered, including a re-stretching that left the original canvas severely creased, and a Gilded Age application of varnish that weathered poorly over time. It’s a painstaking process, restoring such a work to its original glory, requiring countless Q-tips and a giant roller that allowed staffers to safely flip all 9 x 10.75 feet of the massive canvas. Gallagher identifies the last step, a sprayed-on coat of varnish necessary for teasing out the painting’s original luster, as the most nerve-wracking part of the odyssey. Now that you know what went into it, you really should go visit it in person, if only to marvel at how the majority of visitors stream obliviously past, bound for the gift shop, the cafe, or other more name brand attractions. (Certainly Le Brun, First Painter to Louis XIV, was a name brand in his day.) Get even more out of your visit by boning up on some notable aspects of the work itself, such as the geometry of the subjects’ placement and the artist’s self-portrait, reflected in a mirror over his patron’s shoulder. Gallagher and other Met staffers kept a detailed account of the restoration process on the Met’s Conservation blog. Read their posts here. via Devour Related Content: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use Download 448 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

There’s something about Wes Anderson films that prompts people to get creative — to start creating their own video essays and supercuts exploring themes in Anderson’s whimsical movies. You can find a list below. The latest comes from Luís Azevedo, founder of The A to Z Review. "Bibliophilia - Books in the Films of Wes Anderson" (above) tells this story: In the work of Wes Anderson, books and art in general have a strong connection with memory. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) begins with a homonymous book, as does Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) begins and ends with a book. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) ends with a painting of a place which no longer exists. These movies have a clear message: books preserve stories, for they exist within them and live on through them. For a detailed explanation of the video, bibliography, filmography and more visit this page. I would also encourage you to watch the book animation that Anderson himself created for Moonrise Kingdom, which sadly never made it into the film. Find it here. Related Content: Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums & More Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies A Glimpse Into How Wes Anderson Creatively Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Different Films 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

View image | gettyimages.com It’s easy to write off the Grateful Dead—and I’ll admit I did for years—as aging "hippies stuck in the Summer of Love," as a recent Wired article puts it. But this reputation belies a musical depth due in part, as we pointed out yesterday, to the band’s lyrical sophistication. But it isn’t only their lyricism, or their self-sustaining subculture, that has consistently won them generations of devoted followers born long after Jerry Garcia and company got their start at Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties. "Long before it became necessary (or cool) to do so," writes Wired, "the band embraced a DIY ethos in everything from manufacturing its own gear to publishing its own music distribution system. The Dead’s obsession with technology was almost inseparable from the band’s psychedelic ambition and artistic independence." Not only has the Dead fostered what is surely the most widespread bootleg industry in existence, but they also "pioneered rock concert broadcasts," starting with a Carousel Ballroom show in 1968. Thanks to the spread of the Grateful Dead gospel through channels both official and unofficial, we have access to quality recordings of Jerry Garcia’s last show with the Grateful Dead twenty years ago, and to their last shows as a band, played just this past week in a two-city, 50th anniversary "Fare Thee Well" series of concerts in Santa Clara and at Chicago’s Soldier’s Field. The final shows are now largely available online thanks to the efforts of an enterprising "taper," as the diligent amateur recording engineers who capture each Dead show are called. At the top, hear "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)"—the first song on the band’s 1967 debut album—taped at the July 4th farewell gig. (Head over to NYCtaper’s site to hear/download the complete show.) And above, hear "Passenger" from the previous night. (Get the complete 7/3/2015 show here). The final July 5th show is sure to come online soon. Opinions on these final gigs have varied widely, but no matter how uneven some of the performances, as always—scattered amidst the ramshackle jams—the Dead conjure trance states of interlocking rhythms and harmonies that make all the listening worthwhile. We may never get the chance to see them sprawl out live on stage again, but thanks to the stalwart taper community, nearly every moment of the Dead’s 50 year career in rock and roll—from the confusingly noodly to the truly sublime—has been preserved for the ages. Thousands of concerts can be found at The Internet Archive, one of the best sanctioned Grateful Dead bootleg archives on the web. Don’t miss it. Related Content: Every Grateful Dead Song Annotated in Hypertext: Web Project Reveals the Deep Literary Foundations of the Dead’s Lyrics       The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World 10,173 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive The Grateful Dead’s "Ultimate Bootleg" Now Online & Added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grateful Dead’s Soundtrack for the 1960s Famous LSD Parties Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Grateful Dead’s Final Farewell Concerts Now Streaming 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-grateful-deads-final-farewell-concerts-now-streaming-online.html 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. The post The Grateful Dead’s Final Farewell Concerts Now Streaming Online appeared first on Open Culture.

