For the longest time, Facebook gave you no ability to control what content you see in your Facebook newsfeed. Some 378,000 people have "liked" our Facebook page. But only a fraction actually see Open Culture posts in their newsfeed. That’s because a Facebook algorithm started making the decisions for you, showing you material from some people/publishers, and not others. Now, Facebook has finally introduced a new feature that will let you control what you see. Please check out the instructions below. When you’re done reading them, consider giving us a Like on Facebook, and then set your newsfeed accordingly. (You get bonus points if you Follow us on Twitter too!) If you’re using a mobile phone, open the Facebook app, click the "More" icon along the bottom of the app, then scroll down and click "Newsfeed preferences," then click "Prioritize who to see first," and make your picks. (You can select more than one item.) If you’re using Facebook on a computer, click on the downward facing arrow on the top nav bar, then click "Newsfeed preferences," locate one of the people or publishers you follow, and change the setting from "Following" to "See First." Hope all of that makes sense. How to Make Sure You Get Open Culture in Your Facebook Newsfeed: Now You Can Take Control 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/how-to-make-sure-you-get-open-culture-in-your-facebook-newsfeed.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 How to Make Sure You Get Open Culture in Your Facebook Newsfeed: Now You Can Take Control appeared first on Open Culture.

One of the many pleasures of hearing a children’s author reading his or her own work is their overwhelming lack of vocal sentiment. When my children were young, I always opted for the horse’s mouth, over the more histrionic characterizations of a hired narrator, regardless of what sitcom or Broadway play he or she may have starred in. It might have taken author E.B. White 17 takes to lay down a track for Charlotte’s Web’s titular character’s death scene, but he eventually achieved the healthy remove that lets the listener—not the reader—wallow in the valley of deep emotions. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is not a weepie, like White’s best loved work. Instead, it revels in a sort of understated creepiness en route to the horrifically bizarre. It’s a tone his fellow literary celebs are blissfully well equipped to deliver, reading chapters aloud in honor of the book’s 10th anniversary. You can see them read all of the chapters here. Gaiman himself bookends the proceedings by claiming the first (above) and final chapter. Lucky that. One shudders to think of the myriad ways in which a narrator of cutesier sensibilities could have screwed up phrases like "oompah oompah" and "squidy brown toadstools" (thus blighting the entire book). I conceive of these readings as a multiple narrator audiobook because the performers are reading, rather than attempting to act out the text in their hands, but really it’s more of a video storytime. Gaiman is definitely on point in front of the camera—his large brown eyes, prominent proboscis and stringy sternocleidomastoid muscles adding to the proceedings. Sandwiched in between the master’s performances, you will find such luminaries as authors R.L. Stine, John Hodgman, and Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler, framed so that he has no head. Former child star Fairuza Balk would’ve made a gimcrack Coraline back in the day, but her rendition of the book’s penultimate chapter suggests that she’s even better suited to the role of Coraline’s "Other Mother," or rather her disembodied hand. Bedlam, indeed. Listen to the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the book in its entirety here. Should that leave you wanting more, Harper Collins has compiled a stem to stern playlist of Gaiman reading 2008’s The Graveyard Book, culled from various videos of the author on tour. You can watch it above, or find it in our collection, 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Related Content: Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories Neil Gaiman Reads "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday Neil Gaiman & Famous Friends Read Aloud the Entirety of Coraline (and The Graveyard Book Too) 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/neil-gaiman-famous-friends-read-aloud-the-entirety-of-coraline-and-the-graveyard-book-too.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 Neil Gaiman & Famous Friends Read Aloud the Entirety of Coraline (and The Graveyard Book Too) appeared first on Open Culture.

We’ve seen Europeans cover famous rock and metal bands in an American folk style—Finnish musicians playing AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Dio in Appalachian folk, to be exact. Now, prepare to hear famous rock and metal bands in a distinctively European folk style: Medieval Belarusian folk, played by the beautifully named Stary Olsa. The band’s name derives from a stream in East Belarus—their clothing, instrumentation, and rhythms from an early Lithuanian state called the Grand Duchy—but the songs are all 20th century radio fodder. Above, see them do Deep Purple’s "Child in Time," and below, they tackle the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ "Californication." Stary Olsa’s cover of Metallica’s "One" (further down), already an incredibly dramatic song, works particularly well in their syncopated Spartan style. The sounds and costuming of the accomplished Belarusian musicians will inevitably remind you—if you haven’t been under a rock in Belarus—of that Medieval-style fantasy show in which your favorite characters meet horribly violent ends week after week. When we look at the bloody history of Medieval Europe, the gruesomeness of Westeros can seem like only a slight exaggeration—dragons and ice zombies aside—of the so-called "dark ages." These associations, and the solemnity of the song selection and starkness of the voices and instruments, lend Stary Olsa’s performances a gravitas that, frankly, elevates some of the material far above its pop origins (I’m looking at you, Red Hot Chili Peppers). In order for such meldings of styles, periods, and cultures to work, whether they be played for laughs or deeply serious, the musicianship must be top notch. Such was the case with Finnish bluegrass metal cover band Steve ‘N’ Seagulls, and such is certainly the case with Stary Olsa, who have appeared on Belarusian TV (from which some of these videos come) and are currently finding a level of popularity outside their native country that few Belarusian bands have achieved. It’s unlikely we’ll see them soon on the rock festival circuit, but their status as an internet sensation is all but guaranteed. Just below, see the band translate a medley of The Beatles’ "Obla-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "Yellow Submarine" into their musical idiom, proving that they don’t just do dark, haunting, and mysterious; they’re also positively danceable. Related Content: Finnish Musicians Play Bluegrass Versions of AC/DC, Iron Maiden & Ronnie James Dio Pakistani Musicians Play Amazing Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, "Take Five" Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Performed on a Gayageum, a Traditional Korean Instrument Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness With Medieval Instruments, Band Performs Classic Songs by The Beatles, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica & Deep Purple 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/with-medieval-instruments-band-performs-classic-songs-by-deep-purple-red-hot-chili-peppers-metallica-the-beatles.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 With Medieval Instruments, Band Performs Classic Songs by The Beatles, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica & Deep Purple appeared first on Open Culture.

The Montreux Jazz Festival — the second largest jazz festival in the world — has seen many acts come and go since it kicked off in 1967. Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Nina Simone, Bill Evans and Ella Fitzgerald have all played there. And now we have the first concert performed by a jazz pianist (Al Blatter) and The Cosmic Piano, an instrument created by particle physicists at CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland. The Cosmic Piano works something like this: "When a cosmic ray passes through one of four separate detector pads of the Cosmic Piano, it triggers a musical note and a colourful flash of light." The rays arrive in random intervals, and once they’re combined with Blatter’s notes, you get some interesting polyrhythmic jazz. Catch a few highlights above, and get more background information and video clips on CERN’s web site. via @matthiasrascher Related Content: NASA & Grateful Dead Drummer Mickey Hart Record Cosmic Sounds of the Universe on New Album The Soundtrack of the Universe CERN Physicist Explains the Origins of the Universe for Beginners with a Short Animated Video Higgs Boson, the Musical: CERN Data Turned into Melody Free Stanford Course Explains Particle Physics & the Large Hadron Collider Free Online Physics Courses The Higgs Boson, AKA the God Particle, Explained with Animation CERN’s Cosmic Piano and Jazz Pianist Jam Together at The Montreux Jazz Festival 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/jazz-pianist-and-cerns-cosmic-piano-jam-together-at-the-montreux-jazz-festival.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 CERN’s Cosmic Piano and Jazz Pianist Jam Together at The Montreux Jazz Festival appeared first on Open Culture.