Blade Runner, unlike most science-fiction movies of the 1980s, improves with age — in fact, it seems to hold up more robustly with each passing year. Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? endures for many reasons, none of them quite so strong as the richness of its setting, a vision of 2019 Los Angeles replete with fire-belching smokestacks, towering corporate obelisks, 30-story geishas glowingly endorsing products on the sides of buildings, and crumbling "old" architecture retrofitted to inhabit this simultaneously glossy and ramshackle reality. The film’s production design pays close attention to those big things, but also to the small ones: the sidewalk noodle bar where we meet replicant-hunting detective Rick Deckard; the glowing handles of the umbrellas held by the countless passersby streaming past; the detailing of the firearm with which he cuts down his android prey one by one. And often, the big things are small things; at the top of the post, for instance, we see the hulking headquarters of the replicant-building Tyrell Corporation — and, for scale, a member of the design team working on it. Blade Runner, you see, represents perhaps the high water mark of the now seemingly lost art of miniature-based practical visual effects. Most everything in its slickly futuristic yet worn and often makeshift Los Angeles actually existed in reality, because, in that time before realistic CGI, everything had to take the form of a model (or, farther in the background, a matte painting) to get into the shot at all. You can take an extensive behind-the-scenes look at the blood, sweat, and tears involved in building all this in a gallery showcasing 142 photos taken in the Blade Runner model shop. "Take a look at the dystopian miniatures, each tiny car hand painted with future dirt from riding clouds stuffed with future smog," writes io9’s Meredith Woerner. Partisans of these sorts of techniques argue that miniatures remain superior to digital constructions because of their perceptible physicality, and perhaps that very quality has helped keep the look and feel of Blade Runner relatively timeless. Plus, unlike CGI, it gives die-hard fans something to hope for. If you dream about owning a piece of the film for your very own, you theoretically can; just make sure to do your homework first by reading the threads at propsummit.com, a forum about — and only about — Blade Runner props. Enter the photo gallery here. via io9 Related Content: The Art of Making Blade Runner: See the Original Sketchbook, Storyboards, On-Set Polaroids & More The Blade Runner Promotional Film The Blade Runner Sketchbook: The Original Art of Syd Mead and Ridley Scott Online The City in Cinema Mini-Documentaries Reveal the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, Her, Drive, Repo Man, and More Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick was riding high from the success of his Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove. For his next film, Kubrick wanted to make something different. He wanted to make a science fiction epic at a time when sci-fi was a byword for cheap and cheesy. And so, the director reached out to writer Arthur C. Clarke, after reading his short story "The Sentinel." In a letter dated March 31, 1964, Kubrick wrote: I had been a great admirer of your books for quite a time and had always wanted to discuss with you the possibility of doing the proverbial "really good" science-fiction movie. My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character: 1. The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. 2. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future. 3. A space probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars. The two soon met at Trader Vic’s in New York and started hashing out a story that became 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over the course of the next four years, Kubrick and Clarke talked and corresponded frequently. The original plan was for both to develop the novel first and then adapt the resulting work into a screenplay. In practice, the script developed in parallel to the book. Kubrick demanded rewrite after rewrite from an increasingly impatient Clarke as the movie went into production. The book ultimately came out a couple months after the movie’s April 1968 premiere. Ever the master manipulator, Kubrick, in all likelihood, did this on purpose so that Clarke’s efforts wouldn’t overshadow the film. The folks over at Cinefix put together a video on the differences between the book and the movie. If you can get past the bro-tastic voice-over, the piece offers a pretty thorough accounting. You can watch part one and part two above. One of the biggest differences is that in the book, HAL, Dave Bowman and company are off to Saturn. But Kubrick’s special effects guru Douglas Trumbull couldn’t get the ringed planet to look right, so the director simply changed the mission’s destination. Most of the other differences boil down to a difference in the medium. Clarke explains everything in the story in great detail - from the man-apes’ evolution to the real reason HAL9000 went on his killing spree. Kubrick, in contrast, explained almost nothing. In a 1970 interview, Kubrick talked more about the difference between the two works. It’s a totally different kind of experience, of course, and there are a number of differences between the book and the movie. The novel, for example, attempts to explain things much more explicitly than the film does, which is inevitable in a verbal medium. […] [The movie], on the other hand, is basically a visual, nonverbal experience. It avoids intellectual verbalization and reaches the viewer’s subconscious in a way that is essentially poetic and philosophic. The film thus becomes a subjective experience, which hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting. Actually, film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. So you are someone who finds the movie to be frustratingly oblique, the book will give you answers. But it probably won’t blow your mind. Related Content: Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies Lost Kubrick: A Short Documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Unfinished Films Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Stanley Kubrick Never Made Explore the Massive Stanley Kubrick Exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 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. What’s the Difference Between Stanley Kubrick’s & Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (A Side-by-Side Comparison) 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/difference-between-stanley-kubricks-arthur-c-clarkes-2001-a-space-odyssey.html 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. The post What’s the Difference Between Stanley Kubrick’s & Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (A Side-by-Side Comparison) appeared first on Open Culture.

So simple and yet so complex. The bicycle remains the world’s most popular form of transportation, found in households worldwide, in countries rich and poor. And yet the bike remains something of a mystery to us. How the bike can ride almost on its own is something physicists still ponder and write academic papers about. It’s also the subject of this new episode from the popular YouTube series Minute Physics. The video explains in a few succinct minutes what we know and still don’t know about this fixture in our everyday lives. All stuff to think about on your next ride…. via NPR Related Content: Physics: Free Online Courses The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Inferno Inspired Galileo’s Physics The Art & Science of Bike Design: A 5-Part Introduction from the Open University The Mysterious Physics Behind How Bikes Ride by Themselves 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-physics-behind-how-bikes-ride-by-themselves.html 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. The post The Mysterious Physics Behind How Bikes Ride by Themselves appeared first on Open Culture.

Last week, The Guardian reported: Google has made its "inceptionism" algorithm available to all, allowing coders around the world to replicate the process the company used to create mesmerising dreamscapes with its image processing neural-network. The system, which works by repeatedly feeding an image through an AI which enhances features it recognises, was first demonstrated by Google two weeks ago. It can alter an existing image to the extent that it looks like an acid trip, or begin with random noise to generate an entirely original dreamscape. Since then a coder, Roelof Pieters, began messing around with the publicly-available software, and decided to take the "Great San Francisco Acid Wave" scene from Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and run it through "Deep Dream," as the software is known. The results (below), now going viral across the internet, are pretty trippy and intense. Just when you thought Hunter S. Thompson couldn’t get more "out there," this comes along. We noticed that Pieters ran a similar experiment with pieces of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we couldn’t help but put them on display. Watch above. via Gizmodo Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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. Related Content: Free Online: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent Read 10 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965-2005)   Watch Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and 2001: A Space Odyssey Get Run Through Google’s Trippy Deep Dream Software 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/watch-terry-gilliams-fear-loathing-and-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey-run-through-googles-trippy-deep-dream-software.html 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. The post Watch Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and 2001: A Space Odyssey Get Run Through Google’s Trippy Deep Dream Software appeared first on Open Culture.