Not long after David Foster Wallace died, his fans found themselves with a new place of pilgrimage: not his tombstone, in the manner of a Jim Morrison or a Kurt Cobain, but his literary archives. You’ll find them at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. From their collection, we’ve previously featured Wallace’s fall 1994 English 102 syllabus from when he taught at Illinois State University, his English 183A handout breaking down (in the way that only he could) five common usage mistakes, and the language books contained in his personal library. Any reader even casually acquainted with Wallace’s novels and essays will immediately sense his deep interest in language. But if you browse through the Ransom Center’s collection of 321 books from the author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again‘s own shelves (most of them seemingly well-annotated), you’ll find a good deal of evidence about what else interested him. The Awl‘s Maria Bustillos did a post on the surprising variety of self-help books found therein. Other represented types of books include: Mass-market thrillers like Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, and Stephen King’s Carrie The novels of his peers like Rick Moody’s The Diviners, Richard Powers’ Gain, Galatea 2.2, and Operation Wandering Soul, Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Jonathan Franzen’s Strong Motion, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature Books he wrote about like Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, John Updike’s Toward the End of Time Books on his own work like William C. Dowling’s A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest Books on the midwest from which he came like A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest Books clearly used as research materials for his final, incomplete, IRS-centric novel The Pale King like Michael J. Graetz’s The U.S. Income Tax: What It Is, How It Got That Way, and Where We Go from Here, William L. Raby’s The Reluctant Taxpayer, and Marty Kaplan’s What the IRS Doesn’t Want You to Know: A CPA Reveals the Tricks of the Trade My own favorite novels like Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, and Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat Have a look, and maybe you too can find a few of your own current or future favorite books. We could all do worse, after all, than to read like David Foster Wallace did, even if it leads us to the occasional volume like Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder; Barbed Wire: A Political History; or Jack B. Nimble’s The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories. And for a weekend activity, we could do worse than comparing Wallace’s personal library to that of Marilyn Monroe, which we featured last year. Related Content: David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003) 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web 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. The 321 Books in David Foster Wallace’s Personal Library: From Blood Meridian to Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder 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-321-books-in-david-foster-wallaces-personal-library.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 321 Books in David Foster Wallace’s Personal Library: From Blood Meridian to Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder appeared first on Open Culture.

After much press and debate, Harper Lee’s new novel — a sequel of sorts to her beloved book, To Kill a Mockingbird — will be released on July 14th. You can pre-order Go Set a Watchman: A Novel (already #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list). But, even better, you can head over to the The Wall Street Journal or The Guardian and read the first chapter online. The Guardian also features an audio version read by the Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon. Stream it right below. (And, fyi, you can always download a free audio copy of To Kill a Mockingbird through the free trial programs run by Audiobooks.com and Audible.com.) Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. Note: There’s now a way to make sure that our posts show up in your Facebook newsfeed. Find info on that here. Read the First Chapter of Harper Lee’s New Book, Then Hear It Read by Reese Witherspoon 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/hear-reese-witherspoon-read-the-first-chapter-of-harper-lees-new-sequel-to-to-kill-a-mockingbird.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 Read the First Chapter of Harper Lee’s New Book, Then Hear It Read by Reese Witherspoon appeared first on Open Culture.

Though his name may not carry much weight in English speaking circles—his virtues "lost in translation"—no Russian writer stood as high in his time as Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). In his short life of 37 years, Pushkin—the great grandson of a captured African prince—authored two of his country’s most revered and influential works, the play Boris Godunov and the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. Like a character in that latter work, the erudite nobleman poet met his death at the hands of a supposed romantic rival "on a winter evening," writes Phoebe Taplin in The Telegraph, when he "travelled by sleigh from Nevsky Prospekt to the Black River area of St. Petersburg, then filled with woods and dachas, where Georges D’Anthès fatally wounded him in the stomach." Pushkin wrote as passionately as he lived—and died. (That final duel was the last of twenty-nine he fought). His work remains viscerally compelling, even in translation: into other languages, other genres, and other media, as in the animated film above of a short poem of Pushkin’s called Rusalka, or "The Mermaid." Animated in a masterful hand-painted style by Russian artist and filmmaker Alexander Petrov, the film tells the story of a monk who falls in love with a beautiful and dangerous mythical water spirit. You can read a paraphrase, translation, and interpretation of the poem here. I recommend watching the ten-minute film first. Though presented in Russian without subtitles, you will—even if you don’t speak Russian—find yourself seduced. Petrov, who painstakingly paints his images on glass with oils, has also adapted the work of other dramatic writers, including another fellow Russian artist, Dostoevsky. His take on Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea won an Academy Award in 2000, and most deservedly so. Petrov does not adapt literary works so much as he translates them into light, shadow, and sound, immersing us in their textures and images. His Rusalka, just like the poem on which it’s based, speaks directly to our imaginations. Find more literary animations in the Animation section of our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Watch a Hand-Painted Animation of Dostoevsky’s "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Told in a Beautifully Animated Film by Piotr Dumala Nikolai Gogol’s Classic Story, "The Nose," Animated With the Astonishing Pinscreen Technique (1963) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Alexander Pushkin’s Poem "The Mermaid" Brought to Life in a Masterfully Hand-Painted 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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/alexander-pushkins-poem-the-mermaid-brought-to-life-in-a-masterfully-hand-painted-animation.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 Alexander Pushkin’s Poem "The Mermaid" Brought to Life in a Masterfully Hand-Painted Animation appeared first on Open Culture.