Image by The Wellcome Trust When researching a famous historical figure, access to their work and materials usually proves to be one of the biggest obstacles. But things are much more difficult for those writing about the life of Marie Curie, the scientist who, along her with husband Pierre, discovered polonium and radium and birthed the idea of particle physics. Her notebooks, her clothing, her furniture, pretty much everything surviving from her Parisian suburban house, is radioactive, and will be for 1,500 years or more. If you want to look at her manuscripts, you have to sign a liability waiver at France’s Bibliotheque Nationale, and then you can access the notes that are sealed in a lead-lined box. The Curies didn’t know about the dangers of radioactive materials, though they did know about radioactivity. Their research attempted to find out which substances were radioactive and why, and so many dangerous elements-thorium, uranium, plutonium-were just sitting there in their home laboratory, glowing at night, which Curie thought beautiful, "like faint, fairy lights," she wrote in her autobiography. Marie Curie carried these glowing objects around in her pockets. She and her husband wore standard lab clothing, nothing more. Marie Curie died at age 66 in 1934, from aplastic anemia, attributed to her radioactive research. The house, however, continued to be used up until 1978 by the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Paris Faculty of Science and the Curie Foundation. After that it was kept under surveillance, authorities finally aware of the dangers inside. When many people in the neighborhood noticed high cancer rates among them, as reported in Le Parisien, they blamed the Curie’s home. The laboratory and the building were decontaminated in 1991, a year after the Curie estate began allowing access to Curie’s notes and materials, which had been removed from the house. A flood of biographies appeared soon after: Marie Curie: A Life by Susan Quinn in 1995, Pierre Curie by Anna Hurwic in 1998, Curie: Le rêve scientifique by Loïc Barbo in 1999, Marie Curie et son laboratoire by Soraya Boudia in 2001, and Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith in 2005, and Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss in 2011. Still, passing away at 66 is not too shabby when one has changed the world in the name of science. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903), the only woman to win it again (1911), the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and the first woman to be entombed (on her own merits) at the Panthéon in Paris. And she managed many of her breakthroughs after the passing of her husband Pierre in 1906, who slipped and fell in the rain on a busy Paris street and was run over by the wheels of a horse-drawn cart. via Christian Science Monitor/Gizmodo Related Content: New Archive Puts 1000s of Einstein’s Papers Online, Including This Great Letter to Marie Curie A Haunting Drone’s-Eye View of Chernobyl Free Online Chemistry Course 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.

The auteur responsible for The Disorderly Orderlies might not be the obvious choice to make a movie about the Holocaust but that’s apparently what happened. For the handful of people who have seen Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried — his unreleased 1972 film about a washed-up clown named Helmut Doork who amuses a boxcar of Jewish children all the way to an Auschwitz gas chamber — say that the movie is far, far worse than you might imagine. "This film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object," said Harry Shearer in a 1992 Spy Magazine article about the movie. "This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" — that’s all you can say." (Below you can hear Shearer tell Howard Stern more about the film.) There is reportedly only one copy of the movie and that print is under lock and key. Lewis is adamant that the movie is never going to be seen by the public while he still has a say in the matter. "It was all bad and it was bad because I lost the magic," Lewis told an audience at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. "You will never see it, no-one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work." Its mind-boggling awfulness and its inaccessibility has placed The Day the Clown Cried into that rarified pantheon of legendary lost films like the original cut of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. Only the film is purposefully kept in obscurity. Every once in a while, a new fragment of the movie will pop up on the internet only to be quickly quashed. The latest glimpse of this famously wrong-headed production comes in the form of a seven-minute clip of a making-of documentary on the film that aired on Flemish TV. You can watch it above. There’s a longer section here. The clip opens with Lewis in clown face doing his rubber-faced slapstick shtick. It’s not especially funny out of context. In context one can only imagine that the routine would be about as hilarious as a whoopie cushion during the My Lai massacre. Later, the documentary shows Lewis behind the camera and he seems every bit the auteur. The voice over notes that Lewis is working "as a clown, actor, director, conductor and producer." Lewis is even seen telling his French sound engineer how to use his Nagra tape recorder. But perhaps the most surprising moment in the clip is when that 1960s power couple Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg are seen hanging around the set. There really does seem to be something with the French and Jerry Lewis. Related Content: Auschwitz Captured in Haunting Drone Footage (and a New Short Film by Steven Spielberg & Meryl Streep) Memory of the Camps (1985): The Holocaust Documentary that Traumatized Alfred Hitchcock, and Remained Unseen for 40 Years Anne Frank: The Only Existing Video Now Online 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.   Behind-the-Scenes Footage of Jerry Lewis’ Ill-Conceived Holocaust Movie The Day The Clown Cried 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/behind-the-scenes-footage-of-jerry-lewis-ill-conceived-holocaust-movie-the-day-the-clown-cried.html 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. The post Behind-the-Scenes Footage of Jerry Lewis’ Ill-Conceived Holocaust Movie The Day The Clown Cried appeared first on Open Culture.

Image via Diego Sevilla Ruiz A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: "A five year old can understand it, but an 80 year old cannot do it." The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as "mindfulness"—or being absorbed in the moment, free from routine mental habits. In many Eastern meditative traditions, one can achieve such a state by walking just as well as by sitting still—and many a poet and teacher has preferred the ambulatory method. This is equally so in the West, where we have an entire school of ancient philosophy—the "peripatetic"—that derives from Aristotle and his contemporaries’ penchant for doing their best work while in leisurely motion. Friedrich Nietzsche, an almost fanatical walker, once wrote, "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." Nietzsche’s mountain walks were athletic, but walking—Frédéric Gros maintains in his A Philosophy of Walking—is not a sport; it is "the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found." Gros discusses the centrality of walking in the lives of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, and Thoreau. Likewise, Rebecca Solnit has profiled the essential walks of literary figures such as William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Gary Snyder in her book Wanderlust, which argues for the necessity of walking in our own age, when doing so is almost entirely unnecessary most of the time. As great walkers of the past and present have made abundantly clear—anecdotally at least—we observe a significant link between walking and creative thinking. More generally, writes Ferris Jabr in The New Yorker, "the way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa." Applying modern research methods to ancient wisdom has allowed psychologists to quantify the ways in which this happens, and to begin to explain the reasons why. Jabr summarizes the experiments of two Stanford walking researchers, Marily Oppezzo and her mentor Daniel Schwartz, who found that almost two hundred students tested showed markedly heightened creative abilities while walking. Walking, Jabr writes in poetic terms, works by "setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought." (Hear Dr. Oppezzo discuss her study in a Minnesota public radio interview above.) Oppezzo and Schwartz speculate that "future studies would likely determine a complex pathway that extends from the physical act of walking to physiological changes to the cognitive control of imagination." They recognize that this discovery must also account for such variables as when one walks, and—as so many notable walkers have stressed—where. Researchers at the University of Michigan have approached the where question in a paper titled "The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature" that documents a study in which, writes Jabr, "students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets." One wonders what James Joyce—whose Ulysses is built almost entirely on a scaffolding of walks around Dublin—would make of this. Or Walter Benjamin, whose concept of the flâneur, an archetypal urban wanderer, derives directly from the insights of that most imaginative decadent poet, Charles Baudelaire. Classical walkers, Romantic walkers, Modernist walkers—all recognized the creative importance of this simple movement in time and space, one we work so hard to master in our first years, and sometimes lose in later life if we acquire it. Going for a walk, contemporary research confirms—a mundane activity far too easily taken for granted—may be one of the most salutary means of achieving states of enlightenment, literary, philosophical, or otherwise, whether we roam through ancient forests, over the Alps, or to the corner store. via The New Yorker/Stanford News Related Content: Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower: Creativity & the "Incubation Period" The Psychology of Messiness & Creativity: Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Creative Work Go Hand in Hand John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play Free Online Psychology Courses Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Having known Pico Iyer for quite some time, on paper and in person, as a perpetual example and occasional mentor in the writing of place, it delights me to watch him attract more listeners than ever with the talks he’s given in recent years, the most popular of which advocate something called "stillness." But at first I wondered: did this shift in subject mean that Iyer—a California-grown Brit from an Indian family who mostly lives in Japan ("a global village on two legs," as he once called himself), known for books like Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, and The Global Soul—had put his signature hard-traveling ways behind him? Hardly. But he did start telling the world more about his long-standing habit of routinely seeking out the most quiet, least "connected" places he can—the seaside no-speech-allowed Catholic hermitage, the rural village outside Kyoto—in order to reflect upon the time he has spent circling the globe, transposing himself from culture to alien culture. "24 years ago, I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea," he tells us, "but the trip lasted a few days. What I’ve done with it sitting still—going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking—that’s lasted 24 years already, and will probably last a lifetime." If we want to follow Pico’s example, we must strike a balance: we must process the time we spend doing something intensely—traveling, writing, programming, lifting weights, what have you—with time spent not doing that something, a pursuit in its own way as intense. He connects all this with the 21st-century technology culture in which we find ourselves, citing the example of folks like Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly and even certain enlightenment-minded Googlers who regularly and rigorously detach themselves from certain kinds of modern devices, going "completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they’ll need when they go online again." Achieving such a proper intellectual, psychological, social, and technological compartmentalization in life may seem like a rare trick to pull off. But if you ever doubt its possibility, just revisit the last talk from Pico we featured, in which he describes his encounter with Leonard Cohen, the only man alive who has successfully combined the lifestyles of rock star and Zen monk. Related Content: The Best Writing Advice Pico Iyer Ever Received Pico Iyer on "The Joy of Less" How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Pico Iyer on "the Art of Stillness": How to Enrich Your Busy, Distracted Life by Unplugging and Staying Put 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/pico-iyer-on-the-art-of-stillness.html 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. The post Pico Iyer on "the Art of Stillness": How to Enrich Your Busy, Distracted Life by Unplugging and Staying Put appeared first on Open Culture.