In September of 1978, the Grateful Dead traveled to Egypt and played three shows at the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the Great Sphinx looking over their shoulders. It wasn’t the first time a rock band played in an ancient setting. Pink Floyd performed songs in the middle of the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in October 1971. But Floyd performed to an "empty" house, playing to no live fans, only ghosts. (Watch footage here.) The Dead’s shows, on the other hand, were real gigs, attended by Deadheads who made the journey over, and they could thank Phil Lesh for putting it all in motion. Lesh later said, "it sort of became my project because I was one of the first people in the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power that’s been preserved from the ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious number one choice because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids." Logistically speaking, the concerts weren’t the easiest to stage. Rolling Stone reported that an "equipment truck got stuck in sand and had to be towed by camels." Because the electricity in Egypt was an "a winkin’, blinkin’ affair," Bob Weir later recalled, the jetlagged band had difficulties recording the first of the three shows. But, as with most adventures, the inconveniences were offset by the wondrous nature of the experience. Weir captured it well when he said: "I got to a point where the head of the Sphinx was lined up with the top of the Great Pyramid, all lit up. All of a sudden, I went to this timeless place. The sounds from the stage — they could have been from any time. It was as if I went into eternity." The Sphinx and Great Pyramid date back to roughly 2560 BC. The Dead were joined on this trip by the counterculture author Ken Kesey (not to mention Bill Graham and Bill Walton) who apparently captured footage on Super-8 reels. (Watch it above.) Kesey himself later tried to explain the symbolism of the visit, saying: "The people who were there recognized this as a respectful and holy event that went back to something we can all just barely glimpse, them and us both. Our relationship to ancient humans. To this place on the planet. To the planet’s place in the universe. All that cosmic stuff is what the Dead are based on. The Egyptians could understand that." At the very top of the post, you can see the Dead performing "Ollin Arageed," with Egyptian oudist Hamza el-Din and other local musicians, before seguing into "Fire on the Mountain." The clip gives you a good feel for the awe-inspiring scene. Just above, we have a longer playlist of performances that took place on September 16, 1978 — the same night there was a lunar eclipse. The complete 9/16/78 show can be streamed on Archive.org, as can the shows from 9/14 and 9/15. A 2CD/1 DVD package (Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978) captures the Dead’s visit and can be purchased online. To get more on the Pyramid concerts, read Chapter 43 of Dennis McNally’s book, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Related Content: Watch Pink Floyd Play Live in the Ruins of Pompeii (1972) Louis Armstrong Plays Trumpet at the Egyptian Pyramids; Dizzy Gillespie Charms a Snake in Pakistan Louis Armstrong Plays Trumpet at the Egyptian Pyramids; Dizzy Gillespie Charms a Snake in Pakistan     The Grateful Dead Play at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978) 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-dead-play-at-the-egyptian-pyramids.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 Play at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978) appeared first on Open Culture.

Earlier this year, we featured vintage Japanese print advertisements from the golden age of Art Deco and for such products as beer, sake, and cigarettes. If you like that sort of thing, you might consider paying attention to the recently launched Branding in Asia, a site detected to covering "the art of branding" as expressed in "the exciting new ideas and concepts exploding from the mind of Asia" — or the exciting old ideas and concepts which, aesthetically speaking, remain pretty explosive still. Take, for instance, their collection of classic Japanese steamship ads. "In the early part of the 20th century," writes Steph Aromdee, "Japan’s increasingly prosperous middle class was taking to the high seas for travel. One company, the Japan Mail Steamship, advertised heavily, hoping to attract would-be tourists to their luxury ships. What were likely at the time regarded as simple advertisements and brochures that simply showed departures and destinations, have today become viewed as stunning works of art." Here we’ve excerpted a few such advertisements from their impressive selection which, as you can see, ranges artistically from the stylized to the realistic, and conceptually from the practical to the purely evocative. They might entice readers onto a steamship voyage with an Art Deco bathing beauty, a contrast of human traveler against mountain’s majesty, a detailed map enumerating a variety of possible destinations, or, as in the case of deer-filled Nara, a scattering of local icons. The age of the steamship has, of course, long since dissolved into the romantic past, even in Japan. Or perhaps I should say especially in Japan, whose shinkansen bullet train not only put every other mode of transport straight into obsolescence, but — at least to my mind — also boasts a cutting-edge romance of its own. And so these advertisements, more than 70 years after their printings, still get me planning my next trip to Japan, a country that knows a thing or two about desire and place. "Even in Kyoto," wrote 17th-century poet Matsuo Bashō, "I long for Kyoto." via Branding in Asia Related Content: Advertisements from Japan’s Golden Age of Art Deco Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902-1954) Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan 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.

Etgar Keret, above, is a best selling author and award-winning filmmaker with the soul of a teenage zine publisher. He’s a master of the strange and short who plays by his own rules. This sounds like a recipe for outsider status but Keret frequently pops up in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and on public radio’s This American Life. The child of Holocaust survivors told Tikkun that he began writing stories as a way out of his miserable existence as a stuttering 19-year-old soldier in the Israeli army. This may explain why he’s so generous with young fans, handing his stories over to them to interpret in short films and animations. When Rookie, a website for teenage girls, invited him to share ten writing tips, he playfully obliged. It’s worth noting that he refrained from prescribing something that’s a staple of other authors’ tip lists - the adoption of a daily writing practice. As he told the San Francisco Bay Guardian: For me, the term "writing routine" sounds like an oxymoron. It is a bit like saying "having-a-once-in-a-lifetime-insight-which-makes-you-want-to burst-into-tears routine." With no further ado, here are his ten rules for writers, along with a liberal sprinkling of some of my favorite Keret stories. 1. Make sure you enjoy writing. You won’t find Keret comparing his chosen profession to opening a vein. As he told Rookie: Writing is a way to live another life…be grateful for the opportunity to expand the scope of your life. 2. Love your characters. …though few will ever seem as lovable as the girl in Goran Dukic’s charming animation of  Keret’s story "What Do We Have In Our Pockets?" below. 3. When you’re writing, you don’t owe anything to anyone. Don’t equate loving your characters with treating them nicely. See Keret’s story "Fungus." 4. Always start from the middle. This is perhaps Keret’s most conventional tip, though his writing shows he’s anything but conventional when it comes to locating that middle. His novella, Kneller’s Happy Campers (on which the film Wristcutters: A Love Story, starring Tom Waits, was based) manages to start at the beginning, middle and end. 5. Try not to know how it ends. At the very least, be prepared to dig yourself out to a different reality, like the narrator in Keret’s very short story "Mystique," read below by actor Willem Dafoe. 6. Don’t use anything just because "that’s how it always is." Here, Keret is referring to what he termed "the shrine of form" in an interview with his great admirer, broadcaster Ira Glass, but his content is similarly unfettered.  If your writing’s become bogged down by reality, try introducing a magic fish who’s fluent in everything, as in "What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?," read by author Gary Shteyngart, below. 7. Write like yourself. Leave the critics holding the bag on comparisons to Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen, Lydia Davis, Amos Oz, Donald Barthelme… 8. Make sure you’re all alone in the room when you write. um…Etgar? Does this mean I have to give up my coffice? 9. Let people who like what you write encourage you. Nerts to underminers, frenemies, withering internal editors, and deliberately hateful reviewers! 10. Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except me). Read the Rookie interview in which Keret expands on his rules. via Rookie Related Content: Stephen Kings’ Top 20 Rules for Writers Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Piece of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