Stephen King’s 1977 psychological horror novel The Shining has inspired several other works, most notably Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation, a movie widely considered to have elevated King’s story of the possessed Overlook Hotel and its luckless winter caretakers, the Torrance family, to a higher artistic plane. But King himself never really approved of Kubrick’s interpretation: "Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror," he said, "but others fall flat. A visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel." Presumably King had a better time playing the board game of The Shining, which won the first Microgame Design Contest in 1998, and about which you can read more at Board Game Geek. It has been said that King himself helped with the game’s development and offered his services as an early play-tester, though some will contest that. (See the claims in the comments section below.) You can tell that the game’s faith lies with King’s novel rather than Kubrick’s film by its use of things that never made it from page to screen as gameplay elements, such as the hotel grounds’ hedge-sculpture animals that come to vicious life. You can play The Shining board game as the Torrance family, in which case you’ll have to fight those hedge animals. Or you can play it as the Overlook Hotel itself, in which case you’ll control them. Each player has a host of implements at their disposal — ghosts, decoys, the famous axe and snowmobile — all meant to help them accomplish the task of driving the other side away. Think of it as a simplified wargame set in a haunted hotel. If you’d like to see how you fare, whether in the shoes of the Torrances or the Indian-burial-ground foundation of the Overlook, you’ll find all the game’s materials freely available on the Micrograme Design Contest’s site. Print them out, set them up, and prepare to feel some sheer inhuman evil for yourself. via Dangerous Minds Related Content: Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining 7 Free Stephen King Stories: Presented in Text, Audio, Web Comic & a Graphic Novel Video Stephen King Reveals in His First TV Interview Whether He Sleeps With the Lights On (1982) Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Download & Play The Shining Board Game 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/download-play-the-shining-board-game-co-created-by-stephen-king.html 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. The post Download & Play The Shining Board Game appeared first on Open Culture.

Eight years ago—that’s something like five decades in Internet time—the Smithsonian held an exhibition, "More than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art," which featured a curated selection of 178 hand-illustrated letters, love notes, driving directions, and jottings of current events, from various artists. The selections can still be found online, even though Liza Kirwin’s selections for the exhibit can now also be found in an accompanying book. The illustrated letters make for humanizing insights into the private world of artists that we usually only experience through their work. The 1945 letter from George Grosz to Erich S. Herrmann (above) is to invite his friend (and art dealer) to his birthday party, promising not just one glass of Hennessy, but six (and more). "Listen: boy!" he declares. "You are cordially invited to attend the birthday party of ME." This was when Grosz was in his 50s and living in Huntington, New York. It should be noted that Grosz met his end falling down a flight of stairs while drunk, but the man knew how to party. Joseph Lindon Smith was an American illustrator best known for being the artist who traveled to Egypt and documented the excavations at Giza and the Valley of the Kings, very faithful in their representation. But in 1894, this letter finds Smith, 31 years old, living in Paris, trying to make a go of it as an artist, and having enough success to tell his parents: "Behold your son painting under a shower of gold," he writes. Check out that handwriting: it’s beautiful. Sculptor Alexander Calder wrote this note to Vassar colleague and friend Agnes Rindge Claflin in 1936, continuing some conversation they were having about color, and noting her choices mark her as a "Parcheesi hound," and adding that he’s a fan of the game too. The little illustration, which is straight Calder, is cute too. Claflin would later go on to narrate one of MOMA’s first films to accompany an exhibit, Herbert Matter’s 1944 film on Calder, Sculpture and Constructions. This Man Ray letter to painter Julian E. Levi looks like it has been worried over or recycled—-"Dear Julian" appears several times on the stationery from Le Select American Bar in Montparnasse. It’s a bit difficult to make out all his writing: he starts mentioning "Last year’s 1928 wine harvest is supposed to be the very finest in the last fifty years" at the beginning, but I’m more fascinated with the bottom right: "I have seven tall blondes with 14 big tits and one with sapphire garters." Finally, we close out with a letter Frida Kahlo sent to her friend Emmy Lou Packard in 1940, where she thanked Packard for taking care of Diego during an illness. The letter gets sealed, Priscilla Frank notes at HuffPo, with three lipstick kisses — "one for Diego, one for Emmy Lou, and one for her son." There’s plenty more illustrated letters to explore at the Smithsonian site and in Kirwin’s handsome book, featuring artists well known and obscure, but all who knew how to compose a good letter. via HuffPo Related Content: Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters Six Postcards From Famous Writers: Hemingway, Kafka, Kerouac & More James Joyce’s "Dirty Letters" to His Wife (1909) Read Rejection Letters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut & Andy Warhol 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. 178 Beautifully-Illustrated Letters from Artists: Kahlo, Calder, Man Ray & 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/178-beautifully-illustrated-letters-from-artists.html 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. The post 178 Beautifully-Illustrated Letters from Artists: Kahlo, Calder, Man Ray & More appeared first on Open Culture.