In the 1980s, The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore and the wives of several other Washington power brokers, launched a political campaign against pop music, hoping to put warning labels on records that promoted Sex, Violence, Drug and Alcohol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued "the Filthy Fifteen," a list of 15 particularly objectionable songs. Hits by Madonna, Prince and Cyndi Lauper made the list. But the list really took aim at heavy metal bands from the 80s — namely, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, W.A.S.P., Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, and Venom. (Interesting footnote: the Soviets separately created a list of blackballed rock bands, and it looked pretty much the same.) Above, you can watch Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider appear before Congress in 1985 and accuse the PMRC of misinterpreting his band’s lyrics and waging a false war against metal music. The evidence 30 years later suggests that Snider maybe had a point. A new study by psychology researchers at Humboldt State, Ohio State, UC Riverside and UT Austin "examined 1980s heavy metal groupies, musicians, and fans at middle age" — 377 participants in total — and found that, although metal enthusiasts certainly lived riskier lives as kids, they were nonetheless "significantly happier in their youth and better adjusted currently than either middle-aged or current college-age youth comparison groups." This left the researchers to contemplate one possible conclusion: "participation in fringe style cultures may enhance identity development in troubled youth." Not to mention that heavy metal lyrics don’t easily turn kids into damaged goods. You can read the report, Three Decades Later: The Life Experiences and Mid-Life Functioning of 1980s Heavy Metal Groupies here. And, right above, listen to an interview with one of the researchers, Tasha Howe, a former headbanger herself, who spoke yesterday with Michael Krasny on KQED radio in San Francisco. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that you always see Open Culture in your newsfeed, give this a read. Related Content: Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985) Free Online Psychology Courses Heavy Metal: Documentary Explores the Music, Personalities & Great Clothing That Hit the Stage in the 1980s Orson Welles Records Two Songs with the 1980s Heavy-Metal Band Manowar A Bluegrass Version of Metallica’s Heavy Metal Hit, "Enter Sandman" 1980s Metalhead Kids Are All Right: New Study Suggests They Became Well-Adjusted Adults 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/2015/07/1980s-metalhead-kids-are-all-right.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 1980s Metalhead Kids Are All Right: New Study Suggests They Became Well-Adjusted Adults appeared first on Open Culture.

Most cinephiles want to watch not just their favorite directors’ films, but their favorite directors’ favorite films. And how many cinephiles’ lists of favorite directors fail to include Stanley Kubrick? In 2013, we featured the only top-ten list the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange ever wrote, for Cinema magazine in 1963, which runs as follows: 1. I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953) 2. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957) 3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) 4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948) 5. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931) 6. Henry V (Olivier, 1944) 7. La notte (Antonioni, 1961) 8. The Bank Dick (Fields, 1940) 9. Roxie Hart (Wellman, 1942) 10. Hell’s Angels (Hughes, 1930) But fans eager to find out more of what shaped the cinematic taste of this auteur of all auteurs do have a few more resources to turn to. At criterion.com, Joshua Warren has compiled, "from interviews with Kubrick’s family, friends and colleagues, an interview [Kubrick] did in 1957 for Cahiers du cinéma as well as an interview in 1963 for Cinema magazine and the ‘Master list’ by the BFI," an annotated list of Kubrick’s favorite films. And at the BFI’s site, Nick Wrigley ("with the help of Kubrick’s right-hand man, Jan Harlan") has another set of such lists. Their combined selections, organized by director, run as follows. Note that one film on the extended list, Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, can be viewed above. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen, 1992) Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987) McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1998) La notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961) Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) Pelle the Conqueror (Bille August, 1987) Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) Casque d’Or (Jacques Becker, 1952) Édouard et Caroline (Jacques Becker, 1951) Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955) Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) Henry V (Kenneth Branagh, 1989) Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981) Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945) City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931) The Bank Dick (Edward Cline, 1940) Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946) Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938) The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) I vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953) La Kermesse Héroïque (Jacques Feyder, 1935) Tora! Tora! Tora! (Richard Fleischer, 1970) The Fireman’s Ball (Miloš Forman, 1967) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) The Terminal Man (Mike Hodges, 1974) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930) The Treasure of Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1947) Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1990) Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954) Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957) Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981) Abigail’s Party (Mike Leigh, 1977) La bonne année (Claude Lelouch, 1973) Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) Very Nice, Very Nice (Arthur Lipsett, 1961) American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1976) House of Games (David Mamet, 1987) The Red Squirrel (Julio Medem, 1993) Bob le flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956) Closely Watched Trains (Jiří Menzel, 1966) Pacific 231 (Jean Mitry, 1949) Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989) Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944) The Earrings of Madame de… (Max Ophuls, 1953) Le plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1951) La ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950) Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) Heimat (Edgar Reitz, 1984) Blood Wedding (Carlos Saura, 1981) Cría Cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975) Peppermint Frappé (Carlos Saura, 1967) Alien (Ridley Scott, 1977) The Anderson Platoon (Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1967) White Men Can’t Jump (Ron Shelton, 1992) Miss Julie (Alf Sjöberg, 1951) The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921) The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) E.T. the Extra-terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982) Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986) Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) The Emigrants (Jan Troell, 1970) The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) Danton (Andrzej Wajda, 1984) Girl Friends (Claudia Weill, 1978) The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974) Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) Roxie Hart (William Wellman, 1942) Ådalen 31 (Bo Widerberg, 1969) The Siege of Manchester (Herbert Wise, 1965) As you might expect from a filmmaker who entered a different genre with every picture, this list of all the movies he went on record as admiring includes all different kinds of movies. We expect to find respected films by his colleagues in respected auteurhood like Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Max Ophuls (who, said Kubrick, "possessed every possible quality"). But perhaps more surprisingly, the list also includes thrillers like The Terminal Man, exercises in horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and grotesque comedies like The Cars That Ate Paris. But think about those movies for a moment, and you realize that, like Kubrick’s own work, they all transcend their supposed genres. As for what he saw in White Men Can’t Jump — well, I suppose we’ve all got to take some secrets to the grave. Related Content: Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Created) Stanley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Documentaries Terry Gilliam: The Difference Between Kubrick (Great Filmmaker) and Spielberg (Less So) Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Stanley Kubrick Never Made 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.

Back in 2010, Hayao Miyazaki’s company Studio Ghibli produced a commercial for the massive food conglomerate Nissin Seifun. The spot centers on a rotund cat named Konyara who bats lazily at a red butterfly - Nissin’s logo. Konyara is rendered in simple thick, black lines that recall Japanese sumi-e painting. Miyazaki reportedly didn’t have much to do directly with the piece but his influence is all over it. The commercial was produced by Miyazaki’s long time collaborator Toshio Suzuki and animated by Katsuya Kondo, who did the character design for perhaps Miyazaki’s most cat-centric movie Kiki’s Delivery Service. Another Miyazaki collaborator, pop legend Akiko Yano, did the music. More to the point, Konyara looks like some of Miyazaki’s most enduring characters from Totoro to Ponyo to the Kodama from Princess Mononoke. Adorable, elegant and vital. The commercial was so successful that Nissin commissioned two more. The second one aired in 2012 and featured a sleepy Konyara struggling to grab 40 winks while her offspring, named Ko-Konyara (trans: Little Konyara), insists on cuddling. The calligraphy on the side reads "Always together." The most recent Ghibli/Nissin commercial came out a few months ago. Konyara’s brood has expanded to three - the two new cats named Kuroneko and Buchi. All three tumble into the frame as Konyara presents them with a fish while text appears reading, "I’m hungry." When the little black kitten, who looks a lot like a soot sprite from Totoro, runs off with dinner, Konyara gives a resigned sigh. It’s an expression that anyone who has spent long periods with very young children will recognize. You can watch all three above or here. via Cartoon Brew Related Content: The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki How to Make Instant Ramen Compliments of Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyazaki French Student Sets Internet on Fire with Animation Inspired by Moebius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyazaki 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. Insanely Cute Cat Commercials from Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki’s Legendary Animation Shop 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/insanely-cute-cat-commercials-from-studio-ghibli.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 Insanely Cute Cat Commercials from Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki’s Legendary Animation Shop appeared first on Open Culture.

I freely admit it—like a great many people these days, I have a social media addiction. My drug of choice, Twitter, can seem like a particularly schizoid means of acquiring and sharing information (or knee-jerk opinion, rumor, innuendo, nonsense, etc.) and a particularly accelerated form of distractibility that never, ever sleeps. Given the profound degree of over-stimulation such outlets provide, we might be justified in thinking we owe our short attention spans to 21st century technological advances. Not necessarily, says Michigan State University professor Natalie Phillips—who studies 18th and 19th century English literature from the perspective of a 21st century cognitive theorist, and who cautions against "adopting a kind of historical nostalgia, or assuming those of the 18th century were less distracted than we are today." Early modern writers were just as aware of—and as concerned about—the problem of inattention as contemporary critics, Phillips argues, "amidst the print-overload of 18th-century England." We might refer, for example, to Alexander Pope’s epic satire "The Dunciad," a hilariously apocalyptic jeremiad against the proliferation of careless reading and writing in the new media environment of his day. (A world "drowning in print, where everything was ephemeral, of the moment.") Phillips focuses on the work of Jane Austen, who, she believes, "was drawing on the contemporary theories of cognition in her time" to construct distractible characters like Pride and Prejudice‘s Elizabeth Bennett. Taking her cues from Austen and other Enlightenment-era writers, as well as her own inattentive nature, Phillips uses contemporary neuroscience to inform her research, including the use of brain imaging technology and computer programs that track eye movements. In collaboration with Stanford’s Center for Cognitive and Biological Imaging (CNI), Phillips devised an experiment in 2012 in which she asked literary PhD candidates—chosen, writes Stanford News, "because Phillips felt they could easily alternate between close reading and pleasure reading"—to read a full chapter from Austen’s Mansfield Park, projected onto a mirror inside an MRI scanner. At times, the subjects were instructed to peruse the text casually, at others, to read closely and analytically. Afterwards, they were asked to write an essay on the passages they read with attention. As you’ll hear Phillips describe in the short NPR piece above, the neuroscientists she worked with told her to expect only the subtlest of differences between the two types of reading. The data showed otherwise. Phillips describes her surprise at seeing "how much the whole brain, global activations across a number of different regions, seems to be transforming and shifting between the pleasure and the close reading." As CNI neuroscientist Bob Dougherty describes it, "a simple request to the participants to change their literary attention can have such a big impact on the pattern of activity during reading," with close reading stimulating many more areas of the brain than the casual variety. What are we to make of these still inconclusive results? As with many such projects in the emerging interdisciplinary field of "literary neuroscience," Phillips’ goal is in part to demonstrate the continued relevance of the humanities in the age of STEM. Thus, she theorizes, the practice and teaching of close reading "could serve—quite literally—as a kind of cognitive training, teaching us to modulate our concentration and use new brain regions as we move flexibly between modes of focus." The study also provides us with a fascinating picture—quite literally—of the ways in which the imaginative experience of reading takes place in our bodies as well as our minds. Close, sustained, and attentive reading, Phillips found, activates parts of the brain responsible for movement and touch, "as though," writes NPR, "readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analyzed it." Phillips’ study offers a scientific look at a mysterious experience serious readers know well—"how the right patterns of ink on a page," says Dougherty, "can create vivid mental imagery and instill powerful emotions." As with the so-called "hard problem of consciousness," we may not understand exactly how this happens anytime soon, but we can observe that the experience of close reading is a rewarding one for our entire brain, not just the parts that love Jane Austen. While not everyone needs convincing that "literary study provides a truly valuable exercise of people’s brains," Phillips’ research may prove exactly that. via Stanford News Related Content: Jane Austen, Game Theorist: UCLA Poli Sci Prof Finds Shrewd Strategy in "Cluelessness" This is Your Brain on Jazz Improvisation: The Neuroscience of Creativity What Happens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitchcock: The Neuroscience of Film Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature 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/this-is-your-brain-on-jane-austen-the-neuroscience-of-reading-great-literature.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 This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature appeared first on Open Culture.

Yesterday we ran a list of 93 films beloved by Stanley Kubrick, which includes two by Andrei Tarkovsky: 1972’s Solaris and 1986’s The Sacrifice. You expect one auteur to appreciate the work of another — "game recognize game," to use the modern parlance — but the selection of Solaris makes special sense. Just four years before it, Kubrick had, of course, made his own psychologically and visually-intense cinematic voyage out from Earth into the great beyond, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The appreciation, alas, wasn’t mutual. "Tarkovsky supposedly made Solaris in an attempt to one-up Kubrick after he had seen 2001 (which he referred to as cold and sterile)," writes Joshua Warren at criterion.com. "Interestingly enough, Kubrick apparently really liked Solaris and I’m sure he found it amusing that it was marketed as ‘the Russian answer to 2001.'" Jonathan Crow recently quoted Tarkovsky as saying: "2001: A Space Odyssey is phony on many points, even for specialists. For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated." That pronouncement comes from a 1970, pre-Solaris interview with Tarkovsky by Naum Abramov. The Russian auteur indicts what he sees as 2001‘s lack of emotional truth due to its excessive technological invention, effectively declaring that, in his own foray into the realm of science-fiction, "everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film’s characters. That’s why a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth." Critic Philip Lopate writes that "the media played up the cold-war angle of the Soviet director’s determination to make an ‘anti-2001,’ and certainly Tarkovsky used more intensely individual characters and a more passionate human drama at the center than Kubrick." And the films do have similarities, from their "leisurely, languid" narratives to their "widescreen mise-en-scène approach that draws on superior art direction" to their "air of mystery that invites countless explanations." But Lopate argues that the themes of Solaris resemble those of 2001 less than those of Hitchcock’s Vertigo: "the inability of the male to protect the female, the multiple disguises or ‘resurrections’ of the loved one, the inevitability of repeating past mistakes." As a lover of both Kubrick and Tarkovsky’s work, I can hardly take sides. Maybe I just need to watch both 2001 and Solaris yet again, one after another, in order to better compare them. (Find Tarkovsky’s films free online here.) And maybe I need to throw Vertigo into the evening as well. Now that’s what I call a triple feature. Related Content: Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunting Vision of the Future Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Breakdown of the Director’s Filmmaking Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Filmmakers: Sacrifice Yourself for Cinema A Poet in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Filmmaking and Life 93 Films Beloved by Stanley Kubrick: From Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump (1992) 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. Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a "Phony" Film "With Only Pretensions to Truth" 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/andrei-tarkovsky-calls-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey-a-phony-film-with-only-pretensions-to-truth.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 Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a "Phony" Film "With Only Pretensions to Truth" appeared first on Open Culture.