If the impressionistic animation style of psychologist, writer, and filmmaker Ilana Simons‘ "About Haruki Murakami"—a short video introduction to the jazz bar owning, marathon running, Japanese novelist—puts you in mind of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, then the elliptical, lucid dream narration may do so even more. "He didn’t use too many words," Simons tells us. "Too many words is kinda… too many words. Someone’s always losing their voice. Someone’s hearing is acute. Haruki Murakami." Like Roger Ebert said of Linklater’s film, Simons’ ode to Murakami—and the novelist’s work itself—is "philosophical and playful at the same time." Simons reads us Murakami’s existentialist account of how he became a novelist, at age 29, after having an epiphany at a baseball game: "The idea struck me," he says, "I could write a novel…. I could do it." And he did, sitting down every night after working the bar he owned with his wife, writing by hand and drinking beer. "Before that," he has said in an interview with singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding, "I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all." And it’s true. Besides suddenly deciding to become a novelist, "out of the blue" at almost 30, then suddenly becoming an avid marathon runner at age 33, Murakami’s life was pretty unremarkable. It’s not entirely surprising that he became a novelist. Both of Murakami’s parents taught Japanese literature, though he himself was not a particularly good student. But the author of such beloved books as Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore and dozens of short stories (read six free here), has mostly drawn his inspiration from outside his national tradition—from American baseball and jazz, from British invasion rock and roll, from Fitzgerald, Kafka, and Hollywood films. As Colin Marshall wrote in a previous post on the BBC Murakami documentary above, "he remained an author shaped by his favorite foreign cultures—especially America’s. This, combined with his yearning to break from established norms, has generated enough international demand for his work to sell briskly in almost every language." Murakami’s desire to break with norms, Simons tells us in her charming, visually accomplished animated short, is symptomatic of his "detachment" and "introspection." Murakami "liked escape, or he just doesn’t like joining groups and investing too many words in places where words have been too often." The thought of "organized activities," Murakami has said, like "holding hands at a demonstration… gives me the creeps." Murakami’s love of solitude makes him seem mysterious, "elusive," says presenter Alan Yentob in the film above. But one of the extraordinary things about Murakami—in addition to his running a 62-mile "ultramarathon" and conquering the literary world on a whim—is just how ordinary he is in many ways. Both Simons’ increasingly surrealist, bebop-scored short and the BBC’s cool jazz-backed exploration make this contrast seem all the more remarkable. It’s Murakami’s ability to stretch and bend the ordinary world, Simons suggests near the end of her lyrical tribute, that makes his readers feel that "somehow, magically… he does something very private and intimate with their brains" Related Content: Read 6 Stories By Haruki Murakami Free Online 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 Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Katy Davis (AKA Gobblynne) created an immensely popular video animating Dr. Brené Brown’s insights on The Power of Empathy. Now, she returns with another animal-filled animation that could also put you on the right mental track. Narrated by Dan Harris, this one lays out the basics of meditation and deals with some common misconceptions and points of frustration. Give it a quick watch, and if you want to give meditation a first, second or third try, check out these Free Guided Meditations From UCLA. If you know of other helpful meditation resources, feel free to let us know in the comments. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn 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. Related Content: Sonny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Practicing Yoga Made Him a Better Musician David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity Alan Watts Introduces America to Meditation & Eastern Philosophy (1960) Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/meditation-101-a-short-animated-beginners-guide.html 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. The post Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Open Culture.