Separated by only seven years, Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden had what might be called a friendly rivalry—at least, that is, from Thomas’ point of view. The hard-drinking Welsh poet once wished Auden a happy seventieth birthday—on his thirtieth. It’s a typical comment, writes biographer Walford Davies, expressed "with the attractive brio of a younger brother." Thomas wrote of his admiration for "the mature, religious, and logical fighter," but deprecated "the boy bushranger" in the older, more reserved Auden. Whether we take these appraisals as gentle ribbing or—as another Thomas biographer Andrew Lycett writes—"disdain," it does not seem that Thomas felt such antipathy for Auden’s poetry. One would think the contrary listening to him read Auden’s "As I Walked Out One Evening," above. Thomas, Lycett tells us, "approved of Auden’s propensity for radical cultural change" but disapproved of the way his "political tub thumping got in the way of his poetry."  Thomas uses his sonorous voice in a theatrical way that well-suits Auden’s stately verse. That voice became a regular feature for several years on the BBC for whom Thomas recorded broadcast after broadcast of readings and radio plays in the late 1940s. As we’ve detailed in a previous post, he made many recordings of his own work as well, including of his most well known poem, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," which he reads in somber, measured tones. Above, in a reading of Auden’s "September 1, 1939," Thomas takes a strained, almost affected, tone, perhaps evincing some aversion to the "political tub-thumping" in Auden’s poem. His breathing is labored, and he was, in all likelihood, drunk. He usually was, and he did suffer from a breathing condition. Thomas sadly drank himself to death, while Auden, who didn’t quite see seventy, lived on twenty more years, and recorded his own readings of "As I Went Walking" and "September 1, 1939."  Both the latter Auden poem and the one Thomas reads above, "Song of the Master and Boatswain," begin in bars: the speaker in "September 1" sits "in one of the dives / on Fifty-Second Street." "Song of the Master and the Boatswain" opens "At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s" where "we drank our liquor straight." Aside from these settings neither has anything at all in common. "Master and Boatswain" is almost bawdy, but ends on a cynical note. Written days after the event and dense with philosophical and classical allusions, "September 1" laments Germany’s invasion of Poland, the effective beginning of what would become World War II. Thomas was a more anarchic, less restrained poet, and Auden, the more educated, and disciplined, of the two. But it can certainly be said that they shared a similar sensibility in a taste for the tragic.  You can immerse yourself in Auden and Thomas’ poetry by picking up copies of Collected Poems: Auden and The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition. Related Content: Dylan Thomas Recites ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ and Other Poems "September 1, 1939″ by W.H. Auden Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Special Collections, University of Vermont Libraries No matter how much of a political junkie you are, you must surely have had enough of the spectacle that is the 2016 campaign for the presidency. At current count, we are faced with an astounding 15 candidates for the Republican nomination, one of whom is doing his best to revive the ugliest nativism of the 19th century. On the other side of our binary party system, we have only One. Or so it would seem if you were to pay attention to much of the media coverage, which only rarely mentions the handful of other Democratic contenders and mostly ignores the rising tide of support for Bernie Sanders. The Senator from Vermont has unabashedly referred to himself, throughout his long political career, as a democratic socialist or, on occasion, simply a "socialist"—a word that strikes fear into the heart of many an American, and resonates widely with another portion of the electorate. Debates over what this means rage on. George Will calls Sanders’ socialism a "charade." Thor Benson in the New Republic accuses him of playing "loose with the terminology." The history and current state of "socialism" is so long and complex that no one definition seems to suit. Its political baggage in American discourse, however, is undeniable. This was just as true in 1986, when Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in praise of Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Ginsberg playfully draws on the loose associations we have with the word, hammering it home with tongue-in-cheek repetition, then turning reflective. Socialist snow on the streets Socialist talk in the Maverick bookstore Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops Socialist poetry in socialist mouths —aren’t the birds frozen socialists? Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield Social Democratic Appearances? Isn’t the socialist sky owned by the socialist sun? Earth itself socialist, forests, rivers, lakes furry mountains, socialist salt in oceans? Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t belong to me anymore. Calling it "Burlington Snow," Ginsberg composed the poem—equal parts goofy and sincere—on a visit to the city, one of many pilgrimages made by left-wing writers and artists after Sanders’ string of attempted foreign policy interventions. You can read all about the optimistic socialist—or democratic socialist, or whatever—in Paul Lewis’ Guardian portrait. via Mother Jones Related Content: Allen Ginsberg & The Clash Perform the Punk Poem "Capital Air," Live Onstage in Times Square (1981) ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons': Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Collaboration with Philip Glass and Paul McCartney The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading "Howl" (1956) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, "Burlington Snow" (1986) 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/allen-ginsbergs-handwritten-poem-for-bernie-sanders-burlington-snow-1986.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 Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, "Burlington Snow" (1986) appeared first on Open Culture.

Stewart Brand came onto the cultural scene during the 1960s, helping to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and later launching the influential Whole Earth Catalog (something Steve Jobs described as "Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along"). He also vigorously campaigned in 1966 to have NASA release a photograph showing the entirety of Earth from space — something we take for granted now, but fired humanity’s imagination back then. During the 1970s and beyond, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly, a successor to the Whole Earth Catalog; The WELL ("Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link"), "a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over;" and eventually The Long Now Foundation, whose work we’ve highlighted here before. When not creating new institutions, he has poured his creative energies into books and films. Above you can watch How Buildings Learn, Brand’s six-part BBC TV series from 1997, which comes complete with music by Brian Eno. Based on his illustrated book sharing the same title, the TV series offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture (think Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, and Le Corbusier) and instead argues for "an organic kind of building, based on four walls, which is easy to change and expand and grow as the ideal form of building." Brand made the series available on his Youtube channel, with these words: "Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like… Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project." And he added the noteworthy footnote: "this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital." Find the first three parts above, and the remaining parts below: Part 1: Flow Part 2: The Low Road Part 3: Built for Change Part 4: Unreal Estate Part 5: The Romance of Maintenance Part 6: Shearing Layers You can find How Buildings Learn added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: The History of Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to Rococo (A Free Online Course) The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grateful Dead’s Soundtrack for the 1960s Famous LSD Parties Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Animated Watch Stewart Brand’s 6-Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno 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-stewart-brands-6-part-series-how-buildings-learn-with-music-by-brian-eno.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 Stewart Brand’s 6-Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno appeared first on Open Culture.

If you think of the most respected science communicators today, the name Neil deGrasse Tyson — probably the only man alive, after all, who could successfully make a new Cosmos — has to come to mind. His skillset as an astrophysicist, cosmologist, and planetarium director with a high public profile lends itself particularly well to this 21st-century media landscape where the curious not only possess but demand the ability to pull up audiovisual materials clearly explaining things to them, whenever they want to know about them, and where they can take full length massive open online courses (MOOCs). You’ve definitely heard of Tyson, and you’ve almost as surely heard of The Great Courses, the company that has produced a wide variety of college-level classes and sold them on video since the early 1990s - getting into the business of MOOCs, in some sense, before MOOCs existed. But they’ve kept up with the times, so if you want to learn from their Great Courses, you no longer have to buy a boxful of VHS tapes; you can just download their videos on demand. They have a reputation for premium quality that sometimes comes at a premium price: for instance, The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson, goes for $94.95. But wait! For now, The Great Courses will let you access Tyson’s Great Course for free, including all of its downloadable audio and video lectures, as long as you make an account at their site — a process which, we can report, entails only a reasonable hassle factor. (Make sure to check your spam folder for the confirmation e-mail they send, in case it ends up there.) If the zero price point hasn’t quite convinced you, have a look at the sample clip at the top of the post featuring a short discussion of the much-discussed incompatibility between quantum physics and general relativity, which you’ll have to know about if you want to understand this universe of ours. Much about it may remain inexplicable, sure, but if anyone can explicate the inexplicable, Neil deGrasse Tyson can. Note: you can find Great Courses that are currently on sale here. Some are up to 70% off. And just to let you know, we have a relationship with the Great Courses. So if you make any purchases, it helps keep Open Culture going strong. Related Content: Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read Free Online Physics Courses Neil deGrasse Tyson Ponders the Big Question "Does the Universe Have a Purpose" in a Simple Animation The Origins Project Brings Together Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Flatow, and More on One Stage Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers the Greatest Science Sermon Ever Free Online Astronomy Courses 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. Free: Download Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Short Course, The Inexplicable Universe, in Audio or Video Format 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/free-download-neil-degrasse-tysons-6-lecture-course-the-inexplicable-universe.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 Free: Download Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Short Course, The Inexplicable Universe, in Audio or Video Format appeared first on Open Culture.

Heavy Metal owes many debts, though it doesn’t always acknowledge them—debts to classical music, through guitarists like Yngwie Malmsteen, to the blues, through Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and to jazz, through a host of players, including Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi. But while other players have picked up techniques from the jazz idiom like blast beats and sweep picking, Iommi found something else: the motivation to relearn to play the guitar after losing three of the fingertips on his right hand in an industrial accident, on his last day on the job, right before he was to embark on a European tour. He was only 17 years old. Iommi narrates the story himself above in "Fingers Bloody Fingers," a powerful animated short by illustrator Paul Blow and animator Kee Koo. After the gruesome accident, Iommi, "extremely depressed," tragically resigned himself to never play the guitar again — that is, until his factory manager visited him in the hospital and told him the story of Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-Romani swing guitarist who lost two fingers in a terrible fire at age 18, himself just on the verge of stardom and highly sought after by the greatest bandleaders of the day. In the clip above from the French documentary Trois doigts de genie (Three Fingers of Genius), learn how Reinhardt overcame his disability to become one of the most famous guitarists of his day, and see why Iommi was so inspired by his story. "A lesser musician would have given up," wrote Mike Springer in a previous post, "but Reinhardt overcame the limitation by inventing his own method of playing." Iommi, of course, did the same, also along the way introducing a lighter gauge of string, which millions of rock guitarists now use. Reinhardt toured and recorded with his own ensembles and with Duke Ellington and others. Unfortunately precious little footage of him exists, but you can see him above with violinist Stephane Grappelli in their Quintette du Hot Club and in a few other short clips in this post. Once you hear Django’s story of overcoming adversity, and once you hear him play, you’ll understand why he inspired Iommi to push through his own pain and limitations to become one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. Related Content: Django Reinhardt and the Inspiring Story Behind His Guitar Technique Django Reinhardt Demonstrates His Guitar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s Heavy Metal: BBC Film Explores the Music, Personalities & Great Clothing That Hit the Stage in the 1980s Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

A rudimentary difference between fiction narratives and documentary film is supposed to be that one is created out of the imagination, and the other is a recorded document of real events. Yet if we go right back to the very first feature length documentary, Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (Archive.org - YouTube), we see that the line between fact and fiction was just as wobbly then as now. A popular success when it was released in 1922, Nanook brought its heroic title character to an audience who knew nothing about the Native tribes of the north. The film shows a way of life that was disappearing as Flaherty, originally an explorer and prospector, began to document it. We see the hardy Inuit Nanook hunting with spears, pulling up to a trading station in a kayak and trading with the white owner. We see his wife and kids, the family building an igloo and bedding down for the night. The film emphasizes as much his self-reliance as it does Nanook’s naivety. And it fully cemented the idea of the Eskimo in popular culture. Nanook became a name as synonymous with the Inuit as Pierre is to the French. Frank Zappa even wrote a song suite about Nanook. Flaherty was not trained in film, and learned what he could quickly about photography when he decided to shoot footage up north while working for the Canadian Pacific Railway. He accidentally destroyed all of his original footage when he dropped a cigarette on the flammable nitrite film and set about raising money for a reshoot. Without precedent, Flaherty rethought his doc into what we now recognize as classic form: Instead of trying to capture the culture, he chose one man as his main character, an entry into an unknown world. And in those reshoots we find the line between fiction and fact blurred. Nanook’s real name was Allakariallak, and though he was a hunter, he and his tribe had long ditched the spear for the much more effective gun. Flaherty wanted to represent Inuit life before the European influence, and Allakariallak played along, not just hunting with his spear, but pretending at the trade outpost not to recognize a gramophone. The scenes inside the igloo were staged for good reason: the camera was too big and the lighting needed would have melted the walls. So Allakariallak and the crew built a cutaway igloo where the family could pretend to bed down for the night. (Oh, and the two women we see were actually Flaherty’s common law wives.) Flaherty’s legacy was in combining ethnography, travelogue, and showing how people live and work, none of which had been done before in film. Flaherty continued to make documentaries into 1950, including Man of Aran (about life on the Irish isle of the same name) and Tabu, a Polynesian island tale directed by F.W. Murnau, best known for Nosferatu. But none had the impact of this film. When the Library of Congress first started listing films in 1989 for preservation, specifying ones that were "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," Nanook was in the first selection of 25. The idea of building a living habitat in order to control the action still happens in nature documentaries, and humans readily playing a version of themselves to tell a certain kind of narrative is the basis of all reality TV. Flaherty bent boring truth to get to a different, "essential" truth. Is it better that we believe that Nanook died out on the ice, a victim of the harsh reality of survival on the ice, or to know that he actually died at home from tuberculosis? The qualities that caused controversy upon Nanook’s release aren’t the opposite of documentary, they *are* documentary. You can purchase your own copy of Nanook of the North from Criterion here. It will also be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: The 10 Greatest Documentaries of All Time According to 340 Filmmakers and Critics Watch Luis Buñuel’s Surreal Travel Documentary A Land Without Bread (1933) Watch Dziga Vertov’s Unsettling Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924) 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. Watch the Very First Feature Documentary: Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty (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. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/watch-the-very-first-feature-documentary-nanook-of-the-north-by-robert-j-flaherty-1922.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 the Very First Feature Documentary: Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty (1922) appeared first on Open Culture.

On the off chance that this kind of thing interests you, Boing Boing is making available a free audio download of Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Chef. The book pitches itself as follows: You’ll train inside the kitchen for everything outside the kitchen. Featuring tips and tricks from chess prodigies, world-renowned chefs, pro athletes, master sommeliers, super models, and everyone in between, this "cookbook for people who don’t buy cookbooks" is a guide to mastering cooking and life. The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning: 1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential. 2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare. 3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive. 4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder. 5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as "self-rule." In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book. You can download it here. If this isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to dive into our meta collection, 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Or explore the Free Trial Programs offered by Audible.com and Audiobooks.com, both of which give you the chance to download an audiobook for free while trying out their programs. 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. Download The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss as a Free Audio Book 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-the-4-hour-chef-by-tim-ferriss-as-a-free-audio-book.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 The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss as a Free Audio Book appeared first on Open Culture.

Les Paul, known primarily for the iconic guitar that bears his name, also invented most of the recording technology we still use today, including the use of reverb as a studio effect. But of course he didn’t invent reverberation anymore than he invented the guitar; he just turned both of them electric. Reverb has existed as long as there have been soundwaves, obstacles for them to hit, and ears to hear what happens when they do. In every possible space—landscape, cityscape, and architectural formation—the effect announces itself differently, though we’re seldom aware of it unless we’re in grand, cavernous spaces like a cathedral or mountain gorge. But musicians and audio engineers like Les Paul have always paid special attention to the way sound manifests in space, as have singers like the gent above, who calls himself the Wikisinger, real name Joachim Müllner. With "no artificial reverb added," Müllner demonstrates how much environment contributes to the quality of what we hear with a montage of sound and video clips from several—very aesthetically pleasing—locations. In each place, Müllner sings the same strange song: in a tunnel, an attic, a field before an oil derricks, the nave of a cathedral, and an anechoic chamber—which resembles the interior of an alien spacecraft and produces no reflections whatsoever. Sometimes the effect is subtle, inviting you to lean in and listen more closely; sometimes it’s outsized and operatic. The filmmaker’s claim to "no artificial reverb" sounds a little slippery after viewing the Wikisinger’s performance since one of the most dramatic clips features his voice, and person, reduplicated several times. And we should keep in mind that no recording technology is perfectly transparent. Microphones and other equipment always add, or subtract, something to the sound. As slick as an advertisement, the short video uses a heavily mediated form to convey the simple idea of natural reverberation. You may, in fact, have seen something just like this not long ago. Before the Wikisinger, there was the Wikidrummer. In another "no reverb added" video above, he snaps, cracks, booms, and crashes through the same beat in garages, open fields, and underpasses. With each abrupt shift in location comes an abrupt shift in the frequency and duration of the sounds, as the full spectrum collides with metal, concrete, asphalt, and open air. The ways in which sound and space interact can determine the shape of a musical form. This subject has given musician, artist, and theorist of music and art, David Byrne much to think about. As he puts in in a TED talk above, the "nature of the room"—the quality of its reverb—guides the evolution of musical genres and styles. Beginning with the example of CBGBs and like dive bars around the country, he describes how the art punk pioneered by his band the Talking Heads depended on such spaces and "didn’t sound all that great" in places strictly designed for music, like Carnegie Hall. His talk then takes us to some fascinating architectural environments, such as the kinds of rooms Mozart composed and played in. Byrne speaks to the neophytes as well as to the audiophiles among us, and his talk works as a perfect intellectual complement to the sonic and visual adventure on offer in the Wikisinger and -drummer’s videos. Both approaches equally persuade us of the prime significance of that intangible wonder called reverb. Related Content: David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’ Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Wonderful Case Study of How Landscape & Architecture Shape the Sounds of Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-same-song-sung-in-15-places.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 Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Wonderful Case Study of How Landscape & Architecture Shape the Sounds of Music appeared first on Open Culture.

Fans of Twin Peaks, the early-1990s television series co-created and in large part directed by David Lynch, have had a lot to get excited about recently. Most prominently, we’ve heard a lot of will-he-or-won’t-he talk about whether Lynch will participate in the show’s much-discussed 21st-century reboot. That has no doubt stoked public interest in Twin Peaks (available on Hulu here), which in some sense has never really died away, even though it went off the air 24 years ago (and by all accounts got pretty lackluster in its second season); some of us, while we wait for the new series, have even engaged in all manner of Twin Peaks-themed writing, art, and even music projects. Many Australian Twin Peaks fans, while they wait for the new series, made it over to Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art earlier this year for the exhibition David Lynch: Between Two Worlds. If they went on April 18th, they saw experimental post-punk band Xiu Xiu perform their own interpretation of the Twin Peaks score. "The music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans," says Xiu Xiu leader Jamie Stewart. "It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. The idea of holding the ‘purity’ of the 1950s up to the cold light of a violent moon and exposing the skull beneath the frozen, worried smile has been a stunning influence on us." Xiu Xiu, since Stewart formed it in San Jose in 2002, has steadily gained a reputation as, in the words of Vice, "the weirdest band you know." Part of that has to do with the formal adventurousness of their music itself, and part to do with their invariably disturbing music videos. No wonder, then, that they would feel such an affinity with David Lynch, no stranger to getting called "weird" by audiences and the maker of some unsettling music and music videos himself. Given the potential overlap in their followings, and given that nobody seems to know how many production decisions the new Twin Peaks has yet made, perhaps someone can check and see whether Xiu Xiu might have the time to record its score? via Welcome to Twin Peaks Related Content: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recreated in an Adorable Paper Animation Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans David Lynch’s Music Videos: Nine Inch Nails, Moby, Chris Isaak & More David Lynch’s New ‘Crazy Clown Time’ Video: Intense Psychotic Backyard Craziness (NSFW) David Lynch’s Surreal Commercials David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987) 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. Experimental Post-Punk Band Xiu Xiu Plays the Music from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks 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/experimental-post-punk-band-xiu-xiu-plays-the-music-from-david-lynchs-twin-peaks.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 Experimental Post-Punk Band Xiu Xiu Plays the Music from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks appeared first on Open Culture.